Summary of Our Sex Life is a Disaster

Overview of Our Sex Life is a Disaster (Where Should We Begin?)

This episode of Where Should We Begin? (hosted by Esther Perel) is a single couples counseling session with a lesbian couple who have been together six years and are now eight months pregnant after IVF. They describe a repeating sexual impasse: attempts to be intimate spiral into caretaking, over-talk, emotional excavation, and then hours of sobbing or avoidance — which repeatedly extinguishes erotic connection. Perel maps the relational dynamics behind that pattern and offers concrete interventions and exercises to restore play, differentiation, and erotic possibility.

Couple background and presenting problem

• Partners together ~6 years; met through a mutual friend, then married.
• Recent stressors: difficult IVF process (hormones, expense, emotional isolation) and current pregnancy at eight months, producing time-pressure and body-image concerns.
• Sexual history: early relationship marked by discovery and intense sexual joy; sex has become infrequent and fraught. Attempts to initiate sex often trigger a cascade of worry, “trying,” questioning, and deep conversations that restore emotional connection but leave erotic life depleted.
• Additional context: one partner describes childhood chaos and self-effacement (learned to shrink and caret ake), the other describes verbal emotional fluency and a tendency to provide “data” about feelings and needs.

Main relational dynamics Perel identifies

• Caretaking vs. surrender: When one partner becomes hyper-responsible and caretaking (to “do it right”), they cannot surrender — surrender is required for erotic letting-go.
• Lightness/play vs. emotional digging: Sexual connection thrives with playfulness and lightness; heavy problem-solving conversation during sex kills erotic energy.
• Differentiation vs. fusion: The couple struggles to hold separate inner lives and needs without turning differentiation into distance; the pregnant partner feels the other’s caretaking collapses her own desire.
• Power/agency stances: Perel demonstrates three stances — leading, resisting, passive — and shows that resistance (a playful pushback) and leading can create erotic tension, while passive compliance is boring and kills desire.
• Body image, past trauma, and timing: Pregnancy, changing body image, and a resurfacing assault history have amplified fears about desire and safety.

Key interventions, exercises, and practical tools from the session

• "No more talking" during sexual attempts: Stop conversational problem-solving that derails arousal. If something goes wrong, pause, shift to embodiment (music, breath, gentle touch), then return or stop.
• Grounding through touch and breath: Use a simple anchoring practice — hold partner’s hand, lean head in, breathe, allow the body to come back in and stop mentally checking the other person.
• The holding/conviction script: When a partner is headed into an emotional spiral, the other can intervene with a containering phrase delivered with conviction (example: “You don’t have to go down that road right now”). The power is in voice, steadiness, and presence, not in wordiness.
• Lead / resist / passive enactment: Walk holding hands with one partner leading, one resisting, or one passive — to viscerally experience the erotic value of tension and agency. Resist/playful tension often felt most erotic; passive felt deadening.
• Coin-box metaphor: A playful accountability tool in which “checking” or over-caretaking could be tallied to bring awareness to the behavior (used as therapeutic metaphor in-session).
• The seven sexual verbs to consider practicing: asking, giving, receiving, taking, sharing, playing/imagining, refusing. Identify which verbs you each avoid or overuse and practice the ones you need.

Concrete action items (practical takeaways for couples)

• Create a sex-time rule: if it turns toward problem-solving, put a pause on words and return to breath/touch or stop and schedule a separate time to talk.
• One partner practices “containering” with steady voice and presence — short, firm phrases to halt emotional spirals.
• Practice the lead/resist/passive exercise outside of full-sex contexts to re-learn erotic tension and safe differentiation.
• Name and practice one sexual verb you want to strengthen (e.g., practice receiving without self-judgment; practice asking clearly for touch).
• Schedule play-first sexual encounters focused on lightness rather than performance or repair.
• Use grounding touch/breath exercises when overwhelmed rather than cognitive checking of the partner’s state.
• Consider individual or couples therapy for unresolved trauma or persistent blocks.

Notable quotes / insights

• “The very ingredients that nurture love are sometimes the same ones that stifle desire.”
• “You can’t let go in front of someone who collapses. You can only let go when this person has confidence.”
• “Lightness creates a certain differentiation… that then allows them to come close.”
• Perel’s framing: sex requires both emotional security and erotic risk; too much caretaking/security can blunt erotic play.

Conclusion

Perel reframes the couple’s pattern as an interaction problem (caretaking + fear of getting it wrong + emotional excavation during sex) rather than a lack of love. The therapeutic work offered is concrete and somatic: pause the talk, re-anchor in body and touch, cultivate play and tension through role experiments, and for the more reticent partner, practice taking up more steady, confident space. These shifts aim to restore differentiation and play so erotic desire can return.