In a recent fireside chat with women in their 30s and 40s, any asked this relationship question:
What can I do when I’m too angry or resentful but my partner still wants sex? How about when the idea makes me yawn?
Fight first!
Good-to-great sex requires tension, a polarity like magnets that both repel and attract. Consider the example of the couple who fights passionately and makes up just as passionately. Living together, you and your partner must minimize friction while dealing with the kids, the dog or the bills, which fosters a platonic or, even, brother/sister feeling. At the other end of the spectrum, when partners carry around unexpressed or unresolved issues, they can become too emotionally distanced to desire intimacy.
Sex feeds a healthy relationship. Pressing your bodies together cements your bond and invests in your relationship bank account, which helps you let the next annoyance slide. Here are guidelines to fighting for hotter sex.
- Don’t do it too often or too infrequently. About once every week or two does the trick.
- Pick your battles: one complaint per session. Make sure it’s one that matters and don’t stray into other argument territory.
- Limit battlefield time. Human brains focus well for about an hour.
- Only one person gets to complain. The other person listens, without defensiveness and assures that the complainer feels understood by the end.
- One tool that helps develop good fighting skills is to record the discussion, listen to the recording together and notice how often you interrupt each other, don’t answer or don’t answer completely or stray to other gripes.
Take a short break. Then apply that sexual bonding glue!
If you just don’t feel like sex right then, check out the next tips.