When researcher Dr. Peggy Kleinplatz studied people who described their sex lives as extraordinary—many of them over 60 and in relationships of 25 years or more—the ingredients they named had nothing to do with technique.
They talked about being fully present, about deep erotic intimacy, about extraordinary communication, about the freedom to be authentic and vulnerable with each other.
Great lovers, she concluded, are made, not born.
Kleinplatz’s findings describe two people who know what they each need to feel secure, and who trust that the other will meet them there.
What we need to feel secure is determined by our attachment style.
It asks: what does my nervous system need to feel safe enough to want, what does my partner’s nervous system need, and what do we need to do to meet each other’s needs?
Which is the case I want to make this week: understanding your attachment style builds a map to a relationship where both of you feel secure enough to have the kind of sex Kleinplatz’s couples described.
That’s why I invited Gaby Balsells to the podcast.
Gaby is a clinical psychologist, a relationship coach at Modern Intimacy, trained in Emotionally Focused Therapy, and the author of Dating 101, a book she wrote while walking through her own divorce after a ten-year relationship. Don’t let the title fool you, it’s a great resource for those of us in long-term relationships to understand our attachment styles and how to work better with them in relation to those we love.
Below we have the episode highlights, and links to tune in:
Watch it on Youtube:
Watch it on Spotify:
A quick note before we get into it
You can’t ask for what you need until you know what it is. That applies in bed as much as anywhere. Plenty of women assume something is wrong with their desire when what’s actually true is that their body responds to a different kind of touch than the one they’ve been getting.
That’s why I’ve been recommending Aura by Mila. It combines warmth, massage, vibration, and air pulse in a single device, so instead of guessing, you get to find out what your body answers to, on your own or with a partner. I pair it with Bloom, their water-based gliding mist made with skincare-grade ingredients.
And if the conversation is the part you’ve been avoiding, that’s what I built the Wonderlust Intimacy Card Deck for. There are two levels of 69 cards each to explore your desires and bring more novelty into the bedroom. Get 10% off with code LUST at wonderlust.co.
Now, the highlights.
Tell me how you were loved, and I’ll tell you how you love.
Attachment styles are a pattern of relating, but really they’re an explanation: this is why I love the way I love.
The template gets set early, by whether the people who raised us showed up when we cried.
If they came consistently, we learned that our needs matter and that expressing them brings people closer. That’s secure attachment.
If we had to cry loudly to be heard, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, we learned to make the signal big. That’s anxious attachment, and its deepest fear is I will be alone.
If crying didn’t work at all, we learned to go quiet and handle it ourselves. That’s avoidant, and its deepest fear is if you find out who I really am, you won’t like me.
Anxious and avoidant are rooted in the same energy, though they manifest themselves differently. The former reaches out, the latter goes within.
Most of us didn’t get a secure childhood, and the good news is that secure attachment is something we can build in adulthood.
Your attachment style isn’t fixed. It changes with who you’re with.
Attachment styles exist in relation to each other. Someone who feels anxious in one relationship can feel steady in the next, and a partner who is more anxious than you can pull out a version of you that’s more grounded than you knew you had. The reverse is also true.
That’s a hopeful thing and a responsible thing. The brain is always looking for opportunities to rewire toward security, but it needs the right conditions. The person you choose is one of those conditions.
Dating is an energy game, not a numbers game.
Dating is inherently ambivalent: this could be your love story, or you could never see each other again. There is no relationship yet, so there is nothing to be secure in. Of course it brings out anxiety or protection. Those are your factory settings.
Which is why she doesn’t think dating is a numbers game. It’s an energy game.
Optimizing your odds, stacking dates, quantity over quality…all of it runs on urgency, and urgency is why we easily burn out in dating.
What works is the opposite: being intentional about who you go on a date with, what are you doing before a date to ground yourself, how do you want to feel on it, how are you coming back to yourself after.
Your attachment style shows up in bed.
The same way we have attachment styles that shape how we relate, they shape how we have sex. Dr. Sue Johnson–founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)–names three kinds.
Sealed-off sex is emotionally disengaged. It’s about pleasure, performance, getting off. Nothing wrong with this type of sex, it just isn’t nurturing the bond.
Solace sex is sex for reassurance. Makeup sex. Situationship sex. The kind you reach for when you feel far away from someone and want to feel close. Gaby describes it as a deep breath after drowning, which is exactly why it can feel so heightened, and why sex with the wrong person can feel better than sex with someone secure and consistent. It isn’t that they’re a better lover. It’s that you’re starving.
Synchrony sex is when the emotional feeds the physical and the physical feeds the emotional. The deeper in love, the hotter the sex, and the hotter the sex, the deeper in love. The word for what makes it possible is attunement, which I believe is the single most important quality of great sex. You can’t have it without it.
Aftercare isn’t just for kink.
A friend of mine played the Wonderlust Intimacy Card Deck with her husband and landed on the prompt about aftercare. They had been married for ten years and had never once talked about it. She told him he usually got up, took a shower, and got on with his day, and that what she wanted was to stay in bed and cuddle afterward. He had no idea. She had never asked herself what she wanted either.
Now they practice the aftercare she enjoys. Sometimes he still takes the shower first, and then he comes back to bed to meet her.
Sex is a cocktail of hormones, and after the high there’s a drop. The kink community built a whole practice around it to ensure that you are taken care of as you experience that drop. So if you feel empty after sex, it could be a lack of aftercare. That can look like twenty minutes in bed, a glass of water, cooking dinner together, or coffee the next morning before heading to the subway. It’s whatever tells your body that experience was held.
If you want to go deeper with Gaby, read Dating 101, book a free 30-minute consultation with her at Modern Intimacy, and follow her on Instagram.
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