The No.1 Sex Expert: How To Have Great Sex EVERY Time! (And Fix Bad Sex) - Tracey Cox

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You've written 17 books on the topic of sex. So, my first question: how do we have the best sex of our lives?

That’s the question everybody wants to know. The world's most celebrated sex expert has the answers to the questions you've always wanted to know and the secret to a great sex drive.

There is a decline of sex, isn't there?

Yes, there's a sex recession. If you haven't had sex for a year with your partner, it is very unlikely you're going to have sex again.

Are you hopeful that we can turn that around?

Yes, absolutely. The key thing is women fake their orgasms. We have known that women don't orgasm through penetrative sex since the Kama Sutra, and yet most men will go, "Yeah, I’ve heard about that, but my girlfriends always finish." They are faking it.

How do we predict if someone's going to cheat on us?

Number one: being close doesn't actually protect you against infidelity. You become so close to your partner that they're your best friend and you just don't see them as a sexual partner anymore. If you understand how sex works and if you can make sex good with your partner, affairs can be preventable in so many different ways.

Women get bored way quicker than men. Men don't get bored because they get the orgasm as a reward. You need to give women interesting, erotic sex, and then they'll be interested. Otherwise, they're not going to be interested.

I've noticed a trend amongst my friendship group where a startling amount of them are in sexless relationships. What are some of the most important solutions?

If you want to have great sex, you need to have an interesting life. That’s what you have to do if you want a good sex life.

I think that’s phenomenal advice.

Tracy, I reached out to my team and I told them that I wanted to have a conversation with the individual in the world that was best and most educated and most engaging on the subject matter of sex. I've noticed a bunch of things in my personal life, in the lives of my friends, and those around me. I feel like people aren't having the right types of conversations about sex. I feel like we're avoiding it as a society. I feel like sex is so intrinsically linked to performance, well-being, business, and all the things I usually talk about. So, they found you and that's why you're here. Who are you and what do you do? What is your mission?

I’m not a trained sex therapist, which is what everybody thinks I am. I’m a sex educator, which I think means that what I do is look at all the research and what's going on in the sex world in an academic sense. Then I work out what this means for people in the bedroom.

I bring it down to a level that is more practical. All my books are very much like: "Right, here is what we now know about sex, and here is how this is going to help you in bed." My job is to take the research and make it into something that the average person can understand and make it work for them.

Part of the reason I wanted to speak to you is that I've noticed a trend amongst my friendship group where a startling amount of them are in sexless relationships. They're not 50. Your book says "Great Sex Starts at 50," but my friends are in their 30s. There are lots of thoughts here. Why aren't they having sex more often? Is that a problem? Are their partners to blame? Is it wrong? Are those relationships broken?

Let's start with the point you raised about how lust and love are not necessarily great bedfellows. How does one, if they really love their partner and are very close, create that balance? You talk about something called "otherness" in your new book.

That’s a big question because that's the question everybody wants to know: how do you keep desire going long-term? The otherness thing is all about how close couples kind of become like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They don't do anything separately. You need to have separateness from your partner.

This is why during COVID no one had sex at all. In the beginning, it was like, "Fantastic, we can have sex at 11:00 o'clock in the morning!" And then it was like, "Oh, we can have sex any time we want." How unappealing is that? The more available something is, the less we want it. You need to separate from your partner. You need to have your own identity.

See your partner in the real world when you're not with them. So many couples only ever see each other at home. I remember once, very early on into the relationship with my husband, Miles, he was walking through a restaurant. I had arrived first and he hadn't seen me. I saw a couple of women look over at him and I thought, "He’s really attractive." He's out there all the time and people are going to be attracted to him. It makes you lift your game a bit.

If you only ever see your partner at home coming through the front door, they become too safe. I think when people say, "Oh, my partner would never cheat on me," I think, how rude is that? To think that your partner is never going to cheat on you no matter what you do to them or how horrible you are. That’s like saying your partner is just a doormat.

I like to think that my partner is not going to cheat on me, but if I pledge monogamy, I pledge that I'm going to sexually satisfy my partner. I think you have an obligation to do that. I'm going to keep myself looking good because love is kind, but it's not blind. I think it’s a real insult if Miles said to me, "I know you'd never cheat on me." I wouldn't take that as a compliment.

I think it's important to know that your partner will leave you if you drop the ball in a variety of different ways. Do you think we have an obligation to stay in shape or stay attractive for our partners?

Yes, absolutely. I don't mean you have to have face lifts, but you should keep yourself as attractive as you can. And that's not just a physical thing; it's an intellectual thing as well. Desire goes, especially with the "grumpy old man/grumpy old woman" thing.

When people age, I think they become very set in their ways and become quite bitter. You could look like a Greek god, but if you're bitter and twisted, your partner is still not going to want to sleep with you. I do think we owe it to each other to look as good as you can and to be as positive as you can. There is nothing less sexy than being with somebody who's miserable all the time.

It's so interesting. Some of the most attractive things I find in my partner are when I look over and see her doing her work. Last night I came home very late and my partner was sat at the kitchen table designing her new studio on her laptop with her headphones on. I took a photo. I was proud of her, but it was really lovely that when I walked through the door, it wasn't about me. She was busy doing her own thing.

Of course it is. Watching somebody at work doing what they love is the moment when you're like, "Wow, this person's amazing." I would hate to be a person where the partner is at home waiting for you, asking "Where are you?" and "How was your day?" That’s not healthy for a relationship; it puts too much on one person. If you want to have great sex, you need to have an interesting life.

You’re not going to be having great sex if you're boring and you do the same thing every single day because you just end up doing the same boring sex. You need stimulation all the time. That routineness is the killer for women.

Women are the ones that find monogamy boring, not men. If you say to men, "You could have pretty much the same sex, do the same thing every single time, three times a week for the rest of your life with this person," most men would go, "Yeah, all right, sounds right to me." If you said that to a woman, she would go, "You are kidding me."

Women get bored way quicker than men because our orgasm is far more complicated. Intercourse is usually the main event for most couples' sex, and that's great for men. Intercourse very successfully stimulates the penis. For women, the clitoris is outside the vagina. It isn't just that little tip; it looks like a wishbone and goes down the sides of the legs. It’s 10 centimeters long.

Because the clitoris is on the outside, intercourse doesn't cut it for most women. Only 20% of women can climax through penetrative sex. That means 80% of women are not having their orgasms through intercourse.

So if you're going to serve up the same routine sex that most couples have over and over again, and that’s your lot as a female, you're having sex which doesn't give you an orgasm. You’re having sex which isn't exciting or erotic. Women get bored. Men get the orgasm as a reward; women get bored because the sex is just not the right sex for them. Women’s desire for sex goes down so much faster than men's. You need to give women interesting, erotic sex.

I was speaking to a friend of mine who said, "I'm in a relationship where my partner is having the same sex over and over again. He's coming very quickly during sex, and I don't know how to broach the conversation with him about how this isn't working for me without embarrassing him." What advice would you give to that person?

Talking about sex is just the thing. Do you talk about sex with your girlfriend?

Yes, for four years now. We're just very open with things.

Well done. That’s really good because most people talk a lot about sex in the beginning when it's all going well. The minute there are problems, they tail off. Every sex problem can be solved if you talk about it. If you don't talk about it, the tiniest sex problem can ruin your whole sex life.

The reason people don't talk about sex is that they're worried they're going to hurt their partner or upset them. Well, you just be really tactful about it. I always talk about the "compliment sandwich." Say she wants him to give her more foreplay.

Yeah, he's reaching orgasm too quickly and then she's obviously not enjoying it because he's over and she's still not had her orgasm.

Well, the mantra for that is "she comes first, always." The way to solve the whole orgasm thing is to have her orgasms through oral sex, fingers, or a vibrator, and then you go on to intercourse, which is when he gets his orgasm. That’s what a lot of straight couples do.

You’ll notice actually when I talk about sex, I talk about straight couples. The reason why is that gay couples have a lot better time of it because they've got the same issues going on. So it kind of helps if you're gay in lots of ways.

I would say don't worry so much. If she said to her partner, "Look, I really love our sex. I particularly like it when you do X, but you know when you used to do Y—give me more foreplay, give me oral sex—I really, really loved that. Can we do more of that?" You’re not saying, "Actually, you're not lasting long enough." Not lasting long enough is not going to be an issue with most women because they don't have their orgasms through intercourse anyway.

Men need to calm down about that. They feel like they have to go on for ever and ever, and she's not going to orgasm that way anyway. She’s going to feel like she has to, and then you get the faking it and all that stuff.

Talking about sex is such a huge issue. Once you’ve done it once, that first conversation is excruciating. I deal with couples who haven't talked about sex for 30 years. That first conversation is awful, but once you move past that initial awkwardness—which seriously lasts like three minutes—then all of a sudden, there's this relief. You can say, "Actually, I don't really like it when you do that. Can you do this?" You will never regret trying to talk about sex with your partner.

She should think about what she wants and be very specific. Men particularly like and respond best to very specific instructions. Instead of saying, "This sex isn't working for me because you're climaxing too fast," you say, "This is my idea of the perfect sex session. Let's take turns; we each design our own perfect sex session."

You could say, "Could you start with kissing? You could move on to kissing my neck. I really like it if you play with my breasts, and then I love oral sex, but could you do it for a bit longer?" Very specific. People think that's like telling someone, "Can you say you love me?" and then they say it back. But giving instruction in sex is actually something most people are really grateful for. It might feel a bit awkward the session after that, but then all of a sudden you forget about it, and the next session is flowing and great.

One of the things that I've always been a bit conscious of, or that has irked me a little bit, goes back to what you said about lust—the spontaneity and the riskiness of it. I don't want rules. I don't want to be instructed during sex or, even worse, "I don't like that, do it like this." It kind of kills the flow. I think sometimes for guys, so much of sex is feeling like you can flow. If you get critical feedback during sex, that's a pressure stress where the erection might not hold out.

First of all, it's natural for an erection to come and go during any sex session, so that’s not really important. But maybe criticism isn't great. "Don't do it like that, move over here," in a barking sergeant major way is not so great. But often men don't hit the spot, and they are doing it wrong. Do you want women to just lie back and pretend? That’s why women don't give men instruction in bed—because they know that a lot of men don't like it and it disrupts the proceedings.

But it's very quickly back on track if you go and do exactly what she wants. Personally, I think sexual instruction can be "just over to the left a bit" or "that feels great there." Whenever you can give positive feedback rather than negative, it's great. I'm sure you wouldn't mind if she says, "No, that's perfect, stay there, stay there, do it for longer."

Exactly. The key thing is the positive framing.

That is the key thing. And then if maybe you still haven't hit the spot, then afterwards you say, "Actually, that didn't quite work. Can I just tell you what works for me?" and then demonstrate on your hand or something. No one's going to respond to sex where somebody's going, "Oh, that's not right. Why are you doing that for? That's terrible. Don't go there, that doesn't feel anything." That’s awful.

And those instructional sessions should happen when? Before, during, or after?

Depends on the couple. You can use body language during sex. I think maybe sometimes after sex when you're getting on really well, have a few drinks and talk generally. That's the time to say, "By the way, my friend was talking about doing X. What do you think about that?" I always think conversations about sex that are positive and exciting should happen outside the bedroom, really. But otherwise, yeah, you do have to have those instructional sessions, I’m afraid.

What if you want to do something and your partner doesn't want to do it?

Generally, a request for something new is just a request for variety. Say your partner says, "I want to try having sex outside," and you really don't want to. The correct answer to that is, "Look, that's really not my thing, but why don't we try X?" If you give them something else, they'll be fine.

Where you get into problems is if it's something a bit fetish. That’s when you get into situations like in the show *Billions*, where she had the fetish of being whipped and wanting to be the submissive, and he just let her go off and be satisfied by a sex worker. That’s one option, by the way. If your partner has a fetish and it's not for you, but it’s so much part of their makeup they can't live without it, then go off with a sex worker and satisfy it. That’s the extreme version.

But most of the time, I think you can meet halfway. Say you want a threesome with two women; well, then meeting halfway might be that you have phone sex with a sex worker, maybe you roleplay, maybe you go to a lap dancing club and she gets a lap dance by someone. There's always some kind of compromise where you can capture a sense of what the other person wants.

Let's go back to my friends in their 30s in sexless relationships. They are increasingly frustrated about it. In various ways, they are in situations where they don't feel like they're getting enough sex from their partner and they see it as a critical problem, which might result in them cheating or ending the relationship.

Even in my own sexual experience, what got me really engaged with this subject matter was I was in a relationship where the partner turned around to me one day after six months and said, "I don't like having sex." As a young man with an ego, I thought, "What does that mean? Does that mean I'm not doing it right?" We separated. My reaction was very abrupt because I turned to her and said "Why?" and she said, "I'm not comfortable talking about that with you." For me, that was like the door had closed.

A year passes, and on her journey, she really got to understand that at the heart of her relationship with sex was this fear that had derived from previous relationships where the partner was very forceful or parents cheating. It wasn't that she necessarily didn't like having sex; there was a lot of psychological work to be done on removing that fear of abandonment. Really, if I made her feel safe—really, really safe—then the sexual appetite would return. That's what happened. A year later we got back together. We ended up having the best sex of our lives on an ongoing basis because she was able to understand what was really going on.

That is an extraordinary story.

So we went from a point of "I don't like having sex" to the best situation I think one can imagine. Communication was at the heart of it, letting my ego down and giving her space. That's what got me really into the subject matter because I've now got loads of friends that are in that situation.

What I would say to your friends is: if your partner doesn't want to have sex with you, I wonder how good the sex is. A lot of women say no to sex because the sex that's on offer is not that interesting to them. For this, we need to talk about sex drives: spontaneous desire versus responsive desire.

Spontaneous desire is what two-thirds of men have. It’s the desire that everybody has at the beginning. By the way, if you want to know somebody's resting libido, you've got to wait about a year to find out because it's always so artificially inflated at the start. Spontaneous desire is the "want sex, seek sex" type. People can be scrolling through Instagram, somebody sexy walks past, and they're instantly aroused. They go from 0 to 100 very quickly.

Responsive desire means that you have no desire for sex, or very little, until somebody is actually doing something to you sexually. This is somebody who maybe is with their partner, the partner wants to have sex, they're not even slightly interested but go, "Okay, look, I'll give it a go." Then once things start happening, if their partner is very good at stimulating them, all of a sudden they're like, "Yeah, actually, I'm enjoying this."

That’s the warming up.

That’s the warming up. 30% of women have responsive desire; the rest of them are a mix between spontaneous and responsive. Most men have spontaneous desire. Most men are very happy to go straight to genital sex; they don't need warming up the way their anatomy works. For women, foreplay isn't a luxury; it's a necessity.

In order for sex to be comfortable, you need the vagina to "tent"—it literally puffs up so that it can take a penis comfortably. If you don't wait for that to happen and you go straight for penetration, sex isn't great and then it's all over. For men, you could go from not even thinking about sex to having finished within 10 minutes. For women, they need time to warm up because their sex drive is responsive. They're almost like "blink and it's over" and they haven't even got to 5% desire.

This is the problem with couples. Women think because that spontaneous desire is gone and they don't feel like sex—it doesn't come out of the blue unless they start having sex—they think, "Oh, that just must mean I don't want sex anymore." You do want sex; it's just that you've got to be having sexy things happening to you before you feel the desire for sex. If women understood that better and stopped saying, "Oh, it obviously means my sex drive's gone," no, it hasn't. It’s there; you've just got to have great stimulation and great sex to get it back.

The other thing about women is that we have this thing about women wanting tame romance. That’s not true. So much research now shows that women like erotic, wild sex. They've done these experiments with women where they'll show them erotic videos and they'll wire up the genitals to measure response. When you're aroused as a woman, blood flows to the genitals the same as men, and you lubricate.

They are watching these sexy videos, and they have to say whether anything is dis-arousing them. They might say "no" because society says no, we're not supposed to be. But the genitals are like, "Are you kidding? What are you thinking? This is fantastic! Say yes to this!" There’s such a big difference between what we're taught and what we would like. So if your girlfriend's saying no to sex and you're in a long-term relationship, it's because you're not giving her interesting enough sex. Give her exciting, erotic sex.

Look at *Fifty Shades of Grey*. That got middle-aged women wanting sex—women who hadn't wanted sex for 20 years. I remember being on a holiday with my husband and we started talking to this couple around the time *Fifty Shades* came out. She said, "God, I hadn't really had great sex with my partner or been interested in sex for like 10 years. I read the book, I'm sitting there at 2:00 o'clock in the morning, looking down at my partner thinking, 'I really just want to wake him up and have sex with him.'" Suddenly she was back into this erotic sex that she'd just forgotten about. Give people something interesting. Push her out of her comfort zone. Don't give her romance; give her sexy sex, and then they'll be interested.

I'm trying to think of my friends posing that and how uncomfortable they'd feel. Because when you've been with someone and you've become that kind of sibling thing, they might almost look at you with a bit of horror.

Yeah, you wouldn't go straight from not talking about sex to "we're going to go to a lap dance club tonight." No. You have to have the conversation. You have to bite the bullet and have the conversation because the thing about sexless relationships: if you haven't had sex for a year with your partner, it is very unlikely you're going to have sex again with your partner unless you confront it head-on. If you just think, "Yeah, this will pass," it will never pass. It’s got to that awkward, awkward, awkward stage.

30% of couples who have been together for two years or more don't have sex. Two years, not 10 years. 30%. It is very easy to get out of the habit of sex. Once you're out of the habit, the less often you do it, and then couples get into this thing where it's like, "God, we haven't had sex for ages, but you know what? Next weekend we'll have this marathon sex session." Then the marathon sex session is like, "God, how am I going to find time for that? That's a bit daunting." And then of course you'd have to have sex for like six weeks to make up for it, so it just becomes more and more insurmountable.

I always say to people: just have little bite-sized bits of sex. Sex doesn't have to have a beginning, middle, and an end. Have a big snogging session. Have a thing where he gives you oral or you give him oral, or you just do something sensual together. You have a bath. That counts as sex. People think sex has to have intercourse in there. It doesn't. It’s the least favorite bit for women. Take the intercourse out. Start doing little bite-sized stuff to reconnect sexually.

It's like a frog in a frying pan—that old analogy of how slowly the frog doesn't realize it's being heated in the frying pan until the water's boiling and it's dead. It happens very gradually in relationships and then you get to a point where you go, "How the hell did we get here?" At that point, you have to have the talk. You need to stage a crisis. You need to say "Stop. This relationship has to stop. We have to have a conversation now because I'm at a point now where I'm either going to leave this relationship or I'm going to end up cheating." It needs to feel important, or else it'll be allowed to simmer.

That’s exactly right. And of course, what lots of people do in that scenario is they just turn to porn and they just satisfy themselves with porn. But that's not ideal.

Why?

Well, because it's pretty soulless sex, isn't it? Just watching porn and masturbating. It’s really funny about porn, actually. I used to have a great relationship with porn. I used to say to people all the time, "Porn is your friend. Watch it with your partner. It’s great if you've got a high sex drive and your partner doesn't. You can satisfy yourself, it keeps your imagination peaked."

And now porn's moved into a really ugly stage with such a concentration on aggressive acts like spitting and choking. Choking is terrible. Slapping across the face. It’s become very much like that, and young men are growing up to think that this is what a normal sex session is like. Porn is nothing like real-life sex. And then women look at it and go, "Gosh, right, okay, that's obviously what's expected of me, this is what I have to do." It’s moving into a very nasty direction.

They say unmet expectations equal unhappiness. So by setting expectations up here—"I'm going to tie you up and spit on you and choke you and you're going to make this sound and you're going to scream"—then those unmet expectations equal unhappiness in the bedroom. You go, "Well, I'm going to have to go looking for something else."

Exactly. And that's what young men do because they think that's what sex is going to be about. It's not. So then they keep looking for the girls who will give them that. And then girls very quickly figure out, "Okay, if I want to be liked, I have to do that."

I've just done a big thing on choking. I interviewed all these young girls and it was horrifying. Between 58% of college students had all been choked. I think 30% of them had been asked. And I'm not talking about symbolic choking of just putting a hand on the throat, which even that freaks me out, but I'm talking about cutting off wind supply.

There was one girl who told me she was 21. She’d gone out with this guy who seemed really nice. He started choking her; she said no. She passed out. She woke up next to this guy who was asleep. He then said to her, and she got herself out of there and was like, "Oh my God," terrified. He texted her the next day and said, "Oh my God, babe, the sex was awesome, let's meet up again." And she was just like, "How could you possibly think that that was good?" And that worries me a lot.

Except for things like that, sex I think is moving in a great way in lots of ways, particularly for young women. But no, you don't want to be satisfying yourself with porn. You have to have the conversation if sex is now out of your marriage. You cannot just let it go and be the elephant in the room because exactly what you said is going to happen: you're going to leave or you're going to cheat.

So you sit down with your partner and you say, "Listen, we really need to have a discussion about this. I love you desperately, but I miss our sex. I love having sex with you, you're really desirable. Can we talk about why this isn't happening anymore? Is it that the sex that we're having isn't doing it for you? What can I do to make you want to have sex more often with me?"

I've got friends that have tried that. And the partner doesn't necessarily know. It’s a similar situation to the one I described that I was in where my partner turned around and said something because they might not have the information themselves. They go, "Well, I just don't like having it." They might not know about the responsive sex language that you talked about.

Well, that's when you educate yourself. That's when you read a few of my books to give you a bit of education. The partner who wants sex is generally more driven, so maybe they could sexually educate themselves and say, "I've been reading up about this, perhaps it might be because of this. Can we try having sex this way?"

It's all about broaching the topic and then, depending on the reaction—I know I've encouraged some people to have this talk and then they've got an answer which is just startling—where they'll say, "I don't want to have sex anymore. I'm not interested in solving this, so that's it. So you just have to put up with it."

That’s basically what I got.

Well, if somebody says that to you and you've tried on several occasions, I think that is grounds for walking out myself.

And I did.

Good. Because then people do some soul searching. Sometimes maybe you walk out and then the person thinks, "Well, gosh, actually, that's not very fair." Because monogamy is all about "I pledge to only have sex with one person." Well, if that person withdraws sex, then where are you left? Apart from having solo sex or you have an agreement: "Okay, well if you won't have sex with me, then what are my options? My options are to satisfy myself, to cheat, or are you happy for me to seek the sex elsewhere?" Lots and lots of times, people will say, "Yeah, actually, I am. I don't want to know about it, I don't want it to be in our friendship group, and we're going to have to have rules about this," but some women are more than happy for that to happen. Or some men are more than happy for that to happen. It's not just a female thing here; men go off sex as well.

On this point of porn as well, I read something recently about the shame that it's causing in people. I think the study that I read reported about 40% of men that masturbate to porn report to feeling a sense of shame. And then when we think about the sort of macro, where we are in sex as a society right now, there is a decline of sex, isn't there?

Yes, there is a sex recession. And that's very much because—basically, there wasn't a sex recession before social media, streaming, and phones. It's all to do with that. We have too much to do. We basically just go off sex because we have other things to entertain us. Pre-all that, at 10:34 on a Saturday night, most couples were having sex because there was nothing else to do. That was it. We're just too busy. We've got too many other things on our plate. That’s the main problem with long-term couples.

Then you have less face-to-face communication, which makes people quite nervous. If you haven't had sex before and you're dealing mainly with FaceTime calls and video calls, which is what lots of young people are, when you're face-to-face, they get very nervous. They don't know anything about body language, they don't know how to connect, and sex becomes scary.

In Japan, there's something like 45% of people get to the age in their 30s and they're virgins. They've never even had a sexual encounter. And if you don't give your body sex, your body doesn't want sex. So they could quite happily go through life completely sexless. That's what's going to end up happening with sex. We are becoming less and less and less intimate. The more we go into virtual worlds, the more people rely on porn for sex because they can't even be bothered going out and finding a partner because it's all too difficult. It’s becoming less and less about the intimacy and more and more about just the "getting off" part.

We're now in an AI world as well, which is very interesting. You know, we've heard about sex dolls and stuff like that over the years, but a sex doll that can speak to you with such depth and reason and apparent emotional nuance and understanding is really, really scary. You can now have a sex doll in your house that speaks to you, that comforts you, that understands your problems, and can give you unbelievable advice. It will never shout at you, will never criticize you, and will please you in a personalized way. It will learn how to please you.

Sounds great, doesn't it? Let's just swap our partners for that person!

But we are right there. We're on the doorstep of that world.

And you know what, though? Think about all the lonely people. Think about all the lonely people that can now have a companion. I think think of it like that.

Is it companion? Is it real connection?

Of course it is. If you're somebody who can't find a companion in real life or you're lonely, I mean, it's better than a dog, isn't it? I think that's got some really nice applications to it, but it also has some dire applications. Because then ultimately, we’ll end up with no population, will we? Because no one will be having sex with a real person.

If we go up that exponential curve of improvement, we get to a point where this thing is walking, it's talking, it's making your breakfast, your dinner, your whatever, then it's satisfying you on demand. And then you look over at a human and you go, "Ugh."

They're going to be more interesting than humans, aren't they?

That’s what I'm saying. They're going to be more interesting, they're going to be better in every way.

No, I think humans will be more interesting, surely. I don't want a "yes person" in my life. I want somebody who's going to challenge me.

But do people think they do? I think people will choose the short-term without thinking about the long-term of connection and companionship over time, challenge, and solving problems. If the average person could be faced with—if they were to draw their perfect partner—they wouldn't say, "I want difficulty and challenge and sometimes to walk out and arguments and to be interrupted when the football's on."

No, you're not going to put that in there. But then I think surely over time... I don't know. I do worry about AI with humans. Some people present the argument that we'll be free to do all these amazing esoteric things. We won't. We'll just sit there and look at social media and get fat and drink and sit in our rooms watching porn. That's what we'll do. Instant gratification. That's going to be a huge industry.

I don't think they've quite perfected the robot bit though, have they?

There’s a couple of things happening in tandem. Elon Musk is working on his own robots at Tesla. We have Boston Dynamics who have been working on robots for a long time. It’s going to move very quickly. Now we've got the machine learning modeling, and the robotic side I think is going to gain pace because now there's a greater demand. Did you see that film *Blade* back in the day?

No, I saw *Lars and the Real Girl*. Remember that? That was about a guy who had a sex doll and the whole village sort of accepted it, and then when he didn't need her, he got a real person at the end. But no, I didn't see *Blade*.

There's a scene in this film where he puts on a headset—it was set in the future—and this headset is an AI that basically gets him off and he has the time of his life. Actually, they sit, his partner sits opposite him, and they both put the headset on. It's a scary world, but that's what we'll be doing.

We talked about this macro decline in sex. Are you hopeful that we can turn that around?

Yes. And I have great hope with the young generation of women. I think this is the first generation of women who really have probably the least sexual hang-ups that we've ever had. And I think that young women are much more adventurous than young men.

All the young women that I'm in contact with—I'm talking about young women in their 20s, early 30s—we know that young women are more bi-curious than men. We know that young women are more interested in threesomes with two women than men are. We know that young women are more interested in going to a sex club than men are. We know that young women are more interested in polyamory, and they don't want several love relationships; they want the love relationship and then they want to be able to have sex with men on the side. It's not men thinking like this; it's women thinking like this.

I think that it's going to make for more interesting relationships because women are overturning everything. The motivation for affairs now has completely reversed. Men used to have affairs for sex. Now most men, if they're in a good relationship, will satisfy that with porn. Now men have affairs for love and affection.

Women used to have affairs for love that they weren't getting from their partner. Now they have affairs for erotic sex. Sex where they're not looking after their partner, they can be selfish, they don't have to care about whether they hurt his feelings or say "don't do it that way." They're not going to care about whether Steven doesn't like it if he's being instructed. It's like, "Do that, do that." They want that sort of sex, right? And that's why they're having affairs.

My hope is that women are going to take the charge and go forward, and we're going to end up with sex that's more interesting, sex that's less doing everything to please a man, more equal. "This is what I need, this is what I want, this is what you need, this is what you want. Let's work out the best way to do that together." Because so many women still now—that’s the thing that does disappoint me—is still have sex to please men, still pretend to have orgasms during penetrative sex because society's brainwashed them.

Speaking of young women, in your book *Great Sex Starts at 50*, one of the things you talk about is the issue of sexual confidence and sexual self-esteem. I found it really interesting that women view themselves differently when they look in the mirror, which has a libido impact.

Body image is terrible. They've just done a study which looked at 20 years of studies on body image, and it turns out that it impacts every single area of sex: regularity of sex, enjoyment of sex, arousal, desire, orgasm. And it makes sense that if you don't like your body, you're not going to want anyone to look at it or touch it. It is the biggest problem with women today and their sex lives.

Often—this is the other thing with your friends—have they just had babies? Has their body changed? Are they not feeling so desirable? Feeling desired by your partner is much more important to women than anything else. If your partner looks at you like, "God, you're so hot, you're so sexy," that is the biggest turn-on of all.

And if you're feeling not great about yourself and your mindset is so much down on yourself that you think, "I don't even... how could he possibly look at me and think that I'm attractive?" then you'll never feel that. Your partner could fancy you to death, but you're never going to feel it because your brain's just gone "Nope, I am not sexually attractive anymore." So that is a real problem.

And you know what the solution is for that? It's not to go off and get a facelift or get your hair done or lose weight or go to the gym more, though exercise is really good for your sex drive and for your self-esteem. But the other thing that cures body image is actually to have sex more.

If you have sex more often and your partner enjoys it, your brain goes on a subconscious level, "Well, you know what, I can't be that bad because he's having sex with me or she's having sex with me, whoever's having sex with you, they're enjoying it." So your brain starts to make sense of it all and go, "Okay, right, you know, this is... I'm obviously not as undesirable as I think." And it starts to sort of become better and more able to be dealt with.

So the more you have sex, the better because it gives you confidence. Sexually confident women—women who think they're good in bed—increase your skills as well. If you're worried that you're not a great lover, read up on it, buy some books, go online, look up technique. Technique is very important. And the better lover you think you are, the less you worry about what you look like in bed. We all know that; sexually confident women win all the time. Confident women put on weight the same way other people do as they get on in life, but they don't focus on that. They're like, "Hey, I'm a brilliant lover, who cares?" He's not looking at that; he's just thinking how fantastic I am.

It's more about increase your confidence as a lover, exercise more, and then the obvious: take yourself off social media, stop comparing yourself to other people, all that sort of stuff. But it's difficult, it's very difficult. And I think men suffer from this as well.

That's so unbelievably true, especially the part that it also relates to men. I've got multiple accounts from female friends of mine that are in a heterosexual relationship that have told me their partner won't have sex with them with his top off or with the lights on. And also the point there about how you solve that body confidence issue—that confidence comes from the evidence you get from doing the thing.

Yeah. And also if you are worried about your body, when you are having sex, close your eyes. Close your eyes and think about what you're feeling. It’s about what you're feeling, not like how you're looking. Because if it's stressing you out and you're looking and thinking "Oh my God, he's looking at my thighs," just close your eyes and go into yourself. Or become more active.

That’s the other way to overcome body issues: if you're really active in bed and you're like looking at your partner and you're talking dirty and you're making lots of eye contact that way. Anything to sort of take yourself out of yourself is good. You either go into yourself and focus on what you're feeling rather than what you look like, or you sort of become way more active. That also works.

Three things that boost sexual self-esteem easily in your book: Initiate sex to feel more powerful.

Yes, absolutely. Initiation is such a big thing on so many levels. And if you don't ever initiate sex with your partner, you're essentially saying, "I don't actually enjoy having sex with you. I'm only having sex with you because you've asked me to have sex with you."

People argue about that. They say "Well, his sex drive's way bigger or higher," but it doesn't matter. You really need to have a thing where if your partner's got a much bigger sex drive than you, you need to say to them, "Look, okay, it's really sexy being the person who's the sexy one in the relationship. That's why it's nice to be that person. But I want to be the sexy one in the relationship, so hold off on initiating for a while and give me a chance to initiate so that I can feel more powerful."

It’s such a great dynamic. That power dynamic in relationships is really important. You have to be sometimes the dominant person, you have to be the submissive person, and if you swap around, it makes for a much more interesting sex life.

But if you don't initiate sex, it’s a real cop-out. I really do think so. And when women do it, who don't often initiate sex, what often happens is that they'll be so subtle that the man misses the point completely. It’s like, "Well, I gave him this really sexy kiss." And it's like, "Yeah, and? Anything else? Anything else that went with that?" and he didn't even notice, and "Now I'm not going to do that again." For God's sake, just be really obvious about it. Be really obvious about it.

And going back to initiation: just be aware that how you initiate sex will influence whether or not your partner says yes. If you initiate sex the wrong way, your partner might say no to sex because you've just approached it all the wrong way. Whereas if you approach your partner that you know has got a responsive sex drive by talking, cuddling, connecting—whatever she wants, she might want you to initiate sex like that—and getting her in the mood the way *she* wants to be in the mood, not the way *you* would like her to get in the mood, she'll probably say yes to sex. So a lot of people saying no to sex isn't that they don't want sex; they're just being approached the wrong way and they're not being warmed up the right way. If you can solve those two basic things, it can change everything.

Feels like there's something really fundamental here: that we assume sex will take care of itself.

Never! Oh my God, writing all those sex books... When I go to a dinner party, people either want to sit next to me or they go as far away from me as they possibly can because they're terrified. And the people who say to me, "Oh God, well I don't need a sex book," I'm like, "Yes, you do. You're the person that needs a sex book." I've written 17 of them and I'm still learning about sex. There is so much to learn about sex. How can you think you possibly know everything about sex without ever educating yourself?

And it's changing.

Of course it is. But people who think that they're born great lovers... the female response system is complicated. Who knew what a clitoris was back in the day? They're difficult to stimulate. Actually, they're not that difficult; you just give it a vibrator and then they're fine. But it's not easy being a great lover.

Can I just say one more thing about orgasms? We worry too much about orgasms and how we get them. There is no right way to have an orgasm. Everyone thinks the right way to have an orgasm is during intercourse with your partner and preferably them climaxing at the same time. Simultaneous orgasms hardly ever happen for a start; they're always faked.

The easiest way to give a woman an orgasm... Women can be very easily orgasmic if you use the right finger technique, if you give her the right oral sex technique. But the thing that is most expert at stimulating the clitoris is vibration. Most women can have an orgasm within three minutes with a vibrator.

So we have this big orgasm gap problem where men are having lots of orgasms during partner sex, women aren't having very many orgasms during partner sex because they don't understand each other very well, because sometimes people just can't relax with another person there. So the solution is to put your hand in the bedside drawer and bring out a vibrator, and she would have an orgasm every single time the same way you have an orgasm every single time. Why don't we all just do this? It’s the easiest solution in the world.

But we don't. Young men are better at it. They'll often say, "Oh, you know," and she'll say—if women are honest—they say, "Look, you know, that was fantastic but I kind of missed the moment a bit." Which you can, as a woman. "Can I just use my vibrator or can you use the vibrator on me?" Sorted. But we have this thing like "that's a cheating orgasm," that one. Or that it takes something away from what the "couple-ness" is supposed to be. But it’s a solution. I'm not saying have all your orgasms like that, but just maybe now and then have the vibrator in the bed. Why is it inferior? If you can have all that intimacy, if you've had the oral sex, you've had the intercourse, you've thoroughly enjoyed it but it just hasn't given you that tip over.

What I mean by that question about this fundamental belief that sex is supposed to take care of itself... I think that's why we don't talk about it enough, we don't research about it enough, we don't try to invest in making it new and exciting and different and all the things you've said. It’s because we just assume at the start it kind of takes care of itself, doesn't it?

Of course it does. All the sex hormones are there, driving us, driving us, without even having to think about it. And then you don't think about sex as something you've got to work on and talk about and invest and buy stuff for and change all the time. "I've already got a job. I don't want another one." I know. Well, unfortunately, that's what you have to do if you want a good sex life. That's what you do.

And the thing is, it makes me laugh because we put effort into every other thing. You don't eat the same meal every single night. You find/buy a good cookbook and look up recipes and experiment with different things. And no one goes, "Oh, that's terrible, that's so much effort. I don't want to have to do that. I want to know how to cook a three-course Cordon Bleu meal without even looking at a cookbook."

Well, in the movies, they never do this. There's no movie where they sit and talk about sex. In the movies, they come in the door and they pick them up and they put their hands back and they rip the dress off.

Do you know what, I am the worst person to watch TV with because I shout at the television! Honestly, there was a thing called *Doctor Foster*. There was this couple; they'd been together 10 years. They woke up on a Sunday morning—Sunday morning, just woke up—she's of course full makeup, lingerie, everything. And next minute, he's like thrown her against the wall, they're having sex standing up. And I thought, for God's sake! This is a couple 10 years in. It is *not* happening like that.

And then even me, who knows that this doesn't happen, this is not the norm, I'm like a little bit like... and I always turn to poor old Miles and I say, "You realize that's not true. You realize that this is not a real..." and he's sort of sitting there going, "Yep, yep, I do know." Like cover your eyes! Don't have unreal expectations! Don't think you're missing out on this. Because it's sad because people try and... they think that that hot sex at the beginning should last a lifetime. And when it goes, and you think the next person you meet is just going to last forever, this one's going to last forever. And then of course it dies down and dies down and dies down and you're like, "Damn it, I've got the wrong person." You haven't got the wrong person. It's because all the sex and love hormones have stopped working.

That’s the only way to keep having sex like that. The only way to keep having that beginning sex over and over is to swap partners constantly. Constantly swap partners and you can have that beginning bit over and over again. It is impossible to have the type of sex you have at the start, when you're fueled by all these chemicals, at the end of a relationship or during a relationship—anything over two years, it's virtually... You can have satisfying sex, great sex, exciting sex, but it's not fueled by the same hormone. So you cannot recreate that. And if people knew that, no matter what person you end up with, then they'd stop leaving perfectly good relationships in search of something that's not ever going to be found.

I've talked in this conversation as if sexless relationships are unhappy relationships. But that is not true, is it?

No, it's not true. You can often have... I mean, people do instantly think if they're not having sex, "Oh my God, divorce is coming soon." No. I mean, you can get sex isn't the be-all and end-all for everybody. Lots of people have very low sexual libidos. And if you've got two people who have low sex drives, they have a lot of sex at the beginning or maybe not even that much, and then all of a sudden it fades off. They're perfectly happy. Some people are happy having one great session every six months. That's enough for them; it keeps them perfectly satisfied as long as both of you are like that.

But what doesn't work is if one of you is highly sex-driven. In the beginning, we all worry about compatibility. Please measure, match up with somebody who has the same sex drive as you. And I know it's artificially inflated at the beginning, but don't commit to anything until you're six months in, eight months in, a year in. Don't marry anyone under that because you don't know what their sex drive is. Wait until after a year and then you see. And it's very difficult if you've got a massively high sex drive and your other one doesn't.

But you can be perfectly happy in sexless relationships as long as both of you are happy with that. And also, you know, they used to define a sexless relationship as couples who had sex 10 times a year. Now plenty of couples, especially couples over 50, only have sex 10 times a year and they were like indignant to be described as sexless. So now they've changed it to a sexless relationship is one where sex hasn't happened in a year. And that's a low sex relationship to be 10 times a year.

But it's all dependent on where you're at in life. If you've just had babies and they're under two, you're not going to be having a lot of sex. If you're 18 and you just got together, you're going to be having an awful lot of sex. If your partner... if you've just gone through menopause or perimenopause and everything's gone to hell, you're not going to be having sex at that period of time. So you can't... there is no one-size-fits-all thing. So find your normal, is what I would say.

And if your normal is no sex, so long as you have a conversation about it, that's fine. But what you cannot do is stop sex and not talk about it. That is really, really dangerous. You've got to have some kind of discussion, even if that's getting into bed one night and one of you says, "We don't have sex much anymore. Does it bother you?" "No, it doesn't really bother me." "Good." Even if it's that.

But you do need, and you need to have lots of affection. Lots of... you need to make up for that. Don't stop touching physically. Because when sex stops, people often stop touching each other because they're worried that that's going to lead to sex and that's going to be awkward. So keep up the affection. That's why you've got to have the chat. If you don't have the chat, affection stops. And if affection and sex stop, then you are in trouble. If you've got lots of affection, you're okay, so long as both of you are happy. But you're not going to be happy if one person doesn't want sex to stop and the other one does. That doesn't make for a happy relationship at all.

And in that situation, is it right to then just leave?

No, you have the chat. And the chat is—but they say in the chat, "No, I want more sex," and the other says, "I don't want as more sex." Then what do you do? Well, then you look at exactly... you sort of go through a process. So you have the chat. You talk about—you make sure the sex that's on offer is good sex for the person who doesn't want it. You look at anything around it, like have they got any childhood issues that need dealing with? Why do they not want to want? If they don't want to want, then you need to look at what happened: sexual trauma.

There's... I mean, if the person that doesn't want to have sex with you is willing to look at ways to become more sexual, stay, of course stay. You know, there's always hope. Yes, there's tons of stuff you can do. You can take/strip sex right back to basics where you don't have penetrative sex for a year. You might do the sensate focus program, which is all about touching each other without sexual intent. And it might be that you've got to learn how to have sex all over again. If your partner's willing to try, anything's possible. Definitely don't walk out.

But if your partner says, "I don't want to have sex with you and I've no interest in having sex, I've no interest in trying to bring back my desire, and you're not allowed to have sex either. You're not allowed to seek it anywhere else or apart from running off to the office and masturbating to porn," well, what choice have you got? Some people stay. Some people stay in that scenario because the love is very strong and they've got kids or whatever, but I think that's an incredibly selfish thing to say to a partner.

Chapter 9 of your book says that 33% of couples said that they rarely or never had sex, and one-quarter of those rated themselves as being extremely happy.

That’s right. Something like 75% of people who are denied sex nearly all of the time stay if the love is strong. People choose love over sex. Of course they do, because how often are you having sex? Even if you're having sex a lot, even if you're having sex once a day, twice a day, it's still only for half an hour each time. So, you know, in the proportion of the time you spend together, the love bit's more important than the sex bit. Definitely is. Unless the sex bit is really bad and then it tends to poison the rest of the relationship.

Do you do any sort of therapy for couples? Do the couples ever come to you?

Not face-to-face, no.

Do individuals come to you for advice in a professional context to get therapy or anything?

No. I do friends and friends of friends and stuff like that. I don't because I lack the skills to disassociate. This is why I never became a therapist, because I'm not very good at—there are ways to solve a problem where you can stand outside the problem, or you stand right in the middle of it all and take it all on. I'm the "stand in the middle" person. And I wouldn't ever be able to—I would have no boundaries. They'd be calling me day and night, so no, I can't do that.

What are the most common questions that people ask you about sex? And I'd like the ones that we don't talk about enough. So, you know, I don't know whether it's erectile dysfunction or whether it's...

Oh my God, erectile dysfunction for men is—women don't appreciate how having not being able to get an erection is the biggest psychological catastrophe men experience. We can't fake it. No, no. Penis envy! Who wants a penis? I certainly don't want a penis; it's all out there to see. We can fake everything, but it's really difficult for men.

And I think men... I mean, we have a problem with Viagra, by the way. Viagra is a big problem because young men take Viagra because they want to have the biggest, hardest erections ever, and they're worried—they have so much performance anxiety because they're watching too much porn and they think that that's real. So they take Viagra because they think just this once, you know, I'll be really hard. And then of course eventually you stop it or try to, and your girlfriend says, "Oh, this isn't... you're not as hard as you normally are." And suddenly you're back on this cycle.

And then young women expect that that is a normal erection, which it's not. Anyone who's looked at a Viagra-driven erection and a normal erection, they're completely different. And then on the other end of it, you've got older couples who... we've got two problems when you get over 50 or 60: men have erectile dysfunction and women have dry vaginas and very... the vagina basically atrophies. So they've solved it for men, great, take this pill and suddenly you're like you were 18 again. But you're still with this vagina that's not 18, where it's going to hurt like hell. And then the man who's suddenly got the swinging penis is like, "Well, what am I supposed to do with this?" and then he goes off and cheats with somebody because he's so happy to have this big rock-hard erection again. Of course it causes lots of problems.

Is there a relationship between age and infidelity?

I'm not sure about that. I would say I know that middle-aged people cheat a lot. Because that's when you've got choices, you're traveling, you've got money, it's probably easy to get away with. You're bored, you've had the kids, you've started to take everything for granted. Things like that make people cheat. It’s opportunity, temptation, and your moral code. It’s not to do with love, it is to do with respect, though.

Red flags in relationships: the most compatible couples have compatible life goals. Something I've heard you say before.

Yes, I think that is really important because it is all about timing. Timing is so important. And life goals—say you've got the perfect relationship now, your girlfriend's great—say suddenly you decided, "Right, I want to go off to Africa and work with Pygmies for five years. This is my life goal." What's she supposed to do? Of course it's important to have the same goals.

If you've got one person who wants adventure and like to be hiking every weekend and camping—my idea of hell—they're not going to match well with somebody like me who wants to be in a nice hotel and having lots of cocktails. You've got to be compatible.

There's some stereotypes that still sort of exist and linger around sex and men and women being... One of the ones that I was reading about in Chapter 6 of your book is studies show it's not true men have a higher sex drive than women. Women have a different desire for sex, which you talked about. Studies also show it's not true that monogamy is harder for men than it is for women. We tend to think that men are the ones that cheat.

Exactly. And also, if you look at the stats on who's happiest, the happiest people are single women and married men. They're the two happiest groups of people, always. Married men are really happy because they get everything done for them, basically.

What role do kids play in this whole equation?

Kids, I think, really make the love part better, I suppose because you've created that thing. But they're terrible for sex. Terrible for sex. The minute the kids come along, you can kiss goodbye for sex for five years, really. And people freak about it and they're like, "It's never going to come back," and it will come back, of course it will, but all your energy's going to children. If you're going to have kids, you've got to accept that your sex life is going to take a backseat for a long, long time. Don't panic about it, keep having little sexual connections that aren't necessarily including intercourse—little bite-sized pieces of sex—and you'll be fine. But don't kid yourself that it's not going to change your sex life, because it will. Boy, will it.

Some people think that having kids will save the relationship.

Oh God, no! It’s so stressful. Every time I see somebody with a child, you only have to hang around children for about two seconds to realize how stressful they are. If you've already got problems in your relationship and suddenly you're going to sleep-deprive yourself, you're going to have somebody dependent on you 24 hours a day, how is this going to make you more happy with your husband? It just doesn't even make sense to me. It might stop people leaving because of obligation, but who wants to be with somebody out of obligation?

You said something in your work that a neuroscientist told me on this podcast: that after the first year, non-parents are generally happier over time than parents.

It is a controversial idea, but I mean, there's a trade-off with kids. I'm a step-parent—my husband has a daughter—and when we're going through hassles with Sophia, who she is a little darling but also can be a little devil, let me tell you... he can't sleep, I can sleep. And I lie there and I think, gosh, if I'd given birth to Sophia, I wouldn't be able to sleep. No way that I'd be able to sleep. You are knowing that you're going to be worrying for the rest of your life once you have a kid. It’s such a big responsibility. And when you have that responsibility, it means you're not going to be able to do... you become selfless then, don't you? You can't be selfish and have a kid. Well, you can, you could be a really bad parent, but it's different.

But then parents say, "Well, you're the one that's missed out because you don't have this incredible..." and I have such a good relationship with my mom and my dad, and us three kids are all milling around them. They're like 87 and 89. I'm thinking, no one's going to do that for me. Who's going to do that for me? I have to pay for it. So there is that.

When I hear that stat, I do wonder if the term happiness is the confusing thing. A parent might say "It's given me such a sense of purpose or meaning." If you ask me in a survey on a Tuesday how I'm feeling after staying up until 2:00 AM because this kid was screaming, I'm probably more likely to report at any given moment to being less happy, but if you zoom out, there's more meaning and purpose. How many people, if you say "What's the best thing you've ever done?", they say "Having children." Everybody says that. And they can't all be lying.

Not everybody says that. But I do know mothers who say, "God, you know what, if I look back, maybe I wouldn't have done this." But they're very brave, and they tell childless women that. They never tell a woman with a child, by the way.

Women’s libido tends to drop as they age, whereas men's seems to remain fairly stable throughout the relationship.

Stable, but then they have the... women struggle with the drop because menopause, with all the drop of testosterone and all the estrogen, all those things that keep your genitals in good shape and keep your sex drive high. Men's testosterone drops as well, but then they're struggling with erections.

If you're an older man and you can get your head around that you're not going to get erections as easily as you did and it doesn't bother you, you're going to be fine. If you're a woman and you actually get all the things that are available to you—take HRT if you can—there are solutions for all of this. And don't think to yourself, "Oh well, we're old now, we're not going to be sexual," you'll be fine as well. But I think people panic when they hit a certain age.

And there's this perception—I did a campaign for Replens, which is a vaginal moisturizer, which most men blink at and good to see you didn't—and it was all about, and it had these beautiful images of older people kissing passionately or naked from the back. And they were quite old. They were the most beautiful images and so many people were threatened by that. They were really threatened because it was old people doing sexual things. We’re not treated to... we don't see that very often. So when somebody does that, people freak. They don't like to think about older people having sex. So when you're old, you have it already in your head, "I'm not supposed to want sex anymore," which is completely untrue.

And is that why you wrote a book called *Great Sex Starts at 50*?

Yes, because for me, that's what happened. I went through the whole of my life with a high libido. I’d written about sex, I thought "this isn't going to happen to me because I know everything about sex, of course." And then I hit like 50—actually, probably even before that—and suddenly I realized, I remember typing away one day and thinking, "Gosh, I haven't—I was single at the time—haven't masturbated for ages. What's going on? Haven't even thought about sex for ages." And it's the drop in hormones. It’s quite extraordinary. That whole spontaneous desire I had—very high spontaneous desire—and suddenly it went. So I just suddenly became like other women, I suppose. And suddenly it was like, "Oh my God, I see what everyone's going on about." So I thought, yeah, for my own sake, I might write that book.

What are some of the most important solutions?

Again, manage expectations. Keep having sex. That whole "use it or lose it"—you've got to keep having sex. That's very, very important. Get your head around the whole thing about that "old" doesn't mean that you can't be sexy. You can be... it doesn't matter what you look like, it's what you feel like. It’s so many many different things. And also, you don't have to put up with... I think as a society, particularly English people, we all put up with stuff. Like, there are solutions for all of these things. If you've got a dry vagina, go and get a vaginal moisturizer, go and get a estrogen pessary. There are solutions for everything that happens with menopause. You don't have to sit there and just put up with it all because if you do, then you won't want to have sex, definitely. So seek all the solutions. Don't be scared to find solutions to all these things because they really are out there. Change your headset.

And the women—it's interesting that they did a big thing about what really influences women's desire post-menopause, and it wasn't menopause. It was your attitude to sex. If you'd always loved sex and you want sex to continue, you found the solutions and you kept on having great sex. If you were never that keen, it's like, "Oh actually, you know what, here we go, an obstacle. What a great excuse to never have sex again." So it’s attitude. Attitude was way more important to how good the sex was after menopause, nothing to do with menopause.

It seems again like one of the foundations behind all of this that's kind of hiding in the back room when it relates to people's libido and their attitudes to sex is that kind of childhood experiences we talked about, which is super tricky to unpack and even become aware of. Especially for men, often their first childhood experience of sex is being caught masturbating. And how the parent deals with that is very formative. Because if it's like, "Absolutely, what are you doing? Do you know that's really filthy, it's dirty, what are you doing?", then they are going to continue to masturbate, because pretty much they do, but they're going to try and do it faster and faster and faster. So every time they masturbate, they're going to be trying to get it down to as quick as possible time so that they don't get in trouble again. And then they end up with rapid ejaculation. They can last two seconds before they ejaculate. It sets us up in so many different ways.

I was lucky to grow up in a household where—I don't know why a household was like that—but we just talked about sex so openly. I suppose my sister worked for Family Planning, which helped, but that was later. So I don't know. My mom and my dad were really cool talking about sex and things, and so I grew up thinking, "Oh yeah, all households are like that," but they're not.

It's an unknown unknown, so how do you go about even solving for those things? I guess you have to go to therapy and start unpacking it.

Yeah, or just unpack it yourself. You have to just think about—you don't necessarily have to go to therapy. There's so much—the joy of the internet—there's so much online that you can do. If you typed in, "I don't like sex as my parents taught me," there's a book called *Sex Smart*, actually, which is very good about childhoods. *Sex Smart*, it’s called. You can still buy it. It’s an old book, but it delves into all of this. And yeah, I mean, I think I'm so pro-therapy. I think everybody should go to therapy. No one has a perfect childhood, and in fact, having a perfect childhood can also set you up for things. So if we have a problem, if you have a problem with sex, going to see a really good sex therapist could sort it out very quickly. So don't leave it too late.

God, I hope I can pick all these books up! *Hot Relationships: How to Have One*, *Great Sex Starts at 50*, *The Sex Doctor*, *Fix Your Love Life Fast*, *Hot Sex: How to Do It*, *Dare: My Fantasies*. Oh, that looks very *Fifty Shades*. *More Hot Sex*. *Would Like to Meet*... That was a TV show you did about dating?

Yeah, that was a TV show I did about dating.

There's a question there I should ask because I'm thinking again about a friend that just popped to mind. Is there something going on with male and female dating in terms of it becoming more difficult in the modern day and age? Some stats one of my podcast guests shared about how women are having less children and they're finding it more difficult to date and to find a compatible male in the modern way that society is designed. I've got friends that are around that sort of mid-to-late 30s range that are really struggling in the modern world.

Men or women or both?

Women. It’s almost like there’s a generation almost caught in a gap where you're either Gen Z, native to social media, the internet, or maybe the older generation already partnered off. Are they all high-achieving women?

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. That’s the problem. So what happens is you get—and this is why there are more and more single women now because more and more women are high-achieving. So they're not like looking for a husband straight away when you've got a big gene pool of people to—when you come out of uni, because lots of people meet at uni and stay together, you've got this big numbers game. You’ve got loads of women single, loads of men single and you sort of all hook up.

And if your motivation is to get married and have kids, and that's your only motivation, you're going to find a partner early and that's it, job done, keep going. But if your motivation isn't necessarily that, if you want to go on to university, get your career sorted and then turn around and have kids—like at 30, "Okay, right now I've achieved, I'm at the part where I want to have kids and I can take a bit of a break here"—and then suddenly, where is he? Well, he's not there because he's already been taken up by everybody else.

And men traditionally don't like dating high-achieving women unless they're high-achieving themselves. And the amount of high-achieving women is getting higher and the amount of high-achieving men is getting lower, so you've got even less of a pool to choose from. So the answer for the women is to think outside the square and think, "Right, okay, do I really need the guy who's got the degree?" Because high-achieving women like to go for high-achieving men. You need to change your wish list a little bit and think, "Okay, I'm going to look in a—I'm not going to be as rigid with my must-haves and perhaps think about things like: does it really matter how much he earns if I'm already earning lots of money? Isn't kindness, generosity, sense of humor, attractiveness, just general chemistry, isn't that enough?" If you go for those qualities, you end up a lot better off and end up happier as well.

Is that against our innate wiring? Men care less about the financial resources of their partner. So if I'm a woman and I'm looking for a partner, am I going to look for someone who is kind of up and to the right?

Probably. But that doesn't necessarily work. See, for me that didn't work because I'm very alpha female, so whenever I went out with an alpha male, we were just like "crack!"—hated each other. "I'm the boss!" "No, I'm the boss!" "No, fuck off, now I'm controlling you!" No, didn't work at all. Very competitive. I'm too competitive, they were too competitive. That didn't work.

So I've got—my partner is really proud of me. He's not at all threatened in the slightest by any success. Any success I've had, he's my biggest, proudest supporter. And we work differently—like, if my thing is to make more money than him, he doesn't mind me saying that because he's fine with it. And so if I've got more money, that's great. So therefore if he's got more time than me to do the traditional female things, then he's fine with that. And then sometimes I'll do it and he assumes the male role. So it's very—we're comfortable with each other. We don't care that I tick the male boxes in some roles and he ticks the female boxes and it works very well.

And I think that's hopefully where we're headed. But there are some times where—I know I'm not typical with females—I know that a lot of women won't go out with a man unless he makes a lot of money, particularly if they make a lot of money. They won't. I’ve never been like that. I've never been "get their money," it's my money; if I want money, I make it myself, thanks. I don't want to have someone else's money; that's not mine. So I do think it's a big problem for women and men. I think we both have to—especially women—have to stop being so rigid with that and expect the man to provide. And I think men have to stop being so—feeling emasculated if it's the woman who's earning more. So what, who cares? As long as someone's got some money somewhere along the line, who cares which one?

If you're in that age range between say 30 and 40 and you're a woman and you're single and you don't want to be single—you want to meet a partner, you want to have a family, whatever it might be—what advice would you give to that person? I'm thinking now about a series of my close friends that are women that are single in that range and that have expressed that they don't want to be single but they're struggling for all the reasons you said: super high-achieving, they've got great careers, they're very busy because of that as well.

It’s—Helen Gurley Brown, the Cosmo founder, she always said you can have it all. And that's the biggest lie we've been sold. You can't have it all. There is something that gives. And these high-achievers, yeah, they have compromised their chances of finding a partner by putting it all into their career. You can't have it all. And I did that. I mean, it took me to 50—I had lots of relationships, but it took me to 50 to find somebody that I was compatible with. It's not easy. It’s really, really difficult and I was out there meeting tons of people.

So first accept that it's nothing to do with you, doesn't mean that you're not attractive or anything. You're probably less marketable because you're too intelligent and some men will be freaked by that. And you're too successful and some men will be freaked by that. They don't know what to do with you. And it makes them feel bad because they're going to those traditional patterns like, "How is she going to go out with me? I'm not as successful as her so I'm not even going to try."

So you have to make the approach, number one. Change your wish list to become qualities—personality qualities—not "must be a certain height," "must be a certain income," "must drive this car," because they really don't matter. And also, date outside of type. Go out with people, look beyond the exterior, see what's inside. I think they'll be very quick to go, "Oh no, I can't go out with that person." Go on a couple of dates, and even if the first date's a disaster, go on two or three dates. Go on at least three with people.

Go out all the time. Often these women are so busy, it's like, "Well, when do you actually go out to actually put yourself in a situation where you can meet someone?" Never. They're not going to walk in your lounge room, are they? Unless you order a delivery! They're really not. So come on, you've got to make some effort here. You've got to do the numbers game. And I don't know whether dating apps are the right way forward, but they're probably the only way—it's the way that most people meet, so you kind of have to just suck it up and get on there, I think.

I think that's phenomenal advice. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question that's been left for you: When you are near the end of your life and looking back over it, what will you be proudest of and what will you regret the most?

Gosh. Proudest of my career and having helped people. I'm one of the really annoying people when you're in a dinner party who just knew what they wanted to do really early on with the writing and then that happened very early with my parents. So I'm really proud of that. My first book I was so excited, I literally—you know that when you just jump on the spot? I was literally jumping on the spot. I don't really do regrets, actually. I don't really do regrets. Maybe I wish that I was more, or had been more, confident. I'm confident on the outside but not on the inside. I'm the most confident unconfident person you'll ever meet. So and probably realize that no one's looking at you, they're too busy worrying about themselves. I wish I'd sort of calmed down a bit and was more confident.

What’s the symptoms of that in a lack of confidence?

Insecurity. Like going away and like—the first time I listen to this for instance, it'll be like, "Oh my God, I was terrible. Look at me, look at the way I look, look at—oh my God, why didn't I do something else with my hands?" I'll go through it, and then I'll go, "Don't be silly," and then I'll listen to it and then I'll have an okay opinion of it, but yeah, there's still that little bit there.

Any idea where that's come from?

Parents. When you're left on your own and feel abandoned at the age of 15, it's not great, is it?

And then all these small things are a potential abandonment? Maybe people don't think I look good or maybe blah blah blah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny, I'm confident of my abilities professionally, I'm confident that I'm intelligent. I don't know, I suppose yeah, you never really... I mean, I remember when I studied psychology and the guy just got up there and said—he was a great lecturer and he said—"It's all about your childhood." And we all just rolled our eyes and went, "Oh for God's sake, it's so like—how ridiculous, it's not, it's not." And it is. It really is. Like, I'm still that 15-year-old girl that stood there terrified. She's still there. And um, yeah, so it's interesting. But I put on a good show, like everybody.

You certainly do put on a good show. Thank you so much, Tracy. You've given me so much, answered so many of my questions and I know for sure, for sure people are going to tell you—I'm sure they're going to message you—but for sure, for sure I can say on behalf of all of the people that have listened: you've helped them today.

Oh, I hope so. Thank you.

And I think everybody will take away something different from that, which is why it's so incredible. I'm going to do something I've never done before because I really want to illustrate how I believe you've helped people. The previous guest that left you a question—and you know I don't usually tell people this—is a guy called Robert Waldinger. And what he has committed his life to is something called the Harvard Study of Well-being. It was the longest ever study done on a group of people to understand what makes people fundamentally happy at the most basic level. They followed people for almost 90 years.

At the very heart of what they found on this study is that the thing that makes us most happy in life and also healthiest in terms of an insulation from stress is relationships. It's number one. Men that have positive romantic relationships live 14 years longer, women seven years longer. And one of the things that ends great relationships and leads us to isolation and loneliness is sexual issues. I see it in all of my friends, and the work you're doing is therefore in its very essence helping people to solve the most important problem of all, which is connection, relationships. So it's incredible work to be doing and it's work that not a lot of people will want to do and confront because of the stigmas and taboos that still remain. So thank you so much, Tracy.

Thank you. That's a wonderful compliment.

You're captivating. You really are very captivating, and you're super smart and you know your stuff. You really are the best at this, so thank you for being here. Thank you for helping me—you have—and thank you for helping all of our wonderful listeners.

Thank you. I'm going to walk away very confident now!

Awesome. And you look amazing, by the way. Your dress is fantastic, everything about you is fantastic. So, yeah. Thank you.