It's Never About the Sex

It’s never about the sex.

In my work with relationships, it became very clear to me that people’s feelings about
the quality of their sexual relationship is a fantastic guide to the quality of their
relationship. My work is about opening up a conversation that needs to happen for
growth to occur. Whether that’s between me and my client or my client and their
partner, it’s always beneficial. I know that a relationship isn’t purely about the sex but
it does tend to be the first thing to give way when a couple starts to struggle. The
mistake that most of us make, myself included, is then to get fixated on the sex being
the issue. It rarely is, in fact some people have gone as far as to suggest that it’s never
about the sex.

In preparing for a seminar, I was trying to find a good way to illustrate how great sex
is 95% behaviour and 5% technique and I was reminded of a piece of research I came
across regarding first impressions. One of the things I coach people on is dating skills
and a client recently asked me “ How do I make a good impression, what do I say?”
Talk about barking up the wrong tree. Do you know that 64% of what people
perceive about you is how you look as you say what you say, 30% is how you say
what you say and only 6% is what you say? Yet many of us obsess about what we
should say or worse, what we did say. Relax, no one is really listening, they’re too
busy checking out your shoes.

So back to sex…when the relationship begins to get stuck in a power struggle (and
this is a natural occurrence) the sex begins to tail off and we start looking for the
manuals about how to make sex great again. It’s pretty much a total waste of time to
approach it this way and generally leads to greater resentment and frustration. A better
approach is to suspend judgment for a while and ask yourself if it isn’t about the sex
what’s really going on?

Which brings me to my tag line ‘There’s more to sex than just sex!’