Posts tagged: communication
A new study analyses what makes a great sex life. Here are some of the highlights:
You can read the entire article here.
What makes your sex life great?
There is a story that is often told of Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist and the husband of the Margaret Mead. He was asked to come observe a group of otters that seemed depressed to their zookeepers. Otters, if you didn’t know, love to play. You can watch them for hours as they leap, swim, wrestle with each other and get up to all sorts of antics. These otters, however, seemed listless and lethargic.
After watching the animals for a number of days, Bateson dangled a piece of paper on string into their habitat. Before long, an otter came over to the string and began to bat at it. Very soon after, another otter joined in and then both otters started to play with each other. Even when Bateson removed the paper on the string, the otters continued to play.
How did two otters – creatures that are playful by nature – stop playing? Simply put, they got bored.
It is very easy for couples to get bored and, by extension, stop playing with each other when they have been married for years.
I was recently chatting with a client, and she mentioned that her husband liked to pull out a stuffed animal, put on an alter-ego voice, and make silly comments. She didn’t have a clue how to respond. Naturally a very serious person, this activity seemed very confusing to her. When I suggested that she make a silly comment in return – something fun and playful – it made her stop and think because it had been so long since she had been playful in their marriage.
Are you playful together? Believe it or not, this can be one of the most effective tools to making your relationship last. If you are having a lot of fun together, it makes it much harder to split up.
What are you doing to be playful with your spouse? Do you need to introduce something new into your environment to remind the two of you how to play again? What will that something new be? (as a suggestion: you might want to try something different than a just piece of paper on a string!) How can you make your spouse laugh this week? Can you surprise your spouse with something that will completely delight him or her?
As you think about those questions, let me leave you with a video of two otters, taking a nap at the Vancouver Aquarium. They are holding hands so that they will not float apart.
Last week, my daughter bombed a math test. Flunked. Failed. In a big and mighty way. So big, in fact, that the teacher called me into the classroom to show me the test.
Later, when Riley and I were talking about it, she began to tear up.
“Are you saying that I made a bad grade?” she asked as her lower lip quivered.
I hesitated for a beat and then said, “Yes, Baby Girl, you made a bad grade.”
A lot of parents would be horrified with me. I can hear them saying, “What?! You don’t use the term bad when talking to a child!” I could hear them complain that I was going to scar my child or permanently damage her self esteem.
In our society today, we have become so concerned with the emotions of our children that we will lie, cheat and steal to keep them from feeling badly. The theory goes that if we can organize a world where they feel safe and secure and loved and comfortable all the time, then surely they will become confident adults.
The problem with this approach is that it simply doesn’t work. An obese child who is told that she is fine just the way she is will still grow up with be an adult with chronic health problems. A child whose bullying behaviour is overlooked because he is having problems at home that are not his fault will not learn how to care for those around him. A child who thinks that a failed grade is actually good will never learn how to succeed.
And so I let my daughter feel the full weight of failure.
And then I gave her the tools to succeed.
“You see, Riley, a bad grade tells us two things: 1) You don’t understand the material and/or 2) You did not practice enough before the test. However, both of these things are fixable. We can make sure you learn the material and give you lots of practice so that when you will not make this grade again.”
The rest of the weekend, we worked hard. It was obvious that Riley was missing the foundational pieces to the concepts and so we made sure she got them. Then we built on the foundation until she was grasping math which was much more difficult than the concepts on the test.
She got it. She grew confident. She asked to practice so she could show us what she had learned. And she learned how to turn failure into success, a life lesson that is exponentially more important than a math grade.
Many of the couples I meet struggle even admitting that there is failure in their relationship. They dance around the subject, trying to project an image that is perfect. They hope that I don’t ask any questions that might poke that delicate exterior and expose it for what it truly is.
But, just like Riley, if we do not take an honest appraisal of our work and if we do not acknowledge places where we fail, we will never be able to move past failure to success. Admitting you have a problem, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, is the first step to a new life. The brilliance of taking this first step is that you can make changes, fix the problems and move to a place of health and true happiness.
What do you have in your relationship that is not working? What is failing?
Once you have taken an inventory, begin to make changes. Need some help? You can book your coaching session with me today.
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British Rabbi Jonathan Romain has devised a quiz to help couples decide if they really should tie the knot so that couples who choose to marry, stay married. He would like to see the divorce rate drop from 1:2 to 1:16 marriages. Check out this article to see what the Rabbi believes are essential questions to ask of each other before saying, “I do”.
Some questions are light-hearted such “what is your partner’s favourite food”, but most probe what people think their partner’s future plans and aspirations are.
If you are already married, use this as a conversation starter and see how well you know your spouse!
Let me know how it goes!!
I am the mother of a six-year-old and despite the subject matter that I speak about, write about and research for my day job, we are extremely conservative at home. Just the other day, my daughter chastised me for using the “D” word. It’s probably not what you think…I had commented that something was “dumb”. And, for the record, the word “stupid” might as well be cussing in our household.
When it comes to my own profession, I also realize the prudence in speaking openly about sexual questions that come up. A few have with Riley…although not as many as I was expecting by this age. When she does broach the subject, I ask for clarity on what it is she is trying to learn and why, so that I can answer the question simply and truthfully but not answer too much. (There’s the old joke of the Dad who went into a lengthy explanation about sex to his child who asked “what’s sex”, only to find out that the child had been told by his mother that “dinner would be ready in a few “secs”.) I try to balance healthy candor about the subject of sexuality with the fact that we hold pretty conservative values as a family.
So, I was horrified to learn that Abercrombie & Fitch has just marketed a bikini for 7-year-old girls with a PUSH UP TOP.
Really???? Seriously!?! Are you kidding me!!???
We are facing an epidemic of little girls growing up believing that their bodies are inadequate because of the ridiculous amount of media pressure to be a perpetual size 0, and yet they want to send a message to our 7-year-olds that their pre-pubescent chests are inadequate? It’s ludicrous.
But, as CNN’s LZ Granderson points out, companies such as Abercrombie & Fitch would not sell such items if there were not parents who buy them. Companies have increasingly pushed the boundaries on what is and what is not appropriate for teens and children for years, and have been allowed a ridiculous amount of latitude from parents. As parents, it is our duty to make sure that our children wear items that reflect a healthy amount of self-respect rather than just what is the latest fashion. As Granderson says,
I don’t care how popular Lil’ Wayne is, my son knows I would break both of his legs long before I would allow him to walk out of the house with his pants falling off his butt. Such a stance doesn’t always makes me popular — and the house does get tense from time to time — but I’m his father, not his friend.
Thank you, LZ for making the point that is so often lost on my peers. We did not give birth to children so that we could have life-long buddies. When we chose to produce off-spring, we were making a decision to train these little beings how to love themselves and how love others. Decisions that fall within these parameters do not necessarily make us popular with our children, but they do make us good parents.
Because of my job, I get asked all the time how to talk to kids about sex. There are lots of opinions on that subject – when to start, how much to share, what’s age appropriate information. But I don’t even have to broach any of those points to get to the basic premise here: Talking to your kids about sex includes how you let them dress – or how you choose to dress them.
That’s my take-away for this blog post. But in the interest of fairness, I should say that Abercrombie & Fitch have agreed to remove the term “push up” from the title in favour of the less incendiary “striped triangle”, but have continued selling the padded bikinis.
What are you thoughts?
Does time with your spouse get squeezed out because you are spending so much on your kids? Read this article for tips on bringing balance and protecting your marriage.
Being a Parent vs Being a Spouse
And remember these 4 tips:
Right now, I am in the middle of fairly intense media training. My assignment is to shoot 5 one-minute videos each day. That’s not so difficult. However, later that day, I have sit down with a team of people while we all watch and critique the videos. And believe me, there is a lot to critique.
The team tackles issues such as gestures, phraseology, eye movements, expression, emphasis, content, lighting, makeup, and wardrobe. Yesterday was a particularly spectacular day because I wore a sweater that blended into the background and made me appear as though I had no arms. Seriously, every person watching the video laughed out loud, pointed and said, “you have no arms!!” or “wardrobe malfunction!!”
It sucks.
I am deriving very little pleasure from this process.
All my insecurities and perfectionist tendencies are coming to the surface.
I want to run and hide every time the team meets.
I cringe every time a new video starts.
And yet, I am keenly aware that if I want to accomplish some of my goals for 2011 this is exactly the type of training that I need. I will only develop this skill set by completing my assignment each and every day and then learning how I can improve – not just through my own eyes, but from the perspectives of others too. It helps that when I look up from my computer to the list of goals that hangs on the wall across from me, I am able to remember the reasons why I must press on despite the fact that I am miles outside of my comfort zone.
As I ponder what I am doing, it occurs to me that it is not unlike one of the principles that I teach my coaching clients.
If you are going to become a better lover, you must practice. I don’t just mean have sex more often; I mean have times in which you consciously lower your expectations of each other. I find that we put enormous expectations on our sexual relationships. They have to be good, all the time. There is very little room for “practice sex”.
In practice sex, the two of you decide that you want to get more skilled in a particular area. Perhaps she has never had multiple orgasms before, and you want to see what it takes to get her there. Perhaps he would like oral sex as part of your foreplay, and you are completely intimidated by this concept.
Set aside time when the two of you agree that you are going to practice. By agreeing ahead of time, you ease the pressure of performance. Then, allow for mistakes (and possibly even mediocre sex) during this time. Remember that it’s okay to not be great when you are practicing!! The goal is learning how to become better!!
Just as I am learning as I shoot these videos, couples need to remember that in order to get really good at sex, you have to go through the awkward learning stage. So be patient with each other and enjoy it as much as possible!
I am now going to take my own advice and set up the video camera.
PS – My goal is to start rolling out “Vlogs” soon. Hopefully, I will have arms in them.
Did you know that MEN fake orgasm too???
Ever since the famous scene in When Harry Met Sally, we have been culturally conscious of the fact that women can pull the wool over the eyes of their men. However, new studies are now debunking the myth that only women engage in this sort of activity.
According to the November issue of the Journal of Sex Research, 25% of the men in their study confessed to pretending to orgasm. Askmen.com also did a survey of 100,000 men in which 14% admitted that they had done it once and a further 16% said they had done it multiple times.
But how? This seems to be the question that immediately comes to everyone’s mind.
If you think about it, in the day in which condoms and lubricants are prevalent, it would be easy to cover up the (lack of) evidence. If you throw in the fact that most women are not checking to see if their partners are faking it – because, let’s be honest, how many are – it would be relatively easy for the guys to pull off.
Why would a guy fake it? Simply put, for the same reason a woman does. The study published by the Journal of Sex Research stated that the most frequently cited reasons were:
Very often, we assume that men are always willing and eager to have sex and overlook the fact that they might be tired, or stressed or simply not in the mood. Just like many women.
But the typical response for women who find out that their husband is not automatically ready to go or cannot achieve orgasm is to assume that something is wrong with them. “Is he getting it somewhere else? Am I too fat? Am I not good enough?” are the some of the myriad of thoughts that float through their minds.
Perhaps. But it is much more likely that there is something else in play. Here are some of the common reasons why men have difficulty achieving orgasm:
So what if you are caught in the trap of faking it? The first time you faked it, it was probably to alleviate the pressure you were feeling in the moment. But now, you are under even more pressure to keep up the act and this can get very old, very fast.
Here is my advice.
Stop.
Yes, that’s right.
Stop.
Instead of devising ways to pull off the deception, view this as an opportunity to learn together and make your sex life better. You have the information now about the causes for your lack of orgasm as well as some of the feelings that your wife is probably going to have when you tell her, so you will have a little more (intelligent) communication points for the conversation that will inevitably happen.
Here is what I want everyone to remember: change is inevitable in your sex life. Inability to orgasm is just one of those possible changes. It is guaranteed that your body will change as the years go by, and your perspectives will most likely shift as well. If you do not have open and honest communication with your spouse, things will fall apart. You will find yourself with a spouse who is doing things that were awesome five years ago, but aren’t so hot anymore. Or you will find yourself hiding more and more instead of becoming more and more intimate. This does not make a fabulous sex life.
So have the conversation and devise a strategy of dealing with the issue. Perhaps you can go to your doctor and find something that is effective for your condition but does not have the sexual side-effects. Perhaps you can develop ways to lengthen the amount of foreplay so that you can really be aroused. Perhaps you need to lay off the booze.
And if you are the woman who is finding out that her husband has been faking it, don’t be defensive. Just listen. And then seek solutions together.
Sometimes an independent perspective can helpful. If you need a Passion Coach, then contact me for some extra help.
That’s what I am here for!
From the San Francisco Chronicle, “A Communication Expert Tells How Language Affects Intimacy”.
Ordinarily, I bounce along in life, having a series of wild and wacky and usually embarrassing things that happen to me that I can pass onto you in the context of developing a deeper and richer sex life.
But lately life has been teaching me about something more serious. Something that causes one to stop, to ponder, to contemplate. Something that is extraordinarily uncomfortable to acknowledge. And yet something that, I believe, is at the heart of why so many people have such pain when talking about their sex lives.
My personal journey started when I was doing that aforementioned bouncing along and I ran smack-dab into a situation wherein I had caused pain to another. To be sure, this was not intentional on my part in any way, but intent did not mitigate the fact that I hurt someone. I did. And I felt awful for having caused them pain.
But their reaction to me – whether or not they intended it to be – was devastating. I was shaken to my very core. Suddenly my emotions were all over the map.
I cried. I raged. I had dialogues in my head wherein I called upon all my debate skills from law school and trounced them in public. But when all of this subsided, I wondered, “why is this affecting me so personally?” To be completely blunt, I had apologized to them for causing pain, so I could not figure out why I was still in emotional turmoil over this situation!
So, as is my habit when I find myself in unknown waters, I researched. And to my surprise, my research led me to the concept of shame.
Dr. Brune Brown (a self-described researcher/story-teller), who has spent a decade researching “connection”, says that shame is the fear of disconnection. It is the silent, inner question that we all ask, “Is there something about me that if people see, I won’t be worthy of connection?” And in her brilliant book, The Artist Way, Julia Cameron defines the act of shaming as “the attempt to prevent a person from behaving in a way that embarrasses us.”
We all have things within us that we are deeply afraid to reveal to others. Dr. Brown asserts that all humans capable of empathy have shame and the less we talk about it, the more we have it. We all wear masks that hide the parts of us that we don’t want others to see.
It is my profession to poke behind the masks that people wear and peek into their innermost fears and doubts. I cannot count the number of couples I have met who appeared to all those around them to “have it together” and yet they were secretly meeting with me to discuss their sexless marriage, or the incompatibility of their sexual proclivities or the fact that they loved each other, but were no longer “in love”.
I have also met countless young couples, boasting that they would do just fine in their sex lives because they had done all the research on the quantitative and qualitative elements necessary to sustain a healthy relationship. Later, they creep back to me because, in their youthful zeal, they had failed to see that there are things that you very simply cannot anticipate through theory…only experience can truly test whether you can thrive. Relationships, simply put, are not academic.
But what happens when we say something or do something (intentionally or inadvertently) that rips the mask off of someone and exposes their shame?
Most people resort to blame. (Dr. Brown says the clinical definition of blame is “a way to discharge pain and discomfort.”) For if they can turn the argument around and make you look and feel bad – if they can shame you – then they will feel safe and secure once again with their mask firmly back in place. It turns the spotlight from shining on their insecurities to redirects the light onto you. For, as we all know, the spotlight can be extremely uncomfortable.
Here is an example from my coaching practice. I met with a woman who had been married for decades and had decided that the sex life she had lived with was not what she wanted for the rest of her relationship. She had come to the place of needing a substantial change if she was going to stick around. After a series of conversations, her husband threw up his hands in disgust and said, “What is wrong with you? Sex has always been good for me!”
This woman, after years of silence, had expressed a desire to change their sex life, and his response was to cover his own shame of being unable to satisfy his wife by telling her that she was the problem. She had embarrassed him, and he responded by shaming her.
So how do you confront shame and blame in the bedroom?
Of course, putting several bullet points on paper makes the process seem simple. Let me to assure you that it is not. But it is a starting place. If you want to research a bit more, take 20 minutes and watch Dr. Brown’s presentation at TED here.
So what do you think? Have you ever been shamed…have you ever reacted to someone by shaming them? Your thought are always welcome!
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