How Do We Find Our Way Into Pleasure?

So much of what comes up with the couples I serve is a quiet desire to be close again, and the worry underneath it: what can I do to make this better? Which already carries an assumption that something is wrong. Sometimes there is real difficulty in the body, from stress, from an experience that got stored and never released. Most of the time, there is simply distance that crept in without anyone deciding it.

First, Just Acknowledge It

Most of us who have been with a partner for a while reach a point where the play, the sensuality, the actual sex becomes almost non-existent. One of you is stressed. Work takes over. A few weeks pass, then a few months, sometimes a few years. You become bed partners, roommates, sometimes in separate rooms. You love each other deeply, and still something feels missing.

Take a breath and notice where in your body that missing lives. For many people it gathers around the hips, the lower back, the back of the heart, somewhere between the neck and the base of the spine, where there can be a lot of tightness. There may be a hollowness, an emptiness, a little sadness. A wish to feel desirable again, the way you were when you could not keep your hands off each other. You have both grown and changed, and that is perfectly okay. It does not have to stay this way. Often it takes only one person wanting to make the change.

Take Sex Off the Table First

Before anything else, I take sex off the table. Can you schedule five minutes? No kids, no work, no phones. Phones, laptops, television all pull at our attention, the same exquisite attention a lover once gave us. For those five minutes, connect back into what that closeness used to feel like in your body. That is where we store emotion, and where it gets stuck.

We Each Have a Different Way In

Just as we each have a love language, we each have a different way into pleasure. One partner plans a candlelit blanket out in a field, soft music, feeding you grapes, and for some people that is heaven. For others it is, okay, when do we actually get to it. Neither is wrong. They are different codes. Once you understand your partner's code, the whole thing opens up.

• Energetic. Feels the charge in a room, loves eye contact, can almost reach an orgasm across a room from flirting alone. Too much pressure, too much excitement, and the brakes come straight on.
• Sensual. Loves smell, taste, soft fabrics, food, skin, often caressing their own arm. What takes them out is a mess on the floor, a bad smell, the thought that they did not wash.
• Sexual. Wired toward orgasm and the finish line. Nothing wrong with that. Can go from zero to a hundred fast, and switch off just as fast if there is no climax in sight or the foreplay feels too long.
• Kinky. Anything that feels taboo for you. Undressing with the lights on. Role play. Psychological play. Rope. Impact. A vast, vast arena.
• Shapeshifter. A bit of all of them. Often quietly starving, because they have learned to give and receive only in their partner's one way, when they were built for the whole tasting menu.

I once told a client it takes about forty minutes for a woman to become engorged enough to be penetrated and actually enjoy it. He said, I do not have time for that, and you could watch his partner's body fold. He was sexual. She was energetic and sensual. That gap is the blueprint difference in a single sentence.

The Question I Ask Every Couple

Take sex off the table and sit facing each other. One of you asks: tell me, what does intimacy mean to you? Ask the same prompt for five minutes and keep excavating. When your partner answers, if you have understood it, simply say thank you. Then ask it back.

Intimacy to me might mean being read so well that you already know how I want to be held. To your partner it might mean looking into your eyes and seeing them sparkle. You start looking at intimacy in a completely different way. Take it away. See how it feels.

"There is a different way into pleasure, just like we have love languages. Once you start recognising yours, and then meeting theirs, that is when so much excitement comes back in."