Pleasure Mechanics

Help! My Partner Won’t Play Along

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What happens when you are ready to explore sexually, and your partner doesn’t want to play along? How do you move forward as a couple when only one of you wants to get kinky?

If you have ever felt like you were ready to explore new sexual thrills or go on new erotic adventures, but your partner was not willing to participate, this episode is for you. Or maybe YOU are the one who is terrified of your partner’s new desires and feel totally freaked out about what is being asked of you.

We ALL have felt the fear and resistance that comes when we confront change or are asked to try something new. Let’s face it – it is way easier to keep things the same. It is way easier to stay safe. But what gets lost is the adventure, the pleasure and the potentially transformative experience of trying something new. We all need to grow and change, and in long term relationships, we need to learn how to grow and change together, one step at a time.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode:

Couples Massage Mastery – no matter where you are on your erotic path, learning the skills of couples massage will lay a foundation of touch, pleasure and communication that will support all of your other erotic adventures. If we could give all couples one gift, this would be it.

Big thanks to our new sponsor, CloneAWilly.com! CloneAWilly.com offers DIY at home kits so you can make a silicone replica of your own beautiful genitals. Check out CloneAWilly.com and use the code pleasure for 20% off your order.

Surviving Sexless Seasons

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All relationships have sexless seasons – periods of time where there is little or no sexual connection –  here’s how to survive them so a sexless season doesn’t turn into a sexless marriage or breakup!

Sexless seasons happen for any number of reasons – injury, illness, work stress, family commitments, global events – and these reasons often have nothing to do with how much you love your partner or how attracted you are.

Sexless seasons can hijack an otherwise healthy relationship and create a downward spiral of disconnection – or they can serve to deepen your communication and trust so you are ready to reconnect when the time is right.

In this episode, we explore the steps and strategies involved in making it through a sexless season without anger or resentment.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Couples Massage Mastery

Explicit Monogamy Agreements Podcast Episode

To explore more curated Pleasure Mechanics resources to quickly build your capacity for pleasure and erotic connection join the Pleasure Pod.

Jealousy, Arousal and Anxiety

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Sexual jealousy has a big impact on arousal and erection. For some people, sexual jealousy can be a huge turn-on, and these people can harness jealousy and turn it into arousal. Other people feel jealousy as anger and can get dangerously violent when they feel jealous. Some people get anxious and ashamed when they experience jealousy and these feelings shut down arousal and erection.

All of these experiences – sexual arousal, anger and anxiety are all upregulations of the nervous system, interpreted in different ways by different individuals.

In this podcast episode, we share what you need to know about sexual jealousy and how it can impact your arousal and erections. If you’ve ever been burdened by sexual jealousy, this episode will reveal new strategies you can use to either overcome jealousy or harness it and make it work for you!

You may also be interested in these podcast episodes:

Here is the email from a listener that inspired this episode:

I want to start off by sharing my experiences if arousal panic, which I have because of jealousy. Me and my girlfriend got together because she slept with somebody else. It was only then that I realized that she means much more to me than just the casual sex we had before, and I fought for her.

Sometimes during or before sex I get flashbacks to that moment and it feels so intense, imagining that she not only slept with somebody but possibly enjoyed it. That the way she moans or breathes or moves her hips, she did for somebody else.

We were not together, and I even ignorantly of my own yet unknown feelings encouraged her to explore others. So she did nothing wrong, but thinking of this I cannot relax. And not being able to relax and let yourself go is a death sentence for maintaining or achieving an erection.

What I did as a solution was very very hard and took a lot of jumping over an abyss of insecurity, when I just told her plainly what I felt.

Now, when I get into that state, I try focusing on her and why I love her and want to make love to her. She of course notices and she tells me she loves only me, and wants Me. Then, I start to feel safe again and our sex is great.

The solution is therefore not centered on myself, but on us. After all, we do this together. Opening up to her, brought us closer together, and the sex became even more intimate and believe it or not – wild.

This I wanted to share, in the hope of encouraging men to tell their partners about their anxieties. It is a strength.

Intimacy Issues

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Intimacy is one of those words that has lost it’s meaning – and it is time to excavate the meaning of intimacy and see where it fits in the complicated reality of human sexuality.

In this episode, we investigate the meaning of “intimacy” and propose a more deliberate and meaningful use of the word. What does intimacy really mean? How does it play out in all of our relationships? When we want more sexual intimacy, how do we get it? What happens when we don’t want to be intimate?

Intimacy is sometimes understood as “in-to-me-see” – is this a useful concept? If so, who do we want to let in – and what conditions do we need to create in order to make that safe?

In this episode we take a candid look at the concept of intimacy and reveal it to be much more than a euphemism for sex!

Emotional Generosity

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Here’s the secret of the happiest couples: emotional generosity. For long term relationships to work, you have to invest in the emotional landscape of your family. This requires creating a culture of empathy and generosity – while also maintaining enough autonomy to allow eroticism to thrive between you.

In this episode we cover the essential qualities of emotional generosity and how to put it into practice.

Researchers from the University of Virginia National Marriage Project conducted a study on emotional generosity, defined as “giving good things to one’s spouse freely and abundantly,” in nearly 3,000 marriages.

Acts of generosity included things like making them coffee in the morning or offering a little back rub — and researchers studied the relationship between how often spouses men and women behaved generously toward their partners with how happy the couples reported themselves to be. 

Couples who are emotionally generous with each other are the happiest couples on the planet. In fact, the more generous they are with each other, the happier they become.

Emotional generosity is a virtuous cycle: one person lifts up the other with acts of emotional generosity, and that in turn inspires generosity in return.

“In marriage we are expected to do our fair share when it comes to housework, child care and being faithful, but generosity is going above and beyond the ordinary expectations with small acts of service and making an extra effort to be affectionate. Living that spirit of generosity in a marriage does foster a virtuous cycle that leads to both spouses on average being happier in the marriage.” ~ W. Bradford Wilcox, University of Virginia

NY Times article on marital generosity

Wilcox’s research on marital generosity

This episode is sponsored by Good Clean Love, creators of amazing organic personal lubricants and sexual wellness products. Check them out at goodcleanlove.com and use the code PLEASURE for 33% off your entire order!