Why obligation sex destroys desire (and what works better)

You think having sex when you don't really want to will keep your partner happy. But obligation sex actually destroys desire—and doesn't help either of you in the long run.

Research shows that when you cross your own boundaries repeatedly this way, your desire drops even further. Resentment builds. And your partner can wind up feeling even more unwanted.

I break down what actually happens with obligation sex, why it doesn't help either partner, and how to choose a different option that honors each person's truth while actually building (rather than eroding) connection.

Get my free guide: 5 Steps to Start Solving Desire Differences
(Without Blame or Shame), A Practical Starting Point for Individuals and Couples, at https://laurajurgens.com/libido

Find out more about me at https://laurajurgens.com/

Transcript

0:01  
Welcome to the desire gap podcast. I'm your host, Dr Laura Jurgens, and whether you want more sex than your partner or less, you are not wrong, and your relationship isn't doomed. You just need better tools to solve the struggles of mismatched libidos. That's what we do here, so welcome and let's dive in. Hey, welcome to episode 95 so today we're talking about something super important, and I've mentioned it a lot over time, but we're going to do a whole episode on why obligation sex actually destroys desire, why it is not helpful for either person, and what works better. So we're going to talk about something I see all the time, and it breaks my heart, because people think they are doing something helpful. They think they're doing the right thing. They think they're being a quote unquote good partner, but what they're actually doing is making their desire challenge in the relationship and the relationship connection worse. I'm talking about having sex when you don't want to obligation, sex duty, sex, pity, sex, whatever you want to call it, sex that is for your partner, not for you. And I absolutely understand why it's really tempting to do this. You love your partner, you see how hurt they are, you maybe want to protect them from disappointment or from feeling rejected. And those are lovely intentions. Really, truly lovely intentions. And you think if you just push through, maybe you'll get into it. But here's what I really want you to understand, is that obligation sex that doesn't feel like it's for you, does not actually help in the long run, it actually makes things worse for both people, and there is research to back this up. So today I'm going to show you what actually happens when you have sex you don't want and what to do instead that will actually help both of you. So what I mean? What is obligation sex? What am I talking about? So this is the sex that you have, primarily for your partner, not for yourself. It's when you don't really want to, but you say yes anyway, or you think, you know, maybe I'll get into it, but you don't, and you keep going anyway when you're having sex to avoid your partner's disappointment or prevent conflict, or try to keep them from having hurt feelings

3:02  
when you're performing enthusiasm you don't feel,

3:07  
or when your body isn't really there, like you are kind of dissociating and just going through the motions. What it is not so obligation sex is not just starting like responsive desire is very common way to experience desire, where you might not actually feel desire when you first start making out and touching each other, but you're curious, you're open, and your body actually does respond with genuine arousal at some point and pleasure once you Get going. That's normal responsive desire. That's not obligation sex. And if you know that you're a person who tends to experience responsive desire, like a lot of us, like I often do, I'm not really like walking around during the day, typically wanting sex all the time. I actually tend to schedule sex in advance and then prepare myself to be in the mindset and open, and then I give myself an out. If I don't feel into it, I stop. Okay, so that's somebody who understands responsive desire and gives them a chance to give themselves a chance to get into it. But if they're not into it, and if they can't make adjustments to get into it, they actually stop. Obligation sex is when you don't stop, when your body never really gets on board, but you keep going anyway, because you think you should. And the reason people do this is usually because they're trying to protect their partner from hurt, or they're trying to be a quote, unquote, good partner, because they actually think that it's what they're supposed to do in a relationship, that sex is part of the deal, and that your partner somehow deserves access to your body as part of sort of like some sort of transaction, and this is not your fault for a. Assuming that it is what we are messaged around in society all the time. We are constantly given this sort of underlying messaging that being in a relationship means you're supposed to be putting out so and this comes from a lot of old, patriarchal, religious messaging, and it is not your fault, but it is also not true. Sex isn't a deal. There's a societal message that sex is a responsibility of partnering, especially for women, and that our capacity to sort of receive sex is part of our role, even if we're not happy with it, even if there's no joy in it for us. And that is fucked up and not true. And it's not helping to have that subconscious messaging going on for anybody. It's not helping men. It's not helping women. It's not helping whether you're a heterosexual or you're in a same sex partnership, it is not helpful to have any sort of obligation on what somebody being entitled to your body tends to actually backfire and go the opposite direction. So what the research shows there was a great research study by CAMI Hurst that looked at over 1000 women and their experiences with what she called consenting to unwanted sex, which is duty sex in long term relationships. So they were consenting, but they didn't actually want to have the sex. That's the key thing. And I used to do this. I will freely admit to it, I didn't realize I was doing it for a long time, and most women don't realize they're doing it for a very long time, because we are socialized not to really understand our own pleasure or to feel really entitled to it, and because I had sexual trauma early in life, and that's how I was introduced to sex, I didn't realize that subconsciously, I thought sex was something I owed other people in order to be in a relationship with me. But here's what CAMI Hearst study. The study found women who engaged in duty sex often didn't initially identify their experience as harmful. In fact, most of them did it for years before the emotional toll became obvious to them. And what happens is, as time went on, they noticed powerful emotional and physical shifts. Women in the study who were doing this described a gradual erosion of sexual desire, and he even reported feeling repulsed by sex after prolonged patterns of saying yes when they actually when their body really wanted to say no, and the emotional outcome wound up being deep resentment. And this is what I see all the time, and it's what I felt myself, even though I might, my partner didn't force me to do anything, and is a really lovely human being. But because I was constantly crossing my own boundaries, sex started to feel like this transactional exchange, and it didn't feel like it was for me, it didn't feel like a loving, connected experience, there was kind of an emotional detachment, and that is what was commonly reported in the study. So think about this, if you're having duty sex, you're trying to protect the connection by protecting your partner from disappointment or hurt, but you're actually creating more disconnection in the relationship by disconnecting from yourself. So this happens because our bodies are not on board. Our bodies are really amazing truth barometers. Our minds can tell us all kinds of stories, and they certainly do. But our bodies actually tell the truth and accumulate the truth. So when you cross your own boundaries, your body remembers and your nervous system starts associating sex with danger, with pressure, with checking out or dissociating with doing something you don't want to do. Your body literally learns sex is unsafe. It means bad things. It means disconnecting from myself, and then your desire drops even further because your body is trying to protect you. And oftentimes we get numbness, and we even get pain, or we get sort of what's called term sexual dysfunction. If you're a person with a penis, where you might have a lack of erections, so physical consequences for people with penises, if you're not actually turned on and you you might not get an erection, then there can be shame about that, because we're all socialized to expect men to be somehow magically. Be like ready to go with the drop of a hat. There's often times a lot of shame when that doesn't happen, and that creates more sexual avoidance later. For people with vulvas, if you're not actually aroused, there can be an increase in numbness and pain there's not enough physical readiness, and then pain further reinforces not wanting sex. Your body is giving you information. When we override that information repeatedly, you basically train your body to shut down. So I have had a number of clients that this has happened to, and I really I love working with helping people reverse this pattern. One of my clients, Cami, had like in she was experiencing total, like vaginal numbness and then a lot of pain and insertion, and she kept pressuring herself to have sex because she was terrified of abandonment. She was terrified that her partner, who she really loved, would leave if he didn't get penetrative sex. But because of that terror, she was pushing herself to have duty sex, and it was making her shut down even more. So that's just one example of what happens when you do this to yourself.

11:20  
And you know, this is not just happening for women. So I had a client, Christopher, who, you know, he started, he was overworking a lot, and started seeing his wife's desire as another to do on his to do list. And by the time they came to me, he had tried testosterone that hadn't worked. And, you know, she was kind of in this, like deep sulking or lashing out um pattern that she was really feeling bad about, because she was really didn't know what to do. And, you know, Christopher really needed to stop seeing sex as only for her, and this sort of duty or obligation, so that he could start actually feeling like it was actually enjoyable for him again. And we worked on that. So this can happen to all kinds of people. It's really easy to fall into this trap of obligation sex and thinking it's helping, but it's not, and it actually doesn't help your partner either. So what happens that most people don't realize is, when you have obligation sex, you will generally end up resenting your partner, even though they didn't force you, even though you said yes, the body said no, and you overrode it for them, and deep in your brain and your body, you know that somewhere and you resent wind up resenting your partner for asking, and it seeps into the rest of the relationship. It tends to show up as snippiness or distance or defensiveness or avoidance, and oftentimes our partners can feel that even if we don't say it and they don't know why, they don't know what's going on. And oftentimes we don't know what's going on because we haven't even admitted it to ourselves. Remember, women in the study did this for years before they even realized how much of a toll it was taking on them. But your partner, they know something is going on, they just don't know why or what it is. And it feels even worse. It feels like more rejection and more disconnection, because they can feel you pulling away. They can tell, oftentimes not consciously at first, but on some level during sex, they can kind of tell you're not into it when you are performing desire, instead of feeling it, when you're tolerating discomfort instead of experiencing pleasure. If you have a partner who has any attunement whatsoever, at some level, they sense that disconnection and it doesn't feel good to them either. Most people do not want to have sex with someone who is simply enduring it, and this is why higher libido partners will often say, I just want to feel desired. I just want to feel wanted, and I don't want to feel like a predator, because they often will wind up feeling really icky and feeling really unwanted, even if you're having obligation sex with them, and it can kind of create almost a desperation to like force your partner to feel desire for you, to try to like, make it up, or to fill that fear, that worry and that void. But what the higher desire partners typically want is they want you to honor your boundaries. They don't want you to build resentment and say yes when you don't want to and at the end of the day, most people would rather sit with their own disappointment and be allowed to have it and have those feelings, be allowed to be there and be real and valid than have you just be silently tolerating and building resentment. Yeah, because having sex with someone who's clearly not present, who's not enjoying it and who's tolerating feels pretty fucking terrible. So sex shouldn't be about one person's capacity to perform and the other person's capacity to endure in the sort of dance of human sexuality, right? Both partners need to participate fully, freely and with a real desire to actually enjoy being there together and to explore together what feels good for both people. So when sex is about duty, nobody's actually winning. And, you know, I had one client, and we'll call him Ben. I've changed all I always change the names my client. So Ben had just like this incredible sadness when he realized his partner had been crossing her own boundaries and accumulating all this resentment. But he was also really relieved to figure out where it was coming from, because he could not figure out why she was so reactive with him in all kinds of other ways in her life. And he really desperately wanted to feel wanted, and he deserved to feel wanted. He was really amazing. I loved working with him and I and you know, it made a lot of sense that he wanted to feel wanted, but what was really going on was she was repeatedly and for years crossing her own boundaries. And it is not because she didn't have capacity to enjoy sex. It was because she just didn't feel like she was allowed to have it be for her, and they really could only get there and he could feel he could finally feel wanted when she stopped over writing her own note, and it took us a little while to work on that so that she could feel full permission.

16:51  
So here's the thing

16:55  
I want to give you something to do instead, because we don't want to just avoid sex altogether. We don't want to avoid talking about it. We don't want to avoid intimacy and physical affection altogether. That's not going to help either, and that's we'll talk more about that, maybe next week. I'll give like, a whole list of stuff that's not super helpful that people tend to default to. But for now, I think the most important thing I want I want to encourage you to honor your body's No. Your body is not wrong. Your no is just information. It just means not right now. It is not a character flaw. It just means that you probably need something else than what you've been getting, either from yourself, your partner, or both of you. It is okay to say no to sex, always full stop. I don't care if it's your wedding night, it is okay to say no to sex. People can tolerate disappointment. It is a normal part of life, I promise. And it is okay for your partner to be disappointed. It is not the end of the world, and it doesn't mean that they hate you. They are allowed to feel disappointed when they ask for something and then don't get it. That's okay. You also aren't required to always give things to someone so that they don't feel disappointed. Imagine if we I mean, some people do raise their children like this, right where they like, try to protect them from disappointment forever. And then I tell you, when I was a college professor, those kids were in my class, and oh, my god, their lives were so hard. They didn't have any resilience to disappointment whatsoever, and they didn't know how to exist with like, something not going their way. And it was crazy, crazy entitled. It's not a recommended parenting strategy, and it's also not necessary for you to constantly protect your partner from disappointment, but you can be empathetic with them when they feel disappointed. Okay, that is the important part. So you can honor your no but stay engaged. Your no can come with engagement, not avoidance. Just remember, notice this specific thing right now is different from no to all intimacy forever, and I refuse to talk about it. That's what feels really bad.

19:18  
So I want to invite you to explore what is available for you. Get curious about what kinds of connection and physical affection you do want. Does kissing and making out sound nice? Does having somebody like nuzzle your ear sounds sound nice? Is snuggling or cuddling within your boundaries? Clothed, unclothed what sounds good? Maybe there's some sort of sexual behaviors that do feel within your boundaries, maybe giving some oral or hands or whatever, but intercourse doesn't and that is completely valid, and that is okay, and if you don't want to do anything. That stuff, that's okay too. The key thing is make sure it feels within your body's boundaries in the moment. If it feels like you're just performing to service your partner and you're not at all feeling okay with it, then that is what duty sex is. Whatever the activity is, you're doing it out of duty. So think about what actually would feel good to you, and what you are yes to. And don't totally run away and disengage from your partner, but communicate to them, right? Tell your partner what is available. So for example, you might say, hey, you know sex isn't on the table for me right now, but I do want to connect with you. Here's what feels good to me. Can we do that? This is so much better than either having obligation sex that causes later resentment, or pulling away from all touch and make some space for their feelings. It's okay to acknowledge that your partner might have difficult feelings, and you can be there with them for that. You can say, you know, babe, I know you're disappointed, and I get that it must be really hard for you, and I need to honor what my body is telling me right now, but I can be here with you while you feel your feelings, right? It is so much better to just acknowledge their emotions. You don't have to fix them. Just acknowledge their emotions. Don't capitulate and cross your own boundaries, right? You just acknowledge their emotions, and you just stay present with them. You show them that you're not abandoning them even if they have feelings, and they can show you that they're not abandoning you even if they have feelings, right? So then you get curious about what you do want. Give yourself permission to find your No, and you will have so much more space to find your Yes, right? What conditions do you need? What would make you actually turned on? And that can be maybe you don't know yet, that's totally okay. That's the discovery process. But engaging with that question instead of just forcing yourself to do something you don't want is going to be much more helpful for you and much more fun for you and your partner. So we want to encourage you to like when you do say yes to sex, make sure it's a genuine Yes, not like a fine. Let's get this over with, right? But, and I'm curious. I'm open. I want to explore. I want to at least try and see if I can get turned on, right? And maybe you say less yes less often, but it will be so much better for both of you, and it will start encouraging your body to feel like it is for you only say yes when the sex is also for you, and you can believe that. So another example, you know, I had a client, Kate, who shifted from this obligation sex pattern to like, really boundary honoring. And this is the partner of Ben, and she really opened up to all. It took a while, right? She needed a lot of reassurance that it was okay to listen to herself. She had been in a pattern since childhood where she really wasn't attuned to by her family, and she really didn't get the message that it was okay for her to have boundaries and to do what she wanted. She was kind of forced into this like role in her family where that wasn't okay, and when she did switch to allowing herself to say no, we discovered that her yes was actually really awesomely bossy, and it was so great. She was like wanting to use her partner for all of her own pleasure, and her partner loved that was so into it and got to feel super desired. Loved it. Not everybody would. That's okay. He totally did. He was super into it. It was great. We wouldn't have been able to find that if she hadn't given herself permission to say no. Okay. So for higher desire partners, if you are the higher desire partner, I just want you to hear all of this. You do not want your partner to be having obligation sex with you. I promise. I know it feels better than nothing, but it's not. It's actually creating more distance and really gonna erode the desire even further. So try to pay attention to whether your partner is actually genuinely present and engaged. Sometimes people have been doing this for so long that they can't tell that they're checked out. They can't tell they're dissociated. And this is different than being a person who goes into erotic trance. So make sure to listen to that arousal styles episode erotic trance is not being checked out. It's actually being deeply checked in, and you want to make sure you are able to communicate that about that outside the bedroom, so that you can understand whether your partner is just an erotic trans person, but if they are like really seem not into it and just going through the motion. Ends, remember, you know, ask yourself, Is this sex really good for both of us, or is is my partner just tolerating it? And please create safety for honesty. What happens a lot is that higher libido partners have gotten so sensitized around this and around rejection that they are really defensive, and it makes no room for the other person to find their authentic yes and no. So create safety for your partner by telling them, like literally telling them out loud, not just acting like it and not communicating, literally telling them, I only want to have sex with you when you actually want to if you're not feeling it, I need you to tell me I would rather handle my own disappointment than have you cross your boundaries and actually mean it. Please do not punish them for being honest. You want to create open honesty in your relationship. Okay, so the bottom line obligation sex does not protect your relationship actually damages it. Your body will shut down, your desire will drop, resentment will build, and your partner will sense that you're not really there. That is typically what happens. There are very few exceptions. So the best thing you can do is honor your boundaries and stay engaged with curiosity, explore what you do want, communicate clearly and make space for both people's feelings. Now, all of that is way easier said than done, and that is why a lot of times people need help, and that is why I exist. Both of you deserve sex that feels good to both of you, right? And it is genuinely hard to navigate this alone, feel free to reach out what I want you to do now, whether you're the lower desire partner or the higher desire partner, take a moment and just check in with your body. Think about the last time you had sex. How did you actually feel, not what you told yourself, not what you think you should have felt. What did your body actually feel? Was there tightness? Was there bracing? Was there a sense of, let's get this over with, or was there openness and curiosity and genuine pleasure? If you're the higher desire partner, did you have a sense that your partner wasn't really present? How did that feel in your body? Right? Just notice no judgment for either of you. This is just information, right? If you notice that obligation sex has been happening in your relationship, just acknowledge it for now. You were both trying to navigate a really hard situation, and now you know there's a different way, but you might not have known that before, right? And I have a ton of past episodes that will really help you understand more about what might be blocking desire and what actually turns you on, right? You can check out, is it so bad to be a tease? That's a really good one for this. All about erotic emotions is another really important episode, arousal styles, what am I yes to the libido blockers episodes? So if you are realizing that you need help with this, you can also reach out for a consultation call with me, but please start with that body check in and really see if this is something that's showing up in your relationship, because if it is, it does need to be addressed. All right, my dearest, I'll see you here next time. Hey. So before you go, I have some more free help for you. If you are okay with sharing your email, I will send you my free guide, five steps to start solving desire differences without blame or shame. This is a practical starting point for individuals and couples. You can opt out of my emails at any time, but I think you'll want to stick around. I am not a spammer. Go get it at www.Laura jurgens.com/libido. Make sure to spell my last name right and the link is in the show notes.