Brave Love, Great Sex: Why Courage Is the Key to Passion

Seven years ago, my colleague, podcast co-host, and fellow couples therapist, George Faller and I set out to answer a question we've both struggled with in our counseling offices and our own marriages: What does it really take to create a partnership with lasting love and great sex?

That conversation has recently turned into a book called Brave Love, Great Sex: Harnessing Attachment Theory for Passionate Relationships.

While it may sound simple, brave love is acting courageously to share our vulnerable feelings when we'd rather be defensive. It's difficult to do.

Perhaps needing even more courage, brave love also means opening up our inner erotic world to our partner—to share the longings and wishes that really live inside us. While we long to be truly known, it is also terrifying. The risk of revealing ourselves generates an exciting sexual energy that keeps desire alive. It turns out that authentic vulnerability is sexy.

We resist being vulnerable with the most important person in our lives because their rejection would devastate us.

In fact, this resistance comes in the form of a familiar pattern. In Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), we call it the negative cycle—where my protective defense triggers your protective defense. Fortunately, once we understand our pattern, we can change it.

Because our partner is so important to us, even seemingly meaningless arguments trigger us into fight or flight. When our bond with our partner, our chosen adult attachment figure, feels threatened, we land on one side of the continuum with two different energies: pursuing (fight) and withdrawing (flight).

Pursuers want to check and figure out what’s wrong. They ask questions, protest, explain, repeat themselves, and eventually criticize and escalate when they can’t get through.

Withdrawers do the opposite. They want to calm things down, keep things intellectual, stay positive, avoid complicated emotional interactions, and if it gets too messy, they simply leave the conversation altogether.

But unfortunately, both partners often end up feeling far away from each other.

See if this passage from our book sounds familiar:

"Think of negative cycles like tug-of-war. Two people are at opposing ends of the rope. When one partner is threatened, they pull away. The problem is, this pulls all the negative energy from their partner towards them. When the other partner gets anxious that their needs won't get met, they push—they pursue, move toward. And we all know what pushing on a rope gets us—nothing. In fact, the more they push, the limper the connection between them becomes."

Furthermore, we may push for emotional connection but pull away from sexual intimacy. Or we may not feel the need to talk about our feelings but really need sex to feel connected.

Our protagonist couple in our book, Joey and Maria, crisscross in their needs.

“Maria needed emotional connection before she could want sex, and Joey needed assurance about sexual connection before he could open up emotionally. Each waited for the other to go first—a classic relational impasse.”

Certainly, emotional connection makes it safer to have sexual intimacy for some people. But sexual intimacy also makes emotional connection easier for others.

Sometimes we make love because we feel close. Sometimes we feel close because we've made love.

Both directions honor the needs of the couple, and each arena of connection has a gravitational pull on the health of the other.

We all get caught in these patterns, but pursue-withdraw cycles strangle emotional connection and erotic intimacy.

Brave love gets naked.

Rather than protesting, “You never listen.” We, instead, say,  “When I can't get through to you, I start worrying I don’t matter to you."

Rather than complaining "You never want sex.” We, instead, say, “When you turn me down, I get afraid I’m not attractive to you.”

Rather than blaming, “All you want is sex.” We, instead, say, “I’m afraid that if I say no, you will despair, go elsewhere and leave me.”

Rather than walking away, we stay with our partner and say, “Even though you can’t see it, my heart is beating fast. I’m afraid I’m failing you and that I’ll always make you unhappy.”

Facing sexual dilemmas, stuck places, and negative cycles directly is the courage that brave love asks of us sexually. But the reward is huge. In secure love, sex can become more frequent, more varied, less burdened by the need to prove anything, and an exchange of intimate love and pleasure. It is playful, experimental, deeply connected, and safe from betrayal.

While it’s easy to get trapped in negative cycles, most couples truly love each other but need a plan for how to get unstuck.

Our book, Brave Love and Great Sex - Harnessing the Power of Attachment Theory for Passionate Relationship(opens in new tab) teaches you to

• speak from the heart, without blame or edge

• question if what you think about your partner’s intentions are true,

• ask inside whether it really warrants a fight or flight survival reaction in your body,

• see how your own protective move lands on your partner, feeding the cycle

• ask for what you need and

• use the energy that is freed to explore eroticism

 

In our book, we give you a roadmap to get out of the negative cycles emotionally and sexually so you can be brave and have the emotional connection and the great sex we all deserve.