Sex Made Easy (22 page)

Yet this is an area of sexual satisfaction that has rarely been researched. Recently, I had the pleasure of working with a colleague (Kristen Mark) on a study about sexual desire, attraction, and sexual satisfaction among women who had been with their male partners for at least five years. We surveyed 176 women and asked them a number of questions about their partner and their relationship, including how attracted they felt to their partner and how this had changed over time (for example, whether they felt more or less attracted to him compared to when they first met, or if their attraction to him was about the same).
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We found that for this group of women, their current attraction to their partner and their change in attraction over time were better predictors of their sexual satisfaction than were their levels of relationship satisfaction. This supports the idea that in order to be sexually satisfied in one's relationship it isn't always enough to work well together and do things like take out the garbage or talk about each other's days (the whole “functional relationship” idea). These are important parts of living well together and loving one another, but there's more to feeling happy with one's sex life than the day-to-day aspects of living together. Feeling attracted to each other matters too.

This is also backed up by something I regularly hear from men and women, which is the issue of feeling less attracted to one's partner who has “let themselves go.” It seems that this phrase was long applied mostly to women—the stereotypical idea being that once a woman got married, she stopped trying to look good and let her looks fall by the wayside. However, men aren't the only ones who value physical attractiveness, and I just as often hear women complain that their (male or female) partners don't pay enough attention to their appearance. This seems to have intensified for men as more pressure has been placed on them to adopt “metrosexual” behaviors such as dressing more fashionably, grooming their eyebrows, and even grooming their pubic hair.

Of course, beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder and people are attracted to individuals with a wide range of body types, hair colors, skin colors, hair styles, ethnicities, and heights. However, there's no denying that people like what they like, and while they can often learn to appreciate a person who looks different from what they find attractive, they may never have the same gut reaction of pure physical attraction to somebody who doesn't fall at least loosely within their personal perceptions of what it means to be “attractive.”

A few examples from my work life come to mind. One is a letter I once received from a man whose wife had gained a significant amount of weight in the first year they were married (something like thirty or forty pounds). I say this is “significant” because thirty or forty pounds is a lot of weight to gain—or lose—in the span of one year. This man wrote to me because he was feeling terrible. He wanted to have more frequent sex, yet he was no longer sexually attracted to his wife and had tried to encourage her to lose weight so that he would find her physically attractive again. She responded with something along the lines of “If you loved me, my weight wouldn't matter.” He insisted that he still loved her—but that he wasn't nearly as attracted to her as he once was. (Ouch.)

Now, I happen to love and be fascinated by the range of body shapes that exist in the world, and I think we could all use a lot less stigma and busy-body-ness about each other's weight, size, and shape. However, I also agree that love and attraction are often two very different experiences. While
love and attraction often go together, it isn't always the case. If the man who wrote to me was attracted to women in a certain range of body weight, then a thirty- or forty-pound weight gain (or loss) could have considerably changed the way his wife looked (and I have no idea what body weight she started out with, whether she was very skinny, average, or of a larger size) and thus significantly changed his attraction to her. Is that fair? No. Is it a reality for some women and men? Yes. These days it's not politically correct for people to talk openly about losing attraction to someone when they gain or lose weight; however, it's a reality that many people experience.

Several women in their fifties once told me similar stories about their husbands. Of the group of women, only one of them worked full time outside the home. Mostly, they were busy raising their children and managing their households, and all of them prioritized working out and eating healthy meals. Their husbands, on the other hand, were successful businessmen who traveled frequently for work. Each of these women was strong, fit, thin or of average body weight, and an avid exerciser. All but one complained that their husbands had gained a lot of weight since their marriages, and all but one said that they found this unattractive and something that had negatively influenced their sexual desire for their husbands. These women all described feeling very much in love with their husbands and committed to their marriages; but they also said that they were no longer attracted to their husbands because of their weight and had sex largely out of obligation (“duty sex”) and not from desire or attraction. There was a great deal of sadness in these women's stories as they struggled to make sense of the disconnect between their feelings of love and lack of attraction for their husbands. Given the sensitivity of talking about weight issues, not one of them had felt comfortable enough to broach the issue with their husbands or to be honest about their lack of desire.

Politically correct or not, this happens: many people find that their sexual attraction (and related desire and sexual satisfaction) is influenced by their partner's appearance—and, I would add, probably by society's often judgmental attitudes about appearance. On the other end of the weight spectrum, a number of the male college students I teach have talked with me about losing attraction to their girlfriends who starve themselves to the
point of being very skinny. “I liked how soft she used to feel,” I remember one guy saying. “Now she's all bony and pointy and obsessed with being skinny.” Also, it's not only weight that can influence sexual attraction: hair length and color can influence sexual attraction; body composition (being softer versus more muscular); height; how white or straight one's teeth are; and so on.

It's not even always how a person's
partner
looks that matters. Research has found that how women and men feel about their
own bodies,
and their own looks, is important to how they feel sexually, especially in older age. And although research has focused mainly on women's body image in older age, many men feel similarly challenged by body image concerns. A number of research studies have shown that it's not body size, but body image, that's most relevant to people's sexual lives.
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Women and men of all shapes and sizes can have active, healthy, enjoyable, exciting, and highly sexy sex lives; sex is definitely not only for the skinny, despite what you may see on television, in the movies, in mainstream porn, or represented in lingerie catalogs. Sex is for all of us—and it can be enjoyed by all of us—particularly when we feel confident and positive about our bodies (this includes our butts, thighs, stomachs, arms, breasts, genitals, faces, and everything else).

Women and, increasingly men, also worry about growing less attractive to their partner as they grow older. Having grown up in Miami, Florida—a city with more than its fair share of people obsessed with plastic surgery and looking younger—I am all too familiar with watching husbands and wives trade in their spouses for a “younger model.” Two that come immediately to mind are a mid-forties businessman who left his same-aged wife for the secretary half his age, and the early-forties stay-at-home mom who left her slightly older CEO husband for her much younger yoga instructor.

So how do we manage attraction? And how do we keep ourselves attractive to our partner (and attractive to ourselves)? Some of it has to do with adopting healthy lifestyle behaviors: eating well, exercising, and so on. For many people, when they look good, they feel good. The key word, however, is “healthy.” Because being overweight and looking old are so terribly stigmatized in many cultures, people often try anything to lose weight or
look younger (including risky cosmetic surgeries) in order to reach these goals. If you would like to adopt different eating or exercise behaviors, I recommend checking in with a health care provider and a registered dietician to learn more about healthy eating and exercise.

Some of it also has to do with our perspectives and our communication with our partners. For this reason, I also recommend talking with your partner. Oftentimes we think our partner wants us to look like something we're not—and often we're wrong about what they find attractive. As an example, if your partner watches porn that features skinny women with breast implants, it doesn't necessarily mean that that's what he or she finds attractive, or that your partner finds you unattractive if your body is shaped differently from those women's bodies. Raising the issue with your partner may help provide you with more information about what he or she finds attractive. It may also give you an opportunity to share what you find attractive about your partner—and about your own body. You may find that your bedmate doesn't want you to change a thing about yourself, and he or she might find it sexy to hear how much you love your curves, breasts, hips, freckles, tan lines, nose, pale skin, or whatever else you enjoy about your body. All too often we share what we're dissatisfied about in terms of our bodies. But it could do us all some good to share with one another what we like about ourselves and our bodies, what turns us on, and what we hope will turn our partner on as well. Try it and see for yourself. Try to identify what you love about your body and share that with your partner. Let your partner know what you like about their body too. Compliment your partner on their butt, on how they look in their jeans, or on how it feels when they wrap their arms around you (loving a person's body isn't always about how it looks, but how it feels, too).

There's another reason to talk openly with your partner about your feelings of attraction. Remember the concept of “relatedness”? If we hide our feelings from our partner, we don't get the chance to feel understood—or to reach out and understand them. Three times in my life I fell hard in love (and lust) for men whose body types were different from the body types I typically find attractive. Two of these men are individuals with whom I experienced far greater than average intimacy and emotional closeness.
It may be that even if your partner's body or other parts of their appearance are different from your “type,” a sense of relatedness and intimacy will bridge those differences, which may not ultimately matter at all.

T
here's another aspect to feeling satisfied in a relationship and feeling attracted and “into” another person, and this is something called “self-expansion.”
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Some of my favorite research about relationships has examined love from this perspective. The idea is that people often look for romantic and sexual relationships that make them feel bigger than they are all by themselves.

Think about your own life for a moment and think specifically about people you have dated, been romantically or sexually involved with, or have had a serious crush on. Chances are, you felt like some of these people expanded your world by introducing you to new people, music, hobbies, interests, food, sports, and so on.

When I think back on my own life and relationships, I can say this: although I've had the pleasure of participating in several sprint triathlons, I signed up for my first one because a guy I liked was into sprint triathlons and his stories about them fascinated me. And as for music, a look through the music folder on my laptop is like peeking into my past relationships. It's filled with songs that I know and love because people I once dated, or had crushes on, put the songs on mix tapes or emailed them to me. Others are songs I became familiar with because an ex and I would sit around the house and he would excitedly say “you've got to listen to this song.” He would play it, and I would learn it, and the world as I knew it got bigger and bigger—and with a much better soundtrack than I could manage on my own.

We tend to like people who expose us to new things, who introduce us to
something about the world that we didn't see or notice or appreciate before. I've introduced exes to yoga, gardening, folk music, indie bands, cooking, hiking, vegetarian restaurants, travel, and occasionally sex toys and the Stop-Start Technique detailed in
chapter 5
(we all have our own special things to offer). What have you introduced your present or former partners to?

We tend to be less into people who don't expand our world, who don't show us anything new or interesting. To the extent you can, then, try to show your partner more about who you are and what you have to offer. You're not responsible for everything about your relationship; your partner has to be open to seeing you in all your glory and learning from you, just as you need to be open to learning something new from your partner. I often tell people that when they think they know everything there is to know or see about their partner, that is when they can probably say with confidence that they're wrong. If you want to stay together, don't give up on learning new aspects of your partner. Keep looking. Keep asking questions. Keep sharing new things about yourself, and maybe your partner will open up bit by bit as well. Self-expansion isn't only about learning new songs or recipes; it's about being more intimate with each other and building your sense of relatedness (there we go again).