Sex Gets Real 254: Taking responsibility in relationship, living with an ex, and healthy relationship behaviors

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On with the show!

First up, Graeme Seabrook’s latest blog post popped up in my feed a few times this week and caught my eye. It’s titled, “Stop Grading Your Husband On A Curve” and spoke so deeply to so many of the questions I receive and the coaching that I do. Check it out, for sure.

What would it look like to have everyone in a relationship show up and take 100% responsibility for the household, the chores, the management of scheduled? What would it mean if the women and femmes of the world weren’t the ones who managed grocery shopping, meal prep, appointment setting, friend dates, and everything else that contributes to overwhelm and burnout? It’s a big question that will require a lot of changes for many of us if we truly want equitable partnerships.

That article paired perfectly with an older article that a marriage therapist I adore re-shared this week called, “9 Habits Of People In the Healthiest Relationships” and I want more of us to have more humor, transparency, positive regard, and connection in our lives, so let’s chew on these a little and see what might need attention in our lives.

If 69% of our disagreements in relationship are unresolvable, how do we continue to turn towards each other with humor and generosity, knowing that’s true? How do we make time for each other, without distraction, when life gets busy? These are the kinds of questions I want more of us to sit in and grapple with. It would ease so much relationship distress for us all if we did.

I’m also fielding two listener questions this week.

First up, DNA has been with his wife for 17 years. They have an 11-year-old son. They recently decided to get divorced, but because they live in a really expensive area, they’ve decided to co-habitate as they co-parent. But DNA is having trouble moving on. He feels resentful that he’s trapped, he can’t deepen his relationship with the new person he’s dating, and their families don’t even know about the divorce because they’re trying to protect their son. What can he do?

Finally, Alice Joy wrote in because their partner is really dominant. So dominant, that they won’t allow Alice Joy to touch them or to really receive pleasure. AJ isn’t sure if it’s because their partner doesn’t want it or if it’s because they aren’t sure what they want, but it’s impact AJ’s confidence because what if it’s them and how they do things? What can AJ do?

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About Host Dawn Serra:

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Episode Transcript

Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra. That’s me. This is a place where we explore sex, bodies, and relationships, from a place of curiosity and inclusion. Tying the personal to the cultural where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love as you are to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics, and liberation. This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happen here inservice to joy, connection, healing, and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.

Dawn Serra: Here we are with another episode of Sex Gets Real. Yay. So I want to start off by saying the pleasure course that I have that starts on April 22nd, 2019 is now enrolling. There is about a dozen people signed up and I would love to see more of you in there. It’s an entirely online five week course all about pleasure. We’re going to be unpacking the stories we’ve carried about pleasure, creating new stories and paradigms, playing and experimenting, and getting curious in all of the ways that we can invite in our hunger and our wanting, and our desire and all of the stories we carry around that. And we’re going to do it together as a community and witness each other, support each other. It’s going to be such an incredible, incredible experience. It’s called Power in Pleasure and you can learn more at dawnserra.com/pleasurecourse And I would love to see a whole bunch of Sex Gets Real listeners in the course with me. 

We’re going to go some really deep places. I’m also doing a whole big rich series of posts all about pleasure on Instagram. So if you don’t follow me over on Instagram yet, I am instagram.com/dawn_serra and you can check out all of my posts about pleasure there. That’ll give you a little tidbit and test some of the questions we’ll be asking and some of the themes that you’ll see from the course itself. So take a look at that. 

Dawn Serra: I’m really excited to be here with you this week. There’ve been some really interesting articles that have come across my social media feeds. I’ve gotten so many amazing emails from all of you. If you have a question, if you have something that you would love some support around on the show, be sure you head to this dawnserra.com and send me a note because I would love to hear from you. Hearing from all of you is one of my favorite parts of every week and while I can’t respond to all of you personally, I sure do read every single email that comes in. And I appreciate and savor them all. So if you’ve got anything where you’re feeling stuck or confused or unsure or you just like to learn more about something or hear it discussed on the show, shoot me an email. That also helps me to decide who I’m going to invite on the show. And I have some really fantastic guests aligned up for the next couple of months. So we are just trying to get on each other’s calendars and get things going and recorded. So stay tuned because there’s going to be some delicious conversations coming up and I would love to be able to feature some of your questions and curiosities.

Patreon supporters, this week’s bonus is going to be a listener question and we are going to talk about some super delicious stuff. It’s content you can’t hear anywhere else. So if you want to support the show even at a dollar, every dollar counts and helps me to keep the show going. You can go to patreon.com/sgrpodcast for Sex Gets Real. SGR podcast. You have to type the URL in because Patreon has coded me as pornographic, so you can’t search for me on their platform. You have to actually type in the whole URL. So that’s patreon.com/sgrpodcast and you can either support the show or a checkout all the bonuses if you support it $3 a month and above. And, of course, there’s listener questions that you can help weigh in on at $5 a month and above. So take a look and see if you want to support the show and also listen to the bonus material. Let’s jump into this week’s episode.

Dawn Serra: One of the things that I really love doing is getting connected with people who are thinking about things in a really unique way, who are helping me to have aha moments or helping me to find language for things I’ve long been thinking about and chewing on, and being able to share those resources and those folks with the world. Graeme Seabrook is someone who works with moms and I highly recommend checking out Graeme’s work. 

There is an article that just came out on Graeme’s blog this week called Stop Grading Your Husband On A Curve. There’s something really, really, really important about healthy relationships inside of this post. So I’m going to link to it in the show notes for this episode. So if you head to sexgetsreal.com/ep254. You can also get links because I’m going to share a couple of different resources on this week’s episode. 

Graeme wrote this post and it says, This essay is written to cis hetero married mothers. While others might find this helpful, these are the relationships I know well enough to speak on. This is my lane and I’m staying in it.” Now, that little caveat, I think, is super important. Because as more and more of us become more and more socially aware, become invested in social justice and having these conversations, something that I think is so important is for more of us to learn how to stay in our lane. That is speaking to the experiences that we have and the experiences that we’re familiar with, and not speaking ever as an expert in experiences that we don’t have and instead listening and being curious about those types of experiences. So I love that Graeme started with this, but here’s what the post shares and then you can read the whole thing and comment on it if you want.

Dawn Serra: It starts with a quote, “And I have one of the good ones.” Graeme goes on to say, “I swear if I hear one more mom say that to me, I’m going to scream. I’m going to scream so loudly and for so long that I may permanently lose my voice. This statement always comes at the end of the story about why she’s so exhausted or running late or unable to do something or need some support around an issue. And the ‘And I have one of the good ones,’ is meant to soften the previous statements to signal to me that she didn’t marry some dudes straight out of 1950. “He does the dishes, he coaches soccer, he drives the kids to ballet. He’s one of the good ones.” And then Graeme asks, “Is he though? Is that all you need or is it possible that being born into growing up in and beginning your family in this particular brand of modern American patriarchy got you convinced that your C+ dude is an A-? 

If we were all with the good ones, would there be so many articles about the mental load of motherhood? Wouldn’t it be the mental load of parenthood? If we were all with the good ones, would there be so many jokes about how mom packs the entire house and dad packs the socks for his family vacation? Or all those mommy needs wine memes? Or the resentment and stress that simmers inside so many marriages? Or the husbands who are so proud of how they help out around the house? We need to define what it means to be one of the good ones and stop grading these guys on a curve that we didn’t create. 

Graeme goes on to talk about how we’ve set the bar so low and then asks, what is A+ work? Now, while Graeme is specifically talking to cis hetero married mothers, I think that this A+ work part of the conversation is really important for all of us regardless of our gender, regardless of our sexuality, regardless of what kind of relationship structure we’re in. If we’re sharing our lives with someone, here’s what Graeme proposes might be A+ work. 

Dawn Serra: Now, Graeme is talking about men because she’s talking about hetero cis marriages, but know this goes for all genders. The details are going to vary family to family, but here are the basics. He takes full responsibility for the house: the care, maintenance and cleaning of the house. He takes full responsibility for the children and everything connected to them: school, summer camp, daycare, doctors, dentists, allergists, etc. He takes full responsibility for his life as an adult. His health, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. 

In short, A+ is you don’t have a 50-50 relationship. You have a 100-100 relationship, where the responsibility is understood to be his and yours. Who ends up doing specific tasks, that’s up to the two of you. But in practical terms, it may look like the school having his phone number and email instead of yours. It may look like him syncing his vacation days with the school calendar or being the one who researches and studies for the IEP meetings, and takes on the work and worry of that process. Our children are watching us. They are absorbing this grading system we use and what they see will affect whether they want to become parents and what it means to them. 

Dawn Serra: So there’s lots of other great stuff in this post, but it leads really beautifully into this other article that I found that I wanted to share. I think one of the things that’s so challenging around gender roles, sexism, and patriarchy is it does this really unfortunate thing of painting men as helpless and as disinterested and as not invested in doing the labor that it takes to be fully functioning and today’s society. And we know that’s not true. There’s so many men out there who are doing the work, who are single parents, who are stepping up. And we culturally, just across the board, need more. 

We need more from all of us and to explore what it means to take full responsibility where nothing automatically falls to any one person and where it’s not up to only one person to keep that mental checklist of what things need to be picked up from the grocery store and who has appointments when. And I think, even more importantly, when we’re in relationship as an adult, my hope is that everyone involved in the relationship is also getting support from family, getting support from friends, has great healthy, intimate, vulnerable relationships with coworkers and colleagues, that if the emotional labor doesn’t only fall on the person or the people we’re in this particular form of relationship with. That we have multiple sources of meeting our mental health needs, and our emotional needs, and our spiritual needs, because that’s another way that we create so much resentment inside of relationships is an unhealthy, unexamined caretaking. 

And I want all of us to have better relationships. So many of the emails that I get on the podcast are from people who are struggling, as you’ll hear from some of the emails today, with partners who don’t know how to communicate, who aren’t willing to share themselves, who make assumptions about who’s going to do what and when. And in today’s culture, with everything that we have going on that just isn’t going to create really healthy, thriving, joyous, free feeling relationships. So check out Graeme Seabrook’s essay. I will link to it in the show notes and on dawnserra.com and that ties me to… 

Dawn Serra: Now, this is a little bit of an older article. But a therapist that I follow and really admire recently reshared this article and I thought there’s some really good stuff in here for all of us to just sit with and gently hold. And the article is about, The Nine Habits of People in The Healthiest Relationships. Now, everyone’s going to define a healthy relationship slightly differently. For some people, healthy relationships are going to be sexual and their healthiest relationships are going to be sexual and for others, they won’t be. Some people are going to be in monogamous relationships, some people are going to be in different forms of polyamory or subscribed to a relationship anarchy. So keep in mind, there’s lots of different ways for us to be in relationship and for us to be able to express ourselves. But there are a couple of key things that a whole bunch of therapists offered to this article that I thought would just be really good for all of us to hold. 

One of the things that I think is really important is, most of us know this, but it’s more difficult to actually live it. Healthy relationships aren’t necessarily effortless and they’re not necessarily conflict-free. The Gottmans who have been doing all kinds of studies on relationships and marriage for 30+ years, at this point, have found that it’s not whether or not you have a lot of conflict or a little conflict. It’s more, is the way that you do conflict aligned? So you can have two people who grew up in households where yelling and being loud and using big motions when you’re angry was normal. And if you have two people who express conflict that way, it’s going to feel normal and not distressing for either one. You can have other people in relationship where conflict was very quiet and something you talked out very slowly over the course of a number of days, and if you have two people who are comfortable with that conflict style, then their conflict also isn’t going to be a source of distress. It’s often when we have different ways of managing conflict that then the conflict feels distressing. So I think that’s something for all of us to just sit with. 

Dawn Serra: The other thing that the Gottmans have found, now keep in mind that Gottmans almost exclusively study monogamous straight couples, although in the past 10 years they have added gay and lesbian relationships to the mix. But one of the things that they’ve found in their multiple decades of research is that 69% of the conflicts and the disagreements that we have in a relationship with someone are unresolvable, which means only 31% of the places where we disagree are going to resolve themselves. There’s a solution. The 69% of what’s unresolvable is simply because we do life differently. One person might like all the forks and knives facing one way and one person, it might not matter to them. And one of the ways that people who are in healthy, thriving relationships maintain that sense of loving connection is in finding ways to navigate that unresolvable 69% knowing this is going to come up again and again, and it’s probably going to irritate me. So how do I address it, get it noticed and acknowledged, and then return to each other with warm regard and move on without getting stuck. 

So that’s aside from this article. But here’s the things that the article shared and they’re all little quotes from different therapists. One, they compliment their partner in front of other people. Talking positively about your partner, not only in front of them, but to friends, to kids, to relatives, to coworkers. This is the opposite of having undermining behaviors. And it shows that warm regard, that generosity. Two, they make time to connect no matter how busy life gets. I think this is something that all of us struggle with as things get so busy, especially when we’re in a cohabitating situation where we’ve got life being lifey. We might have kids, we might all have jobs. We might be trying to attend to our health, the health of our family. It can be really difficult to actually make time to really slow down and get really present with each other, even if it’s just for a couple of minutes on a regular basis. But to just say, “I see you. I’m here,” without distraction, without phones, without computers, without televisions, “I am here with you and you matter.” So they make the time to connect. No matter how busy things get. 

Dawn Serra: This one is super important. So many people who are in the relationship field will tell you this. They laugh freely and frequently. Laughter is something that is a tremendous asset in a relationship and it helps with those unresolvable disagreements that are inevitable in any relationship. Because you got two human beings being human and everything isn’t going to align forever. We’re also constantly changing. So those things might change a little bit. But laughing freely and frequently is so important. 

Four, they appreciate their partner’s positive qualities instead of harping on the negative ones. This is something that I see a lot in my coaching practice is when things start to feel tough, when we start to feel resentful or scared or worried, often we focus in on the problem and it becomes the only thing that we can see anymore. When we get to that place that is a red flag, that something needs to be adjusted. Because there are so many positive qualities for the people we have in our lives. And if we can’t see that anymore then either there’s something needs to change or we have really forgotten why this person in our life. So focusing on positive qualities.

Now, the fifth one is they practice empathy by regularly putting themselves in their partner’s shoes. I don’t like that phrasing. You’ve heard Kate Kenfield on the show multiple times. And so what I would say is by practicing empathy, what you’re really doing is you’re nonjudgmentally listening and holding what it is they’re telling you as their truth without needing it to be different. So if someone says, “I feel frustrated, I feel lost.” Then to be empathetic is to say, “I hear you. I hear that you feel frustrated and lost. Do you want to tell me more about that?” It’s not trying to change it. It’s not getting defensive. It’s not denying and gaslighting that that might be true. It’s understanding that all of us are moving through the world differently and we validate and say, “Yeah, I hear you. That’s something that seems important to you and thank you for sharing it with me.”

Dawn Serra: Number six, they always let their partner know when they’ll be home, and I think it’s more about communication than this specific point. But Shadeen Francis, who is a therapist that I’ve had on Explore More Summit talked about how when we want to have trust in a relationship, it’s not about honesty, it’s about transparency. It’s not about honesty as much as it is about transparency. And also being really generous with the truth and the things that matter to you. So it’s not withholding information. It’s not doing the bare minimum. It’s saying, “I think you might want to know this. And I think that this might be something that’s important to you. And so here it is before it happens. Here’s what I’m thinking about doing. Here’s what I’m going to be doing. I wanted to let you know.” That generosity of being open and transparent is really crucial in our relationships to help build a secure sense of attachment. And everyone’s going to be a little different around those things. So being able to talk about it is also important. But if we know that it’s important to someone that we love, that they know what time we’re going to be home or that they know whether or not we’re going to be able to make it home for dinner or that they get concerned if we haven’t called by a certain time. Being able to talk about those things and really generously say, “I know this is important to you and here’s what’s going to happen, or here’s what I’m choosing for myself,” opens the door for a lot of dialogue and trust. 

Dawn Serra: The other three things that they mentioned in the article is they never stopped flirting with each other. The healthiest to couples flirt with each other and they do it a lot. I think that that’s such a wonderful thing and regardless of whether you’re in a romantic, sexual relationship or you’re in a relationship that doesn’t have any kind of sexual intimacy, then the flirtation, I think, is still important. Even with our friends, our platonic friends being able to play and tell them, you think that they’re wonderful and telling them that they look great on a particular day or that you really appreciate the thing that they posted. Those little playful moments with each other is one of the ways that we keep feeling special and important in each other’s lives. 

The last two, they keep their fights clean. No name calling, labeling or disparaging remarks about your partner, whether you’re together or not. Also sarcasm, biting comments and little put downs that people just brush off with, “I was just joking.” That’s not fighting clean and that’s not being generous or holding someone in warm regard. That’s a defense mechanism and it’s passive aggressive. So you keep your fights clean and you practice being loving and respectful always, even when you’re disagreeing. And they forgive and move on instead of holding grudges. 

I think that this is something that is really challenging, especially if we’ve been doing a lot of invisible, unrecognized labor in a relationship. We are, of course, going to make mistakes. And I think one of the most important things that we can do in our lives is to build the kinds of relationships where we’re both allowed to mess up. We don’t have to be perfect all the time. Where we can say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing or forget a thing, and then genuinely apologize about it and have that met with generosity, “It’s okay, we all make mistakes. Ouch. That hurt. I really wish that hadn’t have happened, but it did. Let’s reconnect and do better next time.” 

Dawn Serra: We have to be able to make mistakes and relationship. And when we’re doing lots and lots and lots of invisible labor, emotional labor, holding things together for our family, it can be so much more difficult to be generous with our partners and to not hold grudges because of the weight of what it is that we’re carrying. Which goes back to that A+ kind of relationship that Graeme Seabrook was writing about, which is what made me think of this. So I’m going to post the link to this article too. It’s pretty short. It’s just a whole bunch of quotes from therapists. But so many folks who write in into the show are struggling around relationships and so many of the people I work with in my coaching practice are as well. And I thought, these are just some nice little bite size tidbits that can give us all something to think about when we’re thinking about our romantic partnerships and marriages, and triads, and all the other relationship forms that we might be in. And these things really do apply to friendships and family relationships as well. It’s about generosity, trust, grace, communicating and being playful and fun. Couldn’t we all use more of that in all of our relationships even at work? 

Okay, I have one last thing to report on and then we’re going to jump some listener questions. I have seen a number of articles going around that I just have to say. Yep. Not surprised. But because of the porn ban, Tumblr’s users have been fleeing rapidly. They’ve lost 150 million visitors the past few months because of their porn ban. And everyone who used to use Tumblr as a way to not only look at porn but to share sex education information, and stuff around gender and identity, and queer issues have abandoned ship. Because Tumblr’s new community standards have made it a very unsafe place for people looking for anything related to sex and identity. And because of that, their users have been bleeding out. And I’ll be really curious to see if that changes the way that Tumblr has set their community guidelines or if they’re going to join the fight against FOSTA and SESTA. And the ridiculous harmful laws that have been put into place around the Internet and porn. Sorry, Tumblr, but that’s what you get. 

Dawn Serra: Alright. So we’ve got two listener questions. The first one is from DNA and the subject is “Marriage Limbo.” Hi Dawn, I want you to know you’re just great. I’m a 40 year old cis male. I’ve been with my wife for a total of 17 years. Back in January, she said she wanted to separate. We’ve been trying to work on things for a while, but it’s pretty clear that we’re better as friends than a couple. We have an 11 year old boy that we’re committed to and co-parent well.

We live in a very expensive area. So for the time being, we’ve agreed to continue to live together and stay married, but see other people. We don’t want to uproot our child and I cannot afford a place on my own that would be nearby so I can be there for him daily. At the same time, even though our split was amicable, I’m finding it very difficult to move on with my life and my current situation. Feelings of resentment are continuing to grow because I lack the means to physically leave the home. I’ve been able to date and that’s been good for me, but because I can’t leave, it’s keeping me from moving forward with the person I’m currently seeing. Also, most of my family doesn’t know what’s going on because we’re attending family events together for the sake of our son. I just feel stuck and trapped. I want to be there for my son, but I also want to seek the affection and companionship I’ve been lacking for a long time. Any advice? Thank you.

Oh, DNA . That does sound like a really challenging place to be. And it makes sense that you’re feeling stuck and trapped because you kind of are in a way. Circumstances have made the situation, one, where you have more limited options and that’s real. So the first thing I would do is, just validate for yourself that this is not an ideal situation and that you’re working with what you’ve got, which may mean having to make some choices that you wish you didn’t have to make and allowing yourself to grieve and feel angry about that. It’s not fair that you can’t afford a place near your son and get your own place, and it sucks that you’re stuck in a situation that at some point it might even start feeling like a lie.

Dawn Serra: The other thing that I’m thinking is it might be really great for you to check out sex positive families, to check out Anastasia Higginbotham’s books for kids from the ordinary terrible things series. There is a book called Divorce is The Worst. I know your kid is 11 and those books are for five and six year olds, but I still think as an adult there’s a lot to get out of those books in how to talk to young people about these things. 

I’m wondering, so often adults who have younger people in their lives to try to shield the kids in their lives from the truth. And you haven’t mentioned whether or not you’ve talked to your 11 year old about what’s going on or not. I think co-parenting is a wonderful, beautiful thing that many of my friends are doing after their relationships have transitioned from one of marriage and intimacy into something else. But I think so often adults make choices from a place of if we do this, then maybe our kid won’t notice. And kids are really smart and they’re really attuned to what’s going on. They notice things that we really don’t tend to think that they notice as adults. They notice what goes unsaid. They notice body language, they noticed tone of voice. They noticed changes in routines. They notice the ways that things are changing in the home. And in the way is the phone calls go. They notice.

Dawn Serra: I’m curious whether or not you’ve had a conversation both with your ex wife and with your 11 year old about what this new version of life might mean. Have you involved him in a conversation about how the two of you are always going to be his parents, you’re always going to love him and you’re always going care for each other, but the ways you care for each other had been changing? And that you are going to be transitioning into a new way of being. Is there a way for the two of you to normalize bringing people to the home? Polyamorous families do it all the time. Having boyfriends and girlfriends and other partners and people that they’re dating and friends coming into the home and forming relationships with the kids. 

Explore More Summit this year, Tamara Pincus and Aisha Gray, talked about not only polyamorous parenting but also how to deal with breakups with your kids and how breakups are going to happen to our kids. And so giving them an opportunity to actually learn how to navigate breakups from an earlier age is actually a really healthy thing. I think so many parents are afraid of bringing in someone and their kid gets attached and then that person goes on. But being able to support our kids through transitions in relationships and through grief, that actually gives them so much richness and a place to practice. And, of course, we don’t want to be disruptive. But allowing them to actually be supported and see life happening is a really beautiful thing that will give them tools way later in life around their own relationships. So I’m wondering if there’s an opportunity here for you and your, I’m not sure whether to call her your wife or your ex wife, but for you and your wife to be able to bring people that you’re seeing, that you’re forming a deeper relationship with into the home. And is that an opportunity for a different way of being?

Dawn Serra: I’m also really curious about the fact that most of your family doesn’t know because of the sake of your son. I have to imagine that your son knows what’s going on and on some level. He may not have the language or the words, but he knows something has changing between the two of you. Having more support around that would probably be a really wonderful thing unless your family isn’t the kind of family that could be supportive around that. But if your family maybe needs a little bit of time and they’re going to grieve and they might be a little confused, that’s all okay. But if they can get to a place of support, then I would think that would be even better for your son to not only have two loving parents who are modeling how to transition a relationship from one state of being to another; but then to also be modeling, having these vulnerable conversations with family members, inviting family members in as a form of support for your son and for yourselves.

This is how we can expand these stories that it’s all on us to just muscle through and try and pretend things are okay. So how can you increase support for your son and for yourself? How can you make the world a little bit bigger so that it doesn’t feel like you’re trapped in silence inside of this home that you can’t leave because it’s too expensive? How do you start changing those dynamics? Because there’s so much opportunity for creativity in here and all of it is an opportunity to show your son this really beautiful way of being, of being able to feel hurt, but still be loving. To grieve and to feel sad and still have hope. To ask for help, to be supported and allow yourself to be supported. To form new relationships and maybe even go through a breakup or a transition, all while being loved and supported, and held and accepted. 

I mean, that is some amazing stuff that we could be modeling for our young people to help them be set up for much healthier relationships and changes as adults. I hope that’s helpful, DNA. Being able to grieve the truth. And also where are there opportunities for some creativity and for some inviting in rather than closing out with the people in your life, friends and family and with your wife. Turn to sex positive families, checkout some polyamorous parenting books. You might not be polyamorous in the traditional sense, but the fact that you and your wife are living together and being caring parents and dating other people, I mean that’s a nontraditional kind of relationship agreement. So I’m sure there’s lots of really great resources and the polyamorous parenting spaces and blogs that might be worth checking out, how to have some of these conversations with family, with kids, all that good stuff. 

Thank you so much for writing in and listening to the show. I hope that you and your wife were able to find wonderful new ways of being. And I hope that your son is able to experience all of these changes with two loving parents and to see that there is all kinds of different ways of being. It’s not like you see in the movies or on television. That you can really make your own reality in your own truth and find joy inside of situations that might not be ideal. 

Dawn Serra: Alice wrote in with a longer email, so we’re going to dive into the email and then I will share my thoughts. So here it goes. Dear Dawn, I’ve been listening to your podcast for a few weeks now and I’m inspired and amazed by your level of understanding and openness towards all your listeners’ sexy issues. I love your option to send in questions. The variety of them makes me feel safe to ask my own. I hope you’ll be able to give your opinion about my issue. 

I’ve been in a relationship of seven months with an amazing person who enjoys sex, who was willing to explore boundaries and enjoy us giving me pleasure. I’m lucky enough that I feel comfortable with receiving pleasure and communicating what I like and what doesn’t work for me. My partner tends to be the instigator and is a bit more dominant in our play. This means sex has often become about me receiving, oral, fingering or touch or us having penetrative sex. For a long time, that was A-okay for me because I was getting what I wanted orgasm and pleasure wise. Lately, I noticed how I would really like to get to know his desires and body too. The thing is, I sometimes feel like I need to assertively stop him from taking charge in order to just get into a position of exploring his pleasure and giving. Because he’ll often be five steps ahead of me on that one, and we’ll go into focusing on me fully or penetrative sex. Deep down, I would really like him to trust me more with his pleasure and let go of the control, but the amount of effort to get him to that space makes it scary for me to take on a more dominant role. I’ve tried asking about what he likes or doesn’t like and in those moments, he tells me that it’s already good enough. 

Dawn Serra: There’s nothing specific that he likes and that I should just keep trying different things. Only if I do try and explore, his body is not giving me many clues about what he enjoys in terms of movement, breath, sounds. And verbally, I have little to steer on. So I feel like I’m exploring in the deep sea without light. It’s been giving me performance anxiety that gets in the way of me enjoying myself. Combined with the difficulty of getting him into a more receiving position, I’ve noticed I’ve become more uncomfortable with giving and have started avoiding it. I’ve been online looking at performance anxiety, but I can’t find much on what I just described. Before I met my partner, I was a passionate, had giver and enjoyed taking a bit more time to focus on giving my partner or giving to each other at the same time, and I felt sure about myself.

I missed this activity and me feeling good about it. At the same time, I want to honor his sexuality and feel somewhat selfish that I’m making his pleasure about myself. My question is how can I connect with my partner about this issue and at the same time find a way to relax myself while giving or taking on a more dominant role? Much love Alice Joy. Well, Alice Joy. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast and for writing in. I know you’re not the only who one who is in a situation like this and I have several thoughts like I usually do. Let’s dive in. 

Dawn Serra: The first thing that I want to highlight is how with the very end, you said, “I want to honor his sexuality and feel somewhat selfish that I’m making his pleasure about myself.” Honoring where he is is really important. Wherever he is, why ever he is. That’s just where he is. Finding ways to allow that to be okay and to be true is a wonderful, generous thing. And you have to decide if this is how things are now, is this something that I can be in and not feel resentful around? 

There are a lot of myths about masculinity and sex in our world, and many of them have a really significant impact on men. So many of the myths really tie to men not being able to be vulnerable, not being able to say, “I don’t know,” not being able to take a more receptive role. There is this tension and fear around not only being vulnerable, but perceived in any way as potentially feminine or fragile. So much of receiving sex is about letting go and being seen and feeling things that might be uncomfortable or that you maybe haven’t felt before. Receiving can be deeply moving. And there are a lot of people who feel like that’s not something that they can do. It’s too scary. It flies in the face of what they’ve told themselves about what it means to have sexual prowess and to be a man. 

So I think just allowing all of those things to also be a part of the story and to be curious about it. Is he in a more dominant role because he truly is feeling most self expressed as someone who is dominant? Or does he take a more dominant role because to receive just feels way too vulnerable and he doesn’t know how to do it? He’s the only one who can answer those questions for you. And I think that the important thing is being able to express yourself and say, “Here’s some of the things that I’ve been thinking about. I don’t need you to be different. I just want to be open and if you want to have a conversation about this at some point, or if you want to try something different, I’m open to it. And I totally love and accept you as you are right now.”

Dawn Serra: There’s this really interesting tension and liminal space that I wish more of us had the tolerance and the resilience to be inside of, which is how can we totally accept and honor, and love, and be tender with where we are right now in this moment to know we are enough exactly as we are? And to so gently hold that maybe we would like to be somewhere else at some point, to be better at something, to be different around something, and to gently move our way in the direction of that without ever believing that our worth is dependent on being somewhere else.

I hope that we can also hold that true for the people in our lives. As long as someone isn’t invalidating our experience or denying or gaslighting our stories and our feelings, as long as someone isn’t doubling down and just being a stick in the mud because they don’t want to change or they don’t like the change. But if someone really is where they are, can we love and accept them knowing that they will eventually change? It might not be in the direction that we are hoping, but we are all constantly changing all of the time. And sometimes, change takes time. I think that’s something else that we’re not very good at in our culture. We get so agitated after something is a certain way after a couple of weeks or a couple of months. But sometimes some of the changes and the healing that we need to do takes many months and many years.

How can we create some space to allow the people in our lives to be where they are and to also change? So often we try to keep them, the story that we tell ourselves about who they are and we don’t allow them to change. But in this case, wanting something different is okay. If you can also hold that this is how he is. Where is the opportunity for connection in all of this? That’s what I’m always really curious about. So what kinds of conversations, I know you’ve said you’ve tried asking what he likes or doesn’t like, and then he says “It’s good enough.” There’s nothing specific that he likes. Maybe he doesn’t know and maybe trying to figure it out feels too vulnerable and to say, “I don’t know, and I don’t know how to figure it out,” is way too scary. And so instead, what he offers is “It’s fine, it’s good. I like what we’re doing.”

Dawn Serra: The way to unpack that is to just continue to build and deepen trust. The more that you can vulnerable you share, the more that you can model vulnerability in asking for what you want and experimenting and trying new things, and letting him know he’s allowed to do that too, if ever he wants, but there’s no expectation. That can also help build in the space where maybe he will feel into being able to try those things. If he wants to, he might just be like head to toe dominant. Some people are. And for some people, their biggest pleasure is in taking control and doing the things and not receiving really ever other than to receive your receptivity. 

For so many people who are really dominant and it’s just a core piece of who they are, for them, receiving is being dominant. And receiving access to your body, to your sensations, to your responses, to you handing your cell phone over. So I think what you really need to do is decide if there’s a different way to have the conversation and if you feel like you’ve exhausted it without really getting to a pushy place, then asking yourself what a you need to tend to. If this is who he is and this is how things are, and this is what makes him happy, does this make you happy? Is this something that you want for yourself? What if things stay like this for many years to come because he just really likes being dominant or he’s just really not ready to open to receiving and to exploring what that means. Can you be happy in that? Will you feel like your needs are getting met? It might be different than what you’ve had in the past. Can you be happy? Does this meet your needs and your hungers? I think those are questions also for you to ask. How can you honor where he is and still feel connected and curious and self expressed? 

I think something else that’s really important in our relationships, being able to say, “I just keep thinking about wanting XYZ.” So in your case, maybe it’s, “I just keep thinking about exploring your body and giving you pleasure. I know we’ve talked about this and I, in no way, want you to feel pressured or expecting anything. I just want to let you know, I think about this and it’s hot, and it turns me on and I don’t need things to be different if that’s true. But I just want you to know I think about it and it’s really hot. And by the way, I love what we’re doing.”

Dawn Serra: Being able to share our fantasies and our thoughts without it being about secretly trying to manipulate them into something is part of being in relationship with other humans. So I think the tough answer to your question is how can I connect with my partner about this issue? And at the same time, try to find a way to relax while giving or taking on a more dominant role. Is taking on a dominant role something your partner even wants? Based on everything you’ve shared, it seems like no. It’s not something they want now. How important is it to you to take on that more dominant role? Is there a way for you to give from a submissive or a receptive place that might jive more with the dominant energy that he has? 

So I would focus one on connecting with your partner exactly as things are. How can we deepen? How can we bring more curiosity and play? How can we savor where we are and all the things that are working? And then ask yourself, what is it that you need and are those needs getting met inside of this and make it a safe place for exploration to happen. And if you find that, he starts easing into things or showing a little bit of curiosity, I think being able to celebrate, that’s really important. And asking really direct questions, if you haven’t asked direct questions yet like, “I’ve noticed you really enjoy being dominant and taking the lead, and I have been feeling like I had really liked to take the lead and explore your body. Is that something you’d be comfortable with or should we stick with the things we’ve been doing and that feels super yummy for you?” And be open to whatever the answer is.

Dawn Serra: I had a partner for many years who when we first got together, identified as a stone butch and then transitioned into being trans. And for a big part of the first couple of years of our relationship, I wasn’t allowed to touch certain parts of their body or even really acknowledge that certain parts of their body existed. But over time, as we deepened our trust and acceptance, and I allowed myself to be more vulnerable, my partner at the time eventually got to a place where they let me touch them in ways that I had never been allowed to touch them. That’s not true for everyone. For some people, certain things aren’t ever going to work for them or it’s going to take decades for them to potentially open up. So it comes back to that space of how can we accept people exactly as they are knowing that the more acceptance and the more love, and the more support and the more trust we offer, the more space we create for change to happen? Rather than asking for, pushing for, wishing for, expecting change to happen. Those are the conditions that cause people to shut down, to anticipate rejection, to feel defensive. And that’s the opposite of the curious, playful, open energy that we want. 

I hope that just gives you some things to feel into without knowing him or what his desires are. It’s hard to say, but I would focus on how can you connect with now and what the two of you do have and celebrate that. And then just get really clear on what your needs are, what your wants are, and really think about the kinds of conversations you’ve had. Have they been really direct or have they been kind of wishy washy, dancy, hopey, dropping hints, kind of conversations? What kinds of questions would you like to ask? And if you feel like you’ve done those things, you’ve asked direct questions, you’ve made your needs really known, then I think at this point all you can do is just trust that if something changes, he will let you know and find ways to just honor yourself and each other as things are now. I hope that’s helpful, Alice Joy. I know it was long, but there was lots of little tidbits that I wanted to tease out in case that was helpful. Thank you so much for trusting me and all of us with your question. 

Dawn Serra: If anybody has any thoughts about this or stories they want to share, of course, you can write into the show at dawnserra.com there’s a send a note option, and you can weigh in and share your thoughts too. And, of course, you can head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show financially and to hear your bonus content, which I am heading over to record right now. So head over. Also don’t forget, pleasure course, pleasure chorus pleasure course. It starts April 22nd. It’s going to happen for five weeks. I will be, hopefully, running it again later this year. So if April is not a good time for you, then stay tuned. But you can learn more at dawnserra.com/pleasurecourse I will talk to you next week. Bye

Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to the vocal few, the married duo behind the music featured in this week’s intro and outro. Find them at vocalfew.com Had to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and get awesome weekly bonuses. 

 

As you look towards the next week, I wonder what will you do differently that rewrites an old story, revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?