How To Handle Mismatched Libidos
We were sitting in an editorial meeting with the producers, directors, researchers and my co-host on the show The Sex Inspectors. Frustration was high. The problem: how to show a husband oral sex techniques on TV without it looking like a scene from Spouses Gone Wild Doggie Style.
I sat silent throughout the debate. As a gay man I didn’t feel I had much to offer on the subject. Still, the director turned to me and asked what I thought. “Listen,” I said. “The last time I helped a woman get off she was on a bus.”
Actually, helping women improve their sex lives is as simple as helping men. After all, the most important sexual organ is between your ears not your legs.
Take the most common problem we dealt with in the show – “desire discrepancy,” or mismatched libidos. That’s when he’s hot to trot and she’s not. Or vice versa.
Desire discrepancy causes enormous pain in couples. The high-desire person feels rejected and abandoned. The low-desire partner feels pressured and harassed. Both harbor suspicions the other is going to leave. One woman who felt her sexual desire for her boyfriend virtually disappear asked, “Does this mean I’m not in love with him anymore?”
In every couple suffering from desire discrepancy there’s a low-desire and high-desire partner. Guess who the low-desire partner tends to be?
Wrong. More often than not, it’s men who have lower sex drives than their wives and girlfriends. We think of men as having an “Any place, any time with anyone” approach to sex. Not true. Not when they’re married, anyway. After a while, their libido turns into “glibido”—all talk and no action.
So how do you smooth out mismatched desires? First, the low-desire person has to become more aware of what turns them on. The high-desire partner can help them by hauling out a tongue, a hand and a question: “Do you like it better like this or like that?” It’s the kind of survey nobody minds filling out.
Second, the low-desire person has to stop waiting to “feel in the mood” and learn to get in one. Ever refuse food because you’re not hungry? Then somebody insists you take just a little bite and the next thing you know you’re hoovering the plate and asking for seconds? Sex is like that. The right appetizer can lead to a succulent entrée.
Of course, the low-desire partner always has the right to say “No,” but saying it the wrong way can also lead to guilt by the “No-er” and rejection to the “No-ee.” I don’t recommend using the tactic a smart but otherwise undiplomatic girlfriend uses: She writes down her favorite soup, Won Ton. Then she tells her husband to hold it up to a mirror and read it.
Better you should stick to a more effective strategy: never say “No” without saying “When.” A postponement is easier to accept than a cancellation.
Because there are cameras in the bedroom we could see what the couples could not—how they fell into common traps and self-delusions. For instance, one guy told us he was a tiger in bed. Yet all the footage showed him flat on his back no matter what sex act he was performing with his girlfriend. He lay so still I turned to my co-host and said, “Either he’s dead or my watch stopped.”
No amount of talking could have given us the insight that the cameras did (mercifully, the couples were always filmed in a way that preserved their dignity and self-respect). The video footage led to an advice-giving insight that surprised everyone working on the show: Telling couples what NOT to do was more effective than telling them what to do.
Take Bina for instance. She wanted sex far more than her live-in boyfriend, Mark. In the bedroom, video footage showed that she always initiated sex (either by asking or taking matters into her own hands). In other parts of the home, cameras showed that she was on Mark like white on rice, constantly grinding her hips against him or cornering him in the couch when he was trying to relax.
Here’s what we told Bina: STOP. Stop seducing. Stop talking about sex. Stop asking for sex. Stop initiating sex.
Bina looked like a martini made by an amateur—badly shaken. “If I leave it up to him,” she said despondently, “We’ll never have sex again.”
She was wrong. Within a couple of weeks the cameras showed something remarkable: Mark initiating sex. Not only that, he became far more affectionate outside the bedroom, taking the initiative to hug, hold and kiss her.
Our bans worked because they addressed a dysfunctional behavior among high-desire partners: Not giving their low-desire partners room to breathe. By banning Bina from initiating sex she created a space for Mark to step into. She created the opportunity for her boyfriend to miss her.
Getting couples to go from “Badda Bing” to “Badda Bang” is simple but not easy. Men are built like rockets; women like airplanes. Each get airborne but in different ways. Men have a “T-minus 10 seconds” countdown to liftoff while women need to build up speed on a long tarmac before getting airborne. This sets up a built-in, on-going conflict between the sexes: women want more emotional content while men want more physical excitement.
Cameras in the bedroom show just how this conflict plays out and thus how it can be resolved. You don’t have to have sex on national TV to get your sexual problems solved but like my Jewish grandmother used to say about curing a cold with chicken soup, “It couldn’t hoit.”