How couples can sustain a strong sexual connection for a lifetime
I'm sitting in a bar with a couple of friends literally, a couple, married couple. They're the parents of two young children, seven academic degrees between them, big nerds, really nice people but very sleep-deprived. And they ask me the question I get asked more than any other question. They go, "So, Emily, how do couples, you know, sustain a strong sexual connection over multiple decades?"
I'm a sex educator, which is why my friends ask me questions like this, and I am also a big nerd like my friends. I love science, which is why I can give them something like an answer. Research actually has pretty solid evidence that couples who sustain strong sexual connections over multiple decades have two things in common.
Before I can tell my friends what those two things are, I have to tell them a few things that they are not. These are not couples who have sex very often. Almost none of us have sex very often. We are busy. They are also not couples who necessarily have wild, adventurous sex. One recent study actually found that the couples who are most strongly predicted to have strong sexual and relationship satisfaction, the best predictor of that is not what kind of sex they have or how often or where they have it but whether they cuddle after sex. And they are not necessarily couples who constantly can't wait to keep their hands off each other. Some of them are. They experience what the researchers call "spontaneous desire," that just sort of seems to appear out of the blue. Erika Moen, the cartoonist who illustrated my book, draws spontaneous desire as a lightning bolt to the genitals kaboom! you just want it out of the blue. That is absolutely one normal, healthy way to experience sexual desire. But there's another healthy way to experience sexual desire. It's called "responsive desire." Where spontaneous desire seems to emerge in anticipation of pleasure, responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure.
There's a sex therapist in New Jersey named Christine Hyde, who taught me this great metaphor she uses with her clients. She says, imagine that your best friend invites you to a party. You say yes because it's your best friend and a party. But then, as the date approaches, you start thinking, "Aw, there's going to be all this traffic. We have to find child care. Am I really going to want to put my party clothes on and get there at the end of the week?" But you put on your party clothes and you show up to the party, and what happens? You have a good time at the party. If you are having fun at the party, you are doing it right.
When it comes to a sexual connection, it's the same thing. You put on your party clothes, you set up the child care, you put your body in the bed, you let your skin touch your partner's skin and allow your body to wake up and remember, "Oh, right! I like this. I like this person!" That's responsive desire, and it is key to understanding the couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term, because and this is the part where I tell my friends the two characteristics of the couples who do sustain a strong sexual connection one, they have a strong friendship at the foundation of their relationship. Specifically, they have strong trust. Relationship researcher and therapist, developer of emotionally focused therapy, Sue Johnson, boils trust down to this question: Are you there for me? Especially, are you emotionally present and available for me? Friends are there for each other. One.
The second characteristic is that they prioritize sex. They decide that it matters for their relationship. They choose to set aside all the other things that they could be doing the children they could be raising and the jobs they could be going to, the other family members to pay attention to, the other friends they might want to hang out with. God forbid they just want to watch some television or go to sleep. Stop doing all that stuff and create a protected space where all you're going to do is put your body in the bed and let your skin touch your partner's skin. So that's it: best friends, prioritize sex.
So I said this to my friends in the bar. I was like, best friends, prioritize sex, I told them about the party, I said you put your skin next to your partner's skin. And one of the partners I was talking to goes, "Aaagh."And I was like, "OK, so, there's your problem."The difficulty was not that they did not want to go to the party, necessarily. If the difficulty is just a lack of spontaneous desire for party, you know what to do: you put on your party clothes and show up for the party. If you're having fun at the party, you're doing it right. Their difficulty was that this was a party where she didn't love what there was available to eat, the music was not her favorite music, and she wasn't totally sure she felt great about her relationships with people who were at the party. And this happens all the time: nice people who love each other come to dread sex. These couples, if they seek sex therapy, the therapist might have them stand up and put as much distance between their bodies as they need in order to feel comfortable, and the less interested partner will make 20 feet of space.
And the really difficult part is that space is not empty. It is crowded with weeks or months or more of the, "You're not listening to me," and "I don't know what's wrong with me but your criticism isn't helping," and, "If you loved me, you would," and, "You're not there for me." Years, maybe, of all these difficult feelings. In the book, I use this really silly metaphor of difficult feelings as sleepy hedgehogs that you are fostering until you can find a way to set them free by turning toward them with kindness and compassion. And the couples who struggle to maintain a strong sexual connection, the distance between them is crowded with these sleepy hedgehogs.
And it happens in any relationship that lasts long enough. You, too, are fostering a prickle of sleepy hedgehogs between you and your certain special someone. The difference between couples who sustain a strong sexual connection and the ones who don't is not that they don't experience these difficult hurt feelings, it's that they turn towards those difficult feelings with kindness and compassion so that they can set them free and find their way back to each other. So my friends in the bar are faced with the question under the question, not, "How do we sustain a strong connection?" but, "How do we find our way back to it?" And, yes, there is science to answer this question, but in 25 years as a sex educator, one thing I have learned is sometimes, Emily, less science, more hedgehogs. So I told them about me.
I spent many months writing a book about the science of women's sexual well-being. I was thinking about sex all day, every day, and I was so stressed by the project that I had zero zero! interest in actually having any sex. And then I spent months traveling all over, talking with anyone who would listen about the science of women's sexual well-being. And by the time I got home, you know, I'd show up for the party, put my body in the bed, let my skin touch my partner's skin, and I was so exhausted and overwhelmed I would just cry and fall asleep. And the months of isolation fostered fear and loneliness and frustration. So many hedgehogs. My best friend, this person I love and admire, felt a million miles away.
But he was still there for me. No matter how many difficult feelings there were, he turned toward them with kindness and compassion. He never turned away. And what was the second characteristic of couples who sustain a strong sexual connection? They prioritize sex. They decide that it matters for their relationship, that they do what it takes to find their way back to the connection. I told my friends what sex therapist and researcher Peggy Kleinplatz says. She asks: What kind of sex is worth wanting? My partner and I looked at the quality of our connection and what it brought to our lives, and we looked at the family of sleepy hedgehogs I had introduced into our home. And we decided it was worth it. We decided we chose to do what it took to find our way, turning towards each of those sleepy hedgehogs, those difficult hurt feelings, with kindness and compassion and setting them free so that we could find our way back to the connection that mattered for our relationship.
This is not the story we are usually told about how sexual desire works in long-term relationships. But I can think of nothing more romantic, nothing sexier, than being chosen as a priority because that connection matters enough, even after I introduced all of these difficult feelings into our relationship. How do you sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term? You look into the eyes of your best friend, and you keep choosing to find your way back.
How can we support the emotional well-being of teachers?
Like many teachers, every year on the first day of school, I lead a sort of icebreaker activity with my students. I teach at Lincoln High School in Lincoln, Nebraska, and we are one of the oldest and most diverse high schools in our state. Also, to our knowledge, we're the only high school in the world whose mascot is the Links. Like, a chain.
And with that being our mascot, we have a statue out front of our building of four links connected like a chain. And each link means something. Our links stand for tradition, excellence, unity and diversity.
So on the first day of school, I teach my new ninth-graders about the meaning behind those links, and I give them each a slip of paper. On that paper, I ask them to write something about themselves. It can be something that they love, something that they hope for anything that describes their identity. And then I go around the room with a stapler, and I staple each of those slips together to make a chain. And we hang that chain up in our classroom as a decoration, sure, but also as a reminder that we are all connected. We are all links.
So what happens when one of those links feels weak? And what happens when that weakness is in the person holding the stapler? The person who's supposed to make those connections. The teacher.
As teachers, we work every day to provide support socially, emotionally and academically to our students who come to us with diverse and tough circumstances. Like most teachers, I have students who go home every day, and they sit around the kitchen table while one or both parents makes a healthy, well-rounded meal for them. They spend suppertime summarizing the story they read in ninth-grade English that day, or explaining how Newton's laws of motion work. But I also have students who go to the homeless shelter or to the group home. They go to the car that their family is sleeping in right now. They come to school with trauma, and when I go home every day, that goes home with me.
And see, that's the hard part about teaching. It's not the grading, the lesson-planning, the meetings, though sure, those things do occupy a great deal of teachers' time and energy. The tough part about teaching is all the things you can't control for your kids, all the things you can't change for them once they walk out your door. And so I wonder if it's always been this way.
I think back to my undergraduate training at the University of Georgia, where we were taught in our methods classes that the concept of good teaching has changed. We're not developing learners who are going to go out into a workforce where they'll stand on a line in a factory. Rather, we're sending our kids out into a workforce where they need to be able to communicate, collaborate and problem-solve. And that has caused teacher-student relationships to morph into something stronger than the giver of content and the receiver of knowledge. Lectures and sitting in silent rows just doesn't cut it anymore. We have to be able to build relationships with and among our students to help them feel connected in a world that depends on it.
I think back to my second year teaching. I had a student who I'll call "David." And I remember feeling like I'd done a pretty good job at teaching that year: "Hey, I ain't no first-year teacher. I know what I'm doing." And it was on the last day of school, I told David to have a great summer. And I watched him walk down the hall, and I thought to myself, I don't even know what his voice sounds like. And that's when I realized I wasn't doing it right. So I changed almost everything about my teaching. I built in plenty of opportunities for my students to talk to me and to talk to each other, to share their writing and to verbalize their learning. And it was through those conversations I began not only to know their voice but to know their pain.
I had David in class again that next year, and I learned that his father was undocumented and had been deported. He started acting out in school because all he wanted was for his family to be together again. In so many ways, I felt his pain. And I needed someone to listen, somebody to provide support for me so that I could support him in this thing that I could not even comprehend.
And we recognize that need for police officers who've witnessed a gruesome crime scene and nurses who have lost a patient. But when it comes to teaching professionals, that urgency is lagging. I believe it's paramount that students and teachers, administrators, paraprofessionals and all other support staff have convenient and affordable access to mental wellness supports. When we are constantly serving others, often between 25 and 125 students each day, our emotional piggy banks are constantly being drawn upon. After a while, it can become so depleted, that we just can't bear it anymore. They call it "secondary trauma" and "compassion fatigue," the concept that we absorb the traumas our students share with us each day. And after a while, our souls become weighed down by the heaviness of it all.
The Buffett Institute at the University of Nebraska recently found that most teachers 86 percent across early childhood settings experienced some depressive symptoms during the prior week. They found that approximately one in 10 reported clinically significant depressive symptoms. My interactions with colleagues and my own experiences make me feel like this is a universal struggle across all grade levels. So what are we missing? What are we allowing to break the chain and how do we repair it?
In my career, I've experienced the death by suicide of two students and one amazing teacher who loved his kids; countless students experiencing homelessness; and kids entering and exiting the justice system. When these events happen, protocol is to say, "If you need someone to talk to, then ..." And I say that's not enough. I am so lucky. I work in an amazing school with great leadership. I serve a large district with so many healthy partnerships with community agencies. They have provided steadily increasing numbers of school counselors and therapists and support staff to help our students. They even provide staff members with access to free counseling as part of our employment plan. But many small districts and even some large ones simply cannot foot the bill without aid.
(Exhales)
Not only does every school need social and emotional support staff, trained professionals who can navigate the needs of the building not just the students, not just the teachers, but both we also need these trained professionals to intentionally seek out those closest to the trauma and check in with them. Many schools are doing what they can to fill in the gaps, starting with acknowledging that the work that we do is downright hard.
Another school in Lincoln, Schoo Middle School, has what they call "Wellness Wednesdays." They invite in community yoga teachers, they sponsor walks around the neighborhood during lunch and organize social events that are all meant to bring people together. Zachary Elementary School in Zachary, Louisiana, has something they call a "Midweek Meetup," where they invite teachers to share lunch and to talk about the things that are going well and the things that are weighing heavy on their hearts. These schools are making space for conversations that matter. Finally, my friend and colleague Jen Highstreet takes five minutes out of each day to write an encouraging note to a colleague, letting them know that she sees their hard work and the heart that they share with others. She knows that those five minutes can have an invaluable and powerful ripple effect across our school.
The chain that hangs in my classroom is more than just a decoration. Those links hang over our heads for the entire four years that our students walk our halls. And every year, I have seniors come back to my classroom, room 340, and they can still point out where their link hangs. They remember what they wrote on it. They feel connected and supported. And they have hope. Isn't that what we all need? Somebody to reach out and make sure that we're OK. To check in with us and remind us that we are a link. Every now and then, we all just need a little help holding the stapler.