Welcome to the first edition of Ask Natassia, where I answer a question from one of our paid subscribers. This one is shared with her permission and lightly edited for length:
I don’t prioritize pleasure, which I guess means I don’t value it as much as the other things I do make time for, and it’s really a struggle for me to prioritize intimacy in my relationship with my husband. Especially this summer: we’ve got three kids in the house, my business is growing and taking up a lot of my attention, and we moved last week.
And I resent the fact that he won’t bring up any discussion about what he wants. He always waits for me to start the conversation or take action to change things. He doesn’t understand why I’m not more interested in sex, and I don’t understand why he doesn’t want to put more intention into the relationship. Probably if either one of those improved—the sex or the relationship—it would improve the other one. But we’re stuck (again).
Let’s start at the beginning: not prioritizing pleasure is not the same as not valuing it.
Three kids at home, a business in growth phase, and a move. Nobody looks at that list and thinks you don’t value sleep because you aren’t getting eight hours of it.
Pleasure works the same way.
In the 1990s, researchers at the Kinsey Institute developed the Dual Control Model of Sexual Response, and the easiest way to picture it is a car.
You have accelerators, the things that turn you on. And you have brakes, the things that turn you off. Both are learned over a lifetime, and almost anything can weigh on the brakes: stress, exhaustion, body image, hormones, gender roles, how satisfied you are in your relationship.
When the accelerator wins, your body responds. When the brakes win, it doesn’t, no matter how much you want it to.
Right now, much of what’s on your plate has a foot on the brake. No amount of “valuing” pleasure lifts it. Priorities are a ranking of what matters. Bandwidth is what’s left after the day has taken its cut.
And you know what makes it worse? Judging yourself for it. Every “I should” is one more foot on the brake.
The Fifth Shift
In 1989, sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term “the second shift” for what she saw in the homes of working couples: women came home from a full day of paid work and clocked into a second, unpaid one—the cooking, the cleaning, the kids.
We’ve named a few more shifts since, for the mental load and the emotional labor that also land on women’s shoulders.
More recently, writer Amanda Montei named a fifth: the work heterosexual women do to keep their marital sex lives alive. The date nights, the books about desire, the intimacy courses. Reading this newsletter, if we’re being direct about it.
I watch it happen in my coaching practice. The men who want more sex don’t do the exercises I assign unless their wives insist. Even when he’s the one who asked for help, she’s the one who carries it.
So yes, of course you resent it. You run the house and you’re expected to run the relationship too, while he doesn’t understand why you don’t want more sex.
But a relationship is a two-way street and there’s a reason you keep getting stuck. Here’s what it is, and what you can do about it.