Are We Just Too Sexually Incompatible? How to Know.

If you're asking yourself whether you and your partner are just too sexually incompatible for your relationship to work, this episode is for you. (Tip: It's also for people you know who seem to be asking themselves this all the time. Please share it and you could save someone a lot of angst). 

Join me as we dive into the hidden issues underneath this question. If you or someone you know is asking this question, you know that it can take a lot of energy and really sap your joy. So let's figure it out and give you the right questions to ask so you can start feeling empowered to make the right decision for yourself today. 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to Sex Help for Smart People. I'm Dr. Laura Jurgens. I'm here to help you have better sex, intimacy and relationships. So let's get at it. Hey, welcome to episode 76. I am glad you are here. And you know it's funny, so today we're gonna talk about this question. Are we just too sexually incompatible for this relationship to work?

[00:00:24] This episode is all about that question. And when you know, how do you know what could be going on? Some of the questions underlying that question, we're gonna talk about all that. But before we get there, I wanted to say one thing. It is. Summer in Asheville, it is glorious. I'm really fortunate to be making some new friends and going on adventures, and I hope wherever you are, you also have wonderful friends, old or new, and are able to go on adventures, but whatever is going on in your life, I do wanna tell you when I say I'm glad you're here.

[00:01:01] I genuinely am glad you're here and. I know that there's people around the world who listen to this podcast. I am really incredibly grateful for you for being a listener and also for sharing it and recommending it. I just heard a story the other day. About a former client. Now, so this is my friend Kea, who's now a friend of mine and we are doing this retreat in Hawaii together.

[00:01:28] And, you know, she walked into a yoga studio and found out that the teacher listens to the podcast and then shared that with me and told me about it. And it just made me so happy to hear the reach. And that made me think of all of you, right? So now I have this. I hope someday I get to meet this wonderful yoga teacher in Maui, and maybe I will in January when we're there for our retreat.

[00:01:53] But I just think, I think of all you, even though I don't necessarily, you know, know you as an individual, I really do think of you out there and. Imagine who you might be, what might be going on in your life, and I really wanna invite you to reach out to me whenever you want to. You are a podcast listener, and that means we have a relationship, even if it's somewhat one sided, because you know more about me, then I know about you.

[00:02:24] But I would like to know more about you. So if you have particular challenges, particular episode interests, topics that you would really like me to cover. Or you just wanna say hi, please go ahead and shoot me an email. I don't, it's fine. It's totally fine. It might, if you don't hear from me, it probably went to spam, but it's absolutely welcome and you can email me, laura@laurajergens.com.

[00:02:50] Let me know if you have any particular needs for episodes. Absolutely. Feel free. Okay. So today what we are gonna talk about is. Are we just too sexually incompatible? People ask this question of themselves, of sort of the ether, right? They ask it sort of philosophically when they are. Really feeling unsure about whether they should continue a relationship or not.

[00:03:20] Whether they might want to think about getting out of a relationship, having it be sort of closed and done. I think sometimes people think a relationship is a failure if it doesn't go on forever, but that is absolutely not true. Sometimes the. It makes the most sense to actually have that chapter close.

[00:03:37] And that doesn't mean it has to be a failure, and it doesn't have to be a horrible, miserable experience where you hate each other. You can actually have really caring breakups that are, you know, what we would call conscious uncoupling in the relationship coaching and therapy sphere where you are really caring for each other, but.

[00:04:01] Knowing when it's the time to do that, when it's not, the time to do that can be challenging and it can take up a lot of emotional bandwidth, a lot of mental energy, and be really exhausting if you're asking yourself that all the time. So that's why I made this episode. For those of you who have this question or if you have someone in your life where you just keep hearing this question from them, right?

[00:04:23] This is an episode you can send to others and say, Hey, I think you might be. You know, mulling this over, or this might be causing you some challenge and some pain to be spending a lot of time on this, thinking about it, here's an episode that might help clarify things for you. So first off, I just wanna say it is actually less common to have fundamental sexual incompatibility than it is to have.

[00:04:49] Communication and understanding deficits, those are the most common thing. It does happen that there are fundamental sexual incompatibilities. Absolutely. It's not something that never happens. It absolutely happens. I just think it's less common than having challenges in communication and understanding that you haven't overcome.

[00:05:11] There's also a very pervasive misconception. There's a very pervasive misconception that people in a relationship need to be a hundred percent on the same page in order to be quote unquote compatible. And if there are disappointments, if somebody feels. Bummed that the other person isn't exactly the sort of full, fully perfect fit for them.

[00:05:37] It means the relationship is not viable. And that is absolutely not true, but it makes total sense to think it. And your subconscious is really pushing that story hard, that we have to somehow be a hundred percent compatible, a hundred percent sort of perfect fit because we are all steeped from childhood.

[00:06:00] Fantasy happily ever after storylines where there's like one big conflict that's resolved and everything is supposedly perfect from then on offscreen, and somehow there's no problems. Right? And it's worth being really on to your subconscious about this because we all have it. And everybody's subconscious believes that shit.

[00:06:27] So you've got it. You got you fed that storyline, it's in your head somewhere. But if the relationship is deeply valuable in other ways, and you just have some differences, maybe they are sexual differences, maybe there are emotional differences. But then if the relationship is deeply valuable in other ways, I think it's really worth exploring.

[00:06:52] With the coach especially, how to resolve what you can and then decide with whatever's left that you couldn't resolve, whatever remaining differences. Then you get to decide together what you wanna do about that, and if you wanna move forward, or if you wanna let it be the end of the chapter and close that chapter and how you wanna do that and how you wanna feel and support each other or not through that process.

[00:07:18] And if you wanna transition your relationship from a sexual one. To a not sexual one, but I'm really gonna talk about two different things here when we try to answer this question. Are we just too sexually incompatible to maintain a relationship? There's really two questions embedded in here because one question is really about the emotional part.

[00:07:42] Can we make the emotional part work? And the other is. Physical issues or real fundamental sort of functional sexual challenges, but a lot of what seems like physical issues are actually emotional issues. So I'm gonna kind of mix those together today and you'll hear that there are some differences and we need to separate them out.

[00:08:06] So I'm gonna give a list of what I think are the most important issues to talk through and think through. When you are considering this question, are we just too sexually incompatible? So, number one, people of course, are different, and this sounds so obvious, but most of us are not operating. Under this assumption, most of the time we are, we tend to assume people are like us because that's our frame of reference.

[00:08:41] We don't have another frame of reference besides what's internal to us, what we understand for ourselves. But fundamentally, people are different from us because of both nature and nurture. So like that's their genetic makeup and also how they are socialized. And that includes sexuality, how they're socialized around sex, how they're socialized around porn.

[00:09:02] How they're socialized around gender expectations around sexuality, which we talk a lot about in this podcast. What is key to approach differences with curiosity? And a lot of us are trained by society to approach differences with judgment, that somebody has to be wrong. Somebody has to be wrong for being different.

[00:09:23] It's either me or them, right? And that's not true at all. People. It can be fun that there's differences. It can be exciting to embrace differences. So we can embrace different styles of turnon, for example, rather than wishing everyone was just like us. But we do need open communication and we need to understand our own and each other's needs in order to figure out whether there's a true incompatibility embedded in our differences.

[00:09:52] Oftentimes there's not. It's not so irreconcilable as you think, you maybe different shaped puzzle pieces, but maybe those pieces can fit together well. We have to understand the shape of that puzzle piece in order to figure out whether they fit together, right? So number one is just really figuring out if.

[00:10:09] There are some differences that can be embraced, and if you're willing, both of you to embrace them with curiosity rather than judgment. All right, so number two is very related to number one, that emotional needs for arousal do tend to be different. From person to person. Sometimes you can have the same emotional needs for arousal and actually that can create more incompatibility than having different ones.

[00:10:36] Like if you're exact same shape puzzle piece, sometimes you don't fit together, but it's very common for people. Almost, almost every couple I encounter has slightly different needs for emotional arousal. Someone wants to feel one thing and the other person wants a totally different emotional experience, and if neither really know their emotional needs or how to communicate them, this becomes a big problem.

[00:11:00] What happens is we default to assuming the other person wants what we want. And it doesn't. And then we're puzzled and we're confused about why what we're trying isn't working. So for example, say you have one person who wants to feel just, they wanna feel desperately desired exactly as they are. They wanna feel like exactly who they are is really wanted, and let's say their partner actually, their core desire, their emotional arousal needs.

[00:11:30] Or that they wanna feel surprised with novelty like this, like new experience is what really drives arousal for them. So here we have a situation where the novelty seeker may not be able to understand at all why their partner. Won't, for example, dress up for them. They think it would be really fun and surprising and their partner just hates that idea and resists it.

[00:11:56] But the reality is that the partner's core desire is to feel wanted exactly as they are. And the dressing up request is making them feel like their partner wants them to change to be somebody else. Meanwhile, they're frustrated because their partner isn't bringing the I want you energy. 'cause they're waiting for this sort of novel experience to happen before they actually feel excited.

[00:12:17] This is not a fundamental sexual incompatibility, but it could feel like it and look like it on the surface, but it can absolutely worked out creatively with some outside eyes to help you brainstorm. So that's just an example of emotional differences, emotional needs for desire. Driving what looks like real frustration and incompatibility and, but the two people don't know enough.

[00:12:44] They just don't have enough information to actually resolve their challenge on their own. All right? Another thing number three that can happen when you're feeling sexually incompatible is desire and libido differences. And this is one of the areas that I specialize in and have a lot of success with.

[00:13:04] Even when people have like tried a million things and it hasn't worked and it's usually just 'cause they're going about it the wrong way. But often, and I won't go into all this, I have a couple other podcast episodes about it, especially the libido mismatch one. You can check out if this is something that happens for you.

[00:13:20] But I want you to know in terms of in compatibility, what appears to be desire and libido differences may just be. That you too haven't found yet. What works for one person's arousal, like what you're doing is fine for one partner and so they keep wanting sex, but the, it's not actually working for the other person.

[00:13:46] They're not aroused enough to keep enjoying themselves enough to want more sex. For various reasons. So we have to figure out what would work better for that person so that they can really be getting the yummiest most delicious sex that they want so they can feel really like they want this sometimes.

[00:14:07] Also in this situation, the high libido partner, occasionally a high libido, is actually someone who's trying to self-medicate with sexuality. Oftentimes for some sort of neurodivergence, A DHD is one example, and. If they are trying to self-medicate with sexuality, it doesn't feel good to the other person because they don't actually feel like it's about them and so about connecting with them, right?

[00:14:35] So we gotta untangle that sometimes. And so those are just a couple examples of how even desire and libido differences may not be fundamental incompatibilities, but there are things that we have to work out. Okay. Okay. Number four. This is an actual physical challenge, size and fit issues. When one person, at least one person, could be multiple people in the partnership have a penis.

[00:15:03] So if nobody in the partnership has a penis, then. If you wanna use anything that is penis shaped for insertion, you can choose your size. You can choose your fit. You are aftermarket picking it up. But if somebody in the partnership has a penis, it can be either too big or too small for their partners pleasure.

[00:15:24] This is also often not insurmountable as a problem if partners are willing to work together on it and not be too hard line or insecure about it. And we can do all kinds of adjustments and toy use, and there's all kinds of creative stuff that can happen to help people where there is some sort of size and fit issue around either maybe the person needs a bigger penis in order to reach their cervix because there're a person who tends to orgasm through cervical stimulation that can be sorted out.

[00:15:57] Or if they have. You know, maybe the person has just too, it's too big and that we need to like help them either go slower or pacing or depth or some adjustments to make that work. That's also not necessarily a deal breaker unless it is for somebody, right? But it doesn't have to be a deal breaker if everybody's willing to work on it.

[00:16:22] Number five is conflict. Is like a situation where conflict is actually obscuring the situation and it seems like it's about sex. So this happens pretty regularly and there's some sort of conflict going on, and one or both partners are thinking we're, we may be sexually incompatible because there's emotional issues around the sex and this you're fighting about sex and.

[00:16:53] This can happen either because there's actually issues around sex or because there's actually just issues around how you deal with conflict and differences. So sex can just be the surface level sort of playing field where you're actually playing out underlying emotional issues for, I mean, people can fight about anything.

[00:17:12] You could fight about orange juice. I've done it. I promise, and I had a really intense emotional argument. Everybody got triggered about orange juice, but because it was so absurd, we didn't blame orange juice as the problem. But people can do that with sex. So it can also, it can be an issue about conflict styles and emotional needs, not actually the sex.

[00:17:38] So we need to look at that. And if there is a lot of conflict around your sexual relationship, it makes sense to ask, you know, should I stay or should I leave my relationship? But I want you to know that the issues could be fundamentally emotional and that changes the way you ask the question and what sort of landscape you're looking at when you're trying to decide whether this relationship is worthwhile for you or not.

[00:18:01] If you are at that juncture, there are some really important questions to ask yourself, but I am not gonna tell you this is simple and I am definitely not gonna tell you that anyone else can give you the answer. What I do instead is I help people find their own true answer. And feel good about it, but here are some things to check and ask yourself.

[00:18:23] I mean, one should be fairly obvious. Is there physical abuse, manipulation, or like shaming and name calling? If those things are happening, that's really important for you to acknowledge. Those are problems. Those are substantial problems. Okay, next. Do you fundamentally want different things, like you actually want very different things from this relationship?

[00:18:51] Classic example is somebody wants to have kids and somebody doesn't wanna have kids. That actually can be like a deal breaker because those are fundamental desires that. If the person doesn't get or capitulates to, can cause enormous quantities of resentment and maybe a really bad fit. Some other questions is there Trust.

[00:19:14] Sometimes a lack of trust can be solved, but not if there is kind of chronic, sneaky, or lying behavior. And these sort of abuse or fundamental differences in what you want or complete lacks of trust are typical situations in which I suggest you really do deeply consider closing the relationship. For example, one person never ever wants to have sex again and has zero interest in changing that.

[00:19:41] Just is like, no, I, I'd never wanna do this again, and I do not wanna work on it. And the other person really wants sex a lot and has zero interest in giving up that desire. I really wanna have sex. I'm not gonna magically stop wanting to have sex, and that's where they're at. That is a situation where it makes a lot of sense to close that sexual relationship and transition to, for example, a friendship.

[00:20:11] But a lot of differences, most differences that people come to me about are solvable when all the parties involved actually want to solve them. Even if there's a ton of fighting, sometimes that's just because one or one or both of you actually don't know how to do conflict well, and that is solvable if both people want to solve it.

[00:20:31] Abuse is a whole different story, but it is. Solving conflict better is one of my favorite things to teach, and it absolutely transforms people's entire lives. There is an episode on conflict avoidance and what to do instead, so you can check that out a little bit if you wanna hear more about that. But for now, some questions to ask yourself.

[00:20:50] If there's just a lot of fighting in your're, wondering if this is solvable, are one, are you taking responsibility for your part? A lot of people aren't. They're kind of pretending that they are, but if they're really honest with themselves, they're like, yeah. I'm not fully acknowledging. I tend to be kind of defensive.

[00:21:07] Alright, two, how is your communication or lack thereof? Are you actually saying what you need kindly or are you bottling shit up and waiting until you're actually mad about it and then it comes out with all that, all that emotion behind it. Three, are you asking for what you need? Only when you're mad or hurt?

[00:21:26] And not in the kindest way possible. Number four, are your expectations actually reasonable for adult relationships or are they based on childhood wishes? So for example, you actually, if you're honest with yourself, you actually do expect mind reading and you want the other person to fix your emotions or make you happy all the time, or never to have boundaries and say, no.

[00:21:49] Those things you need to take a look at your part, but it also points to the fact that the conflicts are solvable. 'cause when you do take responsibility for those parts, it will really radically change the way the two of you communicate. So. In my opinion, sexual compatibility or lack thereof is one issue where it doesn't really work just to talk about it.

[00:22:13] Even with a therapist, you actually need outcome focused, like results focused support that enables you to develop some new skills and really. In depth understanding and actually be able to communicate it well. You need skills that enable change in the relationship, not just talk based help to understand your differences.

[00:22:40] I. But real help actually implementing solutions, and that means a good coach if you just talk. The problem is that you're likely to just stay in your same capacities, even though you have a little more understanding, but you won't actually have actual change. You need to solve the problems that are solvable first.

[00:22:59] So you need something that's really, you need help. That's very focused on actually getting concrete results. Because then once you solve what's solvable, you'll figure out what's left, how you both feel about that, and decide how you wanna move forward. And so this is a situation where I do strongly recommend coaching over therapy.

[00:23:21] There are some situations where I actually think therapy is like the best, absolute best option, but sexual incompatibility challenges is not one of them. So if this is you and you feel like you're ready. To get a handle on it and get coached. Feel free to reach out to me for a consult or another well-trained qualified coach.

[00:23:41] Whenever you do feel ready, but I wanna invite you, if you're asking this question, are we just too sexually incompatible to really take a, take another, listen through this episode and try to answer the questions that I've put out for you and see, sort of dissect where are those challenges? Where do we need more information?

[00:24:01] And, and if you don't know, just come to a consult and I'll help you do that. It's no big deal. I know how to do it. But do get some support. If you think your relationship is worth it. If you think the other benefits you're getting from your partnership are really valuable, then please don't expect everything to be a hundred percent perfect all the time.

[00:24:24] That is a fairytale your subconscious is telling you, but it also doesn't mean you should just sit in misery. Right. Just because we don't want things, we don't expect things to be perfect, doesn't mean that we should just tolerate something being really bad or feeling bad to us, or not getting our desires or not really feeling lit up by our sexual connection.

[00:24:44] That's solvable in most cases. Alright my friends, I will see you here next week. Have a good one. Wanna come to Hawaii with me? If you are a woman or you know any, send them right to my homepage, https://laurajurgens.com  The Maui retreat info is there and it's open for early bird registration. Don't miss it. And I get to see you in Hawaii.