Prepare

Get clarity about your perspective

It’s helpful to have your thoughts organized before you start the conversation about sex. When analyzing what’s happening, look at these different questions:

• What happens (or doesn’t happen) in your sex life? In other words, what would a video camera show?
• What feelings do you have? Feelings are emotions, and in a simple way, they fit into the four categories of mad, sad, glad, and afraid.
• What are you thinking? Consider what meaning you’ve made around what’s happening and what might be going on for your partner. Identify your assumptions and stories. Uncover the beliefs you have that inform your reaction and the thoughts you have that create some of the emotions you’re experiencing.
• What do you want? Describe your vision of the future that you desire. List some of the specific changes you would want to see, if it were up to you (of course, it isn’t, entirely). What is it you long for?

Get clarity on your contribution

Every situation is co-created. Sometimes it’s easier to see your part, and sometimes you may have to challenge yourself to look deeply at how you could be part of the problem. These questions may help you uncover some of your role in the dynamics:

• How do you focus on your partner’s behavior and attitude rather than your own?
• Do you believe something is wrong with them? That they are acting deliberately to hurt you or to deny you?
• How do you behave in the face of the sexual difficulties? How might that behavior drive your partner further away or deepen the cycle?
• How well do you talk about what you want without blame or pressure?
• Do you stay grounded in conversation and conflict? Or are there ways your emotional response escalates those talks or shuts you or your partner down?

Develop empathy for your partner

Before you talk to your partner, it helps if you have already given some thought to what they may be going through. Your ideas may not be right, but by trying to put yourself in their shoes in advance, you create some space for curiosity and empathy. Consider these questions to help you see things through their eyes:

• How can your partner’s behavior make sense?
• What emotions are they feelings? What do you think they are thinking in this situation? What do they want?
• What are they afraid of?
• How can you see their behavior in the best light?

Approach

Pick your time thoughtfully

helps to be intentional about the hard talks. Avoid the tendency to ambush your partner, diving into an intense topic when they may not have the bandwidth to respond well. If there are persistent trouble areas in your relationship, go ahead and schedule a time to talk. Set a time limit too, so you both know what to expect.

Come from a positive mindset

Introduce the subject by saying you want the very best relationship that the two of you can have. Let them know that you are committed to finding solutions that work for you both.

For many couples, it is clear to both of you that sex has been problematic. In this case, you can acknowledge that this is a tough topic for you both in the relationship and that you want to work together to address it. You can say that you want to be a team in this process instead of adversaries.

If this is the first time you’re talking about sexual concerns or you believe that your partner isn’t aware of your struggles, you can tell them this has been a tough topic for you to address but that your commitment to the relationship means you are willing to work through hard things with them.

Recognize this is an ongoing process

Know that you will likely have to have several conversations and a process of exploration and negotiation to transform your sex life; you don't typically settle it in one conversation. For the tenacious problems, it may take quite a while to fully understand each other and come up with approaches you can both embrace.

Discuss

Adopt an attitude of collaboration

his process goes better when you maintain an attitude of teamwork and collaboration with your partner. Resist any urge to blame them for the problems and to see them as broken or wrong. Remember, you want to create your best possible sex life (and relationship!) with your partner, so it’s important to stay in touch with that motivation and invite them into the process to solve the problems. They will be able to sense your internal state. Goodwill makes it easier to approach; anger or blame makes it likely they will resist you.

Talk about your experience using I language

You will need to share with them a lot of the clarity you developed in step one, when you were preparing for this conversation. Describe what you see happening or not in your sex life. Share your feelings and thoughts that you have in response to that. Tell them what you want and what you picture as an outcome. In all of this, focus on speaking about you, not them.

Use "I" language as much as possible, describing your own experience and your reaction to it, without making it about the other person. Don't label or judge your partner. Don't be attached to the idea that what you think is right. Recognize and admit that you are making meaning out of events; this keeps your conversation in the realm of exploring what's happening for you instead of attacking your partner or focusing on what’s happening for them.

Although you have spent some time imagining what’s happening for them, you don’t need to share those ideas. That exercise was aimed at creating some room for empathy for their point of view. They get to tell you what they are feeling, thinking, and wanting.

Differentiate between thoughts and feelings

Many people get these two confused, especially during conflicts. They label their thoughts as feelings and then feel entitled to them, insisting to their partner, "You can't tell me my feelings aren't valid; they're my feelings!" This statement is true about feelings—but not about thoughts. Your feelings can't be invalid, but your thoughts can. Discriminating between the two can be especially difficult, but this distinction is crucial if you want to stay grounded and want your partner to participate in the conversation.

So how do you tell the difference? Feelings are emotions that fall into one of four broad categories, as I said above: sad, mad, glad, and afraid. A thought is simply your perspective, observation, or interpretation of a situation.

Let me give you an example. You might say, "I feel like you don't want to have sex with me and that I’m not important enough to you for you to make any effort," but this is not a feeling statement. You probably feel sad, afraid and resentful, but you think your partner does not desire you and think they don't value you enough to work on your sex life. This distinction can diffuse the tension because recognizing and acknowledging that you have added your own meaning to the feelings underscores that they are just your thoughts; they are not absolute and may not be correct. This is what opens the door to a discovery process about what's really going on between you.

Understand your “filter” and own your reactions

Everyone is influenced by their upbringing and experiences, and those affect how you respond to your partner. People develop what I call a "filter" that affects how they interpret what their partner says and does. That filter is especially at play during conflict. Your thoughts and feelings are a direct result of how you have been raised to view things. Acknowledging your filter gives you the opportunity to switch from blaming your partner or focusing on their behavior to talking about what's going on for you.

So, let me return to the example of "feeling like your partner doesn't want to have sex and doesn’t care enough about you to work on it." A better way to say that might be: "I realize I feel sad and resentful about the lack of sex in our relationship. I feel afraid that I won’t be happy in our sex life, and that will damage our relationship overall. I have this story that you don't want sex at all, and that you don’t care enough about me to work on it with me. This belief keeps me distant from you, and I can tell it's really in the way of our relationship. Will you explore with me what I'm thinking and feeling so we can move it out of the way?"

Empathize first; then respond

If your partner is upset, empathize first. Listen to what they're saying and make sure that you understand it, from their perspective. Don't stop until you can get in their shoes and see it from their worldview. Do this before you start constructing your response. You don't have to parrot it back or use elaborate communication tools, but you can make it clear that you really see why they are upset, given how they have experienced what happened. That doesn't mean you agree with them, but you can see the situation through their eyes. Then you can proceed to communicate how you see it. That's when they should show you the same courtesy of understanding your point of view. After you each empathize with the other, when both perspectives have been understood, then you can figure out how to handle those differences of opinion.

Master your own emotional regulation

Self-soothing and emotional self-regulation are big parts of the work for each of you. It's important to develop the ability to tolerate feeling unsettled and unsure. Instead of looking to your partner to change what they're doing or to reassure you, you should work toward being able to settle yourself down and tend to your own reactivity. This is going to take practice, but mastering difficult conversations includes regulating your own emotional state.

So how exactly do you do that? You can take a break to get control of yourself, knowing it's your job to show up and engage again. If you get triggered or escalated, it's your job to notice that and do what you need to do to regain control.

Likewise, it's also important to let your partner take a break when needed and not hold them in discussion against their will. It should go without saying, but don't call your partner names or blame them. Avoid taking the bait or throwing fuel on their fire.

More tips

Stay committed to the process

Sexual issues are innately personal and intimate, and couples can find themselves dug in to roles that make it difficult to solve. You may find that the two of you get stuck or that one of you refuses to talk or avoids the conversations. You will need to demonstrate that you are serious about tackling the problem, and that you aren’t going to sweep it under the rug. Stay grounded and self-regulated and continue to bring it up. Let them see that you are serious about solving the problems.

Commit to changing your behavior

Hold yourself accountable to behaving well in this process. You’ve already examined your role in the dynamics, and you may have heard more from your partner about this, too. No matter what your partner does, you can make the choice to act in ways that are productive and in line with working together on the issues. Don’t revert to the old patterns; do whatever work you need to do to improve how you play your side of the court.

Don’t have sex that makes it worse

A powerful way to change the status quo is to only have sex that is a step toward change. Many couples who struggle with sex have fallen into the trap of having sex that really isn’t worth having. You may be tempted to think it’s better than nothing, or you may tell yourself that at least we’re showing up for sex every once in a while. But if you really want your sex life to be better, you may have to turn down sex if you can’t enjoy it as a step forward. If you’ve been having sex to check off a box, if you’ve been going through the motions, or if you feel worse afterwards, then those are encounters you could refuse. Wait for, and insist on, sex that gives you each the opportunity to explore what can work for you and bring you closer together.