Nobody Ever Talks About This One Thing That Can Kickstart Your Love Life
What if gratitude was the missing element?
There’s a lot of sex advice out there—and most of it is pretty abysmal.
It’s a consequence of the profit motive. In our world, a lot of people will say anything to make money. This has had a deleterious effect on our information space. People will write and publish garbage writing just to get clicks.
There are a lot of headlines out there with no substance behind them.
Beyond that, I have a philosophical disagreement with a lot of the sex advice I encounter.
Most of it is either social moralizing masked as advice (you need to do what I say otherwise you’re a bad person) or purely mechanical (here are 5 sex positions to try).
Head over to Cosmopolitan or any other health magazine, and you can find countless articles written by an army of freelance writers churners of rapid-fire content describing the mechanics of sex.
They focus solely on the angles, the directions, the strokes, and the caresses.
I have a big problem with this.
Sex is so much more mental than it is physical. Don’t believe me? Just ask two people who fell in love with one another long-distance, or two people who were swept up in attraction at work and had to keep their secret crush buried.
Sex starts long before we initiate first contact.
First, I’ll get into my philosophy of sexuality a bit (this is essential stuff to know), and then I’ll discuss one of the most neglected things we can do to build attraction and spice up our love lives.
Sex starts with the first time we look at someone who takes our breath away. From there, each encounter ramps up our heart rate. It goes through a series of dates when, eventually, physical touch begins. During this period, many things can go wrong that run the train off the tracks.
Sex is more mental-emotional than physical because attraction is a mental-emotional process, and sex is the physical manifestation of attraction—it’s the communication of attraction.
Attraction builds over a long period and, if neglected, dissipates over a long period. It doesn’t come and go overnight. It then stands to reason that if we want better sex, we have to build a stronger attraction between ourselves and our partners.
The fundamentals include everything from being a reliable person to volunteering to handle our share of the responsibilities in any relationship. Attraction dies with entitlement—and sex dies when attraction dies.
These are the basics of my philosophy of attraction.
With all this in mind, it’s no wonder that most people would ignore the fact that the expression of gratitude can do powerful things for your love life. It’s one of those weird, quirky things in life where it’s right in front of you, but you can’t see it. And it’s not even counterintuitive, either.
Close your eyes and imagine a couple with a dead bedroom—you probably pictured a couple who barely speaks, one that seethes quietly, never so much as flinching, let alone holding an actual conversation. You didn’t picture the couple that constantly tells one another that they value each other’s presence. You didn’t imagine a couple who discusses, in intimate detail, all the unique things the other person does to make their lives worthwhile.
I know, I know, gratitude is a buzzword that’s been beaten to death with the ugly mallet of self-help gurus all over the internet.
A friend of mine once swore that if he made a list of everything he was grateful for in the morning, his whole life would magically get better.
Surprise, surprise, nothing in his life got better—because he took no other action.
There are a lot of overpromises when it comes to gratitude, especially internal gratitude.
But this is a bit different. Our relationships involve other people. And people, as wonderful as we are, are sometimes emotional, oftentimes vulnerable, and have an unnervingly constant streak of self-doubt.
It’s crucial that, as partners, we build our partners up rather than either tearing them down or just leaving them to languish in their own emotional solitude.
Gratitude, Relationship Quality, and Attraction
A novel study by Sara Algoe et al. From the University of Chapel Hill in North Carolina attempted to test the hypothesis that the expression of gratitude between romantic couples could predict relationship quality down the road.
This small study asked participants to express gratitude to their partners and then followed them across six months. The design was fascinating because it asked some participants to “relationally important and socially evocative” statements that weren’t expressions of gratitude, such as compliments.
Six months down the road, those who expressed gratitude tended to have stronger, higher-quality bonds with their partners than those who expressed other social emotions. There’s something about gratitude specifically that affects the other person in our relationships. People whose partners expressed gratitude to them were also more likely to report being receptive to the statements in question.
No surprise, people like to feel valuable—like we need them. And when we admit that we need someone else, however superficial that need may be (even if it’s strictly for sexual or emotional satisfaction, say, between friends with benefits), we admit to ourselves that they’re significant to us. We begin to see them differently—we begin to treat them differently.
Gratitude serves a social function as a glue that binds us together.
It serves a triple purpose in our relationships with others, an important part of the process that Sara Algoe calls “find, remind, and bind.”
When we think about what we enjoyed with past partners, our gratitude can help us identify and find great potential partners in the future. When we find a partner or partners we want to stick with, gratitude can remind us why they’re special and why they attracted us to them in the first place. We also use gratitude to bind with our partners, as mutual gratitude incentivizes us to strengthen and maintain our bonds as time goes on.
Remember when I went on about my philosophy that attraction is the substrate that sex is made of? It’s like still oxygen in a room waiting for a spark to set it off. Oxygen is both life-giving and a highly concentrated explosive. We can’t just sit back and expect people to be attracted to us forever (even if we’re lucky to get someone we like attracted to us in the first place)…no…
Attraction can be built, and it’s created through a series of behaviors—in combination with our unique physical makeup (genes, smells, style, looks, etc.)—and synergy between two individuals. Attraction may not be a choice, but it sure is influenced by our choices in the same way that health isn’t a choice, but our choices heavily influence it.
Attraction Vs. Comfort
Full disclosure: relationship quality is not correlated with sex quality, so it’s important you don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because you’ve made your relationship cozy and secure, automatically your sex life is going to get better.
The point isn’t to make your relationship more secure but to make yourself more attractive.
Sometimes too much security can kill attraction in a relationship.
…but so can emotional neglect.
It’s important that we try to remind ourselves (and our partners) what’s sexy about our relationship and not just comfortable.
So Sara’s research really depends on who you are. Some people are emotionally close, but they really miss the mystery and intrigue—they’ve grown too intimate with their partners and even though they express gratitude all the time, the spark is still missing.
If this sounds like you, I recommend checking out Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (available on Amazon here).
But other times, kicking up the gratitude a notch can serve as the spark to reignite your sex life.
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Three books I recommend checking out:
Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature.
These are also available as an audiobook on Audible.
If you use this link, you can try Audible for free, and you’ll get up to two free audiobooks.