“Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.” Billy Crystal
One of the lessons I had drilled into me early on in my training was to meet people where they are. This is great advice when you are trying to increase the level of intimacy in your marriage.
If you push your wife too hard or too fast to meet your intimacy expectations, all you’ll succeed in doing is hitting her brakes.
She might “give in” and engage in “duty sex” on occasion. To keep you quiet. To keep the marriage functioning, even if it’s only to keep it on life support.
But her heart won’t be in it. Which means her body won’t be either.
You can have sex anywhere or at any time for the most part. It isn’t context dependent. But pleasure is. For both of you.
And you may not have as stringent context requirements for pleasure as your wife does.
Her comfort level around physical intimacy is going to be the limiter on her ability to enjoy the experience.
So your wanting to try a new position or technique that you’ve heard about that’s guaranteed to turn her on may be seen as another failure on her part. Because what she’s been doing with you apparently isn’t good enough.
And she may already be pushing herself to do that.
If it doesn’t give her pleasure, it’s just going to link physical intimacy with dislike or even repulsion in her mind. Not an outcome you want for her or your marriage.
Instead, you need to meet her where she is in regards to physical intimacy.
If something triggers her “shouldn’t” button—a specific activity, how her body looks, having the lights on, dressing in lingerie, being in someone else’s home, whatever, STOP and be gentle with it.
Don’t try to talk her out of what she is feeling. Don’t tell her you find her beautiful and desirable. You probably do but that is only going to have her thinking about it more.
Find a way to work with it. Make it be about her.
If that means it’s plain, vanilla sex with the lights off, so be it. Celebrate it! For now.
Be willing to help her with her “shouldn’ts” outside of the bedroom. Again, not by trying to talk her out of them but to understand where they come from.
When you provide a place of emotional safety, where she doesn’t feel judged or inadequate, you open a path to more and better physical intimacy.
And isn’t that what you really want?
You’ve got this. But if you don’t. I’ve got you. Join my upcoming From Roommate to Romeo Workshop or connect with me directly here.
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