Why aren't we talking about this: Sex and pleasure

We spend a lot of our lives learning how to be good at things. We learn how to do our jobs, manage our money, raise children, cook, exercise, communicate better, sleep better. There is a book, podcast, course or expert ready to teach us pretty much anything we could possibly want to know.

Sex, though? Apparently we’re just supposed to know.

We get taught the mechanics at school. We absorb the rest from films, porn, previous partners and whatever we manage to piece together along the way. Then we get into long-term relationships and somehow expect two people, carrying completely different ideas about what sex is supposed to look like, to magically understand what the other wants.

I’ve been with my husband for more than 20 years and even I realised during this conversation that there were things I had never told him. Things I thought about my body. Things that took me out of the moment. Things he couldn’t possibly have known because, despite apparently expecting him to understand them, I had never actually said them out loud.

Which made me wonder how much pleasure we’re all missing out on simply because we don’t talk about it.

In today’s episode of Why Aren’t We Talking About This? I’m joined by sex educator and coach Ruth Ramsay to talk about pleasure, desire and the completely unrealistic scripts we’ve inherited about sex. We get into why desire doesn’t always just appear, why putting intimacy in the diary might actually make your sex life more spontaneous, the things men and women are too embarrassed to admit they want, body shame, sexual compatibility and why after years of sleeping next to someone, you can still have absolutely no idea what is going on inside their head.

Better sex starts with actually talking about it.

Check out Ruth www.ruthramsay.com

Ruth’s Ted Talk: How to revamp your sex life in 6 minutes (watched by 3.4million people)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-3CANRKuAM

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Why Aren’t We Talking About This? is a series of honest conversations about the stuff we rarely discuss but probably should - big feelings, weird thoughts, life, death, sex and all the messy, beautiful parts of being human.

Hosted by me, Carly Osman-Holme, on a quest to dodge a full-blown existential crisis. I’ve reached that point in life where I’m asking the big questions: How did I get here? What do I actually want? And why didn’t they teach us any of this in school?