SLO MO REWIND: Michaela Boehm on Never Losing the Spark in Your Relationship

0:01I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host, Mo Gaudet This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps some nuggets of wisdom along the way This is your invitation to slow down with us Welcome to Slow Mo

0:33Today's guest is an expert in a topic that we sometimes avoid talking about openly. Michaela Baum is an expert in intimacy, relationship, and sexuality. I first heard about her when I was watching a Netflix documentary called Unwell. And in the documentary, it was talking about intimacy between couples, among many, many other challenges that face our health and mental health in the modern world. honestly not a documentary that I recommend by the way but she was the only one that really made sense I think in that episode and so I tried to reach out to her and I realized that her body of work centers around the intersection between intimacy and embodiment and that she has more than 30 ,000 hours of in-person counseling.

1:29So she would work with an individual or a couple one-to-one to try and uncover the challenges they have with intimacy. She has a clinical experience in trauma and addiction, and she worked with celebrity couples, and her work has been featured in print publications, TV programs, talk shows, and so on. She published a book. She put all of that together and published a book that was called The Wild Woman's Way in 2018. And so, as I said, the topic of intimacy and sexuality is a topic that we normally avoid addressing head-on. But my intention today with Michaela is to dive deep and hopefully ask some of the questions that you truly want to ask and maybe open up to a few discoveries that might make the life of couples a lot happier.

2:26So I am really grateful that you took the time. And the first time I came across your work, I was watching a documentary on Netflix. Let's say is, I actually don't remember the name, but let's say it was a bit new agey, right? So everyone was like, you know, saying things that are not really substantiated. And then you showed up in the documentary and you were like look here are the facts right and I was like okay I was like I like that this is you know it's a it's a sensitive topic but to talk about it logically with facts is quite an interesting way of doing it yes yes definitely I grew up with a focus on things making sense and a rational mind and quite a love for the scientific and all of that yeah I love that but but then you spent What, more than 20 years being an intimacy coach?

3:21I mean, you coached some of the most famous celebrities, Gwyneth Paltrow, I heard, and Will Smith, which is the one male on the planet that I'm most jealous of. You know, I think he's funny and smart and handsome. I'm like, what's wrong with me? Anyway, so what is an intimacy coach? Well, I mean, you know, that's mostly something that has happened in the press. the intimacy coach piece. I work on the intersection between, let's say, relationship embodiment and sexuality. And in that intersection, there is, of course, one of the things that shows up immediately is, are you intimate with your own body?

4:04Are you intimate with your own needs? Are you intimate with the sensations in your body? Can you listen to the messages that you're receiving and integrate them into your conscious mind, so to speak, right? And then, of course, from there, there's intimacy with another. Intimacy is not necessarily sex, right? It's the ability to meet someone where they are, right? Meet ourselves where we are and meet someone else where they are. And that's not always easy. As a matter of fact, that's almost becoming a phenomenon in our modern world that it's almost always difficult. I mean, it's rarely ever easy, isn't it?

4:46No, not anymore. Tell me more. And less so now with all the social media and of course, less so now that we're all in lockdown, you know, and things of that nature. But I think in general, even before, you know, I'm in the fortunate position of having done this so long that I remember the time before everything was happening on Instagram or Twitter or places like that, right? And so even then, for people to really be with their own emotions, sometimes very strong emotions, positive and negative, mind you. It's not only with positive. Some people can't be with their partner when it's really good either, meaning it's too much.

5:30They fuzz out. They kind of start giggling. They go away in their mind. So actual physical connection, physical, not necessarily touching, but physical in one space with a person looking into their eyes, speaking with them, listening with them. That's not exactly something we are taught. Some of us were fortunate enough to have good parents who instilled those kind of things and you learn them by observing them. But many people have never been given that much open, available space, you know, where somebody else listened to them and really looked at them and really connected with them and really felt who they were.

6:14And that's very compelling. And if somebody knows how to do that, it's very wonderful for the relationship, of course. But it's also very wonderful for their general well-being because their experience gets so much richer. In a way, it seems to me that we as humans require that, almost need that for our well-being. And that intersection is actually quite interesting, the way you've mentioned it, because it's an embodiment is really sort of your relationship with yourself, right? And the idea of overlapping that with your relationship and sexuality is sort of like you have to build a relationship with yourself first before you build a relationship with another so that you end up in a place where there is sexuality.

7:03I mean, is that the way you see it? Close, yes. I would certainly say that that's an accurate description, right? Embodiment, contrary to what a lot of people see as embodiment, how we look at embodiment is essentially the ability to hear the messages of the body, right? Be intimate with the sensations of the body. And within that, of course, not everything's positive, right? You're not always going to feel really lovely when you're embodying, meaning when you're allowing yourself to feel your body and feel the messages of the body. Because of course, if you don't listen to them, there's like a sediment of negative stuff.

7:42And if you've had trauma or grief or things like that, that's there too. And so embodiment and the ability to be with yourself is definitely the fundamental bedrock of being with anyone else. Because how are you going to know what's happening in somebody else's body all the way down to sex, right? How are you going to know what somebody else's body is experiencing if you are completely numb to your own body? We pick up via neural neurons and everything else what's happening in somebody else's body. So intimacy with yourself is the fundamental step in intimacy with anyone or anything. Right. And sexuality, of course, in an ideal world is born from the deep bodily wisdom and understanding that allows you to set proper boundaries, that allows you to open to a person if you want to or not open to a person if you want to.

8:47that allows you to feel yourself, feel your partner. And then from there, there's other dimensions available, right? More emotional, psychological, spiritual dimensions available. That would be the ideal scenario. But of course, a lot of people know sex only as something that one does to kind of feel good, like one has a drink or eats a bag of chips. And there's a lot of longing for that depth of connection that, of course, most people into it is there or maybe they had it spontaneously or with somebody who knows how to do that and so often there is you know so to speak fast food sexuality and then there is a there's gourmet sexuality so just oh yeah yeah junk food let's call it junk food junk sexuality and gourmet sexuality yeah yeah and also just good home cooking there's nothing wrong with cooking which is somewhere in the middle right doesn't always have to be on the extreme ends of things sometimes it can just be good but good and enjoyable and so i spent 28 years with one woman in my life and i definitely believe that if that connection is there you know it's actually much better than junk food in so many ways it's intimate it's close it's lovely yeah you know and it's enjoyable in every possible way.

10:12But that's not the common phenomena that we see here, right? I mean, most people sort of like within months or years at most sort of lose the spark. Isn't that normal nowadays? It is normal or let's put it this way. It's considered normal. And one of the reasons it's considered normal is because it's a big topic, right? And certainly one of the main things I deal with when working with couples, it's considered normal. But in an interesting way, even though it's considered normal, everybody thinks they can avoid it till it happens. And then they're very surprised that it happens. Not me. That happens to other normal humans.

10:55Yes, exactly. And then there's no education around that. So then there's two avenues people take. One is resignation, maybe a bit of upset followed by resignation or substitution, meaning people start cheating or other kinds of stuff happens, porn or, you know, whatever. They open the relationship. I mean, you name it. But to understand that that's a normal progression, the relationship, and that there's actually tools around that, and that it's an opportunity to deepen the engagement and not to just seek the thrill somewhere else. That's not being taught, right? And also, I mean, these are skills.

11:37There's some skills to know. There's some education around that. It's not that hard to fix, actually. The problem is that people tend to want to fix it at the point where they have so much resentment and anger and disappointment built up that other things need to be dealt with. The mechanics of keeping the spark alive are pretty straightforward and easy. that is a mega statement Michaela we're going to ask you to get to the stand now and explain what you just said in reality I think one of the biggest challenges in our world today is that people lose that spark sexually in general why do people break up either they chose wrong in the beginning but if they chose right it's eventually what mostly sexuality or it becomes stale You know, you love the person you're with totally from your heart sometimes, but without sex, it starts to go like, okay, as you rightly said, you know, some people will go cheating or whatever, and that triggers or it just becomes stale.

12:42You know, you go through the everyday feeling that you have a buddy next to you, not a lover, not an intimate partner. Right. And so when you say it's easy to fix, prove it. Okay. Well, it's very easy to fix. But like I said, the caveat is you have to know what you're doing from the beginning and not only attend to it when there's a lot of emotional resentment and baggage that has come from it, right? It's not that easy to fix, of course, once you've cheated and things of that. Then all other aspects of relational difficulty come in. But so I'll start, I'll give you a quick overview of how I work with it and how you can make sense of it.

13:28So one of the ways that you can make sense of it is that when you look at sexuality or meaning the attraction between two people, right? We sometimes call it erotic friction, which is a great term. I'll explain in a second. So you have erotic chemistry or erotic friction with someone. And that is based on difference, newness, difference, excitement, unfamiliarity. So that's one area, right? Erotic friction. The other area, and those two areas can get conflated all the time, is relationship. So relationship is built on resonance, on sameness, on similarity. so you and I don't know each other at all so how we would establish relationship is we find commonalities right if we would sit somewhere we'd probably discover that we know some people in common at least you know in the social media world or whatever right maybe we'd discover that we like the kind of music or we have a similar background or whatever right we read the same book recently.

14:42So we're going to connect as humans. And then, of course, this is also true when one connects romantically by finding commonality. And so the mark of a functioning long-term or medium range, however you want to say it, but the mark of a long-term, medium range, or even short-term, but very successful relationship is that you have common ideas, goals, political outlook, spiritual alignment, the way you look at money, children, no children, all of those things. The more aligned you are and the more commonality you have, the better your relationship. Interesting. So there is that conflict between them because one is saying let's be more similar but then by definition there are no newness anymore.

15:36Correct. So that's, but that's an easy fix. And I'll tell you why, but let me just talk about relationship for a moment because when you get this, everything makes total sense. And I don't know why Midas isn't known or taught as much. So a relationship problem is when you are not agreeing. So communication issues, you can't agree on where the kids are going to be raised. One is a vegetarian, one is a meat eater, whatever. So relationship issues have to do with not being on the same side or on the same part of the rope, so to speak. When you have relationship issues, you must see a relationship counselor.

16:22Right. Somebody who creates commonality again, or at least brokers a compromise or teaches you better communication. So you're once again on the same side of the argument. That's relational fixes. Attraction or erotic friction issues are not relationship issues. They have to do with sexual attraction. So like you said, rightly, the very things that make a relationship good are the things that make the sexual attraction go away. And so the normal course of a relationship, there's, of course, always, you know, exceptions. And I'm making a very black and white argument here just as a disclaimer. It's very subtle.

17:08But for the sake of the bigger argument, two people meet, doesn't matter if it's two men, two women, a man, a woman, doesn't matter, right? Two people meet, they like each other and they have strong spark. And now they start engaging sexually and it's really exciting. And at the same time, you know, the beginnings of a courtship, it's like you have sex and then you talk about things that you don't know about each other. Right. You have long discussions at night. There's so much to tell. It's really exciting. You don't know that person. So everything's fresh and new and the world is a sparkly, wonderful place.

17:44Right. So then what happens is now you decide you want to take this further. So what then happens is you start establishing we, right? Commonality. Now you have your favorite place you go to eat. You develop like a ritual for your Sunday. You start introducing your romantic partner to your friends. Then you do things together. Now, eventually the usual progression goes. Then you at some point move in together. and maybe you'll have, you know, get married or have children or form a business together. All of that happens. It's two people coming closer and closer and closer together, ideally without much drama in the relationship, right, if it's a good relationship.

18:27And suddenly one fine day you're sitting on the sofa in your matching sweatpants, eating out of a bowl of popcorn, watching your favorite TV show, right? That you've watched for five times before. Before. And it's wonderful, but nobody wants to hang off the rafters having great sex. Right. So because you are now, like you said, buddies. Anytime somebody says to me, I married my best friend, the next thing they're going to say is, and we no longer have sex. Right. Because that's what happens. You become buddies. You become partners. And that's good. Mind you. This is the important thing to know.

19:07So harmonious, positive, aligned relationship, it's hard to come by. You don't want to throw that away. But if you remember how it was in the beginning when you had the great, exciting sex, well, you were two different people. You haven't just folded in together. Not all your shit is in the same place. Not everything is a compromise, right? You don't get ready for your date night in the same bathroom, seeing each other brush the teeth and going out to dinner, talking about who feeds the dog next and all of that. That is the death of the erotic friction. Now, that's no rocket science. It's just something we forget.

19:53What made it interesting is we were different people. So this is where a quick fix comes in, or the easy fix, I should say, not quick fix, easy fix. If you have discipline around not giving yourself up, around maintaining individuality, around spending some time apart, around not always touching randomly without any purpose or even consciousness, around muddling up, bill paying, huggy, kissy stuff, the kids and your business, you can maintain the eroticism long-term. And I know people who've done it very successfully, but it does take discipline and it takes a shift in your mind where you go spending all your time together is not the best thing for the relationship.

20:48Always touching, not the best thing for the relationship. Discussing, you know, who pays which bill while at a romantic dinner, death of the sex. This is no revelation to anyone if you really think about it. When you first go on a date, what do you do? You go home, you dress yourself, you prepare yourself, you are excited, you've made a plan, you have things to talk about, you meet the other person somewhere, you don't fiddle on your phone while they're ordering their food. You're with them. You ask them questions. You have interesting things to say about yourself. You designate the time to connect.

21:30Nobody talks about that the dog got sick earlier or that little Johnny has to be picked up from kindergarten in the morning. You don't do that on a date. So why suddenly is it okay to do it with your significant other? Well, because we are meant to believe that a good relationship means a good sex life. And if your sex life is no longer great, the relationship is in question. So this is really interesting. This is almost like what we say about work and life, you know, some kind of a work-life balance. So when you're at work, you're at work. When you're back home, you're back home. I think what you're trying to say here is there is a sex relationship balance, right?

22:13Yes. And so there are parts of the couple's life where they're all about relationship and taking care of the kids and, and, and, and. But then they need to carve out times where they're completely separate from this. and engaged in that, again, sort of discovery, if you want. But then I have to say, and I hope that doesn't come as differentiating, but doesn't boredom come in? I mean, they say that men are designed, at least during the old years, to look for as many mates as possible because that's the way to procreate life, right? And so there is still that instinctive part of a man. I'm more and more a believer that there is that instinctive part in a woman as well, by the way, you know, that women also, you know, now that the world is different and they don't need to be protected by this, you know, male figure and so on, that this whole idea of maybe multiple partners and experiences and so on and so forth, that boredom, that variety, seeking variety, isn't that part of the equation?

23:19Absolutely. Right. And it is said, and like you said, other things are happening in current times, which is why we always have to be very careful about the grand statement. Right. But biologically speaking, when you just look at survival of species. Yeah. Men are programmed to have sex with as many young, shiny, viable, healthy women as they can get their hands on, because that's how their DNA gets, you know, projected forward in time. Women in the olden days, we're talking biologically, so I don't want to start some ideological war here. We're talking biologically. Very sensitive topics. Very sensitive topics, and rightly so.

24:01But biologically speaking, women had to find somebody who could provide enough safety, food, and shelter so that the offspring a woman had with that person could live to adult life. Right. Now, those are some tough choices to make when you're in the caves or so. Right. You have to find someone who has enough wherewithal to protect your children. And if you're pregnant and about to give birth, you do need that. Now, so those are the biological programming. So from a biological standpoint, women look for power, money, right, resource. Men look for beauty, youth and variety. That's always there. Right.

24:46But of course, the same way we could say, well, human beings are programmed to eat as much as they can, because that's what grants survival during a tough winter. And the more sweets, the better. Now, yes, that's true, but that's not an excuse to eat every bag of potato chips you can get your hands on, right? It's true. And when you know your biology, you can work with it. So certainly true that men get bored very easily with one woman. like a woman would get bored very easily with one pair of shoes. It's the exact same thing. Thanks for the analogy. Right. All right. Yeah. So women want multiplicity of things and beauty and sustenance, right?

25:30That's really pleasing to us, right? Why have one candle if you can have 30, right? That's part of the abundance of the fertility of the biology, right? And also there's other aspects to it. And men, of course, want multiplicity of flavors of women. So to tell a woman that for the rest of her life, she can only wear one outfit in one color with one pair of shoes is like a life sentence. To tell a man that he can only be with one woman for the rest of his life is also a life sentence. Now, but I'm saying all of this to say that that's only one slice of human existence, the biology. And we are a lot more than our biology, right?

26:14We're not just driven by our biology. Some people are, but most of us have other considerations, one of which is the emotional consideration, pair bonding, depth of engagement with each other, the joy of having children together and creating a life together. That's a whole other layer that follows completely different rules, right? When you want to long-term engage with another human in a life partnership, shiny, young, and sparkly isn't the thing necessarily. You need somebody who is also reliable and can pull their weight when the going gets tough and is a good mother and so on and so on and so on.

26:55So there's another layer, right? Then there's the societal layer, what's appropriate in your society so you're not getting pursued with pitchforks or burned at the stake or whatever, right? So there's all these layers and there's spiritual considerations. So when we look at, yes, men are bored easily and nowadays also women are bored easily because we are now afforded the same. That's why it's not good to say men and women. You could say the male aspect in every human and the female aspect. I love that. And that's a very different story than men and women, because we both have equal amounts of male and female, so to speak, meaning a part of us that wants to strive and succeed in business and get done and gets up on time and shows up on time.

27:45The parts of us that wants to be creative and emotional and enjoy foods and enjoy get togethers. Men have that, too. And women have the other part. So in the part that makes things happen in the world, there is multiplicity of other partners and stuff like that. In the part that engages with life as its fullest, there is depth and enjoyment of the bonding and stuff like that. And both can happen. So is it getting boring in the relationship just from a biology standpoint? Yes, absolutely. And anyone who's had a successful long-term relationship will tell you that they had huge peaks and valleys of attraction and sexual engagement.

28:28So in a long-term relationship, it's perfectly normal for that to go and then come back if it's a healthy relationship. But there's other layers that you can attend to. So what perhaps is no longer the sparkly new exciting thing now becomes a deeper exploration where your heart opens more, where you're actually having a depth of intimacy that can't be done in the second Tinder date or something like that. It might be really exciting and it might feed you for a moment, but you're not actually able to have that depth of openness. And then there's, of course, spiritual dimensions to it. How you perceive yourself with a partner in the sexual domain, in the realms of spirit or the universe or whatever people call it.

29:17Like meaning, how is your relationship serving a greater good in your children, in your community, in your political climate, whatever. So there's much, much bigger. I call that part of a spiritual, you know, because it's outside of yourself. So those are engagements and those are pursuits that can be endlessly exciting and fascinating and that take over from the thrill of the new flavor on one end. On the other end, and this is what you see because people intuit that and then they go at it sometimes in odd ways, right? When people start role playing or going to different hotels with different wigs or stuff like that, right?

30:01The background behind that is that in each human, there is different expressions or different flavors, right? And by the way, not only men like different flavors of women, like you can feel that like spices. Women like that too. That's why all women like firefighters or most women like firefighters. What did I see the other day that was just spectacular? Scottish men in kilts doing yoga, right? That's a flavor. Okay. Might not be a flavor I want every day. Is this a new category on porn? It actually wasn't porn. It was actually something on the BBC. Interestingly enough. Yeah, yeah. Huge. If you type in Scottish men's and killed doing yoga, you will find these two guys.

30:49They have an Instagram account and everything. It's spectacular. Now, that's, do I want that every day? No. for one I wouldn't want to have to deal with ironing the kilt if there's such a thing but women like flavors too right and so there is no reason why within a long-term intimate relationship you cannot give your partner also different flavors but that takes a bit of effort hold on this is a very very very important topic so let me close on the topic before So what I understood is you're saying there are so many layers to a relationship. One of them is the biological layer. And so instead of just chasing that biology, you might as well enjoy the other layers and make the biology work.

31:39And I have to say, I mean, I have this conversation quite a lot with my male friends, men friends, if you want, because the truth is, you know, I enjoyed that very, very long relationship with my ex-wife, who's still my best friend, who are very, very close. right and we spent 28 years together and we're always in love always passionate and so on and there is a joy to that there is an incredible joy to the project that you built together to the kids that you raised together to the spiritual connection exactly as you said and then that comes if you want with a little bit of a price which is no variety during that period that's the agreement right and because of that you make that relationship in itself the variety right but then you come to that concept of, you know, some women want a firefighter and, you know, I'm not a firefighter.