138: Sexual Rejection vs Saying No

Hey, welcome everybody. Today we are talking about how to say no to sex without rejecting your partner. That may seem almost impossible, but I want to assure you that by the end of this podcast, I think you will feel like it really is possible, and you’ll see why.

Starting with a little story. I had a client who really wanted to have more sex with her husband. She would flirt with him. She would invite him to bed, and she was not subtle. And he had this whole set of moves for avoiding the invitation. He’d stay up working late. He’d take a really long shower at night, hoping that by the time he came to bed she’d have given up and gone to sleep. And if she was still awake, he would act really harried, like he was super busy and stressed, and he’d say good night really quick, give her a peck, and roll over.

So lots and lots of this nonverbal communication of no, but he rarely ever said no out loud. And what she was experiencing was this constant feeling of rejection. She really wanted affection, flirtation, any kind of intimacy, connection. What would happen was she would get increasingly desperate, and then have a meltdown about it, a big one, and they would have a fight.

I want to be clear about who this woman is, because she is not a dramatic person. She’s emotionally intelligent. She’s even keeled. She is the steady one a lot of the time in the rooms she’s in, especially at her job. But she did not feel like herself in these moments. When this sense of rejection would build up, she didn’t recognize the person she was becoming when he pulled away time after time.

And he, on the other hand, was just fried. He was burned out at work. He was running on empty. And this is a crazy thing: he told me directly that he was avoiding saying no to her out loud because he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. His way of protecting her was to try to do these very nonverbal expressions of no, not tonight. He thought those were the kind version. He thought he was protecting her.

But it was not kinder. It was so much worse than a “Hey, I’m really fried and I’m burned out and I’m not up for sex right now” would have been. It was so much worse than a verbal no would have been, because with a verbal no it’s possible to actually explain yourself and to stay in connection. What he was doing instead was communicating something way bigger than what he meant to communicate. He was communicating, “I don’t want you. I don’t want to be in connection with you.”

This is really common. This might sound familiar. There are implied invitations and implied rejections. Sometimes there are explicit invitations and implied rejection. But most of the time in these situations, and I’ve had this with so many different couples over time, no one is actually talking openly and vulnerably about what is happening, what they want, what they’re doing, what they need, what’s going on for them. It’s all happening under the surface with this nonverbal dance where somebody winds up really overstating the rejection with body language, rather than kindly and caringly talking about it.

So we’re going to cover this today. I want to say that in this couple, this was a heterosexual couple, and the male partner was doing the avoidance, but that is not always the case. People of every gender and sexual orientation do this. If you’re hearing this and thinking, well, that’s not us, stay with me, because this is about the pattern of overstating your rejection of a partner with nonverbals, and how to do that differently. How to stay in connection. It’s not about who’s in whatever chair.

And it applies to all kinds of situations, both inside the bedroom and outside it, and all kinds of invitations. We’re going to talk mostly today about sexual invitations, but it’s not exclusive to that. It could be about going to a birthday party. It could be about anything.

Here’s what we’re going to cover. First, I’m going to give you the punchline straight out, just like a news article. If you take away anything from today, I want to invite you to take away that a rejection and a no are not the same thing. We’re going to cover all the details of that. What a rejection actually is, why it is genuinely different from a no, and then why so many of us overstate our no and actually offer rejection inadvertently without meaning to, and a couple of reasons that happens.

We’re also going to talk about what that nonverbal version of a no does to a relationship over time, because it’s quite specific and it’s worse than most people realize. Then we’re going to get really practical: how to say no out loud and stay connected while you do it, and what to do if you’re the one receiving this kind of overblown nonverbal no, because you have real agency here too. I don’t want anybody thinking this is a one-person job. And then we’re going to talk about practices you can start this week.

A couple of notes before we dive in. One, I have a lot of episodes out there about desire discrepancies and how to navigate them, so if that’s your situation, I want to encourage you to go grab those, because this episode does apply. It’s really common for this dynamic to be happening if you have a desire discrepancy or a desire gap in your relationship. But it doesn’t have to be a desire discrepancy situation. It can be about occasional hurtful avoidance, or patterns of avoidance about things besides sex, and it can just be about how you relate to each other. Your desire levels could match up just fine, and this is how somebody responds when one person initiates. Sometimes it’s both people.

Second note: this episode is about what happens when someone invites something and the other person is genuinely not up for it. It is not about how you ask, or how you make that invitation in the first place. I want to name that really clearly, because how you initiate does matter enormously, and it’s a whole other conversation.

I’ve talked about initiation before, and I’m going to talk about it again. If your partner has responsive desire, meaning their desire shows up in response to connection and arousal rather than arriving on its own spontaneously like manna from heaven, then being asked point blank whether you want to have sex is typically a guaranteed no. And that’s a lot of us, especially women and men over about 45. It’s not because that person doesn’t want you. It’s because nothing has happened yet that would allow the desire to show up. There are far more effective and thoughtful ways to initiate than just asking somebody, “Hey, do you want to fuck?” I will be returning to this soon in its own episode, because it deserves its own time. That’ll be on initiation preferences and responsive desire specifically, so be sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss it.

But for today, I’m assuming the invitation was a suitable one for your partner’s preferences in how they like to be initiated with, and we’re talking about what happens next.

Okay, those are all the caveats, so let’s dive in.

Number one: rejection is not the same thing as a no. This is really hard to wrap our heads around when we haven’t thought about it deeply before. So I get you if I’m breaking your brain. That’s actually a good thing. That’s what allows us to grow and have new ideas and understand things differently, and not stay stuck in the past. But it might feel a little disorienting.

A lot of people imagine and believe, and remember, a belief is just a thought you’ve practiced a lot of times, so you’ve imagined many, many times that somebody saying no to you is a rejection of who you are, is to be taken as I don’t want you. One of the reasons we get that idea in our head is because people use those words interchangeably. No and rejection. They use them so often together, especially in the context of sex, that it feels true. This is where language is so important in shaping the way we feel about things.

Imagine a waiter came over to your table and offered you the daily special, or the soup of the day. Would you like some clam chowder? And you said no, and they took it as a rejection of who they are, and they shut down and felt bad, and you could see the disappointment come over their face, and they slouched off and wandered away. Nobody imagines that having a preference for what kind of soup you want is a rejection when you say no. But because we say this all the time in our culture around sexuality, we often feel like it’s a personal rejection.

So it’s not your fault if you feel like this. But let’s start opening up to some other ways of thinking, so that you don’t have to feel so miserable. Because a real rejection is pretty miserable.

A real rejection is the withdrawal of connection. It is pulling away, turning away, removing yourself, going cold, disappearing. That is what rejection is. It is an action that we take with our bodies and our attention, and it feels deeply personal. It feels like the tap of connection was just turned off. This person has zero interest in being with me or being connected to me. That is rejection.

A no, on the other hand, is just information about this moment. That’s all it is. It’s one bite of data about where you are right now. Maybe you don’t feel like kissing, hugging, going out to dinner, going to that party, having sex, having a specific kind of sex, having a chat about your next vacation. Maybe you don’t feel like talking about remodeling your bathroom. Those are all things you might want to say no about, out of the millions of things you might want to say no about in any given moment, and none of it has to be a personal rejection of your partner. You are just not up for that thing at this moment.

For some reason, we can often accept when somebody doesn’t feel like talking about remodeling the bathroom, or doesn’t feel like choosing where to go out to dinner. But we take it so personally when somebody isn’t up for sex in this moment. I want you to consider that they are not any different.

Sometimes your body is just not there. Sometimes you’re tired. Sometimes you feel gassy. I have literally had a date where I brought lentil soup, and I promise, do not do that on a first date. We were both way too gassy to have sex, even though we’d planned it. She and I were just like, we need to stop and not do this, because too much lentil soup. You probably didn’t need to know that, but the point is you can have all kinds of reasons for not wanting to have sex that aren’t about a personal rejection of the person you’re with.

And the difference matters so much. When someone withdraws connection from us, it doesn’t land as not right now or not tonight. It lands as a statement about us as a person. That is the experience on the receiving end. You don’t feel like you got a no. You feel like you got a verdict on your worthiness.

Some of that can be coming from the way our partner does it, and some of it is coming from the way we have inadvertently conflated a no in this moment with a personal rejection. If you hold that belief, then any no that somebody offers, even if it’s just a not right now, can land as a rejection. So I want you to hear that the signal is coming from both sides.

But this is really important. If you are the partner trying to offer a not right now, then you want to be really clear that you’re not inadvertently offering a full rejection, a withdrawal of connection. This is one of the reasons it becomes so hard to say no for a lot of people. Because if it’s always being taken as a full rejection, then it feels like you’re not even allowed to say no, because they’re so sensitive. But also, if we’re not saying no, we tend to overstate and overblow the nonverbals so we can avoid having to say it. And we tend to do it in a way that’s basically hitting somebody over the head with it so much that it does feel like a rejection.

In practical terms, you can say no in relationship as much as you need to. In fact, I highly recommend saying it whenever it’s true, because you’re not up for everything all the time. You don’t need to be up for everything all the time. People operate very well within boundaries, and usually better within some constraints. It’s okay to have needs. And if you never say no to anything, you are not allowing yourself to have needs, and you are not allowing yourself to take up space and have autonomy. And you will eventually resent the shit out of your partner.

So it’s really great in any relationship to say no and to hear no from other people. It is a gift. It is a gift of trust. It’s saying, I trust you with my truth. I trust that you can hold it. I trust our relationship can contain it. Beautiful thing. The word no. Love it. Love it when people tell me no. I practice it with my clients all the time.

The thing is, no is not what’s damaging the relationship. The rejections are what’s damaging the relationship.

Okay, so I hope I’ve convinced you that those are two different things: no and rejection. But why do we overstate the no? Why is it so tempting? Why does anybody reach for that long bath instead of just saying it, where they’re lying there going, God, I wonder if I can go to bed yet, is my partner asleep, instead of just saying, hey, I’m not up for sex tonight?

I want to talk about two specific reasons.

One is that you don’t feel entitled to say no. Somewhere in you, you don’t believe that it’s okay for you to not agree to everything somebody else wants. And here’s the thing: your no doesn’t go away. It just comes out sideways. It comes out as avoidance, as irritation, as snipiness, as going stiff when they touch you, as picking a fight about something entirely else at 9pm so that you can avoid any potential invitation for sex, as being conveniently asleep. That comes from not feeling entitled to actually say no. So the no becomes implied and undeniable, because on some level you don’t trust that your partner could hold your no, that it would be respected, that it would be okay, that it wouldn’t break your connection. So you almost break the connection in advance, so that you don’t have to say no and deal with all that.

Some of you learned this early in life, and it was really protective for the situation you were in. For example, as a child, and we talked about this in the freedom wound episode, maybe your no got overridden. Or maybe it got overridden in a previous relationship. And it also might be being overridden in your current relationship. If your partner sulks every time you say no directly, if they make a snarky comment, if they put you down, you have learned that a direct no is not accepted. That’s not paranoia. That’s pattern recognition.

And if that’s the case, I have a whole episode on why pouting doesn’t help you get more sex. Send that one over, because that behavior is doing real damage, and the person doing it usually has no idea. They’re reacting to an internal cue that they’re feeling unwanted, and they’re expressing it out loud in a passive-aggressive way, and they don’t necessarily even know that they’re doing it.

But a lot of the time our nos got overridden as kids, and we internalized the idea that we’re not allowed to say no in relationship.

Also, if you’re somebody like me who is a little neurospicy, you might have something sometimes called pathological demand avoidance. I don’t actually think it’s pathological, that just means it happens regularly. Some of us like to call it persistent desire for autonomy instead. It’s very common with ADHD and autism, and it’s this need for autonomy. A lot of the time it’s because there’s something in our neurological architecture that allows for innovation, which is wonderful, but also really requires a lot of autonomy. When that comes online in childhood and it’s not welcomed, it goes hand in hand with that freedom wound. They can really reinforce each other.

There are a lot of different ways we get the message that a no is not allowed, and it’s typically worse for people socialized as girls, because we’re socialized to caretake other people at our own expense, to do what they want instead, and to believe we’re not entitled to no.

So that’s the first reason: you may not feel entitled to a no.

The second reason you may not be saying no directly is much simpler, but it stems from the first. You literally just don’t know how. Nobody taught you. Most people have never been shown any examples of an adult person declining sex in a way that kept the connection intact. You may literally never have seen it modeled. Your parents aren’t teaching you how to do this. Nobody else is teaching you how to do this. And if you’ve never seen it done, you don’t know how to do it.

In media, in TV, in movies, we see these overblown rejections. Somebody gets hit on and they don’t want to go out with that person, so they’re very dramatic about it. Why are they dramatic about it? Because it’s drama. It’s a movie. It’s the character overplaying. They’re very rarely just straightforward and kind and staying in connection, because that doesn’t move the plot forward. There’s no conflict. So we just don’t see it modeled.

That is not a character flaw. It’s a missing experience. I practice it with people in my practice all the time. It’s really easy to learn, and we can talk about some examples here today, but just know it is really possible to learn how to do it.

So what happens when the no doesn’t happen clearly and kindly and in connection? We get this nonverbal rejection dance. It’s the body language version. Instead of just saying, hey, I’m not up for it right now, but I would love to be connected with you, and I’d love to find something we’re both up for, people essentially use their body language to shout a hard no from the rooftop. Turning away, shrinking, avoiding, going cold, getting angry that they were even asked. And then the other person feels that emotional pull away, and they pull away back.

So now nobody feels safe. Everybody feels disconnected. And then we’ve loaded even more weight onto the no. So now it feels like no is a really bad thing, because it necessarily means we had to be disconnected. But actually, the no and the disconnection are two totally different dances.

The other problem is that nobody feels safe making an invitation either, because the odds of getting this really devastating rejection instead of just a not right now feel way too scary. And once the invitations feel dangerous, they will stop happening. So now you’ve got a couple who isn’t having connection, they aren’t having physical intimacy, and they aren’t talking about it. You’ve got two people almost punishing each other with this nonverbal rejection dance, and nobody is saying anything clear about what they actually want, what they actually need, and what they’re not trying to do.

So what’s the solution? How do we say no and stay in connection? Let’s talk about what to actually do.

Step number one: always get honest with yourself first. You have to be in alignment with what you actually want. You have to let it be okay if you’re not up for sexy times right now, or if you just haven’t gotten the foreplay you need to even know whether you might be up for it. That’s not necessarily a no to everything. It might just mean you’re a no to something that’s too many steps down the road from where your body is right now. Like you’re not up for penetration right now. When somebody says, do you want to have sex, and you know that’s what they mean, you’re like, well, hell no. But you might be up for a makeout session, and then maybe your body would be up for something else next.

So you have to know: what is it that I’m a no to, and what is it that I’m a yes to? That means taking a moment and asking yourself. And you have to give yourself permission to say no, so that you can even notice if you want to say no or you want to say yes.

Also ask yourself: do I actually want to turn away from this person? Do I want to send them the message that I don’t want them as a human being? Most of the time the answer is no. And if the answer is yes, then you have a bigger relationship problem that needs to be sorted out, and we should get in there and help you with that, or you should find somebody who will. But most of the time the answer is not I totally want to disconnect from this person and I do not want it to be easy to reconnect with them again. Most of the time the answer is, I’m just not up for what they’re asking about, but I’m not trying to turn away from them.

So that’s all part of getting honest with yourself. What message do you need to send? What is the honest answer you have to offer?

Step number two is saying it plainly and warmly. Just say the truth. Hey, it’s really nice to be asked. It is nice to be asked and invited for some connection. My body’s not up for that right now. I’m up for this other thing. Or I need to go take a nap. Or I really don’t feel very good and I think I need to lie down. Or I’m up for a cuddle. Or I’m up for a walk. Or how about we watch the latest Ted Lasso together. Or how about we make out for a bit, but I’m not sure I’m going to be up for sex. That’s okay.

Appreciating that they asked, saying what’s true about where your body’s at right now, and what you learned from step one about what you actually want. And keep the no about the moment, not about them.

What I mean by plainly and warmly is that you don’t need to beat around the bush. It’s actually kinder to be direct, so nobody has to guess what the heck you’re trying to say. Say it clearly, but look at them. Orient toward them. Say it warmly. Say it with a gentle expression on your face. We don’t have to turn away. We don’t have to cold shoulder. We don’t have to act angry. We can just say, hey, thanks for asking. That’s a lovely invitation. I am not up for sex right now, but I’m really happy to be here with you. How would you feel about going for a walk?

Expressed in a warm way, while keeping eye contact and staying with them. That’s the key. Let your nonverbals stay with them while you speak plainly and warmly.

All right. No big deal. You figured out what was true. You said it plainly and warmly.

Step three: offering what you do have. You’ll notice in those examples you can offer what you are interested in, or what you might need in order to be interested. Hey, I would love to spend a little time kissing, or having you rub my neck, or pet my head, and maybe we’ll see if I’m into something else after that. Or offer another time. Hey, I’m really tired at the end of the workday today, but I would love to put something on the calendar for Saturday.

For me this is absolutely true, because I’m an afternoon delight kind of person. That’s my biorhythm. So I’m always going to propose a nice little afternoon rompy time, or late morning, not nighttime. But you can offer another time. Be concrete. Offer what you are up for. Offering your yeses, not just your no, helps people stay connected.

Step number four is that you can say the clear thing that differentiates this from a rejection. You don’t have to do this every time, but I do think sometimes it’s useful, especially if you have a pattern of overdoing the rejection side, or your partner has a pattern of misinterpreting a clean warm no as a rejection.

In this example, you’d say something at the close of what you just said, like: hey, this is a not right now. This is not an I don’t want you at all. I do want you. I’m just not up for it right now.

Saying that out loud and clarifying that it’s not a rejection can be really impactful. Again, you don’t have to do it every single time, but you will know there are times when it will help.

And if you’re the one who’s regularly on the receiving end, or if you just know that would really help you, then you can ask for it. It is okay to ask for the reassurances you need, and you don’t have to do it like a little begging puppy, like give me a bone. You can just say, hey, can you reassure me that this is not a rejection, that it’s not you never wanting me, that it’s just a not right now?

See, if I ask in that way, I’m not prostrating myself. I’m not begging or being needy. I’m just saying, hey, I could really use a reassurance. And that’s a reasonable adult thing to need sometimes.

This does not have to be a multi-paragraph speech every single time. You can have the long conversation once. And I do recommend establishing the difference between rejection and a no in a dedicated conversation with your partner. If this is a regular issue for you, schedule a time, sit down, and say, hey, I recognize I have not always been great at this. I think maybe I have overstated, and this has been hurtful. Or, hey, I think this might be what’s happening for you. You’re not feeling entitled to a no, and you’re kind of doing this thing. Can I run this by you and see if that feels true, because I’m feeling quite rejected?

Have the long conversation once, and then you can just do a quick, hey, I’m not up for it right now, I would love to reschedule. Or how about we just have a makeout session. Or how about we just have a cuddle. You can just have a very short sentence. Nobody needs a monologue every single time.

Okay, last big chunk here today, and I don’t want this piece to get missed, because it’s huge for a lot of couples, including the couple we started with. Other ways of connecting. Have a menu. When you’re a no to sex, know what you typically enjoy and what you might be a yes to. I actually have a whole podcast episode from really early on about what are you a yes to.

Physical connection isn’t only sex. A lot of the time we expect that our partner, especially if they’re a male partner, just wants sex. But a lot of men, so many of my male clients, I would say almost all of them, and the only exceptions were people who had some other serious stuff going on, what they really wanted was physical connection and affection and feeling wanted. It wasn’t just sex. Sex was the way they had assumed that was going to happen, or that they were going to feel that way. But at the end of the day, when you just asked them point blank, what is it that you really want from sex, it was that they wanted physical and emotional connection, intimacy. They wanted to feel wanted. They wanted to feel close.

And if their partner would actually stay in connection and offer a hug, or a makeout session, or even just a little grinding, or a dance, some people just want to dance in the kitchen for five minutes, all kinds of things were able to fill that need. It didn’t have to just be sex. It could just be lying down together and facing each other and enjoying looking in each other’s eyes.

So know what else is on your menu. And remember that quality time counts for a lot of people. Do they want to go for a walk, watch something together, play pickleball, whatever? Do they want to talk about your day, about your life goals, about the things that really matter to you? Figure out what kinds of connection you are up for, and say it.

When there are other ways of connecting available, then your partner isn’t just left out in the cold, where every time they invite sex they get a total shutdown from you and feel like there’s no space for intimacy or connection.

And this is not to say that if what you need is alone time, that’s not fine. It is. Or if what you need is to go out with your friends, that’s also legitimate. But just own it and say it. Don’t make somebody guess, and don’t make them think it’s because they are not acceptable as a human being. I frequently need alone time, or to go hang out with my friends, and I’ll say, hey, I just need a night by myself. I really look forward to seeing you and spending more time with you this weekend. No problem.

And if you’re the one receiving the no, I want you to know you have agency here too. This is not a one-person job.

One, you don’t have to get angry about being told no, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you are being rejected. And if it’s about sex and you’re just really horny, that is a moment. That’s a specific circumstance. You will survive. Nobody’s going to be injured by being horny and not getting laid at this particular moment. That’s what our hands are for. And that’s okay. That’s what sex toys are for. It’s wonderful that our hands reach our genitals. Truly, one of evolution’s wonderful decisions. Thank you very much.

But it’s really worth being honest with yourself about what it is that you want. If what you want is connection, then you want a partner who’s actually available for connection. If what you want is to get off, you can just have a wank. Both of those are totally fine, but they’re really different wants. The desire for an orgasm and the desire for connection are totally different. And if you conflate them all the time, then we wind up treating our partners like sex toys. You really want somebody who wants to connect with you, and who wants something for their own pleasure.

If it’s connection you’re after, then of course we care about whether the other person is up for it. So make that distinction for yourself, so that it’s clear not only to you but also to your partner that you’re not expecting them to override their own desires and just caretake you with their bodies. Because when you get that message as a partner, it feels like you just want to run away.

So you can ask for a more direct no. You can ask for a kinder no. You can say things like, hey, when you just avoid me, it really hurts and it comes across as rejection. I would much rather have you be open and honest with me about what you want and what you don’t want, and I will practice taking it well and being open to that.

But do you notice what I started with? Vulnerability. When you avoid me, it hurts and it comes across as rejection. That is information your partner needs, and you need to say it vulnerably in order to be heard. If you just make accusations, if you just get angry, if you just lash out, it’s not going to land well, and you’re not going to get what you want out of the conversation.

So make sure you’re not using any emotional coercion, anger, insults, pouting, or passive aggression to shut down a no when you get one. Because if you do that, your partner is learning that it is not safe for them to say no, and they’re just going to start escalating this rejection business. It never works. I highly recommend not doing any of that. Make sure you’re not punishing your partner for telling you the truth and training them to avoid you by accident.

You can also ask for the type of no you want, and practice with them. Have them try out saying no. How do you want to hear a no? Give them an example. Have them say it back to you. See if that actually feels okay. Play with this a little bit. That’s what we do in my practice. It works great. Everybody’s not exactly the same in the kind of language they want to hear. So just play with it a little bit. Get straightforward.

And for everyone: it is okay to not want sex at the exact same time as your partner. That is just normal. That is human. It’s not a betrayal. It’s just information.

And if you genuinely do not want to be connected with this person ever, that is also valid, and that’s a real answer. You have the option to say so and go, and that is totally allowed. But just know that emotional withdrawal in place of a clear, verbal, warm, kind no has a cost. You can both stop paying that and have a much more fun, connected, enjoyable relationship.

Okay, so back to our couple. I don’t want to leave you with a story that’s just hanging out there, because it actually all worked out great.

The first thing he needed to see was that being indirect was not helping, and he needed to actually look at what the avoidance of her was doing to her before anything else could move. And then we practiced. We literally practiced out loud with me, a low-stakes person who’s not going to get upset about it, the skill of saying no and staying connected, warmly and kindly. And then helping him figure out what he was a yes to.

He was feeling so depleted at work that he had started looking at her as an item on his to-do list, and it was feeling like an obligation, and it was just shutting him down. So we did a lot of work on his life outside the bedroom, and helped him change the way he was looking at intimacy, so that it could feel like relaxation and play and a reward rather than something that took his energy.

But at the end of the day, it was learning how to say no kindly without rejecting her that actually helped her nervous system calm down, so she didn’t pull away, so he didn’t feel like he was being punished, and then he didn’t feel like he was on the hook. It just freed up the whole system. She could feel in her body that he wasn’t rejecting her as a person. He was just not up for sex right now. And they built some other ways of connecting that worked even when he was tired, and he started feeling really good. So the two of them started feeling really good together. She stopped feeling desperate or abandoned, and she stopped having those meltdowns and fights.

Nothing about his desire level changed overnight. The burnout took a while. He still had nights, and even entire weeks, where he was just a no. But the no stopped meaning something it never meant. It stopped breaking their connection. And that meant that when he was feeling up for sex, it was way easier for them to go ahead and have sexy times and have fun. He didn’t have to get over this hurdle of being afraid of even bringing it forward because of all the emotional dynamics in the system. That was all gone. It was all cleaned out.

And then as he started being able to manage his work-life balance, he started having a higher desire level again. But frankly, from the get-go, from the first few weeks, once he learned how to say no better, and she stopped feeling so desperate, and they found some other things they could do, they were already on the same team and they already felt connected. It wasn’t as big of a deal that they weren’t having sex as often, and so it didn’t feel so loaded for her, and he had more time to work on his work-life balance and his burnout.

So it was a really lovely solution. It all worked out really well. It is possible for you too. If this is a challenge for you, your solution might look slightly different, but really noticing some of this stuff and starting to make it explicit, instead of all this subconscious body language stuff, is really, really powerful. And you might be really surprised at how quickly that can solve things.

But importantly, the actual embodied practices for staying connected while you say no don’t translate super well to a podcast. They’re body-level skills. They often need real-time feedback. You can start with some of the examples. You can imagine into it. You can listen to this a few times and try to start here. If you need extra help, please feel free to reach out and get a coaching consultation.