Emotional Intimacy is the Key to Great Sex

What do you do when you want to spice up your sex life? We usually start thinking about new positions, or lingerie or maybe traveling to some exotic location with our spouse. Physical things. But what if the key to great sex was found in a completely different dimension?

Sexual Experience Types & Attachment

The research we’re looking at today will actually have a profound impact on the whole scope of your married life. So this is definitely going to be a pivotal topic for many couples who are reading. We are going to talk about attachment. I know that sounds like something to do with velcro but attachment in the science of relationships is simply about the love bond between two people. So every time you read “attachment” just think “love bond” so that this new term doesn’t throw you off.

What we’re going to see is that the quality and nature of your attachment to your spouse has the largest impact on your sexual satisfaction. If you’re in a sexless marriage, or you have a lot of conflict about sex, it almost always comes back to this attachment issue. The only exception would be if there is a genuine sexual disorder such as erectile dysfunction or vaginismus— those may be related to physiological issues or they may find their root in other things like childhood sexual abuse. But: if you solve the attachment issue you’ll also have a safe place to talk about these other issues, and I would certainly recommend you do so with a qualified sex therapist.

We will look at how attachment affects different ways of experiencing sex, and finish with a look at 7 steps to growing a secure attachment in a sexual context.

Three Experiential Patterns of Sexual Intercourse

The first thing you need to know is that both men and women experience sexual intercourse in one of three patterns:

Relationship-centered orientation: This pattern is all about being connected to your spouse on an emotional level during sex. So it is about the “individual’s feelings of being loved and esteemed by one’s partner and the desire for partner’s involvement, as well as the sense of being the subject of love (i.e. feelings of love toward the partner, and attentional and emotional focus on her/his needs and reactions.) [i]” This is healthy, whole-person sex that encompasses both physical and emotional experience and is focused on both giving and receiving from your spouse.

Worry-centered orientation: This pattern revolves around a focus on you and your own worries over giving and receiving from your spouse. This includes worry about “the personal vulnerability and sense of estrangement related to sexual activity, the negative and immoral meanings of this activity, the lack of partner’s sexual competence, and the potential evidence of one’s sexual inadequacy, along with the occurrence of interfering thoughts[ii]”. This is sex that’s not going well. Anything from doormat sex to abusive sex to my body-is-here-but-my-brain-is-not kind of sex. Or if you’re lost in self-consciousness. It’s not engaged sex.

Pleasure-centered orientation: This pattern reflects sex on a more basic level that’s focused on pleasure and not on the emotional experience. It’s about “the orgasmic cycle of excitement-pleasure-relief-satisfaction, which is accompanied by a sense of power and strength and two complementary states of mind — cognitive/emotional dissociation from the environment and focused attention on reaching the orgasm [iii].”. This is sex that’s purely about crossing the finish line; focusing on the physical sensations, with no real person-to-person connection.

Gender Differences in Sexual Experience

Remember, men and women both experience sex that falls into these three patterns. But there are gender differences in how much of each they experience and what they are looking for:

• Women demonstrate higher relational orientation in their descriptions of sexual intercourse.
• “Women’s experience of heterosexual intercourse was more ambivalent in nature in comparison with men’s experience.” In that, “Women, compared with men, experienced more disappointment with their partner, along with worries and interfering thoughts.”
• While women were more concerned about getting more love from their spouse during heterosexual intercourse, men were more concerned about getting more sexual variety.

So: Houston, we have a problem. Basically, they’re saying that women fluctuate between a worried orientation and a relationship orientation and men tend to see sex from a pleasure orientation. There’s a misalignment here and this is why so many couples aren’t experiencing deeply satisfying sexual intimacy.

Why Do Men and Women Experience Sex Differently?

I think there are some definite societal influences. Let’s acknowledge that briefly but what we need to talk about is what is happening inside the relationship because changing that is more accessible than changing culture.

At the same time, we need to look at our own perspectives on sex. This is especially true for men, who have this pleasure orientation. I think there’s a huge problem in that we’re socialized to believe that we need to release and that the best sex happens with the most ideal female body type. We need to think through both of these carefully.

If it’s about the release, what’s the difference between using your hand and using your wife? If it’s really just about crossing the finish line — that’s objectifying to your wife and completely neglects the relational aspect of sex. Surely this isn’t the perfect intimate experience that God had in mind when he created sex for us?

I want to challenge husbands out there to see sex not as something you need for release- not just as a pressure valve that needs venting once in a while but as a means of connecting more deeply with your wife. And when you orgasm, it’s not because you’ve crossed a line but because you’re experiencing the pinnacle of human connection with this very precious singular person — your wife — who gets to see you and know you and experience you in a way that nobody else does. And afterwards you don’t just roll over and fall asleep, you hold her, you affirm her beauty, you continue to enjoy her presence. Sex is biological, sure, but it can be so much more than that.

Secondly, I think that much of our wives’ worry-centered orientation comes from their insecurities about their bodies. Many of these are prompted by a worldview that says the best kind of sex only happens with perfectly endowed women. Or men, for that case — this can go both ways.

Think about this. Suppose there are 1 million men with “perfect bodies”. And 1 million women with “perfect bodies”. That begs the question: are the other 7.399 billion people in the world condemned to having mediocre or less than satisfying sex? Would God really design us like that? It cannot be.

One of the things I’ve been working on for a number of years is the conscious rejection of this worldview. This is not about whether Verlynda is in the 1 million or not. It’s about what it means for the rest of the world even if she is. And what does it mean for us as a couple as we age? How many 70-year-olds do you see on the covers of glossy magazines? What does it mean for us as an old couple? And yet we’re told by these older couples that sex gets better as you get older. We need to be very cautious about the messages we send each other as spouses around physical attributes and we need to pray that God will keep shaping our thinking and affection to see our spouse as the most beautiful person we know.

Attachment and Sexual Experience

I want to think about attachment. Remember attachment is about the love bond between you and your spouse. Not velcro. There are three main styles- avoidant, anxious and secure:

1. Avoidant attachment “reflects the extent to which a person distrusts a relationship partners’ goodwill, strives to maintain behavioral independence, and relies on deactivating strategies for dealing with relational threats [iv]”. This is all about keeping your distance emotionally for fear of getting hurt and often entails fleeing from problems rather than facing them.
2. Anxious attachment: “reflects the degree to which a person worries that partners will not be available in times of need [v]”. This is where you don’t feel that your spouse can be relied upon to be there, so you act in a controlling or clingy way or do whatever you think will keep them wanting to be with you. You hold on too tightly because you don’t fully trust that your spouse will always be there when you need them.
3. Secure attachment: “is defined by comfort with closeness and faith [vi]”. This is where anxiety and avoidance are both low, and you fully trust your spouse and understand that they are always there for you, enabling you to be less clingy and more of a separate, secure individual.

So you have avoidant, anxious and secure. Attachment styles are often formed early in life and modeled after our relationship with our primary caregiver or parent. These styles of attachment and behavior obviously affect a lot more than just sex. You might, for example, notice some similarities with the different styles of fighting we talk about here. Now, remember our three patterns of sexuality: relationship-centered, worry-centered and pleasure-centered. Let’s tie attachment to patterns of sexual experience.

Relationship