Hello, everyone. Welcome. Today’s episode is for adults only. So heads up. If you like to listen to the podcast with kids around, listen to my episode called Fresh Starts and Do-Overs so your kids can learn that skill from a very young age. Today, we’re going to have a conversation about sex and how to troubleshoot some things that might be coming up in your relationship. If you need to put on headphones or make other accommodations, please do that now. Okay.
This episode is especially dedicated to my Marriage MBA students who asked me to take something that we talked about in class recently and do a whole podcast on it. So by popular demand, let’s talk about sex funnels. First of all, what the heck is a sex funnel? This metaphor came up because we were talking about a sex problem that seemed so big it was unsolvable, like it had no solution.
One of the things I teach is we either eliminate a problem or we manage it. Sometimes looking for the perfect solution to eliminate the problem is not the answer. Sometimes we need to acknowledge the situation or the problem at hand and notice that it’s not likely to change. The example I like to give about that is spenders marrying savers, introverts marrying extroverts, Democrats marrying Republicans. If that issue or situation is not likely to change, then wanting to eliminate it is a recipe for frustration.
However, if we see it as something that we manage as a place to look for common ground and see where we can collaborate, where we can agree to disagree, then we’re much more likely to make progress and feel better. So thinking about that when it comes to sex, some of the thoughts that come up, some of the issues that come up can be thoughts like, “My partner isn’t good in bed.” or “I am not pleasing my partner.” or “I am not good in bed.” or “I wish I wanted sex, but I don’t.” or “I want more sex than my partner does.” or “My partner wants more sex than I do.” These are all thoughts that we’re having. And what we want to do is break them down and think about them differently. First of all, just notice that the thoughts we’re having sometimes they represent a fact, and sometimes they represent something else. That’s what this whole episode is going to be about.
We’re going to be talking about sex specifically in this episode, but if sex isn’t an issue in your relationship in this way, I really invite you to look at whatever the issue is that feels so big that it has no solution. Think about that issue as I walk you through how to troubleshoot a sex situation in your marriage. We were talking about these kinds of thoughts in our weekly coaching call on Zoom in the Marriage MBA. And as we were discussing it, one of my students thought it had to be all or nothing. You’re either good in bed or you’re not. Your partner’s either good in bed or they’re not. As I was looking for a metaphor to really break that down, and because I have an online business and I think about my business a lot, and in any business really, we have what you would call a sales funnel.
So think about this, and I’ll give you a couple of other examples too, but in a sales funnel, it’s simply all the steps that it takes to share what you do. When a person hears about it, they connect with you, and then they buy from you. If you think about any big project at work, it’s a very similar process.
Let’s say you’re an engineer and you’re building a bridge. That project has multiple parts. Think about all the parts from the moment you get the request for a new bridge to the moment that it goes into construction, and then it’s finally completed. If you had a big project like that, you wouldn’t just say, “I can’t build a bridge.” You would go step by step and see what do you need in order to build that bridge, where might you get stuck, and what are the solutions that specific step requires. You might need different materials or different calculations or you might need to reposition the bridge, right? There’s all these different things you might need to do in the process of this big thing that you’re working on.
So you would break it down into the tiniest pieces, and then you would adjust accordingly. It’s really the same idea. So whether or not you can build the bridge is not in question. The only question is which part of the process do you need to troubleshoot? You have to get really laser-focused to find it and then decide what to do about it. I thought about it through the lens of a sales funnel, and I thought, “What if we had a sex funnel?” The sales funnel is very similar. I record the podcast. I write posts on social media. I make offers to join my group program. To give you a concrete example, we recently had 27 wonderful humans go to my sales page for the Marriage Mindset Make-over, that’s my simple self-study program. 27 people went to the page and they didn’t end up checking out.
My Facebook ads consultant thought this was a problem. She was so worried over it whereas I was delighted. My thought was 27 humans read all the way through and clicked to the sales page. Was the sales page confusing? Was it not clear that it’s $97 and you get all the videos immediately? How can I make it more clear? I knew exactly what to work on because I broke it down piece by piece. It doesn’t mean I didn’t have things to do. We totally made the simplest checkout page ever now. We updated it.
If you want to see what that looks like, you can go to maggiereyes.com/makeover, and you can see how simple it is. But we didn’t go into all-or-nothing thinking, we went into laser-focus step by step, “Which part of this is the actual issue thinking, and then how do we solve for that?”
So whether you’re building a bridge, you have a big project at work, you have a sales process, breaking it down is the way to go for so many things. However, when do we ever think in this way about sex? I will tell you from coaching so many of my clients who are smart, capable humans who identify as women, who have careers and businesses and are often leaders in their field, I would say we think about this way never. We never think about it this way until a coach like me says, “Hey, wait, what if we look at this like a sex funnel? What if we break it down into tiny steps, check which one of those steps isn’t working one by one, and then do whatever work is needed on that specific step until we find a resolution that feels nourishing?”
Sometimes that resolution is a new thought. It’s a new idea. It’s a new way of looking at it. It’s a new question to ask. Sometimes that resolution of that new thought or question or that feeling then leads us to taking a different action, which then creates a different result. So that is really how the idea of sex funnels was created. And then all my students immediately understood what I was talking about, and they said, “Please make this.” So here we are.
Let’s take one thought. We’re going to troubleshoot a couple of them together, and we’ll walk you through how to do this. So let’s take either my partner isn’t good in bed or I don’t think I’m good in bed. It’s a thought that I’m having. I want to be super clear and explicit. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. It might mean we just haven’t discovered the things we’re better at yet.
So pick a thought, whether it’s about sex or anything that feels heavy in your relationship right now, and follow along with me. If it’s communication, if that’s the thing that you’re struggling with, I will link in the show notes to Soul-Centered Communication and Closed-Loop Communication. Those will have some really specific guidance in those episodes on ways to think about communicating differently and then very specific thoughts to think and actions to take and things to consider for that. But today it’s sex, and we’re going to look at that. If we make a sweeping statement like that, like, “My partner isn’t good in bed.” or “I don’t think I’m good in bed,” then we believe it’s true, and then we show up for it as if it’s true, what happens?
We just live into that result without questioning it first. We live into that thought without questioning it. What I was inviting my student to do when we were talking about this was simply to question that thought. A lot of you have common thoughts that are somewhere related to, “It’s my partner,” for whatever the issue is. In this case, it was about sex, but think about what your thought might be. And it could be, it could be you have something that is just so overwhelmingly not aligned in your values and desires that the best choice is to move on.
But so many times the error we make is moving on without questioning the thought. And that’s what I’m inviting you to do today. So specifically when thinking something like, “My partner doesn’t satisfy me in bed,” let’s use that one, let’s break it down. This is where the funnel part of it comes in. Is it kissing? Is it touching? Is it that you want something softer or harder or slower or faster? Is it sexual positions? Is it trying new things or doing more things or doing less things or doing different things or finding a few of the same things that you love to do every time?
These are the types of questions we need to ask to figure out what is the actual problem we want to solve. When we make a sweeping statement, it gives us nowhere to go. But when we start asking these very specific questions, first of all, they require us to slow down. We always slow down to speed up when we’re coaching on any topic. We slow down to see what’s happening, feel what we’re feeling, ask questions, and then decide where we want to go from here. We slow down and then we ask ourselves, “What would delightful sexual satisfaction look like? What would be happening? What would not be happening? What would I be thinking and feeling and doing? What am I thinking and feeling and doing right now? Does that match with what I actually want? What is the result I want to create? Is everything that I’m thinking and feeling and taking action on all focused towards that result that I want to create? And then, have I communicated that to my partner?”
I have this hypothesis that our partners want to be our heroes. They want to please and delight us and deliver the wow, as I used to say when I was in hospitality. But they can’t do that if we aren’t clear for ourselves on what success looks like. What would be satisfying? What would be delightful?
I can tell you in a completely unscientific assessment of the clients I’ve worked with over the last few years, whenever I’ve given any kind of sexy times homework in any way related to it, almost every partner that I can think of has always been up for, “Wait a minute, we get to play with this and have fun with this, and we’re going to connect in a physical level by doing these experiments?” I cannot remember any partner who said no. Now that doesn’t mean that there aren’t partners who might say no, and we’ll talk about that in a moment, but I just want to point out that so often our partners are so willing and available to meet us in our journeys, to meet us in our desires. And are we giving them the opportunity to do that?
If they’re not available, we want to also question that. “Why? What’s going on for them? What is their own inner journey? Do they have fears and limiting beliefs that are holding them back? And where can we meet in the middle? What is the middle way around this thing that feels so heavy in our heart?” So here’s something that may surprise you. It surprises my coaching clients and students all the time. Sometimes the solution to what feels like a very large problem or the way forward to manage it, right, maybe we’re not going to eliminate it, we’re just going to manage it differently, sometimes that solution and that approach is super simple. It can be so simple that you think, “Why didn’t I do that before?” or “Will this even work? You mean I just ask for what I want? Could it be that simple?” or “I decide what feels delightful to me, and then I look for all the ways I can have it.”
I was thinking about this idea and thinking about troubleshooting sex funnels and what that could look like, and I came across an article from the Harvard Business Review. The title of the article is Don’t Give Up On A Great Idea Just Because It Seems Obvious. It was written by a gentleman named Andrew Foreman. I will link to the article in the show notes. And for sure, someone at Harvard will have a great chuckle seeing their article linked to something called sex funnels. I am just rejoicing in the humor of that right now. So let’s all just have a chuckle together with that one. Anyway, I really, really loved this idea that we should not avoid innovation just because an idea seems obvious or simple. The point that the article makes is it’s critical to be solving the right problem, and then to be thinking about the most effective solutions. When we do that, the solution seems so simple, it can really feel like, “Why didn’t I think of that before?”
So I thought about some of the things that we practice in the Marriage MBA. So we practice things like asking for what we want, saying thank you and expressing appreciation, practicing self-soothing techniques, practicing coming from our highest wiser self, questioning our thoughts, thinking new ones, sitting with our feelings. These things can be very, very simple. And some of them can seem obvious, but they’re both hard and simple at the same time. So I really love seeing that through the lens of business.
Here’s a section from that article that I just found really useful. I’m going to read it to you, and here’s what it said, “In times of clarity, your resolutions appear obvious and simple. But in fact, they appear simple because the illumination has all the parts lining up and shedding light on a resolve, on a resolution.” The author continues to see there’s a flip side to this. “Obvious answers aren’t obvious to most people, partly because most people aren’t thinking about the question.”
So the article says, “Ideas come only to those who recognize a problem and then look for innovative solutions. As the book, How to Think Like Einstein explains, even Einstein couldn’t find a solution if he had the wrong problem. You must have an enabling problem, one that allows imaginative solutions different from your original expectations. Finding that great problem requires much thought, especially when the solution seems obvious.” That’s the end of the quote. Thank you, Andrew Foreman, for writing that article. The author of that article, Andrew, wrote an app where you can donate to any charity in the United States. And he took what seemed obvious and changed the world with it. He made donating to charity simple and easy for anyone who wanted to do it, by creating his app.
Now you can take what seems simple and obvious and change your marriage with it. And that is what everything I teach is all about. The solution seems obvious when you ask yourself these questions, but you need to be asking yourself these questions in order to find them. It’s why episode two of the podcast is Powered Questions. We do not dilly-dally around with the nonsense around here, we go straight to what works. Now, a common fear that I see come up when we start asking these questions and we start really sitting in this inquiry and breaking things down and really identifying what we want is, “What if my partner doesn’t want that too?”
It can feel so much safer to stay frustrated and have a low-grade annoyance all the time rather than figure out what it is we want and ask for it. To our brains, the unknown feels dangerous, even when it’s good, even when it could be better for us. Just by the fact that it’s unknown, it feels dangerous and unsettling to our brain. Our greatest growth becomes to feel afraid, to feel unsettled, and allow ourselves to still think about what we want, to say it out loud. One of the things about being in a group like the Marriage MBA is you get to practice saying things out loud or writing them in your journal or in the group, and just allow yourself to identify the desire, feel the desire, speak or write the desire, give yourself, your body, the muscle memory of standing in that desire and not dying.
You literally in a very visceral way get yourself ready to then see what parts of that desire you want to take to your partner, what parts do you want to work on for yourself, where you need to practice being gentle and loving, whether it’s with yourself or with your partner, or very often it’s both. And then if you get super clear on something that your partner is absolutely not available for, I propose to you that that is data you want to have. I want every single person in my world who’s exposed to my work to have the best relationship they can create with their partner, to move through all the emotional clutter and get it to the point where you know this is the best we can do together, and from that place decide, “Do I want that?”
And so often the answer is yes. and that’s beautiful and amazing, and you move forward in so many beautiful, powerful ways. We have so many client interviews now on the podcast that walk you through what that can look like. And sometimes the answer is no, and that is also beautiful. Because every single skill you practice to get to that point will help you in every other relationship you have for the rest of your life. Okay, so back to our sex funnels troubleshooting. I want you to see how all of this goes together to show you what’s the best relationship you can have, whether it’s emotional, whether it’s physical, and then to see once we have created that with our personal best, then do we want that?
So let’s say that you want to have more sex or better sex but you just don’t feel like it’s something you naturally desire. It feels like work to you. I know some of you are in that bucket. Some of you are in another bucket, you’re in the I love sex bucket, right? And it feels very natural to you, but let’s just troubleshoot this one. Here the things we want to explore is what is your legit yes and your legit no? That’s what I’ve started calling it.
We want the legit answer, right? Are there emotional things that you need to work through to feel more sexually connected? Do you know, are you aware that most women, not all women, but most women and some men, this is not fully gender exclusive, and we know that gender is fluid, but in a lot of cases, there are many, many women who experience responsive desire, which means they don’t really get in the mood to have a sexual connection until they’re actively engaged in some kind of sexually connecting activity.
Which means if you’re in that group of people that experience responsive desire, you will likely never spontaneously just be in the mood, and nothing is wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with you. We just need to know which problem we’re solving and then manage that one, troubleshoot that one. So some of you may be asexual and have no interest in sex at all. I want to speak to that as well. Let’s find out for sure. Let’s do all the experimenting with before and during and after and collect all the data and see what does your most thriving sexual self enjoy.
Most of you are likely to have some enjoyment, and we just want to find out what combination of thoughts and feelings and actions lead to that enjoyment, and then harness that and cultivate that and activate that repeatedly. And to be really clear, this is never about people-pleasing or partner-pleasing or saying yes when your answer is legit no. This is about you deciding what kind of sex life you want to have, and then exploring it like a scientist or an investigative reporter, collecting data, doing experiments, trying things until you find out what works for you.
And here’s what I think is the simplest place to take your brain when you’re thinking about this, is before, during, and after. So whether it’s sex or it’s a conversation or it’s chores or it’s parenting, whatever’s going on for you that you feel any distress about, is the before setting yourself up for success during and after? What pieces of the before are in your control? What is the tiniest thing you can do to move in the direction you want to go in? During: what is happening during that feels delightful, that feels wonderful? And what is happening during that feels more like a trigonometry test you didn’t study for? Right, that feeling. Let’s isolate all of those things, one by one. Just like we were building a bridge, we needed to check the materials, we need to check the measurements. We need to make sure everything’s going to fit so that bridge of solid.
And then let’s solve for X. What do we need to eliminate? What do we need to manage? What do we need to play with? Step by step by step. Then after, it’s the same idea. Imagine it’s an argument. After that argument, are we closer or farther apart? So many of my clients, they still argue, but at the end of the argument, they have a breakthrough, they’re closer instead of farther apart. So the idea with that is not to eliminate arguments, is how can we make them productive? How do these disagreements bring us closer together?
If it’s a decision that we’re making, after that decision is made, do I feel like we both collaborated as a team to find a workable solution that works for us? How can I set myself up for success in the after? What do I need to do before and during to create an after that feels good to me?
I think this is the simplest place to start. And then from there, we break everything down to its tiniest components. Now, for my client in the Marriage MBA, her actual coaching homework is to spend time thinking about what she loves about great sex. What are all the things that feel amazing to her? Why do they feel amazing? How can she really identify them, explain them to herself, and be in relationship with them, and then share the ones that feel resonant with her partner? So you can have this homework too. I invite you to have fun with it, to play with it. So often we take something like sex and we put so much pressure around it.
There was a time in my own marriage where sex felt so serious. I literally asked my hubby if we could set the intention to be playful and laugh at all the bloopers. It was like taking off the sweater of seriousness and putting on the sweater of playfulness. And that helped me so much. It helped me relax. And of course, then I enjoyed it so much more. I literally just texted him to ask him if it was okay to share that because it feels so intimate and personal. I am so grateful that he said, “Yes, do it.” So I just wanted to share that I teach these things and I still have to do all these things. I still have to work through my own personal journey around each and every one of the things that I talk about here.
Okay, so for everyone who wants to feel more sexually connected with their partners, now you know how to troubleshoot that with your own personal sex funnel? Now you have a new way of thinking about it. You can enjoy all the testing you’re going to have to do to identify what’s awesome and what needs improvement in your sex funnel. If this landed for you, this episode, message me on Instagram, @themaggiereyes. I want to hear your thoughts. I want to hear your feedback. If it brought up more questions for you, I want to hear them. I want to hear all of them. And I will do a podcast episode answering those questions coming up in the future.
Okay, now I think I want to invite you to think about one thing you can implement from today’s episode. What thought can help you move forward that feels delicious to you? How do you feel when you think that thought and what does that thought inspire you to do? One of my favorite thoughts that I love just using for so many things is I can figure this out. Whenever I think I can figure this out, I feel calm. And then I do the things that lead me to the result of figuring it out. Now that thought is really, really simple. It’s so incredibly simple, but if I wasn’t asking myself these questions, I wouldn’t even have arrived at that thought. So I just want you to see that, that it can be so incredibly simple, but until we ask the question and look for the solution, it may not even occur to us. Okay.
These are the kinds of conversations that we have in the Marriage MBA. When you are ready to have them too, go to maggiereyes.com/group, and you’ll see all the details on how to join us there. I will be back next week with more thoughts, feelings, and actions that will help you make your marriage stronger. Bye, everyone.