The No.1 Sex Expert: How To Have Great Sex EVERY Time! (And Fix Bad Sex) - Tracey Cox

24:12And then beyond that, we were able to kind of like rebuild it. Exactly. And we're still together today. Oh my God. So this is your girlfriend. Yeah. I have to ask her for permission to say this. I'll show her the clip and make sure she's comfortable with it. But, um, but that's extraordinary story. So we went from a point of I don't like having sex. I'm not coming so really, really bad situation to the best situation. I think one can imagine in that department, obviously communication was at the heart of it. Of course, the way is, yeah. And giving her space to, you know, and I give the credit to her because she figured that out.

24:43But that's what got me really into the subject matter because I've now got loads of friends that are in that situation. What I would say to your friends is if your partner doesn't want to have sex with you, I wonder whether how good the sex is because a lot of women say no. I'm presuming these straight couples, a lot of women say no to sex because the sex it's on offer is not that interesting to them. So for this, we need to talk about sex drives. Spontaneous desire versus responsive desire. If you heard of that. Yes. From reading your book. All right. So spontaneous desire is two thirds of men have spontaneous desire.

25:18And it's the desire that everybody has at the beginning. And by the way, if you want to know somebody's resting libido, you've got to wait about a year. You have to wait about a year to find out what their real libido is because it's always so artificially inflated at the start. But so spontaneous desire. Two thirds of men have this. It's the, you know, want to see, want to see, you know, seek sex, want sex, seek sex. They can go from people with spontaneous desire could be like scrolling through Instagram, somebody sexy walks past and it's like, wow, I'm instantly aroused for sex. They go from zero to a hundred very quickly.

25:51They seek out their mate once sex and they're off, right? Responsive desire means that you have no desire for sex or very little desire for sex. And till somebody is actually doing something to you sexually. So this is somebody who, you know, maybe is with their partner. Their partner wants to have sex. They're not even slightly interested but goes, okay, look, I'll give it a go. Then once start, things start happening if their partner is very good at stimulating them and they enjoy the stimulation. All of a sudden they're like, yeah, actually, yeah, I'm enjoying this. That's the warming up. That's the warming up, right?

26:26Now, 30 % of women have responsive desire. The rest of them are a mix between spontaneous and responsive. Most men, so you've got this situation where most men have spontaneous desire. Most women are responsive. Most men are very happy to go straight to genital sex. They don't need warming up the way they're in natomy works. For women, for prey isn't a luxury, it's a necessity. Because in order for sex to be comfortable, you need the vagina to tent. So it literally puffs up so that it can, you know, take a penis comfortably. So if you don't wait for that to happen and you go male style sex, go straight for penetration, she's not even off the starting blocks.

27:08Suddenly, your penetrating sex isn't great and then it's all over. So the men you could have, like, not even thinking about sex to having finished within 10 minutes. For women, they need time to warm up because their sex drive is responsive. So they're almost like blinkin' it's over and they haven't even got to 5 % desire. And this is the problem with couples. And that's with, I'm talking about a very basic couple who probably don't talk about sex and who aren't terribly sexually savvy. So I think, because I think people haven't understanding vague understanding that women need more for play. I mean, that's been drummed into men, hasn't it?

27:43But I think that what women don't understand is that women thing, you know, at the beginning it was great. It was all spontaneous. I desire was there. You know, when you get into a long -term relationship, desire doesn't tap you on the shoulder anymore. You have to create it. And women, I think, think, because that's spontaneous desire is gone and they don't feel like sex. It just doesn't come out of the blue unless they start having sex. They think, oh, that just must mean I don't want sex anymore. Well, something's wrong with me. I don't want sex anymore. You do want sex. It's just that you've got to be, have sexy things happening to you before you feel the desire for sex.

28:21And if people understood that, if women understood it better and stopped saying, oh, it's obviously means my sex drive's gone, no, it hasn't. It's there. You've just got to have great stimulation and great sex to get it back. And the other thing about women is that women, we have this thing about that women want tame and they want romance and stuff. That's not true. So much research now shows that women like erotic wild sex. I mean, they've done these experiments with women where they'll show them erotic videos and they'll wire up the genitals to measure genital response. So when you're aroused as a woman blood flows to the genital same as men and you lubricate.

28:59So they're watching all these videos, various sexy videos and they have to say, you know, full anything is disarousing you, no, because society says no, we're not supposed to be. And the genitals are like, you kidding? What are you thinking? This is fantastic. I'm absolutely say yes to this, say yes to this. So the, you know, there's such a big difference between what we taught and what we would like. So if your girlfriend's saying no to sex and you're in a long term relationship is because you're not giving her interesting enough sex, give her exciting erotic sex. Give her something like, actually, this is what we're going to do.

29:32I mean, look at 50 shades of grey. That got middle -aged women wanting sex, women who hadn't wanted sex for 20 years. I remember being on a holiday with my husband and we started talking to this couple and it was around the time when 50 shades came out. And she knew what I did and she said, she said, God, I hadn't really had great sex with my partner. It wasn't interesting sex, you know, for like 10 years. She said, I read the book. I'm sitting there two o 'clock in the morning. I'm looking down at my partner. I'm thinking, I really just want to wake him up and have sex with him. And she said, and I've never, and then she said, and I read the books.

30:06And suddenly I was back into this erotic sex with my husband. That I just forgotten, I've forgotten about. Like you think of sex as like, oh god, here we go kissing, bit fumbling, you know. And then the routine sex, but give people something interesting. Like all your friends, give her really interesting scenarios. Take her somewhere sexy, push her out of her comfort zones. Don't give her romance. Don't give her, you know, give her sexy sex. And then they'll be interested. Hmm. I'm trying to think of my friends like posing that and how uncomfortable they'd feel. Really? Like, baby, I want to drive to the country side and da da da da da.

30:42Because you know when you've been with someone and you've become that kind of sibling thing that you described earlier, they might almost look at you with a bit of horror. Horror, yeah. Yeah, you wouldn't go straight from not talking about sex to like, and we're going to go in a lockdown to a child tonight. And no, you have to have to have the conversation, you have to bite the bull and have the conversation because the thing about sexist relationships, if you haven't had sex for a year with your partner, it is very unlikely you're going to have sex again with your partner. Unless you confront it head on.

31:14If you just think, yeah, this will pass, this will pass. It will never pass. You're not going to suddenly go, oh my god, look at that. We haven't had sex for five years. Let's go to bed now. No, it's got to the awkward, awkward, awkward stage. So, I mean, 30 % of couples who have been together for two years or more don't have sex. Two years, not 10 years, two years, 30%. It is very easy to get out of the habit of sex. And once you're out of the habit of sex, the less often you do it. And then couples get into this thing where it's like, God, we haven't had sex for ages. But you know what, next we came, we'll have this marathon sex session.

31:49And that'll make up for it all. And then the marathon sex session is like, God, am I going to find time for that? Or you know, that's a bit daunting. And then of course you'd have to have sex for like six weeks to make up for the session. So it just becomes more and more insurmountable. So I always say to people, just have a little bite size bits of sex. You know, sex doesn't have to have the beginning and middle and end. Like, have a big snogging session. Have a thing where he gives you oral. You don't do anything, you know, give nothing back. Well, you give him oral or you know, you just do something sensual together.

32:21You have a bath together. That counts as sex. You know, people think sex has to have intercourse in there. It doesn't. It's the least favorite bit for them. And take the intercourse out. Start doing little bite size stuff to reconnect sexually. It's like a frog in a frying pan that old analogy of how slowly that you know the frog doesn't realize it's being heated in the frying pan until the wall is boiling and it's dead. Like it happens very, very gradually in relationships. Yes, it does. And then you get to a point where you go, how did it held it? We get here. And at that point, you have to have the talk.

32:49The talk. This is interesting because one of my friends was talking to him about it. And I was saying like, you've led it gradually stray so far and you're currently letting it. You're not addressing it. You need to stage your crisis. It's kind of the way I framed it to him, which is like, you need to say stop. Like this relationship has to stop. We have to have a conversation now because I'm at a point now where I'm either going to leave this relationship where I'm going to end up cheating or something. So we need to fix this together and it needs to feel important. Yeah. Where else it will be allowed to simmer.

33:18That's exactly right. And of course, what lots of people do in that scenario is they just turn to porn. Yeah. And they just satisfy themselves with porn. But that's not ideal, obviously. Why? But you, well, because it's, it's pretty soul -less sex, isn't it? Just watching porn and masturbating. I do, you know, there's, it's really funny about porn, actually, because I used to have a great relationship with porn. I used to say to people all the time, like, porn is your friend, watch it with your partner. It's great for, you know, if you've got a high sex drive and your partner doesn't, it, you know, you can satisfy yourself.

33:47It keeps your imagination, you know, peaked. You, you know, can satisfy that sense of mueness by watching porn. And now, porn's moved into a really ugly stage with, you know, there's such a concentration on aggressive acts like spitting choking, choking is terrible. Slapping across the face, it's become very much like that. And young men are growing up to think that this is what a normal sex session is like. This is normal real -life sex. It is not porn is nothing like real -life sex. And then women look at it and go, gosh, right, okay, that's obviously what's expected of me. This is what I have to do.

34:25And it's, it's moving into a very nasty direction. They say, unmet expectations equal unhappiness. So by setting expectations up here is like, we're going to do this for an hour. And I'm going to tie you up and spit on you and choke you. And you're going to make this sound and you're going to scream. And you're going to tell me, I'm this and you're going to say that I'm your fight, whatever. The first thing it might be, then for those unmet expectations equals unhappiness in the bedroom. You go, well, you know, I'm going to have to go looking for something else. Exactly. And that's what young men do.

34:50You could say, think that's what sex is going to be about. It's not. So then they keep looking for the girls who will give them that. And then girls very quickly figure out, okay, if I want to be liked, I have to do that. I've just done a big thing on choking. And I interviewed all these young girls and it was horrifying. They've been, I mean, between 58 % of college students, between the age of, you know, like, and all been choked. I think 30 % of them had been asked. And I'm not talking about, you know, symbolic choking of just putting a hand on the throat, which even that freaks me out. But I'm talking about, you know, cutting off wind supply.

35:25There was one girl who told me she was 21. She'd gone out with this guy. He seemed really nice. He started choking her. She said, no, she passed out. She woke up next to this guy who was asleep. He then said to, and then she got herself out of there and was like, oh my God, you know, terrified. He texted her the next day and said, oh my God, babe, this sex was awesome. Let's meet up again. And she was, she was just like, how could you possibly think that that was good? And that worries me a lot. I think that that, I mean, I said, I think it's moving in a great way in lots of ways, particularly for young women, except for things like that.

36:02I think that is terrible. So you know, you don't want to be satisfying yourself with porn. But you have to have the conversation if sex is now out of your marriage. You cannot just let it go and be the elephant in the ring because exactly what you said is going to happen. You can leave or you're going to cheat. So you sit down with your partner and you say, listen, we really need to have discussion about this. I love you desperately. But I miss our sex. I really, we used to have lovely sex. I love having sex with you. You're really desirable. It's, you know, and I, can we talk about why this isn't happening anymore?

36:35Are you having the sort of, you know, is it that the sex that we're having isn't doing it for you? What can I do to make you, you know, want to have sex more often with me? Because I would really love to have sex with you more often. Can we have a discussion about this? Okay. I've got friends that have tried that. And what happened? The partner doesn't necessarily know. It's a similar situation to what I've got the one and the situation I described that I was in where my partner turned around and said something. Because they might not have the information themselves. They go, well, I just don't like having it.

37:03And they might not know that the, you know, the responsive sex language that you talked about. And they might not know what's going on with. I always see the partner might not know why she doesn't have sex. Why she doesn't like having sex? And then you kind of hit a wall, don't you? Well, that's when you educate yourself. That's when you give, really a few of my books to give you a bit of education. But I mean, okay, so the partner who wants sex is generally more driven. So maybe they could actually educate themselves and say, you know, I've been reading up about this perhaps. It might be because of this.

37:32Can we try having sex this way? But it's all about breaching the topic. And then, I mean, depending on the reaction, I mean, I know I've, you know, encouraged some people to have this talk. And then they've got an answer, which is just startling. Well, they'll say, I don't want to have sex anymore. I'm not interested in solving this. So that's it. So you just have to put up with it. That's what I, that's basically what I got. If somebody says that to you and they really, and you've tried on several occasions and you, I think that is grounds for walking out myself. And I did. Yeah. Yeah. And a miracle seems to be.

38:08Because then people did some soul. So sometimes maybe you walk out and then the person thinks, well, gosh, actually, that's not very fair. Because monogamy is all about, you know, I pledge to only have sex with one person. Well, if that person withdraws sex, then where are you left apart from having solo sex and, you know, or you have an agreement, okay, well, if you won't have sex with me, then what are my options? My options are to satisfy myself, to cheat. You happy for me to seek the sex elsewhere. And lots of times people will say, yeah, actually, I am. I don't want to know about it. I don't want it to be in our friendship group.

38:44And we're going to have to have rules about this. But, you know, some women are more than happy with that to happen. Or some men are more than happy for that to happen. It's not just a female thing here. Men go off sex as well. On this point of porn as well, there was, I read something recently about the shame that it's causing in people. Like, I think the study that I read, and I'm. Yeah, I think I read that too. About 40 % of men that use that masturbate to porn report to feeling a sense of shame. And then when we think about this sort of macro where we are in sex as a society right now, there is a decline of sex, isn't that going on?

39:17Absolutely. Which is quite concerning. Yeah, there is a sex recession. And that's very much because, I mean, basically, there wasn't a sex recession before social media streaming phones. It's all to do with that. We have too much to do. We basically just go off sex because we have other things to entertain us. Preal that 1034 on a Saturday night, most couples were having sex. There was nothing else to do. That was it. We just stood two. You know, there's that going on. So we're too busy. We've got too many other things on our plate. That's the main problem with long -term couples. Then you have, like, I think less face -to -face communication it makes, which makes people quite nervous.

39:55If you haven't had sex before, and you're dealing mainly with, you know, face -time calls, you know, video calls, which is what lots of young people are, when you're face -to -face, they get very nervous. They don't know anything about body language. They don't know how to connect. And sex becomes scary in Japan. There's something like 30 percent, no higher. I think more like 45 percent of people get to the age of in their 30s and their virgins. They've never even had a sexual encounter. And they just, and if you don't give your body sex, your body doesn't want sex. So they could quite happily go through life completely sexless.

40:33That's what's going to end up happening with sex. We are becoming less and less and less. And, you know, the more we go into virtual worlds, the more, I mean, the amount of people who rely on porn for sex, who can't even be bothered going out and finding a partner, because it's all too difficult. I mean, we're, it's becoming less and less about the intimacy and more and more about just the getting off part. We're now in an AI world as well. Yes. Terrifying. Which is very interesting. Yes. Because you're now, you know, we've heard about sex dolls and stuff like that over the years. But a sex doll that can speak to you with such depth and reason and apparent emotional nuance and understanding is really, really scary.

41:11You can think, I was thinking about, thinking about this, thinking about all the different ways that AI is going to disrupt us as like the social fabric of society. One of the really clear ways that was you can now have a sex doll in your house that speaks to you, that comforts you, that understands your problems, understands what you're going through and can give you unbelievable advice, will never shout at you, will never criticize you, and will please you in a personalized way. It will learn how to please you. Sounds great. Fantastic. Let's just swap our partners for that. I've heard you've heard that.

41:43But that is where we're right there. We're on the doorstep of that world. And do you know what, though? Think about all the lonely people. Think about all the lonely people that can now have a companion. But is it a companion like that? Yes, of course it is. If you're somebody you can't find a companion in real life or you're lonely, I mean, it's better than dog, isn't it? I mean, I think that's got some really nice applications to it. But it's also got some dire applications to it. Because then, you know, ultimately we'll end up with a, with no population movie because no one will be having sex with a real person.

42:15So I think you think you can see the short term, oh well, you know, Dave's going to be slightly more less lonely, potentially. Yeah, yeah. But if we go up that exponential curve of improvement, we get to a point where this thing is walking, it's talking. It is making your breakfast, your dinner, your whatever, then it's satisfying you on demand. And then you look over at a human and you go, they're going to be more interested in this out there. That's what I'm saying. They're going to be more interesting. They're going to be better in every way. No, I think you mean to be more interesting, surely.

42:48Do you think? Do you want like somebody like it? It's like a yes person. I don't want a yes person in my life. But do people think they do? Yeah. People, I think people will choose the short term without thinking about the long term of like connection, companionship over time and challenge, different and solving problems. You know, I think the average person, if they could be faced with if they were to draw their perfect partner, they wouldn't say, I want difficulty and challenge and sometimes to walk out arguments and to be interrupted when the football's on. Yeah, you're not going to put that in there.

43:21But then I think surely over time, I don't know. I do worry about AI with humans and I don't share, you know, like some people present the argument. Like, would be free to do all these amazing esoteric things. We won't. We'll just sit there and look at social media and get fat and drink and sit in our rooms watching porn. That's what we'll do. Yeah, because we choose the like short term dopamine over the long term. Yeah, instant gratification. Gosh, that is scary. That's going to be a huge industry. Yeah. I mean, it already is a big industry. It already is, yeah. But these living AI sex dolls will be a huge industry.

43:51I don't think they're quite perfected the robot bit, though, have they? So there's a couple of things happening in tandem. I mean, Elon Musk is working on his own robots at Tesla. We have Boston robotics, I believe they're called who have been working on robots for a long time. But it's going to be very quickly as all exponential curves do. So now we've got the kind of machine learning modeling MLM, AGI, they call it artificial general intelligence stuff moving quickly. The robotics side, I think, is going to gain pace because now there's a greater demand. But it's really, really, it's one of the things I did you see that film blade back in the day?

44:26No. It's all now in the real, real girl. Do you remember that? That was about a guy who had a sex doll. Oh, really? And the whole village sort of accepted it. And then when he didn't need Harry, got a real person at the end. But now I didn't see Blade. There's a scene in this film called Blade where he puts on a headset. And it's set, I mean, it was 20 years ago, but it was set in the future. It puts the headset on and this headset, you know, is exactly that. It's an AI that basically gets him off and he has the time of his life. And actually, his partner sits opposite him. And they both put the headset on.

44:56And they... Yeah, I actually had to think I did this. Gosh, yeah. It's a scary world. But that's what we'll be doing. We will be doing that. I mean, we're kind of going that way already with porn. And we talked about this sort of macro decline in sex. Are you hopeful that we can turn that around? Yes. And I have great help, hope, with the young generation of women. I think this is the first generation of women who really have probably the least sexual hangout. And I think that, I mean, young women are much more adventurous than young men. It's sort of going in a weird direction, I think, that way.

45:36And all the young women that I'm in contact with, I'm talking about young women in their 20s, early 30s. We know that young women are more bicarious than men. We know that young women are more interested in three sims with two women than men are. We know that young women are more interested in going to a sex club than men are. We know that young women are more interested in polyamory. And they don't want several love relationships. They want the love for the relationship. And then they want to be able to have sex with men on the side. It's not men thinking like this. This is women thinking like this.

46:10And I think that it's going to make for more interesting relationships. And because the whole women are overturning everything, like the motivation for affairs now has completely reversed. So men use to have affairs for sex. Now most men, if they're in a good relationship, will satisfy that with porn. Right? Most men. Now men have affairs for love and affection. Women have affairs, they use to have affairs for love, that they weren't getting from their partner. Now they have affairs for erotic sex. Sex where they're not looking after their partner, they can be selfish. They don't have to care about whether they hurt his feelings or say, don't do it that way.

46:50They're not going to care about whether Steven doesn't like it. If he's being instructed, it's like, do that, do this. They want that sort of sex, right? And that's why they're having affairs. So I feel like my hope is that women are going to take the charge and go forward. And we're going to end up with sex that's more interesting, sex that's less doing everything to please a man. More equal. You know, this is what I need. This is what I want. This is what you need. This is what you want. Let's work out the best way to do that together. Not where, you know, because so many women still now, that's the thing that does disappoint me, is still have sex to please men, still pretend to have orgasms during penetrative sex, because society's brainwashed.

47:31We have known that women don't orgasm basically through penetrative sex since Karma Sutra, which was written in the third to fifth century. And yet most men will go, yeah, yeah, I've heard about that. It hasn't happened to me. I've just been really lucky for all my girlfriends, you know, I mean, it's just like they're faking. They're faking because the girl before faked and they feel they have to fake. And, you know, every depiction of sex is that, you know, everybody has this mutual orgasm, simultaneous orgasm together. And that's just how sex is. Well, it's not like that. It's totally not like that at all.

48:09Speaking of young women, in your book, Great Sex Dance at 50, one of the things we talk about is the issue of sort of sexual confidence and sexual self -esteem. Talk about that in the opening chapter of the book. And I found it really compelling that really interesting that women view themselves differently when they look in the mirror, which has a libido impact. Body image is terrible. They've just done a study which looked at two decades, 20 years of studies. So they just study on all the studies on body image. And it turns out that it impacts every single area of sex, regularity of sex, enjoyment of sex, arousal, desire, orgasm.

48:51And it makes sense that if you don't like your body, you're not going to want anyone to look at it or touch it. It is the biggest problem with women today and their sex lives. Is that often, you know, this is the other thing with your friends. You know, have they just had babies? Has their body changed? You know, they're not feeling so desirable. You know, desire, I think, feeling desired by your partner is much more important to women than, you know, anything else. So if your partner looks at you, you know, like, God, you're so hot, you're so sexy, that is the biggest turn on of all. And if your feeling not great about yourself and your mindset is so much down on yourself that you think, I don't even, how could he possibly look at me and think that I'm attractive?

49:31Then you'll never feel that your partner converts you to death, but you're never going to feel it because your brain's just gone, nope, I am not sexually attractive anymore. So that is a real problem. It's a real problem. And do you know what this solution is for that? It's not to go off and get a face lift or get your hair done or lose weight or go to the gym more. Though actually going to the gym more is one exercise is really good for your sex drive and for your self -esteem. But the other thing is that Cure's body image is actually to have sex more. If you have sex more often and your partner enjoys it, your brain goes on a subconscious level, well, you know what, it can't be that bad because he's having sex with me or she's having sex with me, whoever's having sex with you, they're enjoying it.

50:18And so your brain starts to make sense of it all and go, okay, right, you know, this is, I'm obviously not as undesirable as I think and it starts to sort of become better and more able to be dealt with. So the more you have sex, the better because it gives you confidence. And sexually confident women, women who think they're good in bed, so increase your skills as well. If you're worried that you're not a great lover, read up on it, buy some of the books, go online, look up technique. You know, because technique is very important. And the better lover you think you are, the less you worry about what you look like in bed.

50:50We all know that, sexually confident women win all the time. And sexually confident women put on weight the same way other people do is they get on in life, etc, etc. You know, their bodies are different after pregnancy, but they don't focus on their, they're like, hey, I'm a brilliant lover. Who cares? You know, he's not looking at that. He's just thinking how fantastic I am. So it's more about increased your confidence as a lover, exercise more. And I mean, then the obvious, take yourself or social media, stop comparing yourself to other people, all that sort of stuff, but it's difficult. It's very difficult.

51:22And I think men suffer from this as well. That's so unbelievably true, especially the part that it also relates to men, because I've got multiple accounts from female friends of mine that are in a heterosexual relationship that have told me they're part and they won't have sex with them with his top off or with the lights on. And also the point there about how you solve that body confidence issue, that confidence comes from the evidence you get from doing the thing. Yeah. And also, if you are worried about your body, when you're having sex, close your eyes, like close your eyes and think about what you're feeling.

51:57It's about what you're feeling, not like how you're looking, because if it's stressing you out and you're looking at thinking, oh my god, he's looking at my thighs, he's looking at this, just close your eyes and go into yourself or become more active. That's the other way to overcome body issues, is if you're really active in bed and you're like looking at your partner and you're talking dirty and you're making lots of eye contact that way, anything to sort of take yourself out of yourself is good. You either go into yourself and focus on what you're feeling rather than what you're looking like or you sort of become way more active.

52:27That also works. Three things that boost sexual self -esteem easily in your book. Initiate sex to feel more powerful. Yes, absolutely. Initiation is such a big thing on so many levels. And if you don't ever initiate sex with your partner, you're essentially saying, I don't actually enjoy having sex with you. I'm only having sex with you because you've asked me to have sex with you. And people argue about that. It's like, well, he's sex drives way bigger or higher and lots of stuff. It doesn't matter. You really need to have a thing where, you know, if your partner's got a much bigger sex drive than you, you need to say some, look, okay, it's really sexy being the person who's the sexy one in the relationship.

53:06That's why, you know, it's great. It's nice to be that person. But I want to be the sexy one in the relationship. So hold off an initiating for a while and give me a chance to initiate so that I can feel more powerful. And it's such a great dynamic, that power dynamic in, you know, relationships is really important that you have to be sometimes the dominant person. You have to be the submissive person. And if you squat around, it makes for a much more interesting sex life. But if you don't initiate sex, I mean, it's a real cop out to never initiate sex. I really do think so. And when women do it, who don't often initiate sex, what happens is that they'll be so subtle that the man, Mrs.

53:45Point, completely is like, well, I gave him this really sexy kiss and it was like, yeah, and anything else. And he also went with that and he didn't even, you know, and now I'm not going to do that again. It's like, oh, for God's sake, just be really obvious about it. Be really obvious about it. And going back to initiation, just be aware that how you initiate sex will influence whether or not your partner says, yes. So if you initiate sex the wrong way, your partner might say no to sex because you just approach it all the wrong way. Whereas if you approach your partner that you know has got a responsive sex drive by talking, cuddling, connecting, whatever she wants could be, you know, she might want you to initiate sex like that.

54:32But, you know, and getting her in the mood, the way she wants to be in the mood, not the way you would like her to get in the mood, but the way she wants to be in the mood, she'll probably say yes to sex. So a lot of people saying no to sex isn't that they don't want sex. They're just being approached the wrong way and they're not being warmed up the right way. So if you can solve those two basic things, it can change everything. If you'll say there's something really fundamental here that we assume sex will take care of itself. Oh my god, writing all those sex books, when I go to a party, people either want to sit next to me or they go as far away from me as they possibly can because they're terrified.

55:10And the people who say to me, oh god, but I don't need a sex book. I'm like, yes, you do. You're the person that needs a sex book. I've written 17 of them and I'm still learning about sex. There is so much to learn about sex. How can you think you possibly know everything about sex without ever educating yourself? And it's changing. Of course it is, but people who think that they're born great lovers, they don't, you know, I mean, the female response system is complicated. Who knew what a cliturist was back in the day, you know, like they're difficult to stimulate, actually, they're not that difficult.

55:41You just give it a rebration and then they're fine, but, you know, it's not easy being a great lover. And can I just say one more thing about orgasms is we worry too much about orgasms and how we get them. There is no right way to have an orgasm because everyone thinks the right way to have an orgasm is during intercourse with your partner and preferably them climaxing at the same time. Simultaneous orgasms hardly ever happen for a start. They're always faked. So the easiest way to give a woman an orgasm being great women can be very easy orgasmic if you use the right finger technique, if you give her the right oral sex technique.

56:17But the thing that is most expert at stimulating the cliturist is vibration. Most women can have an orgasm within three minutes with a vibrator. So we have this big orgasm gap problem where men are having lots of orgasms during partner sex, women aren't having very many orgasms during partner sex because they don't understand each other very well because sometimes people just can't relax with another person there, right? So the solution is to put your hand in the bedside drawer and bring out a vibrator and she would have an orgasm every single time the same way you have an orgasm every single time.

56:52Why don't we all just do this? It's the easiest solution in the world. But we don't. Young men and better at it. They're often say, oh, you know, and she'll say, if women are honest and they'll say, look, you know, that was fantastic, but I can't miss the moment a bit, which you can as a woman can I just use my vibrator or can you use the vibrator on me sorted? But we have this like, that's a cheating orgasm gap problem. Yeah, or that it takes something away from what's the problem? It's the solution. But it's a solution. I'm not saying have all your orgasms like that, but just maybe now and then have the vibrator in the bed.

57:25And why is it inferior? If you can have all that intimacy, if you've had the oral sex, you've had the intercourse, you've thoroughly enjoyed it, but it just doesn't give you that tip over. What I mean by that question about this fundamental belief, that kind of sex is supposed to take care of itself. And I think that's why we don't talk about it enough. We don't research about it enough. We don't try to put invest in making it new and exciting and different. And all the things you said is because we just just shoot because at the start, it kind of takes care of itself doesn't it? Of course it does.

57:55Yeah. First couple of months. And then all the sex hormones are there driving us driving us without even us having to think about it. And then we don't think about sex or something you've got to work on and talk about and invest in and buy stuff for and you know, change all the time I've already got a job. You know, I don't. Well, unfortunately, that's what you have to do if you want a good sex life. This is what you do. And the thing is, it makes me laugh because we put effort into every other thing. You don't, I eat the same meal every single night. You find it by a good cookbook and look up recipes and experiment with different things.

58:27And no one goes all that's terrible, that's so much effort. I don't have to do that. I want to know how to cook a three course called on blow meal without even looking at a cookbook. Well, in the movies, they never do. There's no movie where they sit and talk about sex. What did you like? I could you like to want to do that. In movies, they come in the door and they pick them up and they put their hands back and they rip the dress off. Oh, you know, and then do you know what I am the worst person to watch TV with because I shout at the television. Honestly, there was a thing called Dr. Foster.

58:52She thought, so around Jones was in it. And there was this couple. They'd been together 10 years. They woke up on a Sunday morning, right? Sunday morning to wake up. She's a course full makeup, laundry, everything. And next minute, he's like thrown her against the wall, they're having sex standing up and you know, like, oh, I thought, oh, God, sake. This is a couple of 10 years in. It is not happening like that. And then even me who knows that this doesn't happen. This is not the norm. I'm like a little bit like and I always tend to pull my mouth and I say, you realize that's not true. You realize that this is not a real and he's sort of like sitting there and yep, yep, I do know.

59:32Like cover your eyes. Don't have unreal expectations. Don't think you're missing out on this. And because it's sad because people try and they think that that hot sex at the beginning should last a lifetime. And when it goes and you think the next person you meet is this is going to last forever. This is this one's going to last forever. And then of course it dies down and dies down and dies down. You're like, damn it. I've got the wrong person. You haven't got the wrong person. It's because all the sex and love hormones have stopped working. That's the only way to keep having sex. Like that. The only way to keep having that beginning sex over and over is to swap partners constantly, constantly swap partners.

1:00:09And you can have that beginning bit over and over again. It is impossible to have the type of sex you have at the start when you're fueled by all these chemicals at the end of a relationship or during a relationship. Anything over two years, it's fair. You can have satisfying sex, great sex, exciting sex, but it's not fueled by the same hormones. So you cannot recreate that. And if people knew that no matter what person you end up with, then they would stop leaving perfectly good relationships in search of something that's not ever going to be found. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead.

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1:01:22Over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to netsuite .com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. That's netsuite .com slash Bartlett. But I've talked in this conversation as if sexless relationships are unhappy relationships. Yes. But that is not true, is it? No, it's not true. You can often have, I mean, people do instantly think if they're not having sex on my guard, you know, divorce is coming soon. No, I mean, you can get sex isn't the be all an end all for everybody.

1:01:54Lots of people are very low sexual libido. If you've got two people who have low sex drives, they have a lot of sex at the beginning or maybe not even that much. And then all of a sudden it fades off. They're perfectly happy. Some people are happy having, you know, one great session every six months. That's enough for them to keep some perfectly satisfied. So long as both of you are like that. But what doesn't work is if one of you is highly sex driven in the beginning, you know, we all worry about compatibility. Please match, you know, match up with somebody who has the same sex drivers you and I know it's artificially inflated at the beginning, but don't commit to anything until you're six months in eight months in a year and don't marry anyone under that because you don't know what their sex drive is.

1:02:36Wait until after a year and then you see and it's very difficult if you've got a massively higher sex drive and your other one doesn't, but you can be perfectly happy in sexist relationships. So long as both of you are happy with that. And also, you know, they used to define a sexist relationship as couples who had sex 10 times a year. Now, plenty of couples, especially couples over 50 only have sex 10 times a year and they were like indignant to be described as sexless. So now they've changed it to a sexist relationship is one where sex hasn't happened in a year and that's a low sex relationship to be 10 times a year.

1:03:13But it's all dependent on where you're at in life. Like if you if you've just had babies and they're under two, you're not going to be having a lot of sex. If you're 18, you just got together, you're going to be having an awful lot of sex. You know, if you're part, if you've just gone through menopause or perimenopause and everything's gone to hell, you're not going to be having sex at that period of time. So you can't there is no one size fits all things. So find your normal is what I would say. And if you're normal is no sex. So long as you have a conversation about it, that's fine. But you what you cannot do is stop sex and not talk about it.

1:03:47That is really, really dangerous. You've got to have some kind of discussion, even if that's getting into bed one night and one of you says, we don't have sex much anymore. Do you doesn't bother you? No, it doesn't really bother me. Good. Even if it's that. But you do need and you need to have lots of affection, lots of you need to make up for that. Don't stop touching physically because when sex stops, people often stop touching each other because they're worried that that's going to lead to sex and that's going to be awkward. So keep up the effect. That's why you've got to have the chat. If you don't have the chat, affection stops.

1:04:20And if affection and sex stops, then you are in trouble. If you've got lots of affection, you're okay. So long as both of you are happy. Interesting. But you're not going to be happy if one person doesn't want sex to stop and the other one does. That doesn't make for a happy relationship at all. And in that situation, is it right to then just leave? No, you have the chat. And the chat is what they say in the chat. No, I want more sex. It's harder one is more sex than what you do. Well, then you look at exactly you sort of go through process. So you have the chat. You talk about you make sure the sex that's on offer is good sex for the person who doesn't want to.

1:04:56You look at anything around it like, you know, have they got any childhood issues that need dealing with one of their, you know, why don't do they not want to want if they don't want to want. Then you need to look at what happened, you know, sexual trauma. There's, I mean, if the person that doesn't want to have sex with you is willing to look at ways to become more sexual stay, of course stay. You know, there's always hope. Yes, there's tons of stuff you can do. You know, you can you can take strip sex right back to basics where you don't have penetrated sex for a year. You might do the sense a focus program, which is all about touching each other without sexual intent.

1:05:30And it might be that you have to go almost like you've got to learn how to have sex all over again. If your partner's willing to try anything's possible, definitely don't walk out. But if your partner says, I don't want to have sex with you and I have no interest in having sex. I've got no interest in trying to, you know, get back my desire. And you're not allowed to have sex either. You're not allowed to seek it anywhere else or, you know, part from running off to the office in masturbating to pour. Well, what choice have you got? I mean, some people stay. Some people stay in that scenario because the love is very strong.

1:06:04And they've got kids or whatever. But I think that's an incredibly selfish thing to say to a partner. Chapter nine of your bucket says that 33 % of couples said that they rarely or never had had sex. And one quarter of those rated themselves as being extremely happy. That's right. So something like 75 % of people who are denied sex nearly all of the time stay if the love is strong. People choose love over sex. And of course they do because how often are you having sex even if you're having sex a lot, even if you're having sex once a day, twice a day, it's still only really for half an hour each time.

1:06:40So, you know, in the proportion of the time you spend together, you're the love bits more important than the sex bit. Definitely is. Unless the sex bit is really bad and then it tends to poison the rest of the relationship. Do you do any sort of therapy for couples? The couples ever come to you? No. Do individuals come to you for advice and a professional context to get therapy? No, I do friends and friends and friends and stuff like that. I don't because I lack the skills to disassociate. Oh, yeah. This is why I never became a therapist because I'm not very good at. There are ways to solve a problem where you can stand outside the problem or you stand right in the middle of it all and take it all on.

1:07:18And I'm the stand in the middle person. And I wouldn't ever be at a, I would have no boundaries. They'd be calling me day and night so no, I can't do that. What are the most common questions that people ask you about sex? And I'd like the ones that we don't talk about enough. So, you know, I don't know whether it's erectile dysfunction or whether it's... Oh my God, erectile dysfunction for men is women don't, I appreciate how having not being able to get an erection or, you know, is the biggest psychological catastrophe men experience. We can't fake it. No, no. Venus envy, who wants a penis? I certainly don't want a penis.

1:07:57It's all out there to see. We can fake everything. But it's really difficult for men. And I think men, I mean, we have a problem with Viagra, by the way. Viagra is a big problem because young men take Viagra because they want to have the biggest hardest erections ever. And they're worried about their so performance, you know, they have so much performance anxiety because they're watching too much porn and they think that that's real. So, they take Viagra because they think just this once, you know, I'll be... I'll just win as first time I sleep with her, I want to be really hard. And then of course, you know, eventually you stop it or try to and your girlfriend says, oh, this isn't, you know, you're not as hard as you normally are and suddenly you're back on this cycle.

1:08:33And then young women expect that that is a normal erection, which is not anyone who's looked at a Viagra driven erection and a normal erection, they're completely different. And then on the other end of it, you've got older couples who, you know, we've got two problems with when you get over 50 or 60, men have erectile dysfunction and women have, you know, drive vaginas and very, you know, the vagina basically atrophies. So, they've solved it for men, great, take this pill and suddenly you're like, you were 18 again, but you're still with this vagina that's not 18, where it's going to hurt like hell.

1:09:08And then the man who suddenly got the swinging penis is like, well, what am I supposed to do with this? And then he goes off in cheats with somebody because he's so happy to have this, this big rock hard erection again. Is there a relationship between age and infidelity? I'm not sure about that. I would say... As in men cheating later, more likely to cheat later in life or... I know they're middle -aged people cheat a lot because that's when you've... You've got choices. Yeah, you've got choices, you're traveling, you've got money, it's probably easy to get away with, you've had the kids, you know, you've started to take everything for granted.

1:09:42Things like that make people cheat. It's opportunity, temptation and you're moral code. It's not to do with love, it is to do with respect then. Red flags in relationships. The most compatible couples have compatible life goals. Something I've heard you say before. Yes. I think that is really important because it is all about, it's timing is so important. And life goals, say you've got the perfect relationship now, your girlfriend's great. Say suddenly you decided, right, I want to go off to Africa and work with pigmies for five years. This is my life goal. What she's supposed to do. Of course, it's important to have the same goals.

1:10:22If you've got one person who wants adventure and you like to be hiking every weekend and, you know, camping, my dear, hell, they're not going to match well with somebody like me who wants to be in a nice hotel and, you know, having lots of cocktails. I don't mind the old camping hiking, but you know what I mean? You've got to have, you've got to be compatible. There's some stereotypes that still sort of exist in linger around sex and men and women being, you know, one of the ones that I was reading about in chapter six of your book is, this study show it's not true. Men have a higher sex drive than women.

1:10:53Women have a different design for sex, which you talked about. Studies also show it's not true that monogamy is harder for men than it is for women. We tend to think that men are the ones that cheat, which is never made sense because if we just pretend the world for a second was, do the heterosexual equation every time a man is having sex in a heterosexual world. So as a woman. So, you know, the numbers don't quite add up it. One would assert just from the looking at the numbers that it's got to be quite close to like 50, 50 to some degree. Yeah, of course. And also, like if you look at the stats on who's happiest, the happiest people are single women and married men.

1:11:27The other two happiest groups of people always single women and married men are the happiest. I've been the happiest groups of people, like not married women, married women, like end up doing all the jobs and you know married women aren't happier than single women, single women happier than married women. And married men are really happy because they get everything done for them basically. What role did the kids play in this whole equation? Oh my God. Kids, I think really make the love part better. I suppose because you've created that thing, but they're terrible for sex. Terrible for sex. I mean, the minute the kids come along, you can kiss goodbye for sex for five years really.

1:12:05Really? And people freak about it and they're like, it's never going to come back and it will come back. Of course it will. But you know, all your energy is going to children. So I think if you're going to have kids, you've got to accept that your sex life is going to take a backseat for a long, long time. Don't panic about it. Keep having little sexual connections that aren't necessarily including intercourse, little bite size pieces of sex and you'll be fine. But don't kid yourself that it's not going to change your sex life because it will. Boy, will it. Some people think that having kids will save the relationship.

1:12:33Oh God, no. It's so stressful. I do not understand this. Every time I see somebody with a child, you only have to hang around children for about two seconds to realise how stressful they are. If you've already got problems with your relationship and suddenly you're going to sleep deprived yourself, you're going to have somebody dependent on you 24 hours a day. How is this going to make you more happier with your husband? It doesn't even make sense to me. It might stop people leaving because of obligation. But who wants to be with somebody out of obligation? You said something that in your work that a neuroscientist told me in this podcast, which is that after the first year non -parents are generally happier over time than parents.

1:13:17It's kind of a controversial idea. It is a controversial idea. But I mean, there's a trade -off with kids. There's such a trade -off. I think there's a step -parent. My husband has a daughter. And when we're going through hustles with Sophia, which she's a little darling but also can be a little devil, let me tell you, he can sleep. I mean, sorry, I can sleep. Mars can't sleep. And I lie there and I think, gosh, if I had given birth to Sophia, if she'd been, you know, I wouldn't be able to sleep. There's no way that I'd be able to sleep. It's you are knowing that you're going to be worrying for the rest of your life once you have a kid.

1:13:55It's such a big responsibility. And when you have that responsibility, it means you're not going to be able to do, you're not selfless. You become selfless then, don't you? You can't be selfish and have a good week, can you be a really bad parent? But it's different, isn't it? It's really different. I'm sure, but then parents say, well, you're the one that's missed out because you don't have this incredible. And I have such a good relationship with my mom and my dad and us three kids are all milling around. They're like 87 and 89. I'm thinking, no one's going to do that for me. Who's going to do that for me?

1:14:26How to pay for it? So there is that. When I hear that, I do wonder if it's the term happiness is the confusing thing because a parent might say it's given me such a sense of purpose or meaning. Yeah, of course. If you ask me in a survey on a Tuesday how I'm feeling after staying up till fucking 2 a .m. because this kid was screaming, I'm probably more likely to report it any given moment to being less happy. But if you zoom out, there's more meaning in purpose. One might say that to try and provide the counter argument. I mean, how many people who say, what's the best that you've ever done? They say having children.

1:14:54Yeah. Everybody says that. And they can't all be lying. No one says a promotion at work or whatever else they say. No, they don't. So it must be, you know, me not everybody says that. But I do know mothers who say, God, you know what? If I look back, maybe I wouldn't have done this. But they're very brave and they told childless women that they never tell a woman with a child. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Women's libido, I was reading in in chapter 6, but women's libido tends to drop as they age, whereas men's testos, it seems to remain fairly stable throughout the relationship. Stable, but then they have the women struggle with the drop of, because medicals of all the drop of testosterone and all the, you know, estrogen, all those things that keep your genitals in good shape and keep your sex drive high.

1:15:41Men's testosterone drops as well. But then they're struggling with erections. So if you're an older man and you can get your head around that you're not going to get erections as easily as she did and it doesn't bother you, you're going to be fine. If you're a woman and you actually, you know, get all the things that are available to you, take HRT if you can. There's solutions for all of this and don't think to yourself, oh, well, we're old now. We're not going to be sexual. You'll be fine as well. But I think people panic, you know, when they hit a certain age and there's this perception, you know, like, you know, people get, I did a campaign for replans, which is a vagina moisturizer, which most men blinker and good to see you didn't.

1:16:19And it was all about and had these beautiful images of older people kissing passionately or naked from the back and they were quite old. They and they were the most beautiful images and so many people were threatened by that. They were really threatened because there was old people doing sexual things and we're not treated to that. We don't see that very often. So when somebody does that, they, um, yeah, people freak they don't like to think about older people having sex. So when you're old, you have it already in your head. I'm not supposed to want sex anymore, which is completely untrue. And is that why you wrote a book called Great Sex, Star Set 50?

1:16:54Yes. Because for me, that's what happened. I went through the whole of my life with a high libido. I've written about sex. I thought this isn't going to happen to me because I know everything about sex, of course. And then I hit like 50. No, actually probably even before that. And suddenly I realized I remember typing away one day and thinking, I was single at the time. I hadn't masturbated for ages. What's going on? I haven't even thought about sex for ages. And it's the drop in hormones. And, you know, and it's quite extraordinary to that whole spontaneous desire. I had very high spontaneous desire and suddenly it went.

1:17:29So I just suddenly became like other women, I suppose. And suddenly it was like, oh my god, I see where everyone's going. What about? So I thought, yeah, for my own sake, I might write that book. And it's very good writing that book. There's a lot of solutions in there. What are some of the most important solutions for my listeners that are maybe experiencing a similar situation? Again, manage expectations. Keep having sex. That whole user will lose it. You've got to keep having sex. That's very, very important. Get your head around the whole thing about that. It doesn't mean that you can't be sex.

1:18:01It doesn't matter what you look like, it's what you feel like. It's so many, many different things. And also, you don't have to put, I think as a society, particularly English people, we all put up with stuff. There are solutions for all of these things. Like, if you've got to drive a gynec, go and get a vagina moisturiser, go and get an estrogen -pessery. There are solutions for everything that happens with menopause. You don't have to sit there and just put up with it all. Because if you do, then you won't want to have sex, definitely. So, seek all the solutions. Don't be scared to try and find solutions to all these things.

1:18:32Because they really are out there. Change your headset. And the women, it's interesting that they did a big thing about what really influences women's desire, post -menopause. And it wasn't menopause. It was your attitude to sex. If you'd always loved sex and you wanted sex to continue, you can, you found the solutions and you kept on having great sex. If you would never that keen, it's like, well, actually, you know what, here we go, an obstacle. What a great salute. What a great sort of excuse to never have sex again. So, it's attitude was way more important to how good the sex was after menopause.

1:19:09Nothing to do with menopause. It seems again like one of the foundations behind all of this, that's kind of hiding in the back room, when it, as it relates to people's libido and their attitudes to sex, is that kind of childhood experience, as we talked about, which is super tricky to unpack and even become aware of. And we all have our childhood experiences of sex, intimacy, relationships, some cases in the worst cases abuse and all those things. Yes, terrible. That we need to find a way to overcome first or address first before we can even... That's right. ...have a... And I mean, particularly for men, often their first experienced childhood experience of sex is being caught masturbating.

1:19:44And how the parent deals with that is very formative. Because if it's like, absolutely, what are you doing? You know, like, do you have a very filthy, it's dirty, it's like, what are you doing? Then they are going to continue to masturbate, because pretty much they do, but they're going to try and do it faster and faster and faster. So every time they masturbate, they're going to be trying to get it down to as quick, quick possible time so that they don't get in trouble again. And then they end up with rapid ejaculation. They can last two seconds before they ejaculate. So that's affected their sex life in a purely physical way.

1:20:16It sets us up in so many different ways, our childhood. You know, and I mean, I was lucky to grow up in a household where I don't know why a household was like that, but we just talked about sex openly. I was faced with my sister work for family planning, which helped, but that was later. So I don't know, my mum and my dad were really cool talking about sex and things. And so I grew up thinking, oh yeah, well, households are like that, but they're not. It's an unknown unknown. So how do you go about even solving for those things? I guess you have to get a therapy and start unpacking it. Yeah, I was just unpacking it yourself.

1:20:44You have to just think about, you don't necessarily have to go to therapy. There's so much, I mean, the joy of the internet is there's so much online that you can do it. If you typed in, you know, I don't like sex as my parents taught me. There's a book called Sex March, which is very good about childhoods. Sex. Sex March, it's called. Sex March. Yeah, you can still buy. It's an old book, but it sort of delves into all of this. And yeah, I mean, I think I'm so pro therapy. I think everybody should go to therapy. No one has a perfect childhood. In fact, having a perfect childhood can also set you up for things.

1:21:13So, you know, if we, if we have a problem, if you have a problem with sex, you know, going to see a really good sex therapist is, could sort it out very quickly. So, don't leave it too late. I work out and I can't even pick all these books out. This isn't even all the books, is it? No. So, you've got hot relationships, how to have one. Great sex starts at 50. The sex doctor fixes your love. My father's hot sex. How, how to do it? We've got dare. Oh, that looks, that looks, that looks very, uh, 50 shades. It is a bit. More hot sex. Okay. Would, um, would like to meet. Yeah, that was a GD show. I did about dating.

1:21:52Yeah, yeah, it's okay. That's interesting. That's interesting. There's a questioner I should ask, because I'm thinking again about a friend that's just popped to mind. Is there something going on with male and female dating in terms of it becoming more difficult in the modern day and age? Yeah. There's some stats that one of my podcast guests shared about how women are, um, having less children and they're finding it more difficult today to define a compatible male in the modern way that society is designed. And I've got friends that are, you know, around that sort of mid late 30s range that are really, really, really struggling in the modern world.

1:22:29It's almost, I almost, I almost, women or both women. Right. Right. I almost suspect that, um, I actually don't have that many friends that are in that region that aren't. But it's almost like there's a generation almost caught in a gap where you're, you know, a Gen Z native to social media, the internet, you know, that's the where they grew up. And then maybe the older generation are already already partnered off because, you know, they met someone at church or, yeah, yeah. Or, and then he got this generation who were caught in the gap. Are they all high achieving women? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's the problem.

1:22:58So what happens is you get, and this is why there are more and more single women now because more and more women are high achieving. So they're not like looking for a husband straight away. And when you've got a big gene pool of people to, you know, like, when you come out of uni or even before you go into uni because lots of people meet at uni and stay together, you've got this big, you know, like numbers game, you've got loads of women, single loads, men, single and you sort of all hook up. And if your motivation is to get married and have kids and that's your only motivation, you're going to find a partner early and that's it.

1:23:26You job done, keep going, right? It's even all goes well. But if your motivation isn't necessarily that, if you want to go on to university, you know, get your career sorted and then turn around and have kids like at 30, okay, right now, achieved on that the past, you know, where I want to have kids and I can take a bit of a break here and then suddenly where is he? Well, he's not there because he's already been taken up everybody else. And men traditionally don't like dating high achieving women unless they're high achieving themselves. And the amount of high achieving women is getting higher and the amount of high achieving men is getting lower.

1:24:02So you've got even less of a pool to choose from. So the answer for the women is to think outside the square and think, right, okay, do I really need the guy who's got the degree because women high achieving women like to go for high achieving men? Is that statistically? It's just generally what happens, isn't it? If I've got a degree, I want somebody else who's got a degree. So then you have to change your wish list a little bit and think, okay, I'm going to, you know, looking at, I'm not going to be as rigid with my, you know, must habs and perhaps, you know, think about things like, well, it doesn't really matter how much you're young, if I'm already earning lots of money, you know, isn't kindness, you know, generosity, sense of humour, attractiveness, you know, just general chemistry, isn't that, isn't that enough?

1:24:46So if you go for those qualities, you end up a lot better off and end up happier as well. Isn't that against our innate wiring? Because, you know, some people sometimes say that men care less about the financial resources of their partner. So does that kind of go, for me, if I'm a woman and I'm looking for a partner, am I going to look for someone who is kind of up into the right? Probably. But that doesn't necessarily work. For me, that didn't work because if I'm like very alpha female, so whenever I went out with an alpha male, we were just like, I hated each other. So on the boss, no, I'm the boss.

1:25:27No, if I'm wrong, no, I'm controlling you. You know, you know, no, it didn't work at all. It didn't work at all. Very competitive. I'm too competitive. They were too competitive. That didn't work. So, so I've, I mean, my partner is really proud of me. He's not at all threatened in the slightest by any success, any success I've had. He's my biggest, proudest supporter. And we work differently. Like, you know, if my thing is to, you know, if, you know, I make more money than him, he doesn't mind me saying that because he's fine with it. And so if I've got more money, that's great. So therefore, you know, if he's got more time than me to do the traditional female things, then he's fine with that.

1:26:10And then sometimes other times I'll do it. And, you know, he assumes the male role. So it's very, you know, we're comfortable with each other. We, you know, we don't care that I tick the male boxes and some roles. And he ticks the female boxes and it works very well. And I think you have to, I think that's hopefully where we're headed. But there is, there are sometimes where, I mean, I know, I know I'm not typical with females. I know that a lot of women, you know, won't go out with a man unless he makes a lot of money, particularly if they make a lot of money. They won't. I've never been like that.

1:26:42I've never been, get their money. It's made my, if I want money, I'll make it myself, thanks. I don't want to have someone else's money. That's not mine. So I do think it's a big problem for women and men. I think we both have to, especially women, have to stop being so rigid with that, you know, and how expect the man to provide. I think men have to stop being so feeling emasculated if it's the woman who's owning more. So what? Who cares? Someone's got some money, somewhere else in line. Who cares? Which one? If you're in that age range between say 30 and 40 and you're a woman and you're single and you don't want to be single, that's important.

1:27:16You don't want to be single. You want to have, you know, you want to meet a partner, you want to have a family, whatever it might be. What advice would you give to that person? I'm thinking now about my, a series of my close friends that are women, that are single in that range and that have expressed that they don't want to be single. But they're struggling for all the reasons you said, super high achieving. You know, they've got great careers. They're very, very busy because of that as well. You know, yeah, that was the issue, isn't it? It's, I mean, I was talking about Helen Gerley Brown, the Cosmo founder and she always said you can have it all and that's the biggest lie when you're in the soul.

1:27:53You can't have it all. There is something that gives and these high achievers, yeah, they have compromised their chances of finding a partner by putting it on to their career. You can't have it all. And I did that. It took me to 50. I had lots of relationships. It took me to 50 to find somebody that was, I was compatible with. It's not easy. It's really, really difficult. And I was out there meeting tons of people. So first accept that it's nothing to do with you. It doesn't mean that you're not attractive or anything. You're probably less marketable because you're too intelligent and some men will be freaked by that and you're too successful and some men will be freaked by that.

1:28:28They don't know what to do with you and it makes them feel bad because they're going to those traditional patents like how she's not going to go out with me. You know, I'm not successful as her, so I'm not even going to try. So you have to make the approach. Number one. Change your wish list to become qualities, personality qualities, not, you know, must be a certain height, must be a certain income, must drive this car, must, you know, all those sort of things because they really don't matter. And also date outside of type, like go out with people. Look beyond the exterior. See what's inside.

1:28:59Like I think that we're very quick to go, oh, I know, I can't go out with that person, you know, like go on a couple of days. So you need to be the first dates disaster. Go on two or three days. Go on at least three with people, you know, go out all the time. And often these women are so busy, it's like, well, when do you actually go out to actually put yourself in a situation where you can meet someone? Never. They're not going to walk in your lounge room, are they? Unless you sort of order delivery and they're really not. So come on. You've got to make some effort here. You've got to do the numbers game.

1:29:31And I don't know whether that dating apps are the right way forward, but they're probably the only way it's the way that most people meet. So you kind of have to just suck it up and get on there, I think. I think that's phenomenal advice. I was really, really happy you said that as well, because I know certain friends of mine are going to be listening and hate me for it. No, I don't think so. I think it's an opinion. It's one that makes sense. And I think that's all that anyone can deliver on this podcast. And that's that's why I like it. And it's actually matches the opinion I had from a man, bring this on this podcast, who received quite a, when a man says those kinds of things, I don't think it's received as well, necessarily, because they're speaking from a place of like, they don't have the lived experience.

1:30:10And there's a lot of like gender inequality things that are, you know, historical things with men. And the term one of my previous guests used to describe it was, um, tall girl problem. That you see what I mean. It's not necessarily the most, um, you could also say, yeah, you could say small man problem. Yeah, exactly. It's the same that, you know, this is an interesting question. It's probably the question I should have started with. What is sex? Well, sex certainly isn't intercourse. And people need to stop thinking of sex as intercourse. Sex is any type of, any type of feeling word thought that makes you feel aroused.

1:30:50That's how I describe sex. And what purpose is it solving? Why does it exist? To create other human beings. This is why, you know, our going right back to the beginning, this whole thing that we have that, you know, why can't we have the sex at the beginning all the way through, because it doesn't suit, it wouldn't work. If you were have so in, you know, lust driven and all you wanted to do was shag like rabbits, you would never get anything else done. You certainly wouldn't have children. You certainly wouldn't have a job. So we are designed to keep the world in a safe place. We go through lust and infatuation, romance, attachment for a reason so that we calm down.

1:31:24If we don't have the hot sex and we keep the world, you know, we bring up our children in a sense for way and the world continues. What does that say about monogamy though? Because if that's probably not natural, that's what I was going to say. Because if my sex drive is deteriorating to any degree, one would suggest that's encouraging me to go shag someone else. Well, it is, but you don't because you love your partner. So you, it's a trade off. It's always a trade off. You can have the love and this contentment and the companionship. And this is why older, you know, you just about infidelity statistics, older people don't cheat very much, who are in good relationships because they're not having that drive that that lust has gone.

1:32:05You know, your sex drive is lower as you get older. And it's the trade off. It's like, yeah, I could go out and cheat and have really hot sex. But I'm going to have to look my partner in the eye and I really love my partner. So I'm going to, I'm happy to wave goodbye to that hot sex. I've had enough of it in my life. So it depends on your motivation. So if you are driven by sex, then just don't settle down. Keep swapping partners and get that out of your system. And then you're not going to be dishonest to anyone. But if you do want a relationship, sometimes you have to go, okay, we can have great sex.

1:32:34It's not going to be like the sex that you have at the beginning. But you know what, I've got two kids. I've got a great wife. I've got, you know, it's a trade off in life, isn't it? Everything's a trade off. So you don't think monogamy is natural? I think that for sex, no. I think for sex, no, it's absolutely not. For our sex drive, it's the worst thing is to give some security and, you know, predictability and stuff in the same person over and over. No, not for our sex drive. But the problem is, is that the alternative is polyamory, right? So you have this one love relationship and then you seek sex elsewhere.

1:33:08Now, in theory, that really appeals to me. I can see that that would be great, right? But I'm never going to feel comfortable waving off my husband by darling. You have a great time. You know, don't worry about what time you get by. No way. I'm, he's my, you know, his possession, isn't it? It's ownership. It's sexual ownership. You know, you're not going to, you might want to do it yourself, but you're not going to send your partner off and they might want to do it themselves, but they're not going to send you off. So I don't know what the solution is. I really don't. Well, as you said, in life, you can't have it all.

1:33:35So everything is trade -offs. It is. It has another trade -off where I'm sure some people would love to be able to have sex with other people, but they wouldn't be able, they wouldn't want to reciprocate that. Exactly. To their partner. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you, okay? When you are near the end of your life and looking back over it, what will you be proudest of and what will you regret the most? God. Proudest of my career and having helped people.

1:34:15I wanted to really know people when you're in a, in a party who's just knew what they wanted to do really early on with the writing and then that happened very early with my parents. So I'm really proud of that. My first book, I was so excited, literally, you know that when you just jump on the spot, I was literally jumping on the spot. I didn't really do regrets, actually. I didn't really do regrets. Maybe I wish that I was more or had been more confident, I'm confident on the outside but not on the inside, on the most confident, unconfident person you'll ever meet. So and probably realize that no one's looking at you, the TPC worrying about themselves.

1:34:50I was trying to calm down a bit and was more confident. What's the symptoms of that lack of confidence?

1:35:00In security, like going away and like every, you know, the first time I listened to this for instance, it would be like, oh my God, I was terrible. Look at me, look at the way I look, look at, I'm like, oh, I can't do something else with my hands, like I'll go through it, then they're not going, don't be silly and then I'll listen to it and then I'll have an okay opinion about it. But yeah, they're still that little bit there. Any idea where that's come from? Yeah, parents. When you're left on your own and feel abandoned at the age of 15, that's not great, is it? And then all these small things are a potential abandonment.

1:35:33Maybe people don't think, I don't get it, maybe I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's funny, I'm confident of my abilities, um, professionally. I'm confident that I'm intelligent. Um, I don't know. I suppose, yeah, you never really, I mean, I don't know if I studied psychology and the guy just got up there and said, he was a great lecture and he said, it's all about your childhood. And we all just rolled our eyes and went, oh, for God's sake, it's so ridiculous, it's not, it's not. And it is. It really is. Like, I'm still that 15 year old girl that stood there terrified, you know, she's still there.

1:36:08And, um, yeah, so it's interesting. But I put on a good show like everybody. You certainly do put on a good show. Thank you so much, Tracy, um, given me so much, I answered so many of my questions and I know for it, for sure, for sure, people are going to tell you I'm sure they're going to message you, but for sure, for sure, I can say on behalf of all of the people that I've listened, you've helped them today. I hope so. Thank you. And I think everybody will take away something different from that, which is why it's so incredible. I'm going to do something I've never done before because I really want to illustrate how I believe you've helped people.

1:36:39So the previous guest that left you a question, and you know, I don't usually tell people this is a guy called Robert Waldinger. And what he has committed his life to is something called the Harvard study of well -being. I'm going to call it that. I know I've got one word there wrong. I'm going to call it the Harvard study of well -being, which was the longest ever study done on a group of people to understand what makes people fundamentally happy at the most basic level. So they followed people for almost 90 years, the same group of people, even, you know, the founders of the study who have actually died.

1:37:11So they've passed the study on to Robert. And at the very heart of what they found on this study, which ended up being a TED talk, which has done 45 million views. It's the most one of the most listened TED talks of all time is that the thing that makes us most happy in life and also healthiest in terms of insulation from stress is relationships. It's number one. Men that have positive romantic relationships live 14 years longer, women's seven years longer. That's right. And one of the things that ends great relationships and leads us to isolation and loneliness is sexual issues. I see it in all of my friends.

1:37:45And the work you're doing is therefore, in its very essence, helping people to solve the most important problem of all, which is connection relationships. So it's incredible work to be doing. And it's work that a lot of people want to do in confront because of the stigmas and taboos that still remain. So thank you so much, Tracy. Thank you. Thank you for being so wonderful. Wonderful compliment. You're captivating. No, you really are. You're really, really captivating. And you're super smart and you know your stuff and you've looked at all the research. You really are the best at this. So thank you for being here.

1:38:13Thank you for helping me. You have. And thank you for helping all of our wonderful listeners. Thank you. I'm going to walk away. Very confident. Awesome. And you look amazing, by the way. You address this fantastic. Thank you. Thank you.

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