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Archives for October 2014

Five Tips For Keeping The Sexy and The Passionate in Long Term Relationship

By Pamela Madsen

Despite being a published sexuality expert who works with countless women and their partners, I’m always my own best case study. I have written and been public about many parts of my own sexuality. Most of my sexuality has occurred in a long term, mostly monogamous marriage of more than 30 years.

I give lectures and have been interviewed on the lack of passionate sex in long term relationships (including my own), and what we can do about it.

Last night, I realized that I do still have a pretty sexy marriage. That seemed funny to me because not too long ago, my husband and I gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal about having less sex in a long term relationship. That is still true. But things keep shifting for us, and the couples that I am working with. Sex and passion keeps slowly getting better. So what is up?

Tip One: Stick Around a Little Bit Longer Than You Think You Should!
We all know that boiling point, when we think we can’t take it anymore. But there is a gift that comes from sticking around, not throwing your cards on the table and walking away. When you allow for some time, and the understand that relationships can shift, you can often be surprised with what you have.

Tip Two: Long Term Relationships That Remain Sexy Have A Lot of Erotic Privacy
My husband and I have our sex life together, and we have an agreement that allows each of us to have a certain amount of erotic privacy and independence in our marriage. It is has slowly been evolving since I wrote Shameless.

Erotic privacy may mean different things to different people. It may mean the privacy to look at pornography and not share some desires with our partners. It may mean the possibility of exploring ourselves within agreed upon boundaries without our partners.

Tip Three: Have Willful, Non-Spontaneous Sex
My husband I and have been exploring this tip for the past year, and it is working for us. I strongly suggest buying a massage table, and setting up a separate place for willful, non-spontaneous sex adventures! Massage tables allows you to explore giving and receiving touch in a new way. It allows for some newness and surprise which is always a good thing to spark desire. There are many great books out there on giving and receiving sensuous massage, and it can be a great way in for sexy in long term relationship sex. Massage tables can get us touching each other again.

Tip Four: Understand That Sexual Desire Ebb and Flow
In my marriage, we have known and understood that our passion had an ebb and a flow. Sometimes it is hot, and sometimes it simply vanishes like the sun on a cloudy day for months at a time. But that didn’t mean that our relationship was broken. Life is not a romance novel.

If you are willing in part to stick things out, and not expect every need of yours to be fulfilled by one person, I think there is lots of hope for passion in long term relationship. You need to create the space for sex. Review Tip Three!

Tip Five: Sex Starts With Your Relationship with Your Own Body
For me personally, (and for the majority of the women that I work with), I had to learn who I was erotically. That was pretty vulnerable work and took time. I also think that it’s an evolving practice and I’m still doing it. It has involved me taking many different paths to my own self-discovery. My husband needed to give me the privacy and the space to go explore that. He had to trust me enough to know that I would indeed come home to him. This takes a lot of trust, and it’s not always easy to do. But if you can go there, it is key!

I share my personal journey in my book Shameless, but there are no short cuts in getting really clear about who you are first.

It is only when we are clear about who we are, that we can truly deepened in relationship and take on the hot desires, and willful sex that is needed for long term relationship to make it through the years. Remember, we change over time. Who we were erotically when we entered our love relationships may have shifted. We need the time to take stock!

So, last night my husband threw some spontaneity at me, and some willful sex. He created a space of the erotic where there wasn’t much desire. And we danced. This morning, I decided to give a listen to my colleague Esther Perel’s TED Talk about passion in long term relationship, and she does it spectacularly well!

“In long-term relationships, we often expect our beloved to be both best friend and erotic partner. But as Esther Perel argues, good and committed sex draws on two conflicting needs: our need for security and our need for surprise. So how do you sustain desire? With wit and eloquence, Perel lets us in on the mystery of erotic intelligence.” Give a listen to Esther.

We can all have passionate, often sexy long term marriages and relationships. But first we have to unlock ourselves. Make room for our own self-discovery, and then make room for our lovers. We need to learn how to give our relationships air.

Create space while knowing that there is some security. It is the secret surprise to passion.

Pamela Madsen

 

Pamela Madsen, M.S. is an integrative life coach specializing in women’s issues: sexuality, fertility, body image, wellness and rejuvenation. Pamela is also author of the best selling memoir, Shameless (Rodale, Jan 2011), and founder of The American Fertility Association. Her websites include PamelaMadsen.org, www.backtothebody.org and www.thefertilityadvocate.com are breakfast essential for reporters, writers and policymakers.

Duck Dynasty Star All Wet When it comes to STDs

Robertson family patriarch takes the familiar and all too easy approach of blaming STDs on immorality. Here’s why Phil’s wrong.

A colleague shared an MSNBC article about a CNS News story where Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson weighs in on what he sees as the root cause driving sexually transmitted diseases: a lack of biblically-correct sex!

Let’s simply allow the man to lay it all out for you, er, that is to put it in his own words. Referring to an STD-free, monogamous heterosexual couple he opined thusly:

“Those two will never have a sexually transmitted disease. You know why? They keep the sex between the two of them….biblically-correct sex is safe.”

He lays out the logical foundation of his argument regarding this hypothetical couple: “You’re not going to get chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, AIDS, if a man marries a woman and neither one of you have it, and you keep your sex between the two of you, you’re not going to get EVER a sexually transmitted disease.” (Phil does allow that an out-of-left field exposure such as a tainted blood transfusion could still expose the couple.)

It’s been years since I had a chance to formally use the skills acquired in my critical thinking class so I’m proud to construct Phil’s syllogism for you:

  • John is STD-free and only has sex with Sally
  • Sally is STD-free and only has sex with John
  • Therefore, John and Sally will remain free of STDs

What’s a bit exasperating is that the simple logic does stand up when presented with a hypothetical couple on paper, of course. That’s also the problem: these matters really aren’t that simple and treating them this way ignores the flesh and blood, real-world complexities of human desire and biology. It’s just too easy to claim that STDs are the result of hedonistic lifestyles of promiscuity; the fact is STDs are so common that even those with a single partner are at risk. Add social determinants to the mix (lack of access to health care, poverty, and simply residing in a community where STDs are very common) and we begin to see that risk reduction requires more than a wagged finger and sharp tongue admonishing us to exert a little more self-control.

We humans have sex. Lots of it. Always have and always will. Pick your era, pick your culture: from the most sexually-repressed, tightly controlled Puritanical age you can find to a Saturday night in Haight- Ashbury in 1969 after a Jimi Hendrix/Stones double bill, you’ll find people gettin’ busy. Condemn it, attempt to contain it, legislate against it all you want, but nature wins out and when we come of age we get curious about our bodies, sex and pleasure, and we begin to explore.

Phil is fighting against something of a phantom enemy, too. Sure there is plenty of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll imagery in modern society but 1) people discover and have sex regardless, thank you very much and 2) across the political/cultural spectrum almost NO ONE is actively encouraging people to “just have it” in a wild orgy of excess. In fact, while an organization like mine is certainly sex-affirming we also have initiatives to point out the dangers of having sex under the influence, to encourage mom’s and dad’s to talk to their kids so that parental values are well communicated, and to inform teens that it’s OK if they resist peer pressure and choose not to have sex!

Where we differ with Phil is that we don’t believe sex is bad, we do our best to ditch the fire and brimstone judgment and we’re realistic enough to understand people (even teens) will do the deed no matter how much we may insist otherwise. It’s far better to have open (and calm and respectful) conversations and not demonize our natural impulse to have sex. We also need to give a shout out to the safer sex practices and contraception methods that we’re so fortunate to have in our modern world and realize that condoms and the pill don’t encourage sex; they only serve to make it safer.
I’m not going to yell at Phil or call him names. We all do too much of that. He’ll probably never believe me, but I’ll end by pointing out the sad irony of his thinking: opinions like his actually fuel the STD epidemic and create more of exactly what he wants to avoid.

—Fred Wyand

Grassroots Hope

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
― Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

Photo by Andrew Hetherington
Photo by Andrew Hetherington

Danah Abarr needed answers about HPV. She figured others did, too. So she started an organization and a movement.

It’s a familiar story: when Danah Abarr first searched for answers to her questions about HPV she was left frightened, puzzled, and poorly informed. Where to turn for help? Not wanting others to go through the same thing she founded HPV Hope, a non-profit that debunks myths and busts stigma through education while also building relationships between healthcare professionals, educators, advocates, and patients. Based in Seattle, HPV Hope offers support groups and extends its reach beyond the Emerald City with free online forums.

What led you to found HPV Hope?
When I went through my own HPV diagnosis, I was scared and felt alone. I turned to the internet to learn about HPV, but that only made me more scared and confused. There was so much conflicting and misleading information out there. I searched for in-person support groups but couldn’t find any for HPV. I was shocked; if this really is something that 8 in 10 sexually active people have in their lifetime then why wasn’t everyone talking about it; why did I feel so alone? That’s the reason I started HPV Hope (www.hpvhope.com). I wanted to be a part of a positive dialogue about HPV, to be able to talk about it openly and help to end the negative stigma that surrounds it.

I want to ask about the work you’re engaged in through HPV Hope, starting with the support groups. You have actual meetings in addition to online support, right?
Yes, HPV Hope offers online support groups. These are not chat or message boards but live online meetings where participants from all over the Country can come together and share their stories. We also offer online resources and one-on-one phone calls for anyone who isn’t quite ready to join the group.

What do you find support group attendees are asking about—for example, medical issues, relationship/personal concerns? Where do they most need the support you offer?
People come to the support groups with lots of questions. Most of them seem quite simple like; how long will I have HPV? What can I do to make it go away? How and when did I get this? The problem with HPV, and the reason we have so much confusion about it is that the answer to most of these questions is ‘we don’t know’. That’s why talking about it helps so much, because it helps us to understand that the real issue here is not the who or when of HPV, but the what to do now. In most cases, participants are scared and feel alone.

Often times the only other person they’ve spoken to is their doctor and they are worried what their friends or family members would think if they told them. And this is completely normal, so we talk about that – about how common HPV is and about how they’re not alone. We share our stories and through this sharing people begin to feel better – they see that others are going through the same things they are and that there is no reason for them to feel abnormal or alone.

We also talk about relationship issues like how do I tell my partner or future partners and what does this mean for them? Because HPV is a sexually transmitted infection, it can be a very sensitive topic, so HPV Hope wants to give people the knowledge, support and resources to be able to deal with it in a positive way and to be able to have these difficult conversations in a healthy way.

What other activities does HPV Hope sponsor?
HPV Hope was just recently granted 501(c)3 nonprofit status and with that we look to begin partnering with clinicians to do more outreach to patients who are diagnosed with HPV. We are also interested in educating medical providers about what an HPV diagnosis means to patients and the role they play in helping a patient to better deal with it. HPV Hope is also active within the community, participating in fundraisers, educational events and supporting other like-minded organizations.

I notice the education section of your website has HPV research articles focusing on both males and females. Males are often overlooked in HPV discussions and it’s good to be reminded it’s the HUMAN Papillomavirus we’re talking about, not the Female Papillomavirus! What do you think might be done to engage men more in HPV discussions?
I’m so glad you asked this question! HPV Hope has always been of the mindset that in order to deal with HPV we need to engage both men and women in the conversation. HPV Hope receives just as many inquiries from men as it does from women. This may seem surprising but I think it makes sense. Most women are used to talking with their OBGYN about sexual topics and often have support among their female friends when it comes to issues of a sensitive nature. But men do not have these same resources, and they’re just as scared and confused as women are. An HPV diagnosis brings up similar issues in both men and women: fear of sexual rejection, feelings of isolation and depression, guilt, shame, fear about their health and ability to have children. All of these topics are alleviated when we share our stories and learn that we aren’t alone. When I first started hosting support groups I considered having separate groups for men and women. I ended up not doing that simply because I didn’t have enough participants to split them up.

Looking back I’m so glad it happened that way because by dividing HPV into men vs women we miss the bigger picture – that we’re all dealing with the same fears. Blame is also a big topic when talking about HPV and if you have a conversation with just women or just men its easy to point the finger at the opposite sex. In HPV Hope’s support groups we have both men and women talking about their experiences and it helps for each gender to see it from the other’s perspective and see that they are struggling too.

If we are ever going to defeat HPV we need to focus on bringing men into the conversation. We need to shine a light on the impacts HPV has on men and we need to have more open dialogue about HPV, as you said, as a human issue not a women’s issue.

Say you’re speaking with someone newly diagnosed with HPV or a related condition. What are the three things you most want to communicate?
1. You’re not alone. HPV is the most common STI in the US. Most people don’t even know they have it and 8 in 10 sexually active people will have some form of HPV in their lifetime.
2. In most cases HPV comes and goes from your system with no lasting medical impacts, even the high risk strains. 90% of cases will clear up within 2 years (according to the CDC). What’s important to focus on are regular checkups for any high risk or precancerous symptoms.
3. The only way you could’ve avoided HPV is by never having any intimate contact with another human being. HPV is a reality of our sexual lives. Getting one of the over 150 strains of HPV is not the issue; getting a high risk strain that starts causing abnormal cell growth is and that’s when we need to have cautious concern.

What are the big challenges around HPV education?
As the HPV test & vaccines becomes more common we are, medically speaking, better equipped than ever to prevent, detect and diagnose precancerous symptoms due to HPV. However, what we aren’t at all prepared for, are the mental and emotional impacts these new HPV diagnoses will have on patients. HPV has always been a part of our lives, we just didn’t know it, and now that we’re testing for it we’re going to get a lot of HPV positive test results. So the question is, how can we better educate the public about HPV so that receiving an HPV positive test result doesn’t feel overwhelming and devastating. It has to start with more open and educated conversations about sex and STIs and what they mean for our health.

Connect with Danah at 206-486-6221 and danah@hpvhope.com
You can read more about Danah’s story in Cosmopolitan’s November STI feature “What Living with an STI Is Really Like.“

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