So many people are looking for love, seeking it as though it is something outside of them, separate from them. 

Singles trawl the dating apps, date after date, hoping that this time it will be the one who will bring love into their life…

Couples engross themselves in their individual lives, becoming complacent, losing their connection. They feel the lack of love and seek it through work, children, or external lovers…

Yet the love is already there. It’s within us and it’s around us. Single or partnered, know yourself, love yourself. We need to do the psychological and spiritual work to clear negative patterns, to develop understanding and compassion for ourselves. It can be hard, and a life-long process, but so rewarding. We come to realise that ‘I’m ok’. We learn to let down the barriers, remove the armour that we created to keep us safe from the large or small hurts and neglects we experienced as children, to deal with the conditioning we received even though it didn’t feel right – ‘boys don’t cry’, ‘be a good girl’ – the message that we aren’t good enough unless… that we aren’t loveable unless….that we aren’t lovable.

Yet humans thrive on love, we are a bonding species, we need to connect to others, and to have stronger bonds with small numbers, particularly with our parents as children and then with our partner as adults. It is hard-wired in us, our evolutionary drive was to bond so as to raise our helpless slow-growing young and therefore survive as a species. Our human evolutionary drive has always been love.

The more we are able to love ourselves, the more we can let ourselves open to the love that is around us. Having that internal sense of self-love gives us strength to be vulnerable and authentic, allowing others around us to be the same, allowing us to connect as the fragile, beautiful people that we are, bumbling along in life the best we can. Single people then meet those who are a good match to their true selves and the love flows. Couples stay attuned to each other, really knowing each other and through that supporting and loving each other through life.

With the self-love you feel the external love. The experience of life is inevitably challenging, yet with the love it is experienced as safe, joyous and fulfilling.

You are always going to have differences, you’re always going have challenges, there are always going to be things that you don’t like about your partner…you are always going to need to have difficult conversations, including when you have a complaint about your partner.

So, an essential skill in having a quality relationship is being able to communicate complaints effectively.

Couples with undeveloped communication skills will deal with complaints in one of two ineffective ways:

• They’ll pretend the problem doesn’t exist and sweep it under the carpet… where it will fester unresolved until it re-emerges down the track in much worse form.

Or

• They’ll go into full-on confrontation mode, with aggressive accusations… leading to full-blown war and generally no resolution, only, at best, capitulation.

Neither of these approaches are effective ways of communicating complaints. So how do you do it well?

If you are the person with the complaint:

• Be gentle, make sure your partner is in a receptive mode and not distracted or busy, ask if this is a good time to talk and if not, when would be.
• Start the conversation with a positive comment, use ‘us’ language. Then share what behaviour is causing you problems and why it is a problem for you. Keep in mind the issue is not the behaviour, it’s why it’s a problem for you. So, no accusations or telling your partner what they’re doing wrong, instead, share how you’re feeling about it.
• Allow them space to reflect back to you what they are hearing and to ask questions to clarify that they understand you.

If you are the person being complained about:

• Woah, that’s hard! It really is! No-one likes hearing their partner say they’re not happy with you. But it is necessary, so take a deep breath and go in with open-heart and open-mind.

Now, there are five likely responses you will feel when you hear the complaint. Be prepared for this so that you can have the self-awareness not to succumb. The five are:

• Going on the offensive and attacking back

“How dare you, you do it too, in fact you’re worse than me, blah blah blah”

• Going on the defensive and explaining yourself

“Well, what do you expect, I’m busy/tired/etc, I can’t blah blah blah”

• Dismissing your partner’s concerns

“Don’t be ridiculous, that’s not important, it doesn’t matter.”

• Fixing the problem

“Right, what you need to do is blah blah blah”

• Apologising for the problem

“Oh, you’re so right, I’m such a terrible person, I’m so sorry blah blah blah”

Now, there might well be a place for apologising, fixing, explaining and even letting your partner know they do it too. But not too soon. Find out what the problem is first, not the behaviour but why it’s a problem, and once you are sure of that, then you can if necessary apologise, fix, explain or point out that they do it too and then address that side of things.

There is never a reason to dismiss. That’s the worst thing you can do. You can defer a conversation if you’re not in the right space to discuss then – as long as you set a time to discuss and honour the timing. But never, ever dismiss.

When you can manage these reactions, when you stay curious and seek to truly understand your partner’s experience of what’s bothering them, then you can stay calm, co-regulate, and understand and resolve even the most challenging of issues.

That’s what makes a great relationship.

Quality sex nurtures your body. It releases stress, is good for your heart health, your skin, your fitness, suppleness and so much more. 

Quality sex also nurtures your mind and emotions. It’s fun, it’s creative, it’s connecting, and keeps you feeling relaxed, calm, bonded and loved up.

It’s about the healthiest activity you can engage in!

It goes much deeper though than just being physically good for you, and even deeper than having a positive effect mentally and emotionally. It goes right to your soul. Quality sex nurtures your soul.

When you are able to create the level of connection and safety, through self-awareness and communication, that enables you to engage sexually with presence, vulnerability, authenticity, the quality of experience becomes so freeing and joyful. This is a level of freedom beyond just stress release. It’s a sense of expansiveness that feels transcendent. And it’s a sense of joy that is more than just fun and happiness, it is experiencing a core vitality and a joyfulness of life and love.

 It’s an altered state of consciousness, with transcendent states of bliss and flow where you’ve let go of control, there’s no expectation or pressure. It’s two authentic lovers coming together to co-create an experience of pleasure and connection moment by moment. 

This is what sex can ultimately be. All the way from a gentle cuddle under the sheets as you drift off to sleep through to hours of experimentation and play. When it’s entered into and experienced in this way it becomes a part of life that nourishes you, individually and as a couple, at the deepest levels of body, mind and soul.

Some people are labelled as ‘emotional’, as if it’s a bad thing. Well, you know what, we’re all emotional. All the time. We are all, every one of us, at every single moment, having an emotional experience. Experience, which is the state of being alive, is felt through our feelings, our emotions.

So being ‘emotional’ is being alive. 

Being able to be in touch with our emotions, to feel them, to know them and to express them is a very important skill in life. Particularly in relationships. 

A lot of us aren’t good at that. Some of us grow up thinking emotions are ‘bad’, particularly negative emotions. The message you get is: It’s bad to be feeling bad, so don’t feel bad. Um, so what you are supposed to do with those feelings? Well, either you suppress them, pretend they’re not there, and just let them fester. Or you become overly ‘emotional’, intense and not being able to express cleanly. 

It’s actually a little healthier to be overly expressive in your emotions than to suppress them. At least they are getting out and not festering. But if they are not being expressed well, they get violent or abusive and that is not at all good. That’s out of control. 

So how do you express feeling without suppressing or getting out of control? 

Firstly, take some time to identify what you’re feeling, yourself, internally. Be as clear as possible to yourself before you speak. If you’re the type of person who processes outwardly, that can be confusing to your partner, it’s messy and unclear to them, so try to have processed as much as possible before you speak. Conversely, if you’re the type of person who processes inwardly before speaking, make sure you don’t take too long as that could be upsetting to your partner too. At least let them know you’re processing so they don’t think you’re supressing or ignoring an issue.

Secondly, make sure your partner is in the right state to engage. There’s no point trying to talk with someone if they are busy or distracted as they can’t be receptive. It’s better to postpone to a time when they can listen – but do set a time and keep to it.

Thirdly, speak cleanly, being aware of both keeping yourself calm and paying attention to your partner. You need to be co-regulating, making sure you support each other so that neither of you gets triggered and dysregulated. That means breathing well, looking at each other, using a kind tone of voice, touch, allowing space for the other to take in what you’re saying. If you notice your partner is getting a little dysregulated then focus on calming rather than pushing your point harder. If you notice yourself getting dysregulated then breath more deeply and slow down a little, ask for a hug or a break if you need it.

Remember this isn’t easy, it’s a skill that needs to be practiced and mastered both as individuals and as a couple. The better you get the better you can express your thoughts, feelings and emotions without it getting overly ‘emotional’. You’ll get understanding and through that you’ll get resolution.

Q: We’re all so time poor these days, but booking in for a ‘romance’ night with my partner seems a bit pre-meditated. But the occasional dull and brief late-night sex we have leaves a lot to be desired. How can I add some zing?

A: There’s a myth in our society that good sex has to be spontaneous. Which is like saying a good meal has to be spontaneous. In fact it’s quite the opposite, the better the meal usually the more focus and time is put into it. Otherwise you get McDonalds. It’s the same with sex. Give it the focus it needs or you end up with MacDonald’s sex – dull and not very satisfying.

People often reminisce about the early days of their romance when it was supposedly spontaneous, but in fact there was a huge amount of lead-up and anticipation. You’d be thinking all week of Saturday night and what you’d wear, what you’d do, where you’d go…Fast forward several years and you slob around the house in your flannel jammies, spend the evenings engrossed in anything but each other, fall exhausted into bed at 11pm and wonder why you can’t be bothered!

If you want good sex in an on-going relationship you’ve got to create the time and the space to get the two of you in the mood, yearning for each other, just like you used to.

It starts way before the bedroom. Ideally it should start the moment you wake up and smile as you gaze over at your partner. Those small acts of affection should continue throughout the day, to build intimacy and raise erotic tension (I call it the ‘mmm’ factor!)

Once evening comes you need to chill out together. Being in each other’s company and enjoying each other’s company is the key to good sex. So set aside at least one evening a week for a nooky night. Don’t veg out in front of the TV or surf the net or catch up on emails or clean the house. Once the kids are in bed, it’s you time. Soft lights, music, a glass of wine and thou. This is transition time from the busyness of your day to a relaxed space where you can gently open up to each other.

By the time you get the bedroom you’ll be feeling pretty good about each other, and the ‘mmm’ factor will be simmering, if not boiling! Now, use your bedroom to put you even more in the mood. Make sure it’s a boudoir, a sanctuary away from the stress of life, a place that when you enter, you leave the world behind. Soft lighting, candles, music, beautiful bed linen, whatever makes you soften and open.

And then…it’s playtime! Take your time, treat sex more as a picnic than as a race towards a finish. Gaze into each other’s eyes, touch all over, use props, whatever. Be light and playful, use your imagination, enjoy each other’s bodies and get into a flow. Playful, wild, sensual, wherever it takes you. Just not dull.

Create the time, create the space.

It’s so easy to become complacent in relationships. Hey, we’re busy people, we’ve got a lot on, we’re tired, we don’t have the time or energy to invest in our relationship, there are other priorities…

 And so, without the nurturance, it withers and dies…

 Like everything in life, if you want something to be good, if you want it to be a part of life that supports and enhances you, you need to focus on it. If you want to be healthy you have to focus on your health, if you want to be wealthy you have to focus on your finances, and if you want to be loved-up you have to focus on your relationship.

 If you get complacent you stop being consciously engaged with your partner and even with yourself and revert to subconscious beliefs and patterns, such as poor parental role-modelling, limiting cultural beliefs around relationships, unhelpful myths about sexuality.

 When you pay attention though, you learn about yourself and your partner and through that you develop a better dynamic. With that awareness you make better choices. If there are tensions or blocks, you work on them. You admit where you lack knowledge or experience and get help and learn. Then you practice, together, and keep developing what you learn. You constantly, consciously cultivate a life-enhancing relationship.

 At first this might take a lot of effort, but over time, with positive feedback and results, being conscious becomes easier, more habitual. And because you are doing this together you have the added benefit of positive feedback and reinforcement between you.

So often people tell me that they don’t want to say their truth as they don’t want to upset their partner, but what they really mean is that they don’t want to feel bad about disappointing their partner. There’s a big difference between those two statements.

Of course, we don’t like our partners to be upset, but that doesn’t mean we should do anything we can to prevent them having a bad feeling. That is intensely co-dependant.

We are not responsible for our partner’s feelings. We are responsible for our own feelings. Now, let me clarify that a bit.

In a healthy relationship we are interdependent. That means we are both independent and relational. The relational part is that we are attentive and supportive of our partner. We are always responsible for being caring and polite and kind and respectful to our partner. Absolutely. The independent part of a good relationship is that we are also attentive and respectful to ourselves. That means we need to express our truth to our partner. The relational element of this is that we need to express that truth in a caring, polite, kind and respectful way.

Then the independent element on our partner’s part, is that they are responsible for managing their own response to your respectfully-presented truth. If that happens to be something that is disappointing to them, so be it, that’s ok! Feeling bad is ok. Life cannot be one long stream of happy emotions. Disappointment is a regular part of life.

The relational element of the partner managing their disappointment is that they are also polite and respectful to the one sharing their truth, who is then responsible for their response to the partner’s response, and on it goes. This is how you can discuss and resolve issues where you have differences, of which life is full. Including, and particularly, our sex life.

Trying to mind-read your partner, trying to make sure they’re happy even though you don’t want what they want inevitably goes bad. It’s confusing, it often seems manipulative, no-one gets what they want. You might think you’re aiming for win:win but at best it’s win:lose and more likely it’s lose:lose.

So, know your own truth, express your own truth cleanly and respectfully, receive your partner’s truth with an open heart. Discuss with curiosity and compassion, staying kind and polite, and you’ll be able to deal with any issue. The worse outcome is that one doesn’t get what they want, but at least they feel heard and understood; and at best you are able to co-create something that does work for both of you.

"Oh, yeah, oh yeah, that’s good, oh yeah, mmm, oh, yeah, oh god oh god, mmm, mmm..."

It’s hard to convey in writing – so listen to the podcast – but those moans and groans during sex are so sexy. It’s a turn-on for your partner to hear them and it actually makes the experience more pleasurable for you too.

Why? Well, firstly we all like to know that our partner is enjoying themselves when we’re having sex with them, no-one wants to have sex with someone who isn’t enjoying it, particularly if it’s your beloved – and it’s a sexual confidence-builder to know that we’re good at pleasuring our partner. It’s a pleasure to pleasure!

And then, it feels better for us as individuals when we make sounds. Why? Because we’re opening and releasing. We’re breathing, we’re letting the feeling, the pleasure, the energy flow and that creates more good feeling. If you’re feeling tight and holding it in, then there’s no flow and no release.

It’s particularly good when we let the sounds come from deep in our torso. The higher sounds which come from high in our torso or throat, are good, but see what it’s like when you drop down into your belly and pelvis and let the sounds come from deep within. Notice how the feeling changes when the sound changes in tone, strength, loudness and so forth.

Now, I want to make an important point here - some people think that vocalising during sex needs to be some kind of pornified ‘dirty talk’, sleazy, often denigrating ‘do me big boy’ or ‘take this you dirty slut’ kind of talk. Look, if that’s your thing, fine, but for most people it’s not their thing, particularly not with someone they love. That kind of talk is a big turn off, not a turn on.

Another common problem with trying to be vocal during sex, is thinking that you have to use words. Again, if you do like that and can do it no problem, then go for it. If you like telling stories while having sex and it keeps you present and connected, that’s great. It’s certainly easier to do if you are giving focused pleasure to your partner and not receiving it yourself. But when you’re receiving pleasure, either because your partner is focused on you manually or orally or because you are engaged in mutual activity like intercourse, lots of people can’t speak without losing the mood.

I suspect that this is because when you’ve moved into that erotic altered state of consciousness, had the ‘erotic shift’ that I described in the last blog post, then you’ve moved from the logical, focused left-hemisphere of your brain  to the broader, less-boundaried right-side of the brain (see my article Bonking on the Right Side of the Brain for more on this). The speech centres are in the left side of the brain, so if you’re in the right side your speech centres aren’t engaged. So to be able to speak you have to move your awareness to the left-side to engage the speech centres, you have to draw yourself out of a broad, euphoric, unfocused state, to an alert focused one, and you lose all that lovely rapturous trance-link feeling.

So, what’s the solution? Simple, use your breath. On the out breath, let out a sound. Experiment with deep and high tones, closed mouth ‘mmm’s and open mouth ‘ah’s. Then add some simple words that can come out with thinking about it – yeah, good, oh god, type of thing. (Listen to my podcast version to hear me demonstrate verbally.) Practise it alone, so you can get used to the feeling and don’t feel awkward. Or for a bit of fun, sit opposite your partner and practice it together – it can be really arousing!

But what if it gets too noisy, you might ask. Well, that’s what pillows and cushions are for, especially those little ones that sit in front of the big pillows on the bed, they are perfect for holding over your mouth and moaning into when you want to let it all out!

Mmm...

There’s the everyday, and there’s the erotic. And there’s a shift between the two.

There’s a physical shift where your body stirs.  It’s not just genital arousal, it’s a shift in your physical state, a rich warm spread of feeling throughout your whole body. And there’s a shift in consciousness, from the everyday waking state to something altered, with less active cognitive thinking, to a more right-brain, bliss-like awareness.

To have good sex, you need the erotic shift, physically and consciously.

Sure, you can engage in sex without it, you might even have genital orgasms, but you won’t have that rich altered state of consciousness. Which is fine for a quickie, but for a fully satisfying experience right to the depths of your soul, you need to access the erotic shift.

What leads to that shift? What are your gateways?

For some it might it might be sensual engagement through touch and sound, for others it might be a sense of deep love and devotion.

Some might get there through a sense of the transgressive, going to the edge, in their minds or in their actions, for others it could be through the simplicity of an eye gaze.

Some might find their way through erotic storytelling, others with erotic images.

Some might be led there through role-play and pretend, others through admiring the beauty of the naked body.

For some the right atmosphere alone can be the gateway, for others a flirtatious lead-up of hours or days.

Whatever your gateway, is unique to you, and will change with time, age, mood and energy. There’s no right or wrong, just what is authentic for you, at that time, and what you co-create between you.

When the shift occurs, you can engage with your entire being. And this way sex becomes whole - truly bodyful, mindful and soulful.  

It might not sound particularly sexy, but without safety you don’t get sexy, at least, not quality sexy. 

Safety is needed to be able to trust, be vulnerable, open up and let go, and that is what’s required for good sex. 

Safety comes first.

It’s often overlooked in sex though. We want to jump straight to the good stuff, the behaviours, rather than making sure the conditions are safe. It would be like going skydiving without checking the parachute is packed properly. It’s dangerous! And not pleasurable. And in fact, like with skydiving, the more ‘dangerous’ you want your sexual encounter to be, the more you have to focus on safety.

You’ll actually find that those who engage in the kinkier sexual activities have very thoroughly well-packed “parachutes”. You’re safer in a BDSM dungeon than in the average bedroom, because there you don’t engage without a thorough understanding of what each is wanting and setting your boundaries very clearly. In contrast, I’ve had clients who have been together for decades, who have never discussed their sex life.

If your partner doesn’t know what you’re feeling and wanting and fearing and hoping, it’s not safe, and it’s not going to be good. Either you’ll exceed your boundaries and get hurt or you’ll play it safe and limit your experience so it’s not as pleasurable as it could be. The latter is obviously better than the former, but it is limiting.

I’m talking about both physical and emotional safety here. Physically, you need to make sure you’ve got contraception and preventing STDs covered; and you need to make sure sex doesn’t hurt. If it does, stop and/or change what you’re doing. Sex must never hurt.

The emotional side of things is just as important. To make sex emotionally safe you need to know what is going on for the other person. That requires communication, the type of communication that allows you to be heard without judgement, so you can share your desires and fears. Though this discussion you create safety and allow for authentic expression and exploration. 

Interestingly, the discussion itself can ignite an erotic charge. So it’s not that you create safety first and then you can be erotic, the creating of the safety though discussion can in itself be erotic!

I see this all the time in the couples I work with, the ones who are best at creating safety through open supportive communication are the ones who have the best, most profound sex lives.

As one female partner said to me: “Our bed is the safest place in the world”. 

Followed not long after by her male partner saying “I keep thinking our sex can’t get any better, but it just does.”