How to Ignite Sexual Passion In Your Relationship (Even If It’s Been A While) | (#093) The Masculine Psychology Podcast with David Tian

Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast, where we answer key questions in dating, relationships, success, and fulfillment, and explore the psychology of masculinity. Now, here’s your host, world-renowned therapist and life coach, David Tian.

David: Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast. I’m David Tian, your host. In this episode, I’ll be answering a listener question about how to grow sexual passion in a long-term relationship over time. My answer to that will also be directly relevant to how to spark and grow sexual passion in a new relationship with a partner you’ve just met.

Let’s get right to the question here. This one comes from Gurshan Singh. He writes, “Hey, David, I have a question. Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of women on the internet who are in committed marriages and relationships, but they are not attracted to their husbands. They say they have emotional intimacy, but no sexual intimacy.” [00:57.6]

As an aside, first of all, who are these women on the internet, who are going on the internet, saying that they’re in committed marriages and relationships, but then saying they’re not attracted to their husbands? This was a follow-up question that I gave to the comment. Gurshan hasn’t replied yet to my original question, but it’s only been a day.

But that’s already interesting. Where are you hearing this? Where are you seeing this? Is this in Reddit? Are these in some kind of anonymous blogs? I’m curious, because if a woman is going on TikTok or YouTube and showing her face in a video, saying that she’s in a committed marriage or relationship, but she’s not attracted to her husband anymore, why is she doing that? Already get clear on why. Is she hoping for a therapist to come help? Is she just complaining? Is she just trying to get attention? Is she trying to flip this in some way? Always look at your sources.

But I will take this at face value, Gurshan, and I will grant you that there are these women that you’re claiming, and I’ll just keep going. So, he says he’s been seeing a lot of women on the internet in committed marriages and relationships, saying that they’re not attracted to their husbands, saying they have emotional intimacy, but no sexual intimacy. [02:07.4]

Then he concludes, “It seems to me like sexual attraction cannot be created even if there’s emotional intimacy.” That’s the first half of his question. He then goes on. “Another thing that I noticed is that women who have been in toxic relationships say that they have had the best sex of their lives, and when they get into healthy relationships, the sex is nothing compared to the toxic guy.” Then he concludes, “It looks like the good guys just cannot have a woman desire them. Please give your thoughts, Sir . . .”

Okay, so in this episode, I’ll be answering the first half, and in another episode, hopefully the next one, I’ll be answering the second half, so the first one first. But as you can see, in Gurshan’s mind, these two questions are related and his conclusion is that it looks like the good guys just cannot have a woman desire them. With that in mind, let’s revisit the first conclusion that he draws and “It seems to me like sexual attraction cannot be created even if there is emotional intimacy,” and that somehow this is related to being a good guy. I’ll first address the sexual intimacy and sexual attraction bit, and then I’ll address the good guy comment at the end. [03:17.0]

Hopefully, you picked up a contradiction in the first and second questions. In the first question, his conclusion is, sexual attraction cannot be created. In the second question of the second half of the question, he says that women in relationships with toxic guys have better sex, or as he puts it, the best sex of their lives, so it looks like if you’re toxic and the more toxic you become or you turn up in yourself, the more that you would end up creating sexual desire and attraction and good sex.

Let’s, first of all, address this false assumption that emotional intimacy would immediately lead to or directly lead to sexual attraction. Hopefully, you have watched enough of my content, my material, that you would know that that is clearly false. In fact, I have a video seminar that I’ve been titled “Love vs. Attraction” in which I make the explicit point for about an hour how love and sexual attraction are two different things. [04:14.8]

If you’ve opted in to my mailing list on my website, DavidTianPhD.com, you get access to a suite of master classes, I think there’s more than 13 of them now, and there are master classes on how to make a long-term relationship passionate, as well as being able to tell whether she is relationship material and what the relationship red flags are.

In all of those master classes, I’ve included, as a bonus, the video on love versus attraction, because it’s so important that nice guys mess this up because of sexual shame in their households growing up, and in their wider culture and community, which is something along the lines of “If you’re really nice, you will be rewarded by women with sex,” and this would come out of naiveté or ignorance, or sexual shame. [05:04.6]

It comes out of sexual shame because it’s too difficult for women to tell or teach their young men about sexual attraction, because then they have to get into sex and “Is Mommy like that?” and all of that sort of thing. So, it’s safer, it’s less icky, it’s less shameful and more embarrassing for the mothers and the older women to teach the young boys that girls are all just sugar and spice and everything nice.

Then these boys grow into their 20s and they’re shocked that women enjoy sex, and this is, after all, where red pill and MGTOW and incels come from, lots of sexual shame and naiveté. Then they have to, finally, see the real world as it is, and they can’t handle it because their fairy tale of the tooth-fairy kind of level fairy tale where women are just pure and virginal princesses and angels, and they find out that, ooh, women enjoy sex, and they’re naughty and they’re dirty and they like it, and all that unconscious shame programming from their upbringing that tells them, unconsciously, implicitly, that sex is dirty and evil and bad, and you’re only supposed to have it if you’re married, and even then, you’re not really supposed to enjoy it. [06:16.7]

That’s the unspoken understanding, and so no wonder when they end up in relationships, women become sexually unfulfilled with them. But then they have a very immature reaction, which is their internalized judge, moralistic judgment, saying, “Those sluts, those whores,” when, really, these men are just the same way. It’s just that they don’t have the access to the sexual abundance that these women do and it’s not easy for them at all. So, that unspoken, unconscious sexual shame and moralistic judgment that was in the background now comes to the fore and projects onto the woman all of this judgment of her being dirty and less than. [06:58.3]

It also judges men, who probably I’m triggering them just by the way I’m speaking about sex and just in the sort of forthright way, those, what incels called Chads, guys who get laid and are good at sex, and they judge them as players, cads, manipulative, evil, and all of that. All those people, men and women, who enjoy sex and have thriving sex lives, they’re evil.

These sexually-shamed moralistic nice guys are sexually neutered, because they don’t know how to harness their sexual energy, so then they just make the easy move where they attack where they cannot understand, because they’re still immature and they just take on the same energy of sexual shaming as they imbibed in their childhood.

They sexually shame all of these women who enjoy sex, as well as the men who get it naturally or easily, and they make up a myth about how all women, all of them throughout time and throughout history, are incapable of being moral, of having integrity, and even if they did behave that way, then they’re simply mimicking masculine traits, which are antithetical to their natural feminine energy or nature. [08:09.8]

Now, I don’t think Gurshan has gone that far. I’m just showing you, trying to head off at the past, showing you where he’s going. So, let’s get clear here, the main lesson, the main point that Gurshan is missing is that sexual attraction and emotional connection are in two different channels. Any guy who has jerked off to porn knows that already, unless you’re so immature, that you think you actually have emotional intimacy with that porn star through the screen in which case you don’t know what intimacy is, you don’t know what connection is. But that makes sense if you’re immature, because you haven’t yet experienced real connection or intimacy, and if most of your sex life where the majority of it is your hand and a screen, you also don’t know what good sex is. [08:59.0]

There were two parts to Gurshan’s first conclusion. The first part of his first conclusion is “It seems to me like sexual attraction cannot be created.” A lot of my work directly counters that. I have a course, Invincible, which teaches you how to generate a sexual attraction, how to create sexual tension, how to incite a sexual desire. That’s something that can definitely be created.

I know it’s hard for young men these days—young men, as in, in their 20s—to even imagine that sexual attraction is something that you can create, that you can increase that to some degree that’s within your control to be more or less sexually attractive. I know this is a new idea because I read statistics that men under 30, it’s like 60-something percent of them, almost 70 percent, have not had sex even once in the past 12 months.

If you want to learn how any man can increase sexual tension or sexual desire, or sexual attractiveness, I have a free master class on how to create sexual desire, and you can get access to that by opting in on my website DavidTianPhD.com, and it’s part of the suite of master classes. [10:10.2]

I also go into it in much more depth in my course Invincible, as well as in Rock Solid Relationships. In my course, Rock Solid Relationships, I devote to entire modules, Modules 8 and 10. These are part of the “Masculine Mastery” component of Rock Solid Relationships. I devote to entire modules to sex technique and sex psychology, as well as to improving the health of your sexual organs and erectile strength and health, and so forth, because, yeah, you need to learn those if you want to increase the sexual passion in your marriage, in your relationship. Passion and connection are two different things, so let’s get clear on that.

Now, returning to his conclusion, the first half was “It seems to me like sexual attraction cannot be created.” I’m going to dispense with that my whole 16 years of work and the many courses I’ve made, including Invincible and that free master class, are directly countering that assumption that sexual attraction cannot be created. Of course, it can. [11:07.3]

The second half is this, so we start with “It seems to me like sexual attraction cannot be created even if there is emotional intimacy.” He makes it sound like it would be easier to create sexual attraction with emotional intimacy. So, this is the great myth that nice guys buy into that if you’re just nice and sweet, then these sweet girls will just give you sex, and they try to earn sex by being nice.

That’s not how we’ve evolved. There are two different pathways. There’s one pathway for sexual passion and another pathway for emotional connection. So, it’s passion and connection, one pathway for passion, one pathway for connection.

If you have a relationship that’s all connection and no passion, then you have a really great friendship and it’s basically the sort of platonic, nonsexual relationship or marriage. If you have all passion and no connection, then you have a typical or really good fuck-buddy relationship. Actually, the buddy part of the fuck buddy would include maybe 10 to 20 percent connection there, but it’s all sexual chemistry. [12:10.6]

Or it could be a really great professional relationship that’s sexually charged with lots of passion with a professional sex worker or a stripper, or something along those lines, where there’s relatively little intimacy, real intimacy, but there’s lots of passion.

Now, an immature guy confuses those two things, so he doesn’t really know what they are, the difference between connection and passion, because when he gets sexually attracted or aroused, he is now projecting all of his unfinished business, all of his unresolved core issues, onto the woman, and he is basically thinking, as a kind of fantasy figure, that she will fulfill them. She will complete them. She will finally make him feel like he’s enough. I’ve done a ton of episodes on that dynamic of the immature man, so, hopefully, you can turn to those, Gurshan, and understand what’s actually happening there psychologically, psychotherapeutically. [12:59.4]

Now, when a relationship gets started between two sexually-immature or sexually-inexperienced people, very well-meaning, of course, they have the sort of falling-in-love experience of the butterflies in the stomach and all that, and just vanilla sex where they’re just going at it, that feels hot because it’s new, it’s a novel, and there’s also the psychological promise of “you complete me and you will fulfill me, and you will meet all of my unmet needs from childhood,” and so forth, so all of that gets melded together.

Then, inevitably, around the three-year mark or maybe as early as six months, that sexual passion will begin to wane. This is natural. This is just hormones and chemistry. Because they’re sexually inexperienced, they don’t know how to revive those. They don’t actually have within their control, how to turn a woman on or how to turn a man on, and then they just slide.

Inevitably, they let themselves go in that department and there aren’t new positions that they can think of or maybe they go out and do a little bit. Maybe they buy some handcuffs or something. But then, pretty quickly, they run out of ideas or it loses its novelty, and so they’re out, and by the three-year mark there about, anywhere between six months to 10 years depending on what’s going on in their lives, the passion has deflated and has fizzled out of their relationship. That’s the natural course of things when you don’t understand how to create sexual desire. [14:21.8]

Okay, so prep work before we dive into what to do about it, and already on the way of what to do about it is addressing sexual shame. Sexual shame is the big obstacle preventing you from internalizing any sexual psychology or sexual technique that will allow you to master your sexuality and sexual intimacy. Remember, those are two different things, emotional intimacy and sexual intimacy. Emotional connection means that you’re going to be really good friends, really good partners, but whether you guys are good in the bedroom together is a separate question.

I’ve devoted an entire episode to sexual shame, and I’ve also addressed it in other episodes and in my Rock Solid Relationships course. We dive into toxic shame over the period of five modules in the middle of the course. But assuming you can release the burdens of your sexual shame and become secure and confident in your own body and your own sexuality, then you can move on to sex technique and sex psychology. [15:20.5]

By far, going with the 80-20 rule, sex psychology is far more important. It’s the 80 percent of what’s important versus the sex technique. But most men, because they’re performative-oriented, if they do learn about sex, they’re mostly focused on sex technique.

There was this company way back in the day called 2 Girls Teach Sex. I think that’s what it’s called and you might be able to find it I think this was way long ago, and they spelled it out on the internet, the URL was instead of T-W-O, it’s the number 2. I don’t know if you can find that. A quick Google search did not turn it up for me, but I know that there are many people who are much better at finding these sorts of things floating around on the internet. [16:00.5]

They had a whole bunch of courses where they had porn stars in a good-natured way, while they’re actually demonstrating the sexual techniques, naked, having sex, are speaking to the camera saying, “Do it this way. Do it that way. I like it this way. I like it that way,” that sort of thing. It’s fun to watch, made for great television, so to speak, but it was almost entirely about sex technique. But that is part of it, so if you don’t know how to use your instrument, which is your body, it would be good for you to learn that, especially if you’re raised on porn, so to speak, because if you’re used to using porn, you’re probably just not even moving your body except your hand and you’re very passive in the reception of the sexual pleasure. [16:40.2]

No matter their physical strength, for many men, emotions are too much for them to handle. It’s why they can’t give women the deeper levels of emotional intimacy and connection that they crave. It’s why they fail to be the man that modern women desire most: a man with inner strength, a man who has mastered his emotions.

Find out how to master your emotions through David Tian’s “Emotional Mastery” program. The Emotional Mastery program is a step-by-step system that integrates the best of empirically-verified psychotherapy methods and reveals how to master your internal state and develop the inner strength that makes you naturally attractive, happy, and fulfilled.

Learn more about this transformational program by going to DavidTianPhD.com/EmotionalMastery.

That’s D-A-V-I-D-T-I-A-N-P-H-D [dot] com [slash] emotional mastery.

Okay, so that’s sex technique, and going by the Pareto principle, the 80-20 rule, sexual technique accounts for about 10 to 20 of how fulfilling and satisfying and enjoyable the sex actually is. Far more important than the technique is the psychology, sex psychology, and that’s why sexual shame is such a huge obstacle to a fulfilling sex life, especially over the long term once you remove the factor of novelty, at least in terms of the partner that you’re having sex with. [18:10.2]

Most immature guys have no idea of the importance of the brain when it comes to enjoyment of sex. They think of it mostly as just fiddling with a body part. But here’s an easy demonstration of how powerful and the necessary component of the brain in sexual enjoyment, how the brain is actually the biggest sexual organ, in that sense.

Imagine trying to masturbate while looking at a really disgusting scene. Think of the most disgusting scene you can think of, I don’t know, a toilet full of diarrhea and you’re standing over it and it’s just overwhelming all of your other senses visually, olfactorily, and the whole thing. Throw in auditory, hear other people having diarrhea. And while you’re getting all of this in your senses, you’re supposed to get an erection and get aroused enough to ejaculate. [18:58.6]

It will probably be impossible, if not incredibly difficult, and the only way probably you could do it is by closing your eyes and trying to close off as much of that sensory stimulation as you can and go into your imagination—and notice, lo and behold, it is your brain that actually enables the sexual arousal. In fact, you don’t even need to touch your genitals in order to become aroused, or even to orgasm or ejaculate.

After all, that’s what wet dreams are, as you have already, if you’re over 18, I’m sure, have experienced what it’s like to become aroused just through thoughts or by looking at something, or reading something or hearing something, without touching your genitals, so there’s no actual physical stimulation yet. It’s all in your brain, in your mind.

So, under the category of sex psychology comes all of the most important elements of sexual enjoyment, satisfaction and fulfillment and pleasure. So, how good are you at building anticipation and teasing and dirty talk? One of the most important dynamics to master is dominance versus immersion, both of which are required, really, for a fulfilling sex life overall. [20:07.0]

For most people, most of the time, because we are evolved animals, the best ratio of dominance to immersion, in terms of when you are having sex, is probably something like 60 to 80 percent of the time, you’re engaging in a kind of dominance and submission kind of fantasy, sort of dirty talk with hair pulling and spanking, and being able to be comfortable and adept at pinning and tying, and especially, of course, dominant talk, dirty talk, to create and invoke those fantasies of domination and submission that are part of our animalistic nature. That is, after all, the function, biologically speaking, of the sexual act.

How much of your sexual shame gets in the way of you actually enacting or even learning about how to do this well, teasing, anticipation, dominance, dirty talk, hair pulling, spanking, leading and creating and evoking fantasy? [20:58.5]

So, if you’re wondering why your sex life in your relationship is getting dry and all you do, as most immature guys do, is think of it as a purely physical act and purely physical stimulation, you’re probably just going at it jackhammering for 10 minutes and then coming. No wonder that gets boring and stale, and the sexual passion and chemistry is gone.

Of course, if you suck at sex, the easiest thing to do is to just get a new partner. That’s, after all, what happens when guys get bored with the same porn clip that they have been going to and now it doesn’t do it for them or they get bored of it, and so they find a new clip, and then they’re back up, back and going. That’s how most people who suck at sex don’t understand the psychology of sex, how they just basically go back to that primitive level of the very low level, the base level of sexual stimulation and psychology. [21:53.0]

A big part of becoming more sexually attractive is being in control of your instrument, as we would call it in acting, your body. This, of course, involves body language and being able to control your body in such a way that you can exude sexuality and sexual energy just in the way you move or stand, as well as the way you dress and hold your body. This is separate from being fit, okay, which also, of course, helps, as well as having endurance for the physical act itself and having the flexibility, and so forth.

But I’m talking about just being able to be in control of your body language and understanding what body language is sexually attractive, not the slouched, weak-cored man, or that overly stiff body language. It also includes eye contact and being able to be good at using different kinds of eye contact, including sexual eye contact and the different kinds of sexual eye contact.

This also includes, of course, the sound of your voice, whether you’re able to make your voice slow and smooth, whether you’re able to invoke sexuality through the tone of your voice, whether you’re able to induce relaxation through the sound of your voice, to seduce, just with the sound of your voice. [23:12.8]

Body language, eye contact tonality, the way you move, this is basic sexual attraction, and of course, being good at generating sexual attraction and increasing your sexual attractiveness as a man is an important part to keeping her turned on and desiring of you, and this is all leading up to the sexual act. This is all extended foreplay.

Foreplay begins in the mind, of course, and that begins the moment the two of you wake up and maybe even, if you want to count it, the day before and everything leading in between the last time you had sex and the next time you have sex, the buildup over that whole period. Do you even think about that? When you’re married, you’re now in a long-term seduction that might last 50 or more years. How good are you at seduction? [24:05.5]

For pickup artists, they might have a good four hours in them and might rely on a lot of deception. You won’t be able to keep the deception up for long in a marriage, and you’d better be good at it, because you’re going to need to call upon it for the next 50-plus years.

Now, in a relationship, the connection, the actual emotional intimacy plays a much bigger role than merely physical attraction. The fact that if you’re truly intimate with another person over the long term, your deepest childhood wounds, your deepest psychological buried burdens will get surfaced and you’ll have to deal with that. That, in my mind, is much harder than mastering attraction technique. That’s why I’ve spent the majority of these episodes focusing on the emotions in the psychology of it. [24:54.2]

But Gurshan’s question presupposed that there was already emotional intimacy and the relationship devolved into a kind of platonic friendship, so now he’s asking, can there be, is it even possible to have a sexual intimacy and emotional intimacy over the long term? So, I’m focusing now on, if you want to increase the sexual passion over time, you will need to learn how sexual passion and sexual attraction is created in the first place, and get good at, master increasing it over time.

To recap so far, first, you’ve got to deal with the sexual shame, because if you’ve got sexual shame, that’s going to put a stop to any fulfilling sexual life. Then after sexual shame, I mentioned sex technique, and that’s a fun thing to learn and it’s relatively straightforward, assuming you have the flexibility and endurance for it.

Then you have sex psychology and I mentioned, as some examples under the category of sex psychology, dominance. I gave examples of dirty talk and hair pulling and spanking, and building, teasing anticipation through your sexual talk, and the foreplay that is between sexual encounters with your wife. A big factor in whether she’s turned on in one’s sex is what happens in between the times you have sex. Okay, so that’s incredibly important, the relationship itself. [26:13.7]

Now we get to the other part of the dynamic of dominance and immersion. How good are you at immersive sex? Of course, to some degree, whenever you’re invoking the fantasies and dirty talking, and dominance, you’re immersed, so to speak, in the dominance play. But when I’m referring to immersion, it’s more of a connection type of soul-gazing type of sexual experience, and a great way to learn this and practice this and train it is through tantra.

Now, be careful when you go online and search for tantra trainings and that sort of thing. There’s a lot of hand-job parlors type of things that will be listed as tantra. That’s not real tantra. There is an actual kind of tantric practice that is sort of spiritual, but will get you into this kind of immersive connecting type of sexual experience, and I recommend that everyone do that. [27:03.0]

You can even do this as a couple and go to a tantra training. There are many weekend or week-long tantra retreats for couples. That’s a lot less about the performative sexual technique of porn stars and much more about the emotional connecting kind of immersive type of sexual experiences, and there’s a place for all of that, in my opinion. So, how good are you at that, at the immersive, emotionally-connecting sex?

Then, of course, there’s your sexual fitness, which gets more and more important as you get older. But even for younger men, there’s the issue of premature ejaculation. How good is your erectile health? And I’m not going to go into detail on that here. I covered this and all of those issues that I raised, the points that I raised earlier, sexual shame, sex technique, sex psychology, both dominant and immersive sex, sexual fitness, I cover all of this in detail and devote two entire modules to these issues in my course Rock Solid Relationships. [28:02.4]

Under the category of sexual fitness, I would also put down your testosterone levels, which have been plummeting in modern men, and your diet, and supplements. So, how good is your sexual and erectile health and fitness?

If you’re wondering why your sex life in your relationship or marriage is waning, the first place to look is actually your connection emotionally and that’s why I devote most of the episodes on relationships to that, but being good at sex and sexual arousal, sexual attraction, inciting desire, this is itself a set of skills. How good are you at that, at sex technique, sex psychology? How much are you addressing your sexual shame? And how good is your sexual fitness? Again, I address all of these issues and how to master them in my course, Rock Solid Relationships. [28:54.2]

Finally, there’s the underlying character element, the traits of these bad boy qualities, and this I was reminded of by a Gurshan’s last sentence where he says, “It looks like good guys just cannot have a woman desire them,” and as I hope you have picked up, I think the good guys that Gurshan has in mind are actually sexually-immature guys. But that “good guy” reference brings up the moralistic judgment against bad boys, and I will be addressing the deeper psychological question that he brought up in the second half of his post in another episode.

But for now, I just want to mention that underlying good sex technique and good sex psychology is how you see yourself, your identity, and the character traits that are part of that. It helps a lot if you want to be sexually attractive and be able to generate a sexual passion and desire in women, if you have a few qualities that are often associated with bad boys, like being adventurous, being spontaneous, being comfortable with taking risks. [29:59.3]

A big part of the thrill of sex is the unpredictability of it, the spontaneity of it, the, in a way, taboo nature of it. If sex were predictable and certain, it wouldn’t be exciting anymore, and if predictable and certain and safe are the values by which you live your life, then it’s no wonder that it’s hard for you to spark sexual desire over the long term. So, it would help to inculcate to cultivate these qualities of being adventurous and spontaneous, and a risk taker and a leader, and assertive.

Insofar as you have trouble with any of those character traits, that is, if you have trouble being adventurous, acting spontaneously, taking calculated risks, being a leader or being assertive, insofar as you have difficulty with those traits, you will have difficulty in your sex life in the long term. [30:57.2]

Now, if those traits don’t come naturally to you, if they’re not a natural part of the way you are right now, the good news is that, very likely, you have parts of you that are already like that and you just need to access them more fully. In my course, Rock Solid Relationships, I have a process to help you access the parts of you that we call, in a Jungian language, archetypes, and this is the Lover and the Warrior and the King. Accessing the Lover the Warrior and the King can make mastering the sexual technique and sex psychology natural and almost effortless. There’s a guided meditative process that I have in my Rock Solid Relationships course that helps you to access these archetypes.

Even more, as I’ve mentioned in previous episodes, further along in your therapeutic process, you will be able to discover whether you have any, and I think everyone does, to some extent, have parts that are naturally inclined to enjoy and are talented at being adventurous and spontaneous, because those are, in a way, childlike traits, and when you’ve unburdened more and more of your parts, you’ll have more access to a natural adventurousness, a spontaneity, the creativity, propensity toward taking risk, courage. [32:13.8]

I discovered that I have parts that enjoy flirting, building sexual tension, playing with vocal tonality and body language, and enjoy and naturally occupy a charismatic space in groups and in romantic settings. I discovered that I had parts naturally enjoyed being assertive and dominant, and taking leadership roles, so very likely, you do, too.

That would be the most natural way to approach learning, training and mastering sex psychology and sex technique. You can do it both ways, learning about the techniques and the psychological principles, and these sexually-attractive behaviors, and practicing those, and at the same time, accessing those parts of you that are already good at that, or already inclined to it or have some talent for it—and a big part of accessing those parts of you is to remove the burdens of the sexual shame that have accrued over the decades. [33:07.7]

Okay, so to recap, I want to remind you of that, for the most part, and for most people, most couples, sexual issues happen way before you get to the bedroom and that’s where most of the trouble begins, and that’s where it should be addressed, the emotional connection and the triggering that happens, and the intimacy problems.

Now, Gurshan’s question that I’m addressing already assumes that emotional intimacy isn’t the issue and that they have some sort of a platonic emotional connection, but the sexual passion is gone, and that can definitely happen as well because sexual passion and emotional connection are happening on two different channels.

If you just have lots of connection and no passion, you have a really great friendship, and if you have all passion and no connection, you just have a couple that has lots of sexual chemistry, but then have nothing to talk to or say to each other afterwards or before. So, you can get good at the sexual-passion channel just on its own and add that as a necessary ingredient to a sexual relationship in your long-term intimate relationship. [34:09.3]

I covered sexual shame as the saboteur, the big obstacle, and I’ve mentioned that I’ve devoted entire episodes to sexual shame before this. I mentioned sex technique and we went into psychology. We just started getting into it. There’s a lot more, obviously, to say about it. I’ve devoted entire modules to this in the course, Rock Solid Relationships. And I talked about sexual fitness as another category.

Then I mentioned about the bad-boy qualities of adventurousness, spontaneity, risk-taking, assertiveness. being a leader, and how we have parts of us like the archetypes of Lover, Warrior and King that are naturally good at those things already and have a talent for them, and enjoy them and can get better at them the more practice they get; and that the best way to access them is through a therapeutic process that I’ve been covering throughout this podcast, and that I’ve given a summary of in the episode that I’ve entitled “Seven Steps of the Therapeutic Process”; and that in the course, Rock Solid Relationships, I devote several modules to all of these issues, including accessing your archetypal parts of the Lover, the Warrior in the King. [35:20.4]

Thanks so much for listening. If you liked this at all, hit a like on whatever platform you’re listening to this on. Leave a comment. Let me know what you thought of it. Give me that feedback. I’d love to hear your feedback. And if this helped you in any way, please share it with anyone else that you think could benefit from it. Thank you, Gurshan, for the question—and thank you for listening. Until next time, David Tian, signing out. [35:41.3]

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