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

00:02I 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 counselling network, found that 26% of people in relationships were having sex less than 10 times per year and 8% were having no sex at all. 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. Yeah. So the question is, where's the problem?

00:42Is 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 incidents 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.

01:30And 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 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 survives more than an hour without a build-up of frustration and the more we can let out that frustration at the dinner table the more it won't you know create a blockage in the bedroom And so the chance to discharge frustration and, you know, often the reason why we don't tell our partners what our frustrations are is that they sound ridiculous.

02:29It'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 know 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 uh why does that matter but but for them it matters or you know 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.

03:19Triggered. 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 honor when we can dare to reveal this to our partner and they can do likewise so if i'm 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 um 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? 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.

04:37And 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. And then we can ask ourselves, what does sex really aim at? Sex aims at intimacy. We'll say 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. Most of the time we approach other people with our guards on.

05:24and 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. I had Tracy Cox on the podcast and she said something to me which really stuck with me because I hadn't noticed it until she said it which is this idea I believe she called otherness which is when your partner almost becomes like a family member or you start seeing them as like a sibling because they are in their sweatpants around you and she made the claim which I think I've read in your books as well that in many respects that's the very opposite of the the spice that makes sex so appealing in those early days when it's new and novel and risky you know and so she kind of alluded to the fact that love and sex were actually set on two different ends of a pole right and again to come back to my theme um what does a romantic say a romantic romanticism tells us sex and love belong entirely together. But I think what you're saying, and what many of your viewers will know,

06:46is that the relationship is trickier. And again, let's not torture ourselves about this. Let's get curious, and then let's communicate about this. And I think that, look, a growing child has a paradox to deal with. And this is what Freud famously, doesn't matter what you think of Freud, very useful observation really that um the child experiences love in the first instance at the beginning of life we all experience love um at the hands of people who everything's gone right we will have no sexual connection with right so given the debt that adult love owes to childhood um that sets us up with a problem when we as adults start to fall in love with people and start to build up relationships, which is that the more we get cozy with someone, the more we feel like we did a little bit with our parents when things were really cozy, which is oddly why people like going to hotels. Why do people like going to hotels to revive a relationship?

07:55It's because the furniture doesn't remember you. The curtains don't remember you. You're allowed to be for a chosen moment somebody without the history and it's the history that is making intimacy hard because that history while it's knitting you together and making you emotionally close is also rendering sexual freedom problematic and i think it's just we need to go very easy on ourselves for the fact that this happens and um what do we do about it though um do i need to book a lot of hotel rooms. I need to spend a lot of time away from my partner.

08:32I noticed even that you're laughing, you're smiling as you say that. And I think that's partly the clue. You know, when we come up against the hardest conundrums in life, having the tolerance of a sense of humour, a shared sense of humour, you know, if a couple can turn the sexual challenges from a tragedy into something, you know, closer to a comedy, it's an enormous achievement. Think of teasing, right? There are sides of couples that they find really, really hard. Isn't it wonderful when a couple learns with affection to tease one another?

09:06They go, oh, Stephen, there's that thing that you do, it gives you a little nickname, calls you whatever it is, a little affectionate nickname. That's a wonderful moment because it means that irritation has been sublimated into tender, compassionate understanding for why someone is as difficult as they are. So the best thing we can do with our irritations with our partners is to be able to tease our way out of them. And we may need to do this in troublesome areas like sex. It's an enormous achievement if your partner can go from thinking that you are an idiot to smiling at you and thinking you're a lovable idiot.