When Sex Becomes a Substitute for Real Intimacy
This article is included as one of the chapters in the e-book, Good Sex: What Three Conversations about Sex Revealed about Shame, Intimacy and Reconnection after Sex, based on Tim Tedder’s interviews with Jocelyn Silva, Linda Landon, and Xanet Pailet. Download the entire e-book for free.
When a couple finally decides to fix their sex life, there's a predictable first move. Xanet sometimes hears it in a client's initial phone call: What positions should we try? Should we schedule date nights? Should we buy something, watch something, bring something new into the bedroom? She doesn't refuse the question. She'll answer it eventually, but she knows what she's actually hearing: a couple looking for surface solutions while ignoring the deeper problem.
Most of the time, she says, sexual difficulty in a relationship is a symptom of unresolved relational struggles. Maybe one partner feels unseen or has been criticized so many times that they stop volunteering anything. Maybe they suspect that if they open up about what they actually want, it will be used against them.
Sometimes sex has become currency, traded for cooperation or a vacation or a period of peace. None of that is fixed just by trying a new technique. You can bring an entirely new experience into a bedroom where two people don't feel emotionally connected, and all you'll have is two disconnected people attempting something unfamiliar.
Linda uses a particular word for this attempt at filling the gap: performance. She says performative sex is counterproductive because when you're performing, you’re forgetting yourself. While you're refocusing your attention outward, into the other person's experience, monitoring their face for evidence that you're succeeding, you are no longer attentive to your own body. Two people can do this simultaneously, each one working hard at it, each one wondering afterward why something felt missing.
Ask yourself honestly what's occupying your mind the next time you're with your partner. Is it sensation, or is it assessment? (Am I taking too long? Is she still interested? Am I going to be able to finish? Is he comparing this to something? Should I make a sound here?) That inventory is not intimacy. It's a performance review.
Here's where Linda's framework becomes a bit uncomfortable for those of us who have been unfaithful. Leaving yourself, she says, is also what happens in an affair. You go out toward the bright, shiny object, the person who seems sexier and more alive, and the movement is outward, away from home, often away from your own values.
The affair is another way to satisfy a deeper longing by trying a new trick: a new position, a new toy, a new partner. Different costs, wildly different consequences, but the same underlying attempt that’s often being made by committed couples. Each experience is a reach for something out there to resolve something in here.
I don’t mean to trivialize infidelity. Betrayal is categorically worse than insisting on new positions or trying velvet handcuffs. But if you had an affair and you believed you finally discovered a part of yourself that had been missing,
Linda's message deserves consideration. What if you weren't finding yourself at all? What if you were doing, at enormous cost, a more extreme version of the same thing you'd already been doing for years—looking anywhere but inside yourself for a feeling you didn't know how to generate at home?
Jocelyn arrives at a similar conclusion from a different perspective, and she states it bluntly: you cannot develop intimacy without integrity. In our conversation, she said it twice to make the point. She borrows the physics definition from Gay Hendricks in his book, The Big Leap: an object is in integrity when it is whole and complete, and energy can only move freely through an object that's in integrity. Put a pebble in a hose, and it doesn't matter how much pressure you apply at one end; the flow is compromised at the obstruction.
When your partner is honest with you, connection flows freely. When they lie (even a small lie, even one you'll never discover), the flow is blocked. And this, Jocelyn suggests, is why so many betrayed partners report having sensed something long before they had any evidence. They weren't being paranoid. They were recognizing an obstruction.
Xanet describes the free flow of connection by looking at the word “intimacy” phonetically: “into me see.” Emotional safety, in her description, means I can be totally honest with you, including telling you something that might hurt, and trust that we'll be all right. I can bring you my emotions without fear that I’ll be shamed for them. You might get defensive, because people do, but we both know we'll find our way past it. That certainty is the foundation for satisfying sex. Without it, she says plainly, you will never have a sex life that is deeply passionate and durable enough to survive the ups and downs.
So it all comes back to this: if you are trying to rebuild a sexual connection, whether after betrayal or after years of gradual drift, don’t focus on trying to find the highest pleasure. Instead, look for a deeper connection. Once you start dealing with the things that are in the way, the pebbles in the hose, you’ll be more naturally driven to find ways to express your new closeness through genuinely intimate sexual encounters.
