Would you make love to yourself?
The first time I asked someone this question, I was having lunch with a friend who was complaining about her sex life as a married woman.
It’s so monotonous, she said. I’m not even sure he considers if I’m enjoying myself.
I thought of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, and how Marianne would tell her husband that he could “make love to her” in the sporadic moments she was open to sex. How passive, I’ll never forget thinking.
It captures an enormous inheritance: the idea that for women, sex is something done to us. We accommodate. We lie back and wait to find out whether it will be good.
Starfish is what they called it when I was growing up.
Though phallocentric imperative is where it’s born from. The man’s pleasure is prioritized, while the woman’s is optional. And that message shapes how we step into sexual experiences.
Dr. Emily Nagoski, during her book launch in NYC, said that she dedicated an entire chapter in Come Together to heterosexual couples because “the straights are in trouble.” The room erupted in laughter. With all of the benefits “we straights” have from living in the status quo come so many unwritten rules and expectations that make it hard for us to play outside the lines.
So much goes unsaid.
In Scenes from a Marriage, Marianne and Johan feel empty in their partnership for years, assuming things about each other without having the open, honest conversations they’re only willing to have once the husband has an affair and decides to leave.
Couples therapist Liliana Doyon said in episode 13 of Lust in Translation that the order your relationship falls apart is sex, then kindness, then respect.
Contrary to popular belief, sexual satisfaction leads to greater relationship satisfaction. Research consistently shows that when a couple’s sex life improves, so does their relationship.
I asked my friend: If you’re not sure he considers your enjoyment, how do you know if he’s enjoying himself?
We are so good at noticing what others fail to give us that we forget to notice what we bring to the table.
In an episode of Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin?, a woman lays out everything she expects from her partner. It’s a long list. Esther listens, then turns it back to her: And do you bring those things to the table too?
Sex is no different, though in my experience it’s easier for people to list what they don’t want, than what they do want.
One of my favorite pieces of advice on success is if you want to achieve something, you have to begin by believing that you deserve it and planning your life accordingly.
Embodying the qualities we look for in bed–such as sensuality, attunement, presence and curiosity–is necessary if we are to reasonably expect them.
This question, by the way, was also raised in The Invite, which I wrote about here. Joe and Angela hadn’t had sex in a year.
When their upstairs neighbor–also a sexologist–asked whether they would make love to themselves, she was asking whether they find themselves worth desiring.
Joe and Angela had lost touch with their own appetites: for work, for play, for their own bodies. You cannot hand your partner an aliveness you no longer have.
Psychologist Marta Meana has spent much of her career studying women’s desire, and argues that our arousal is shaped less by the relationship than we like to believe, and more by how a woman experiences herself.
She calls it erotic self-focus: the way many women are, in part, their own erotic object. In one study from her lab, women reported more of it than men did. Feeling desirable, feeling like someone worth wanting, is not vanity. For many women it’s the ignition.
Which reframes the problem my friend described. Her lament, he doesn’t consider my pleasure, may be true. But it’s also only half the story. The other half is whether she still considers it herself.
Audre Lorde wrote about this in 1978, in an essay called Uses of the Erotic. For Lorde, the erotic was never confined to the bedroom. It was a source of power and knowledge within us, the measure of our capacity for joy. And once we’ve felt that depth of satisfaction, she argued, we begin to demand it from every part of our lives.
Erich Fromm made a cousin of this argument two decades earlier in The Art of Loving: that love of self isn’t selfishness, but the ground from which we love anyone else at all.
Would you make love to yourself? Would you be curious about you, patient with you, attentive to what you like? Would you pursue you?
If the answer is no, it’s worth asking why we expect someone else to.
My friend laughed when I asked her this. Honestly? I guess I never considered it. Probably not. I’d be bored too.
She’d been waiting for her husband to make sex less monotonous, just as Marianne waited for Johan, fifty years earlier.
When the New York Times interviewed Perel about The Invite, she said:
“Monogamy is a concept that has always evolved through history. Relationships are breathing, living organisms that constantly adapt between continuity and change. Stability and novelty. Familiarity and surprise. Security and freedom. All the time. And that’s what makes them so fascinating.”
Relationships change because the two people in them do. The woman my friend was when she got married isn’t the woman she is now, and it’s hard to feel desirable as someone you haven’t gotten to know.
Which is why cultivating eroticism isn’t something we do for our partners. It’s something we owe ourselves.
Whenever you’re ready, here are 2 ways I can help:
Couples Intimacy Card Deck - Turn each other on, one question at a time. I created this for you and your partner to bring more connection, curiosity, and play into the bedroom. Get 10% off with code LUST.
Book a 1:1 Session - I help individuals and couples in long-term relationships find more desire, confidence, and connection—in and out of bed. Start with one session and a clear plan for what to do next.
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