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Most people who come to me can describe exactly what is wrong. The fight they keep having. The silence in the car on the way home. What it feels like to reach over and get turned down again. The desire that used to be there and isn’t anymore. They can give me the problem in detail.

Then I ask what they want instead, and there is usually a long pause.

Sometimes the answer is “more sex.” Sometimes it is “more desire,” or “I want to feel like she actually desires me.” Sometimes it is “I want him to stop asking.” Sometimes it is “I don’t know. I just want it to be different.”

So we go to work on something neither of them has ever defined.

Most of us got two pieces of information about sex growing up. Don’t, and then do. Nothing in between about what it is supposed to look like once you get there. So couples end up measuring themselves against whatever they picked up along the way. A friend’s offhand comment. A number they read somewhere about how often married people have sex. A scene in a movie. Or even worse, porn.

I get the same question constantly. “Is this normal?” “Are we normal?” “Is he normal?” Normal covers an enormous range, and it isn’t actually what people are asking. What they want to know is whether what they have is healthy, and whether something better is available to them.

Today I want to give you a picture you can hold up against your own marriage. Not a prescription, because this looks different in every relationship. A framework, so you can see where you are solid and where you have room. Most couples have never had one, which is how two people in the same bed end up measuring completely different things.

Two people measuring the wrong thing

One of the couples I coached, Talia and Vaughn, came to me because Vaughn said their sex life was dying, and Talia said she had no idea what he wanted from her.

I asked them separately to describe a good sexual experience in their marriage.

Vaughn described a night when Talia initiated.

Talia described a night when Vaughn didn’t seem upset afterward.

He was measuring by her desire. She was measuring by his mood. Neither one of them was measuring by anything that had to do with what they wanted.

If it wasn’t frequency and it wasn’t mood, they didn’t know what to want.

Wanting each other is not the problem

It is normal, right, and good for a husband and wife to be sexual with each other. To want to touch each other. To want to see each other naked. To want to be touched in the places that feel the best. To be curious about each other’s bodies. To want sex, and to say so out loud.

That is not something God tolerates about you. Your body was made with the capacity for pleasure on purpose, by Heavenly Parents who could have designed it some other way and didn’t.

I don’t believe God creates something in us for us to fight against our entire lives. I believe Satan takes what was made good and distorts it, until we either use it in ways that hurt us or spend our lives treating it as the enemy. Both of those get the same result, which is that what God gave us stops working the way it was meant to.

The Law of Chastity tells you where sex belongs. It never told you to be embarrassed about wanting it once you’re there.

Getting married did not change what a lot of the women I work with believe about themselves. They’re married, they’re keeping covenants, and underneath all of it they still believe that wanting sex says something unflattering about them. That wanting it a lot makes a woman less like the woman she was supposed to become. That enjoying it too much means she has lost something.

I hear from a lot of husbands, and the specifics are remarkably consistent. She won’t let him touch her vulva. She won’t touch his penis. The lights stay off, every time. She won’t let him see her changing her clothes, and she won’t let him see her in the shower. He has never really seen his wife’s body, and at some point he stopped asking.

Any one of those on its own can be a preference, and preferences are allowed. When all of them are true at once, something other than preference is running the show.

When it started usually points to what it is. If it has been this way from the beginning, it is most likely shame she was handed long before she ever met him, and she has built her whole sex life around never having to feel it. If it used to be different, then something happened inside that marriage. Betrayal. Pressure she couldn’t get out from under. Criticism about her body. Sex she agreed to again and again that she didn’t want.

If you recognize yourself in any of that, where it came from matters. Shame that was put on you before you ever married is not your fault, and the sex life you built around it is still yours to change. An injury that happened inside your marriage has to be dealt with directly, because no amount of work on desire will move while it sits there untouched.

Either way, no framework is going to help you until you deal with it. And dealing with it is your work. Nobody can hand you permission you won’t accept.

From there, you need something concrete to measure against.

The floor: six principles of sexual health

Doug Braun-Harvey is a licensed marriage and family therapist and a certified sex therapist who trains clinicians all over the world. He put together six principles of sexual health as a guideline, a minimum set of ground rules that anybody can build their own picture of sexual health on top of. He adapted them from a definition the Pan American Health Organization published in 2000.

I went through these in Episode 94 if you want the longer version.

These six are the floor. They are the minimum that has to be true before a sexual relationship can be called healthy at all. Meeting all six does not hand you a good sex life. It means nothing happening between the two of you is doing harm. Building something you actually love goes well past these six, and that is where I want to spend most of today.

1. Consent. Consent means voluntary cooperation, with both people participating toward mutual satisfaction. In marriage we tend to treat it as automatic, something handled once you say “I do.” It isn’t. Sex that happens because you’re afraid of the mood that follows a “no” is not consensual in any meaningful sense. Neither is sex you agree to because you’ve been asked eleven times and you’re worn down, or because you’re scared of what the consequences will be if you don’t.

A yes only counts when neither the yes nor the no carries a consequence. If saying no costs you something, or if saying yes and then stopping partway costs you something, a technical yes does not make it consensual.

That is coercion. It doesn’t require force, or threats, or a raised voice. It only requires both of you knowing what a no is going to cost. Most of the coercion I see in marriages is quiet, and the person doing it would be horrified to hear it called that.

The clearest version is an enthusiastic yes. The other version that works is an honest one. “I’m not in the mood right now, but I’m willing to start and see what happens, and I want to be able to stop if my desire doesn’t show up.” That is a real yes. It stays a real yes only if stopping actually costs nothing.

This runs in both directions. Plenty of husbands say yes to sex they know is duty sex. She agreed, she’s there, and he can tell she would rather be asleep. He goes ahead anyway, and then feels terrible afterward without being able to explain why.

Consent is not only about the person giving the yes. If you know the yes you are getting is not a real one, taking it is your part of the problem.

A yes at the start of the night is also not the end of it. Consent is ongoing. It sounds like “is that too much pressure,” and “can you slow down,” and “I love that, keep going,” and “I want to stop.” It requires both people to be able to hear a “no” and let it be an answer.

Most of the women I work with have had a lot of sex that would not clear this bar, and it took them a long while to let themselves call it what it was. They weren’t forced. They said yes, and they didn’t want to. If you have been doing that, you probably feel resentment you haven’t been able to explain, and it probably shows up in your body before it shows up in your words.

Take a look at Episode 247 and Episode 253

2. Nonexploitation. Nobody is using power to get sex. That includes guilt, threats, sulking, the silent treatment, withdrawal of money or affection, and invoking someone’s worthiness or salvation to get them into bed.

It shows up when one spouse unilaterally changes the agreement, has an affair, and then keeps up the pretense so the sexual relationship continues on false terms. The exploitation there is the cover-up. The other spouse is consenting to a marriage that no longer exists.

The salvation one deserves its own mention, because it is specific to us. “If you don’t, I’ll end up looking at porn.” “The bishop said a wife should be available.” That is using a woman’s faith as leverage, and it is exploitation no matter how sincerely the man believes it. His choices belong to him.

Wives use power too, and it gets discussed a lot less. Sex handed out as a reward when he has been good and pulled back when he disappoints her. Bringing up the thing he confessed, the worst moment of his life, any time she wants a conversation to end. Agreeing to sex in exchange for something she wants, and making sure he knows that is the trade. Using how badly he wants her as the lever, because she knows exactly what a no costs him.

Power is power. It does not turn into something else because the person holding it is the one who wants sex less often.

3. Honesty. Honesty with your spouse and with yourself.

Faking orgasm is the one I see most often, and here is what it costs. You teach your husband a wrong answer, he files it away as the thing that works, and he keeps doing it. Then when you finally tell him the truth, he doesn’t just hear “I’d like something different.” He hears that he has been wrong the entire time and never knew. Which is why women keep faking, and why the hole keeps getting deeper.

Honesty also means saying “that hurt” instead of “it was fine.” Saying “I don’t want to tonight” instead of manufacturing a headache. Saying “there’s something I’ve wanted to try” instead of deciding in advance that he’ll think less of you for wanting it.

And honesty with yourself is the one people skip. That is admitting you’re a sexual person who was made to enjoy this, when you’ve spent a long time managing that part of yourself like a liability.

4. Shared values. Not identical preferences. A shared understanding of what sex means in your marriage and what the two of you are doing when you have it.

Most of the conflict I see here isn’t between husband and wife. It’s inside one person. She’ll tell me sex is a good and holy part of marriage, and she will mean it. Then we get into her actual beliefs and find that underneath, she still thinks her body is dangerous and that a woman who likes sex too much has lost something. Both things are living in her at the same time, and the second one is winning.

You cannot build shared values with your spouse until you know what yours actually are. Not the ones you’d say in a lesson. The ones running the show.

This is why a values exercise is usually one of the first things I do with a new client. You have to get clear on what you actually believe about sex, and then the two of you have to say those things out loud to each other. Most couples have never done either one.

5. Prevention. Protection from sexually transmitted infections and from pregnancy you don’t want. People assume this one doesn’t apply to their marriage. It does.

It means honesty about anything that happened before either of you married. It means contraception decisions made together rather than one spouse pressuring the other into their preference, in either direction. A woman who spends every month afraid she’s pregnant is not going to relax into sex, and no amount of work on desire will fix that while the fear is still there. The same is true for a husband who doesn’t want another pregnancy. He initiates less, or he’s somewhere else in his head the whole time, and neither of them connects it back to a decision they never actually made together.

6. Pleasure. Pleasure is the reason people have sex, and it belongs to both of you.

This is where I spend more time than anywhere else, because so many women arrive believing pleasure is something other people get. Or that pleasure is dangerous. Or that it isn’t important. Or that wanting it is selfish and indulgent. When pleasure comes off the table, you’re left with sex as a chore someone performs, and there is a hard ceiling on how good that can ever get.

Men run into their own version of this. A husband who has been treated like his wanting is a burden his wife has to manage starts to believe his pleasure is too much, and some of them stop asking for anything at all.

Pleasure also isn’t meant to run in one direction. Both of you should be getting something out of this. There will be nights that are mostly about one of you, and those are good nights. When one person’s pleasure is the point in general and the other one is there to provide it, that is no longer the principle.

The six principles of sexual health are not only a marriage framework. I use them as my guide for the conversations I have with my children about relationships, and I have never waited until a conversation about sex to start.

A small child can understand consent. At that age it has nothing to do with sex. It’s whether someone gets to hug you when you don’t want to be hugged, and whether you stop tickling your sister the moment she says stop. Honesty starts as telling the truth about what you actually want instead of going along with whatever everybody else picked. Nonexploitation starts as noticing when somebody is getting pressured, and deciding not to be the one doing the pressuring. Shared values starts as figuring out what you believe and whether the people around you believe the same thing.

Every one of these holds true in every relationship a person has, with friends, with roommates, with the people they work with. They just deepen as kids get older. By the time sex is actually on the table, my kids are not encountering consent for the first time. They’re applying something they’ve had all along to a new situation.

Back inside your marriage, getting all six of those solid is a real accomplishment. It is also only the beginning.

Both of you are in the room

A healthy sexual relationship is not one-sided. That sounds obvious and it is the single most common thing I see missing.

One-sided has two versions. In the first, one spouse is the provider and the other is the recipient.

Sometimes that’s the wife performing a service. She knows what he likes in great detail, and he knows almost nothing about what she likes, because she has never told him and possibly doesn’t know herself.

Sometimes it runs the other way and he’s the one doing all of it. He initiates, he does the touching, he’s working the entire time, and she receives. She has never learned his body. She rarely touches him unless it’s headed somewhere. Taking charge of a night has never occurred to her. He doesn’t have a wife who wants him. He has a wife who lets him.

In the second version, one spouse is the project. Everything is about getting her there, checking on her, making sure she’s okay, which sounds generous and eventually turns into pressure. She stops being a person having sex and becomes an outcome he’s trying to produce.

Either way, only one of you is actually in the room.

A night here or there that’s focused on one person is a good thing. Sometimes she’s exhausted and wants to give him something. Sometimes he wants to spend an hour on her and nothing else. Those nights are great, and I’d like more couples to have them on purpose. The question is what happens in general, over months and years. If your sex life has one main character, that’s the thing to look at.

Vaughn and Talia had the first version, with Talia as the provider, and neither of them had noticed. Talia could have listed a dozen things Vaughn liked. When I asked her what she liked, she said she liked that he was happy afterward.

The tell is usually in how each of you describes a good night. If one of you describes what you felt and the other describes how it went for their spouse, you have your answer. Finding that out takes a conversation, and conversation is where most couples get it wrong.

You can talk about sex with your clothes on

Most couples only discuss sex in the worst possible moments. In bed, right after someone got turned down. In the ten minutes after it went badly, when one person is hurt and the other is defensive. Or they don’t discuss it at all, and every sexual decision gets made through a reach in the dark that either gets accepted or doesn’t.

There’s another version that’s just as common. One of you finally brings it up because you want something better, and the other one won’t engage. They change the subject. They go quiet. Or they fold into “so I’m the problem,” and the next hour goes to reassuring them instead of talking about what you asked for. If that happens enough times, you stop asking, which was kind of the point.

If you’re the one who folds, that’s the thing to work on. Your spouse telling you they want something is not an accusation, and treating it like one is how a marriage ends up with nobody willing to say anything.

Couples with a healthy sexual relationship talk about sex when nothing is on the line. “I’ve been thinking about what I want more of.” “I don’t love it when you do that, and here’s what I’d like instead.” “What was going on for you the other night?”

The conversation is not easier because they are better people. It’s easier because nobody is naked and nobody just got rejected. Take away the vulnerability of the bedroom and the sting of the last twenty minutes, and a lot of couples can say things they have never been able to say.

But, it isn’t always that simple. If the two of you can’t talk well about money, or your kids, or your in-laws, you are not going to suddenly talk well about sex. Sex is the most vulnerable conversation in a marriage, and it sits on top of whatever your conversations already look like. If every hard topic turns into a fight or a shutdown, that is the thing to work on first, and it will do more for your sex life than anything you try in bed.

If that sounds impossible in your marriage, start smaller than a conversation about sex. Tell your spouse one thing you liked, on a day when you’re not having sex. That’s it. See what happens.

And if even that feels out of reach, you may need some outside help and support.

You can want it differently and still be fine

Back to what a healthy sexual relationship looks like in practice.

One of you almost certainly wants sex more often than the other. That is the most common setup in marriage and it is not a malfunction.

In a lot of marriages the husband is the one who wants it more. In plenty of others it is the wife, and those women often carry the added belief that wanting sex more than her husband means something is wrong with her. Her husband usually carries the matching belief that something is wrong with him, because a husband is supposed to be the one who wants it more. She often believes it about him too. So both of them are walking around convinced that he’s broken and she’s too much.

What makes a marriage unhealthy is not the difference. It’s what the two of you do with it, and there are a lot of ways that that goes wrong. In one, the spouse who wants sex more often experiences every no as rejection of them personally, and the spouse who wants it less often experiences every ask as pressure, or as a demand or they’re failing. Both of them start bracing. The asking gets less direct and more resentful. The agreeing happens more often and gets enjoyed less. Between them they have built a system where neither one can win.

In another, the one who wants it more stops asking, and the silence gets read as relief on one side and rejection on the other. In another, they settle into a quiet schedule that keeps the peace, and neither of them admits how little they look forward to it.

Every one of those has the same thing underneath. Some couples talk about it and some don’t. There’s usually some managing happening either way. What is always there is that each of them has decided what the difference means about themselves, about their spouse, and about the marriage.

The healthy version is that you both stop treating the difference as a problem to eliminate and start deciding together how the two of you want to handle it. The one who wants it more is allowed to want it more. The one who wants it less is allowed to want it less. Neither of those is a character flaw, and neither one gets to be the default the marriage runs on.

That takes both of you doing your own piece. The one who wants it less has to look honestly at whether they are actually uninterested or whether they have just never been given a reason to be interested. The one who wants it more has to stop reading their spouse’s body as a scorecard on their own worth.

A “no” doesn’t cost anything

Another couple I worked with, Landon and Annika, had a different pattern. When Annika said no, he never argued. He never guilted her. He said okay.

And then he went quiet. Not angry. Just somewhere else. Short answers at dinner, in bed early, polite and absent.

Annika learned that a “no” cost her two days of her husband.

So she stopped saying it. Which meant every “yes” she gave after that was worth less, because it was no longer a real choice. Landon eventually noticed that she seemed further away during sex than she used to be, and he had no idea why. He had never raised his voice.

In a healthy sexual relationship, a “no” is survivable for both people. The person saying it can say it plainly, and they work to stay connected while they do. A no doesn’t have to mean turning away. It can sound like “not tonight, but come here.” It can sound like “I don’t have it in me right now, and I still want you.” If you want help with that, I have a freebie called 16 Ways to Say No.

The person hearing it gets to be disappointed, out loud, and then gets to move on with the evening. Disappointment is allowed. Punishment is not, and going quiet for two days is punishment whether you meant it that way or not.

If you’re the one who goes quiet, that’s yours to change. Not your spouse’s to work around.

Landon’s work was learning to be disappointed without letting it take the rest of his night. He had to feel it and stay with her anyway. Once Annika could turn him down without losing her husband for two days, her yeses started meaning something again.

Turning each other down isn’t the only place this gets hard. Plenty goes sideways after you’ve both said yes.

You repair when it goes badly

Sex goes badly sometimes in every marriage. Bodies don’t cooperate. Somebody gets distracted or ticklish or hits a memory they weren’t expecting. Someone’s feelings get hurt by a single sentence. Somebody cries. Somebody laughs at the wrong moment.

Healthy is not the absence of that. Healthy is whether you can come back.

Couples who can’t repair end up with a growing list of things they don’t do anymore, because each one is attached to a bad night that never got repaired. Eventually the list of what’s off the table is longer than the list of what’s on it, and neither of them can remember deciding.

I see this with positions, with certain kinds of touch, with oral sex. I see it with initiating, where one of them reached for the other, it went badly, and they stopped reaching. Whatever it was, it went sideways once, neither of them brought it up again, and it moved onto the do-not-attempt list. Now that’s just how the marriage works.

Repair is short and it is not complicated. “That didn’t go how I wanted. Can we talk about it?” It just has to happen soon, before the silence sets.

Repair isn’t hard because you don’t know what to say. It’s hard because somebody has to go first, when you’d both rather pretend it went fine. And in most marriages it’s the same person every time. Be the one who goes first, because you can see what it’s worth to your marriage.

You each own your own desire and your own pleasure

Going first applies to your own desire too. Your spouse cannot make you want sex, and he cannot figure out what feels good to you by trial and error while you say nothing.

Knowing what you like is your job. Finding out is your job. Telling him is your job. Cultivating your own willingness on the days you’re not feeling it is your job.

This is the piece women push back on hardest, and I understand why. It feels like one more thing on the list, in a life that already has too many. The alternative is waiting for him to guess correctly, being disappointed when he doesn’t, and calling that his failure. That is a long time to wait for something you could go get. Meanwhile you keep having sex that isn’t worth having, and then you wonder why you don’t want it.

I’ll say the harder version too. If you have never once put any effort into your own sexuality, you cannot fairly call your sex life his fault. You can be angry about how you were taught, and about what nobody told you, and you can still be the only person who is going to fix it now.

And for husbands, it runs the same direction. Your wife is not responsible for your mood, your confidence, or your regulation when things don’t go the way you hoped. Those are yours. If a no sends you into a spiral, that spiral is a thing to work on, and it is not something she can spare you by saying yes.

Both of you are still growing

That is the pattern underneath all of this. A healthy sexual relationship rests on two things, and you need both of them.

The first is a healthy sense of self. Knowing who you are and what you want, being able to hold onto that when your spouse is unhappy with you, and not needing their approval in order to feel okay about yourself.

The second is a healthy relationship. Two people who can be honest with each other, who can have conflict without doing damage, who repair when they hurt each other, and who let each other be separate people with separate opinions.

You do not get a good sex life out of one of those without the other. A woman with a strong sense of self, in a marriage where she doesn’t feel safe, is not going to open up sexually. And two people who treat each other beautifully while having no idea who they are will have a kind, polite sex life that never goes anywhere.

So a healthy sexual relationship is not a state you arrive at and then maintain. It is two people who keep working on themselves.

A big part of that work is your need for validation, and it is harder to see in yourself than anything else in this episode. A husband who needs his wife to want him in order to feel like a man has handed his sense of himself to her. A wife who needs her husband to pursue her in order to feel attractive has done the same thing in the other direction. When your worth is riding on your spouse’s response, every sexual encounter turns into a test you are both taking, and neither of you can relax enough to enjoy it.

Nobody is free of that entirely. The work is catching it while it’s happening and being able to hold onto yourself anyway. That is what lets you hear a no without coming apart, and say a no without having to manage your spouse’s reaction.

There is relational growth on top of the personal kind. Getting better at hard conversations. Getting better at repair. Being able to let your spouse be disappointed without rushing in to fix it.

The couples I see with genuinely good sex lives are the ones who never stopped working on themselves, separately and together. Growth is not something you do until the sex gets better. It is part of what a healthy sexual relationship is.

Sex is bigger than intercourse

There is more available to you than most couples use. A lot of us grew up with a definition where sex means intercourse, and everything else is either a warm-up for it or it doesn’t really count.

That leaves out most of what you have. Hands. Mouths. Being naked together with nowhere to be. Touch that isn’t headed anywhere in particular. Getting in the shower together. Making out the way you did before you were married, and stopping there because you both wanted to stop there.

There is a whole spectrum between nothing and intercourse, and healthy couples use all of it. Some nights are a long slow hour. Some nights are ten minutes and then sleep. Some nights are lying there naked and talking and that’s the whole thing. It all counts as your sex life. Couples who let it all count end up with a lot more of it.

When intercourse is the only thing that counts as sex in your marriage, every time it’s off the table, so is everything else. So is the touching, the closeness, the whole evening. Couples end up going long stretches with nothing, when there was plenty they could have done.

That gets more expensive as you go, because bodies change.

It is allowed to change

Sex at thirty-two is not the same as sex at fifty-eight, and it is not supposed to be. Postpartum changes it. Medication changes it. Menopause changes it. Illness, surgery, grief, a hard year at work, a kid in crisis, all of it changes it.

Healthy couples renegotiate. Unhealthy couples treat the old version as the only legitimate one and often grieve it privately.

If something used to work and doesn’t now, that is information about where your bodies are today. It is not a statement about your marriage.

People mistake a lot of ordinary things for evidence that something is wrong.

What healthy is not

Healthy is not a frequency. There is no number. I have worked with couples who have sex twice a week and are miserable, and couples who have sex twice a month and are deeply connected. The number tells me almost nothing.

Healthy is not both of you wanting it at the same time. Emily Nagoski’s work on responsive desire describes something most women recognize immediately: desire that shows up after arousal begins rather than before. If you wait to feel spontaneous desire before you’ll consider sex, you may wait a very long time, and there is nothing wrong with you.

Healthy is not simultaneous orgasm, and it is not orgasm every time for both people.

Healthy is not the absence of disappointing sex. Some of it will be mediocre. That’s true of couples with great sex lives too. They just don’t conclude anything from it.

Back to Talia and Vaughn

Talia and Vaughn had to unlearn most of that. Vaughn’s job was to stop using her initiation as his scoreboard. As long as that was the measure, every ordinary night was evidence against him, and Talia could feel him grading her.

Talia’s work was harder and slower. She had to figure out what she actually liked, which meant admitting she had never really taken the time to find out. She started paying attention to her own body with no goal attached, and a short list started to form. Four or five things. She was embarrassed by all of them, and we worked through that embarrassment as it came up.

The part that changed her marriage is that she didn’t do all of this privately and then hand Vaughn the results. She talked to him the whole way through, at moments when nothing was on the line. She told him what she was noticing. She told him when something surprised her, and when something embarrassed her enough that she wanted to quit.

And Vaughn wasn’t trying to fix her. He didn’t offer suggestions. He didn’t tell her she shouldn’t be embarrassed. He listened. He worked to understand what she was going through, and he stayed present with her while she was still working it out. That is what it means to be known by your spouse.

Vaughn told me afterward that he had learned things about his wife he never knew. He also said he was a little angry, because he would have done any of it at any point if he had known.

That is where a lot of couples land when they start talking. Not at a fight. At the realization that you’ve both been guessing, and that guessing was never going to work.

Their sex life is not dramatically different in frequency. What changed is that Talia is in the room now, and Vaughn has stopped keeping score. She still turns him down some nights, and he’s able to let that be an ordinary thing that happened.

You can get to that from wherever you are right now.

Where to start

My suggestion is to start with the six principles. Go through them and ask honestly whether any of them is being violated in your marriage right now. If consent is compromised, or someone is being coerced, or there’s active dishonesty, that comes first. Nothing else you do will hold while that is still true.

If all six are solid, pick one thing. The one that made you uncomfortable while I was talking is usually the right one. Don’t try to overhaul your sex life this month. Pick the single smallest change you’re actually willing to make, and make that one.

And if you listened to all of this and thought “I don’t even know where we are,” that’s a fine place to start too. Most couples don’t know. The ones I work with who make real progress are not the ones who arrived with clarity. They’re the ones who were willing to find out, and willing to be the one who speaks up first.

Some of you are listening to this with a spouse who won’t participate in any of it. You’ve asked. You’ve explained. You’ve sent them the podcast. Nothing moves. That is a hard place to be and I’m not going to pretend a conversation fixes it.

What I’ll say is that you can still do your half. You can get clear on what you believe and what you want. You can stop agreeing to sex you don’t want. You can stop punishing a no. You can become someone who is honest about what you want, whether or not your spouse ever meets you there. Sometimes that changes the marriage, because one person changing does change how the whole thing runs. Sometimes it doesn’t, and then you are looking at a harder set of questions than the ones in this episode.

Coaching works on both pieces. I work with individuals and couples, and the individual work happens either way. Even in couples coaching, a lot of what we do is each of you getting clear on who you are and what you actually want. You can’t negotiate for something you haven’t figured out yet. The relationship piece gets built from there.

What a healthy sexual relationship looks like

So let me put it all together.

A healthy sexual relationship is two people who both want to be there, and who are both getting something out of it. Who can say what they want and hear what their spouse wants without either one of them coming apart. Who can say no without it costing anything, and hear a no without punishing it. Who come back and repair when it goes badly. Who expect it to change and change along with it.

Underneath all of that, it is two people who each know who they are, and who let themselves be known by the other one.

It isn’t a technique, and it isn’t a destination you arrive at and then get to keep. It is two people who keep doing the work, separately and together, for as long as they’re married.

And it’s worth every bit of that work. Good sex is pleasure. It’s connection. It’s intimacy. And it is one of the greatest gifts we have been given to show our spouse that we love them. All of them. Mind, heart, body, and soul.

If you’re nowhere close to that right now, that’s fine. Almost nobody starts there. You just have to know what you’re building toward, which is the reason I wanted to do this episode in the first place.