I’m going to spend this entire month talking about how to balance mismatched sex drives in a relationship.

If it feels like you and your partner are on totally different pages about when to have sex, you’re going to want to check back here every week for more tips! Or sign up for my mailing list to get the new posts emailed directly to you a few days before they get published here!

This month, I want to share with you five stories from five couples who have gone through my online course for overcoming mismatched sex drives: The Passion Project: A Couples Blueprint To Rediscovering Desire And Reigniting The Spark.

I ran the course in November and February, and got feedback from the couples who went through it. (For the record, I got permission to share these stories, and I’ve changed or omitted any identifying details.)

I thought it would be interesting to share the most powerful lessons these real couples learned from working with their mismatched sex drives.

I wanted to do this for two major reasons:

It’s an important reminder that all couples have to deal with mismatched sex drives. Even couples who have similar libidos rarely want sex at the exact same time, but most couples have pretty different sex drives. It’s one of the most universal issues that couples struggle with.
To show you that you can have a pleasurable and satisfying sex life even if your libidos are different. When your sex drives don’t match and you don’t have the tools to balance them, it’s easy to feel like it’s a stuck dynamic that will never change. But it is absolutely possible to get on the same page about your sex life!

Today’s couple is Sophia and Derek. They’re both busy professionals in their mid 30’s, and have one young child. Derek has always had a higher sex drive than Sophia, and Sophia went through some major struggles with her sex drive after the birth of her child. Sophia and Derek have had a lot of serious fights over how often they have sex, and they both feared that they just weren’t compatible enough to make their relationship work.

When I asked them what lesson from The Passion Project had the biggest impact on their sex life, Sophia said, “You spoke about the fact that some people need to feel connected to have sex, and some people need to have sex to feel connected. I’m in the first group, and Derek is in the second group. In taking the course, I realized that I had been judging Derek for wanting sex all of the time, and thinking it was this stereotypically male thing.”

As Sophia mentioned, people typically fall into one of two groups:

People who need to feel connected in order to have sex.
People who need to have sex in order to feel connected.

Typically, in a relationship, one partner needs to feel connected in order to have sex, and the other partner needs to have sex in order to feel connected.

In heterosexual relationships, it’s often, but not always, the woman who needs to feel connected first. Here’s why: men and women are socialized very differently when it comes to emotions. Women are given societal permission to be emotional creatures. We can be tuned into our emotions. We can talk about them.

Men on the other hand, are taught that they’re not supposed to be emotional. To have emotions is to be weak. To be a “pussy”. Men are socialized to believe that the only truly acceptable way for them to connect with another person is through sex.

Sure, guys also have casual sex just for the sake of having sex. So do women, for the record.

But in relationships, or with someone they care about, sex is one of the primary ways men connect.

When it’s the woman in a relationship who wants sex more often than the man, or in same-sex relationships, these gender stereotypes don’t come up as often. But the partner with the lower sex drive tends to judge the partner with the higher sex drive as just wanting sex in order to have an orgasm.

Sophia said, “In the past, I would often push myself to have sex with Derek even though I wasn’t in the mood. Sometimes it felt easier to do that than to turn him down and deal with the repercussions. But Derek would still complain that he didn’t like having sex when I wasn’t into it. I used to think he was being so selfish and demanding. He was getting sex, shouldn’t he be happy? Now I realize that he didn’t just want to have sex. He wanted to feel close to me. He wanted to feel like I was sharing that moment with him. I feel bad for assuming it was just a physical urge, like an itch he needed to scratch.”

If you’re a person who needs to feel connected to have sex, and you’re with a partner who needs sex to feel connected, I know it’s really easy to get wrapped up in this idea of your partner needing sex just because they’re horny, or just because they need a release.

But try taking a step back and looking at it from this lens. What if what your partner is really wanting is to connect with you? To be present with you? To share with you? To express their love for you?

Does that change how you feel about their desires?

Derek said, “I’d never been able to verbalize to Sophia that sex was just as much – if not more – about closeness for me as it was about the physical pleasure. Once we were able to put it in that language you used, we both felt so much lighter. We realized that our needs are more aligned than we thought. We both want to have a healthy sex life, and we both want to feel close to each other. The fact that we get to those places in different ways doesn’t feel like such a barrier anymore. It feels more like a puzzle that we can solve together. How do we make sure we’re both getting what we need to feel close to each other in these different ways?”

If you and your partner struggle with mismatched sex drives, sit down together and ask each other these two questions:

What makes you feel interested in being emotionally intimate with me?
What makes you feel interested in being sexually intimate with me?

See if you can make a list of five things that help you feel interested in being emotionally intimate, and five things that help you feel interested in being sexually intimate.

Here are some possible answers:

I feel emotionally intimate with you when we spend quality time just talking and snuggling without distractions, and I feel interested in being sexually intimate with you when we have a weekly date night.
I feel emotionally intimate with you when you tell me why you love me, and I feel sexually intimate when we set the mood with candles, music, and mood lighting.
I feel emotionally intimate with you when you tell me the ways that you need me, and I feel interested in being sexually intimate with you when you give me slow, deep kisses.

Asking the questions in this way helps you focus on giving each other what you need both emotionally and sexually. It takes the focus off of what comes first – emotional intimacy or physical intimacy, and helps pay attention to both at the same time.

As I mentioned above, I had previously opened The Passion Project for limited time windows. After getting feedback from the participants, I decided to slowly transition to keeping it open year-round. If you’re interested in balancing your mismatched sex drives, and creating a sex life that feels more pleasurable, satisfying, and exciting to both of you, head on over here!