If you’d rather listen to the audio version of this content, check out my podcast episode, “Sex in an Instant”
A friend said to me, "We can see it between you and Kurt. The turn on, the connection, that delight in one another is so obvious when I'm with you two together.”
And, listen, we're not making out all the time or all over each other in a way that makes friends want to shout, "Get a room, you two!"
But I know what she means.
Because it's there in the spark between our eyes. It's there in how we sit next to each other. You can hear it in how often and how hard we make each other laugh.
It wasn’t always electric between us.
The connection my friends see in our relationship brings me so much aliveness and I'm grateful for it every day because we didn't always have it.
Your story may be like mine:
You're too tired for sex, but you miss it.
It feels like you're in a dry spell and you don't know how to break it.
You're in the mood sometimes and your partner is in the mood sometimes, but usually not at the same time so it's hard to actually, er… consummate.
Or it feels like there's just a long trip from all the things you're doing all the time, to that really turned-on, yummy, buttery place where you can drop into a delicious sexual encounter.
I hear these situations every day from my clients. And those are when they aren't having a ton of resentment or conflict communication problems, things that make them feel like they're not on the same page.
I joke that sex in a long term relationship is like a baby sea turtle.
The mama lays the eggs in a nest on a beach. She lays hundreds of eggs because for those eggs to come to maturity and hatch, and for baby sea turtles to get to the water is just a losing proposition. Of the hundreds of eggs that she lays only a few live to adulthood. That's why sea turtles are endangered.
Same with long term sex in a marriage: it’s endangered.
I don't believe sex naturally goes away when we get older.
Here’s what 13,000 hours of coaching have taught me:
Sex goes away when we get busy.
Sex goes away when we live with each other for a long time and learn all of each other's foibles but haven’t yet learned any lover would have their faults.
Sex goes away when our insecurities get projected onto a partner.
Enter: "Nano-Sex."
It's those little microscopic, erotic connections that create a lubricant in your day to day experience together. We’re greasing the skids -- so to speak -- to help us get to full blown erotic encounters, whether those are penetrative or not.
If you know me, you know that I am not phallocentric or penetration-centric in my definition of sex. I hope that if you stick around with me, you'll also think of sex as a space that the two of you create together.
What I call “Nano-Sex” is breaking that space down into teeny tiny encounters. Nano-sex is the little ways you are with each other that say, "I see you and I know you to be an erotic being. The erotic being in me meets the erotic being in you right here right now." Kind of an eros-rooted namaste.
It’s like a firestarter. You strike together flint and steel to make a spark that will eventually catch and become a raging fire. And that's what Nano-erotic encounters are; you’re creating a little spark by striking the two of you into each other.
You, too, can have that Nano-turn on together with your partner every day, regardless of how often you have time, energy or alignment enough to have a full-blown erotic encounter.
There are five keys to Nano-sex, and I'm going to walk you through each one.
Key #1 Remember you're an erotic being.
My client Natalie, had given birth to two kids within three years, and she was parenting them both along with her husband, David, while continuing to run her business. And this woman was whooped.
All of her touch needs were met and then some by that baby and her toddler, and she had more to do every 24 hours than a person ought to have in 36. Because of the overwhelm she felt, she kind of forgot that she used to know herself as this sexy woman, someone who is fun and playful and really enjoyed a sweaty, yummy roll-around with her husband.
So David was missing sex. Natalie wasn't.
Here’s what I did: rather than asking her to say yes to him, when he was making advances that were (quite understandably) not appealing to her, I started by inviting her to remember herself as an erotic being.
She and I talked about ways that wouldn't take more time (because she really didn't have more time) but that would help her feel her own sexiness and beauty.
She changed up her workouts. She did fewer treadmill runs and made time every week or so for a more expressive Nia movement class.
She put a lipstick in her car so that sometimes, at a red light, she could pop it on and see her own beauty.
She hadn't been really adorning herself. She moved the things that made her feel gorgeous to the front of her closet. They'd gotten kind of stuck in the back when she first started breastfeeding three years earlier. Just moving them helped her wear them more often.
Through little bitty actions like that, Natalie gradually began to shift how she saw herself. Until she did that, there wasn’t going to be any way for her and David to have more connection erotically. By reawakening her erotic self and remembering she is still an erotic being, she started to want to express that side of her.
Key #2: Behold your partner as an erotic being
Once you remember your erotic nature, the next key is to behold your partner as an erotic being. If you've been head-down in your work, or really busy with parenting, or both, if the two of you have been vegging out in front of the TV together every night for a couple months, or you're running around doing really great things and just staying busy, but you're not really connecting, you might have forgotten the erotic marvel that your partner is.
So often people fantasize or share with me that there's someone somewhere who would be sexier, who's better in bed, who would turn them on more than their partner does. But, honestly, I've heard that even with people whose partner is ostensibly pretty dang sexy. I've worked with people of all genders who have a damn hot partner, but they don't see them that way.
I've seen enough of this dynamic to realize we’re not objective about our partner’s eros nature. It's not really about your partner's sexiness quotient in the world, It's about how you see them. It's about you looking over and realizing what you're looking at. You're looking at a bleepin’ sex machine. It's just that it's your job to behold them in that way.
What if they don't yet see themselves that way? If they don't turn towards you in a confident, sexy way, if they have turned their light off (“Kitchen’s closed, don't look here!") then you are beautifully positioned to help them see their sexiness and thereby to turn on your relationship's erotic potential all day every day.
Key #3: The “Eyes Habit”
A lot of my clients aren't making much eye contact in the bedroom when we first start working together. If that's the case, I first dig in with both of them to see what each person is protecting by avoiding eye contact. Then we find ways to make them feel safer and more comfortable making brief eye contact and then, eventually sustaining it more in erotic situations. The eye contact that we can cultivate contributes directly to more pleasure and to more emotional intimacy inside sex.
That's inside the bedroom, but when it comes to Nano-sex, like in the kitchen at breakfast time, or while you're putting the boat back on the trailer at the lake, eye contact is just as important there.
This builds on those first two keys: I see me as an erotic creature, I see you as an erotic creature. Now, the quickest and most direct way to convey that is through how we look at each other. You can convey volumes with how you look at your partner, but you may not be accustomed to it. And that would be why it's a little uncomfortable at first.
The first time you look at your partner in a more flirtatious way, in a way that telegraphs, “Hey, I'm hot, and I think you are too”, they may look behind them, like "Who you looking at like that? Me? What? Why are you flirting all of a sudden?" It can be surprising, it can be vulnerable, and it can be a turn on. You might talk about it together first. But really know that when eros is sparked in an instant, it is so often through our eyes.
Key #4: It's an inside joke.
Humor is key to turn on. Or maybe I've just been blessed to be married for 24 years to somebody who cracks me up, so I can't really remember someone trying to turn me on without also making me laugh! Either way, it certainly can be a key to shared pleasure when you can amuse each other and be lighter and more playful.
Just like any other component of your sexual connection, Nano-Sex relies on creating this secret world that only the people involved share. This is the "inside" part of an inside joke. Whether you're in a crowded party, or you're at the dinner table with your kids, the two of you can, with a glance, or the graze of a hand, communicate a world of meaning and turn on without anybody else being the wiser.
And that component of secrecy, of exclusivity, is a part of the turn on, it's a part of how we can have a delicious experience together in just a moment.
Key #5: No strings attached.
This is important: Nano-Sex is self-contained. It is its own fulfillment.
It's not foreplay.
It's not a promise.
It's not an obligation to do anything else.
We actually crush our Nano-erotic encounter if we start to expect our partners or ourselves to do anything else in particular, as a follow up to our Nano-connection. Just enjoy it. And if that creates a certain kind of tension in you, you want more, and you don't have it, well, get off on that tension. Enjoy the frustration of it.
Think about some of your hottest memories of erotic situations. I’ll bet that many of them include an element of wanting something you couldn’t have. You wanted to release that tension, but there was something in the way. It's that tension that actually increases our turn on if we let it and we don't go negative in our frustration over it.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg
Those are five keys to Nano-Sex or Nano-eroticism. I've got lots of other ideas for how you can cultivate this kind of intimacy. A lot of them are keys not just to creating an erotic connection in an instant. They’re keys to a great relationship.
Many of the biggest ones are the things I recommend most often: the practice of “wagging, front loading the fun, or what I call "love unplugged." You can get the guides to those five relationship habits at lisenbury.com/habits. If you stack today's five keys on top of those five habits, and you really choose to have a turned on joyful, close relationship, you are going to be unstoppable as a couple, even if only one of you is working on it right now.
That's my hope for you: even if you have to take these steps alone for now, you will choose a turned on relationship. I hope you'll decide right now that Nano-Sex is a fun thing you want to cultivate with your partner throughout your days together. And I really hope you'll let me know how it's going.