Today’s podcast episode is all about sex. Sex in long-term relationships, often after kids — it’s something many people struggle with. When we did a big ParentData survey on your sex lives, a lot of you expressed unhappiness, stress, pressure about how much sex was the “right” amount, whether you were behind (or too far ahead!).
My guest today, Emily Nagoski, is about taking that pressure off and redefining normal. Her new book, Come Together, is on sex in long-term relationships, and I think people will find it revelatory. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
To spark your interest, here are three highlights from the conversation:
What does “normal” sex look like?
So I invented a definition of normal sex, which is: normal sex is sexual contact among peers where everyone involved is glad to be there. They don’t have to be hot and horny, can’t wait to put my tongue in your mouth, but just glad to be there, free to leave with no unwanted consequences. And I’m including no unwanted emotional consequences, no “Aw, come on. But if you love me, you would.” No unwanted consequences. Plus, of course, no unwanted pain.
How can you navigate the transition from parenting to sex?
And there’s, I think for many people, then a moment they’re just like, “Are you f-ing kidding me? Not another thing. I did all the things today.” And it’s not so much the not wanting the sex, it’s the not being ready for the question.
There’s a temperamental trait that humans vary in called “adaptability” — whether or not they adjust well to change, how long transitions take. Some of us just transition more gradually than other people.
My sister was actually just talking about this with her husband. His first reaction to everything is no. And he’ll think about it and process it and later come back with, “Yeah, I think we can find a way to make that work.” And it’s not that he doesn’t want to, it’s that there’s a transition that is required to get from one brain state to another. In computer coding, they call it context switching cost, which is literally the amount of electricity and time it takes for a computer to switch from one task to another task. It literally takes time and energy. And that is true for human brains too.
And if you are a person who is slow to transition anyway and your partner asks you out of the blue, it’s not that you don’t want to say yes, it’s that you’re looking at the energy and the time it would take to transition out of where you are now into where you would need to be in order for sex to be a big giant yes for you.
People who are slow to adapt: please try scheduling sex, because it means that you can build in your transition to the rest of your day. You can make sure that, okay, so Saturday is going to be the day. I’m going to make sure that Saturday is a day when I don’t have anything that’s going to suck me into a completely draining brain state, and I’m going to schedule half an hour before the sexy times to do a thing that helps me transition into a sexy state of mind.
For me, it’d be something like taking a bath. For my sister it might be something like listening to her husband practice piano, because they are both musicians. So finding the thing that helps you to transition from that state into the other, knowing that it’s going to require time and planning and energy. And it’s so much easier if you know ahead of time instead of just fingers crossed, hoping against hope that both of you are in the same state at the same time.
What does science say about having great sex in long-term relationships?
And we have been taught to be really fragile, to feel like we don’t have the internal and external resources to deal with any degree of vulnerability beyond what we’re already willing to try in our relationship. And in the same way that we don’t want our partners to judge us, we don’t want our partner to feel in any way hurt, criticized, or judged.
Especially if you were raised as a girl, socialized, and grew up to identify as a woman, a major part of your role as a sexual person you were taught from birth is to be a giver, to meet other people’s needs. And so when you get into sexual situations that involve another person, a lot of your attention shifts away from your internal state into monitoring this other person to make sure their needs and expectations are being met, they’re satisfied, they’re pleased with what’s happening. So much so that you might not even be aware of whether or not you yourself are experiencing pleasure. So that when somebody like me comes along and says, “Tell your partner what you want and like. Just talk about it,” you’re like, “How am I supposed to even know what I like?”
So I’m in no way saying that this stuff is easy. And I am saying that the people who have great sex lives—
Full transcript
This transcript was automatically generated and may contain small errors.
And my guest today, Emily Nagoski, is here to give us all permission to cut ourselves some slack. It’s not about the sex we’re not having. It’s about the sex we are having, and how to make it the best it can be. We talk about quantity versus quality, pleasure versus obligation, spontaneous versus responsive, and just how hard it can be to even talk about this, especially – and ironically – with the person we do it with. There is no parent I know that won’t benefit from listening to this conversation.
After the break, let’s talk about sex with Emily Nagoski.
And I don’t know what you want when you want sex. I don’t know what anybody wants when they want sex other than me and my partner, I can give a pretty good answer. But people have answers to that question. When people are struggling with desire, when one partner wants more sex than the other one wants, this is a great conversation starter. What is it that you want when you want sex with me? And what is it that you don’t want when you don’t want sex with me?
We can get into all kinds of gender stuff, but so for example, if you were born with genitals that made an adult go, “It’s a boy,” and then they raised you as a boy and you grew up to identify as a boy and then a man, then part of what you were taught was what makes you a man, what makes you worth the air you breathe is whether or not you get to put your penis inside someone else’s body.
And so when your partner says no to sex, they may just be saying, “No thank you, no penis for me tonight.” I’m too tired or I’m too stressed, or I’m too distracted, or I’m too frustrated with you for other reasons. But what it can feel like is, no penis for me tonight because you’re not quite worth the air you breathe. So answering the question, what is it that you want and what is it that you don’t want? It can get really feelings really fast, and it just cuts through a lot of cultural myths that we carry around in our brains about what it means to have and want sexuality.
It’s interesting because I think it’s kind of the way many people thought about their sex lives before, right? Before you got into the long-term relationship where sex was this thing that you have and you procreate with and so on. Maybe you were doing all kinds of crazy stuff. But now we’re in this regular sex life and it’s like, well, just there’s the regular kind of sex, and if we’re not doing that, we’re just doing nothing.
So I invented a definition of normal sex which is, normal sex is sexual contact among peers where everyone involved is glad to be there. They don’t have to be hot and horny, can’t wait to put my tongue in your mouth, but just glad to be there, free to leave with no unwanted consequences. And I’m including no unwanted emotional consequences, no, “Aw, come on. But if you love me, you would.” No one wanted consequences. Plus of course, no unwanted pain. If it’s pain that you want, do you, awesome, love that for you.
And if it’s unwanted pain, then, and I am not saying this flippantly, I know that it takes approximately seven attempts for even white cisgender women to find a medical provider who will take their sexual pain seriously. But medical treatment is available and effective for a lot of kinds of sexual pain. So everybody’s glad to be there, free to leave with no unwanted consequences, no unwanted pain. And then I offered a definition for perfect sex because when you spend 100,000 words reading a book about sex, you don’t want the outcome to be somebody saying to you, “Wow, Emily, that was really normal sex.”
And you could do those very fun things, or you could do stuff that has nothing to do with a penis, or any combination. And the same if it’s a person with a vulva and that vulva has recently been through some kind of trauma and is unavailable for contact, you just turned toward what’s true right now in this moment with kindness and compassion and curiosity and a sense of confidence and joy. Confidence is knowing what’s true, and joy is the hard part. Joy is loving what’s true, love what’s true in this moment, even if it’s not what you wish were true in this moment, even if it’s not what you were taught should be true in this moment.
And there’s, I think for many people then a moment they’re just like, “Are you fucking kidding me?” Not another thing. I did all the things today. It’s in some ways they say no, but then maybe later you oh, maybe not no. Or if somebody feels bad and somebody feels rejected. And it’s not so much the not wanting the sex, it’s the not being ready for the question.
And he’ll think about it and process it and later come back with, “Yeah, I think we can find a way to make that work.” And it’s not that he doesn’t want to, it’s that there’s a transition that is required to get from one brain state to another. In computer coding, they call it context switching cost, which is literally the amount of electricity and time it takes for a computer to switch from one task to another task. It literally takes time and energy. And that is true for human brains too. It literally takes time and energy for our brains to transition from one task to another, from one state to another. And if you are a person who is slow to transition anyway and your partner asks you out of the blue, it’s not that you don’t want to say yes, it’s that you’re looking at the energy and the time it would take to transition out of where you are now into where you would need to be in order for sex to be a big giant yes for you.
And you’re like… This is one of the four… That people are resistant to the idea of scheduling sex. And if scheduling sex is not for you, feel free not to schedule sex. And people who are slow to adapt, please try scheduling sex, because it means that you can build in your transition to the rest of your day. You can make sure that, okay, so Saturday is going to be the day. I’m going to make sure that Saturday is a day when I don’t have anything that’s going to suck me in to a completely draining brain state, so that it’s easy and I’m going to schedule half an hour before the sexy times to do a thing that helps me transition into a sexy state of mind.
For me, it’d be something like taking a bath, for my sister it might be something like listening to her husband practice piano because they are both musicians. So finding the thing that helps you to transition from that state into the other, knowing that it’s going to require time and planning and energy. And it’s so much easier if you know ahead of time instead of just fingers crossed, hoping against hope that both of you are in the same state at the same time.
So spontaneous desire is one of the normal healthy ways to experience desire. And also there’s responsive desire. Where spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure, responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure. So you have to create a context that makes it easy for your brain to like, you get in the bed, because it’s scheduled and you’ve already transitioned into a pretty good state of mind.
You let your skin touch your partner’s skin and your body goes, all right, I really like this. I really like this person. What a good idea this was. We should do this again, that’s responsive desire, and it is also normal. And it was developed in the late 90s by a sex therapist, Rosemary [inaudible 00:24:29], as a way to describe women’s sexual response. But the more research has been done on it, the clearer and clearer it becomes that it is not really that gendered. Some of it has to do with the way people are socialized, and certainly if you get raised as an it’s a girl type person, you’re given so many distressing, scary, overwhelming messages about sex, that your sexual breaks are just on all the time, and that means that it’s going to be a more gradual process for your body to engage sexually.
But when I wrote… A confident hair flip. I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about responsive desire and how it’s entirely normal, and I got more emails from men than from women saying thank you for this language, it explains what I have been experiencing. So I hesitate to frame it as a gender difference, but I do frame it as a difference in ways that people can experience desire. And the sort of the most frustrating thing is when people experience spontaneous desire like early in their relationship and then their desire becomes more responsive later in the relationship because it changed, they believe it is broken. And no, what happened was the context changed, and so the way your brain is able to respond to the world is different.
And it is normal and natural that when your life changes, the way your brain works is going to adapt to that. So there’s nothing broken that a change in your context can’t fix. Does that make sense?
One of the ways people have the conversation most successfully is when they can start with an example of their slowness to adapt to a transition in another context, in a nonsexual context. Like we were planning on having X for dinner, it turned out we couldn’t have X for dinner, we had to have Y for dinner. And the reluctance and the difficulty that my brain had in adjusting to changing, even though the thing we ended up having is one of my very favorite things to eat. It’s not about it not being something I don’t enjoy, it’s the letting go of the plan and transitioning to something else is, it’s just work for my brain.
And if you are having fun, if you like the sex you are having, you are already doing it right. There’s this great analogy that I learned from sex therapist Christine Hyde in New Jersey where she talks to her clients with this metaphor, if your best friend and invite you to a party, you say yes because it’s your best friend and it’s a party. And then as the date approaches you start thinking, it’s going to be really heavy traffic. We’re going to have to find child care. Am I going to want to put my pants on at the end of a long week? I don’t know.
But you know what you said you would go, so you put on your party clothes, you arrange the child care, you go through the traffic and you show up to the party. And what happens at the party? Usually you have fun at the party. If you are having fun at the party, you are doing it right. And my thing is there’s no amount of being like, man, I really wish we could go to a party tonight that would make that party worth going to if you don’t like the people who are there, if you don’t enjoy the kind of music they’re playing, if you’re allergic to the food, if you’ve recently had an argument with somebody there and it’s unresolved and you wish it could be resolved, when you still have a huge to-do list in your mind of all the stuff that needs to get done back at your house, and why am I wasting time going to this party?
None of that’s going to make the party worth going to. So pleasure, whether or not you’re having fun, is the question. Do you like it?
So after the couple describes the sex that they have, Peggy being Peggy says, “Well, I rather enjoy sex, but if that’s the sex I were having, I wouldn’t want it either. So what kind of sex is worth wanting?” And the question comes back to, it’s not about desire, it’s about pleasure. And here is the totally radical, completely obvious once you hear it said out loud idea. It’s not dysfunctional, it’s not a problem if you don’t want sex you do not like. If you don’t like it, of course you don’t want it. It’s not a desire problem, that’s a pleasure problem.
A major part of your role as a sexual person you were taught from birth or earlier is to be a giver, is to meet other people’s needs. And so when you get into sexual situations that involve another person, a lot of your attention shifts away from your internal state onto monitoring this other person to make sure their needs and expectations are being met. They’re satisfied. They are pleased with what’s happening. So much so that you might not even be aware of whether or not you yourself are experiencing pleasure. So that when somebody like me comes along and says, “Tell your partner what you want and like. Just talk about it.” You’re like, “How am I supposed to even know what I like?”
Two, they prioritize sex. They decide that it matters for their relationship, that they set aside time and energy, not just to have the sex, which that’ll by itself is a lot to… I mean, maybe we’ve got kids to raise, maybe we’ve got school to go to, maybe we’ve got jobs to go to, maybe we’ve got other friends to spend time with, other family members to pay attention to. God forbid we do just want to watch the Golden Bachelor and take a nap, right? Why would we set aside time to just let our bare skin rub against another human’s bare skin and put our mouths on each other’s genitals and bite each other’s to… Why? Because the couple decides that it matters. It does something valuable for their relationship that they spend some of their time together doing this very silly, often fun, sometimes important, sometimes really terrible thing that we humans do when we choose to.
But the couples who prioritize sex aren’t just setting aside the time actually to do it, they’re setting aside time to talk about what went well, and what they could try different, and what it means for them, given their life history, to have the kind of erotic connection that they have with this person. They decide that it matters. The second characteristic is that these couples prioritize sex. And blanket caveat, that it is normal for sex not to be a priority at some seasons of our lives. The first four years of having young humans in your home is quite typical for sex just to disappear off the priority list. People vary, and that’s a sort of standard narrative.
And the third characteristic is, this is honestly the hard one. The couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term, especially the people who have really extraordinary sex, are the ones who recognize that they have been taught a lot of other people’s opinions about who they’re supposed to be as sexual people, and what it means that they’re sexual, and what kind of sex they’re supposed to have. They jettison all of it and create space for who they truly are as a sexual person. And they explore to learn who their partner truly is, beyond all of those other people’s opinions about who their partner is supposed to be. And they explore who they as a unique pairing are in a partnership.
They start from scratch so that their authentic selves can connect in a way that feels true and vulnerable and real to them without trying to meet somebody else’s expectation of what they’re supposed to be doing. Because all those other people whose opinions you have in your head about what sex is supposed to be, they’re not in the bed with you. I always think of that moment in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth tells Mariah, Mariah’s repacking her bags because Lady Catherine de Bourgh told her she should be packing her bags totally differently. And Elizabeth taps her on the shoulder and says, “This is your trunk, these are your gowns, you can pack them any way you want. Lady Catherine will never know.” This is your sex life. This is your partner.
Because your idea of what you think sex is supposed to look like is made up of all those other people’s opinions about who you’re supposed to be. And all of that is lies, and all of that is just obstructing your access to ecstasy. And so then we start with tools to use to find… Because in addition to the couple where someone would be happy if they never had sex, again, there’s couples like me and my partner.
The origin story of the book is that in writing Come As You Are, my first book, which is about the science of women’s sexual wellbeing, the stress of writing a book about sex was so intense that I lost all, I had zero, zero interest in actually having any sex for months. Nothing.
So here I am, this sex expert with nothing for months. So I did what anyone would do. I looked at the peer reviewed research on how couples sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term. And what I found there and started me on this journey of like, wait a minute, everything in the mainstream narrative is not only wrong but wrongheaded, and making the situation worse for people if they actually believe that the goal in a long-term relationship is to keep the spark alive. If I could eradicate one sentence from the English language, it would be-
Parent Data is produced by Tamar Avishai with support from the Parent Data team and PRX. If you have thoughts on this episode, please join the conversation on my Instagram at ProfEmilyOster. And if you want to support the show, become a subscriber to the Parent Data newsletter at parentdata.org, where I write weekly posts on everything to do with parents and data to help you make better, more informed parenting decisions.
For example, just in time for Valentine’s Day last year, we conducted a survey about all of your sex lives after kids, and found the answers really illuminating. There are a lot of ways you can help people find out about us. Leave a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts. Text your friend about something you learned from this episode. Debate your mother-in-law about the merits of something parents do now that is totally different from what she did. Post a story to your Instagram debunking a panic headline of your own. Just remember to mention the podcast too, right Penelope?
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