Moment 171: STOP DOING THIS! It's Ruining Your Sex Life

Steven Bartlett (0:03)

I was looking through some statistics earlier on, because I know that you've talked quite extensively on relationships and sex and sexless relationships. I found this stat that says a 2022 study by Relate, a UK-based counseling network, found that 26 percent of people in relationships were having sex less than 10 times per year, and 8 percent were having no sex at all. So this is a stark rise from 2018 where the numbers were quite significantly lower than that. It seems like as a society we're getting increasingly sexless.

Alain De Botton (0:39)

Yeah. So the question is, where's the problem? Is the problem in the body or is the problem in the mind? Now, being the kind of guy I am, I'm going to shift us to the mind. I'm sure sometimes there are bodily issues and they deserve attention too. But if I can talk about the mind, why is it that sex is easier at the beginning than in a long-term relationship? One of the leading answers is anger. It's not very easy to have sex or want sex with someone that you're angry with. And in many relationships, there's a lot of stored anger that neither party knows is there. And that anger has come from micro-incidence of disappointment. Someone didn't quite call when they said they would. Someone didn't laugh when they might have done. Someone didn't show generosity when it might have been required. And these things get stored up. And the result of too much of this is that you don't want someone going anywhere near you. Because you're furious. You're essentially furious. But in the way of these things, you don't know you are. You don't know you're furious. Again, the mind is not obvious to itself.

So, you know, if you want to have more sex, don't just invest in candles and fancy linen. A quite useful thing to do is to go and have dinner with your partner and say to them, we're both going to ask each other how we've annoyed each other. Because we have annoyed each other. Not because we're evil people, but because we're human and we're in a relationship. And no relationship can survive more than an hour without a buildup of frustration. And the more we can let out that frustration at the dinner table, the more it won't create a blockage in the bedroom. And so the chance to discharge frustration. And often the reason why we don't tell our partners what our frustrations are is that they sound ridiculous. It's like, well, hang on. You're upset with me because I use the word really in what you thought placed too much emphasis on the why when I was speaking to your mother.

Are you crazy, right? You are laying yourself open to your partner, pointing to you, going, are you crazy? But I think that we're all in love, very small children, at least a small part of us is. And as we know, small children get upset about really weird, tiny things. You'll move a button and they start wailing. And you go, what's happened? And they go, you moved a button. And you go, I did? Why does that matter? But for them it matters. Or a pencil has slightly changed direction. So we should learn, we should remember what it felt like to be a child. And we should acknowledge that there remains even an adult who's very competent in all sorts of areas, a small child who is liable to be getting very upset about small things.

Steven Bartlett (3:19)

Triggered.

Alain De Botton (3:20)

Triggered. But because they're an adult, this is the problem. We think an adult can't possibly be having such childish reactions. Again, we need to just cast aside our fears of shame and say, you know what, yes, an adult can get very upset about tiny things. An adult probably is upset about tiny things and we're doing ourselves an honour when we can dare to reveal this to our partner and they can do likewise.

Steven Bartlett (3:47)

So if I'm someone listening to this now and I'm in a relationship where I don't think, because it's interesting, even when I say I don't think I'm having enough sex, the idea of how much sex is enough sex has probably come from movies, which is a bit of a trap as well, right? But if I'm in a relationship and we are in a sexless relationship by whatever definition, solution one you presented there is try and resolve the anger, the underlying contempt.

Are there anything else that you think is effective ways of solving for that?

Alain De Botton (4:19)

Look, I think one useful thing to do is to go, why does sex matter? What is this thing called sex? Why does it matter? And when people get very upset, I think the answer tends to be that sex is a symbol of something very poignant and very delicate, which is, my partner loves me. And the reason why it becomes such an acute issue is that they cannot hold on to the idea that the partner might love them and might not want sex. This is psychologically impossible. Now, it is important to say, it is possible. It is possible that your partner both loves you and doesn't want to have sex. There could be other reasons. They're feeling unwell, da-da-da. So, and then we can ask ourselves, what does sex really aim at? Sex aims at intimacy. You know, even we'll say they, you know, in people's polite language, they became intimate, which means they had sex. So what we know about sex is that the really exciting thing about sex is not the sex bit, it's the intimate bit. It's the idea that someone is without their guard. You know, most of the time we approach other people with our guards on. And in this very rare and unusual thing we do, we meet another human being in a vulnerable state. And this is such a relief from the normal limitations of life. And there are other ways of doing this. You know, sex is not the only way of doing it. So by understanding better what sex is, we can also have a chance to get some of what we get in sex in things that are not sex, if that makes sense.