How to Have a Better Sex Life: The Way to Greater Sexual Satisfaction

A better sex life can mean sex that is more frequent, more pleasurable, more connected, more playful, and more freely chosen, and it means all of those at once. Sex fulfills many purposes that are not mutually exclusive. By broadening our definition of better, we broaden the potential for both people to get something meaningful out of the interaction.

I am treating sex here as a wonderful given in life. The sections below cover the many purposes of sex, the many things foreplay can be, and what each of twelve human capacities contributes to a sexual relationship, from the body to play. Part of having better sex is checking the constructs that give us a bias toward the topic in the first place.

What Does Better Sex Mean?

When someone says they want to get more out of exercise, we know without asking that better can mean many things. Better can mean more playful exercise, exercise that builds mass, weight loss, the mental health benefits, bonding and attachment with another person, or the spiritual side of exercise, where we use it to access the natural environment. We innately know that all of those meanings sit together, and the wish itself raises no concern.

The same question about sex tends to arrive with more severity. “What does better sex mean?” can be asked as if holding the opinion that sex is necessary and good were already a problem. Much of what happens in our sexuality starts with collective and cultural constructs about sex, absorbed long before we chose anything.

A better relationship with cooking runs through the same channels as exercise. Better cooking is healthier, more delicious, and more exciting, gives room for connection with another person, and allows us to experience things. Would I like to be more playful? I might put edible flowers on a dish for no nutritional reason, because the flowers are playful and a way of expressing my uniqueness, my artistic self. Lately at home I have been trying to learn more Chinese and Thai cooking techniques, and there were fundamental things I did not know. Citrus and fish sauce are more foundational to Thai cooking, while sesame oil, umami, and miso point toward certain parts of Chinese food. Learning both expands my palate, and the learning is play. The learning is also heavily strategic. I am trying to eat less gluten, and eating more Asian food lets me do that while still having the pleasure of food that tastes good and needs no substitution.

Sex has the same range, and better sex is better across all of it. Better sex is more connecting and more playful, more present in the body and fuller in feeling. Better sex is moving better, dancing better, to give more pleasure. Better sex also means communicating more easily about what each of us likes, holding our beliefs about sex and about ourselves loosely enough to see the person in front of us, making room for sex in a busy life, finding a diversity of values in it, and feeling more gratitude for it.

Better here is all-inclusive, as opposed to my own subjective idea of better. Every one of these is a wonderful reason for having sex, and the aim is sex that is better in every single way.

We Do Not Need to Want the Same Thing

Both people do not need to be getting the same thing out of sex at the same time.

One person might be having sex because they want to be playful. The other might be pent up and want an orgasm. Very little about that pairing is a problem. The two purposes are innately reciprocal, and they probably facilitate each other.

Sex usually gets talked about in a more complicated way. We have mismatched sexual desires, and then the conversation turns to what the mismatch does to the perceived power dynamics in the relationship and to a transactional, tit-for-tat way of relating. Those questions may be important. People also go into the weeds with them, and the weeds can give us enough ammunition to stop growing in our ability to embrace something wonderful and immerse ourselves in it.

Dialectic and Deconstruction Solutions (DDS) is my model for working on shared problems (more on the model at SolveSomething.com), and one of its principles is that solutions beget solutions. Each way that sex works for a couple makes the next way easier to reach.

Who This Post Is For

I am writing for relationships that are looking to have better sex and are already functioning with a high level of emotional connection and safety. Where those prerequisites are missing, codependence and power dynamics need to be addressed first, and some of what follows could land as minimizing or condescending. Integrating recovery from significant trauma is its own article, and medical causes of sexual difficulty belong with a medical professional. Wanting closeness and feeling threatened by it is a separate subject as well.

Fourteen Purposes of Sex

We tend to be well aware of the reasons not to have sex. We are less aware of the reasons to have it. Sex has at least fourteen purposes.

These purposes can overlap, and the people involved do not always need to be seeking the same experience. One person may want orgasm while the other enjoys being held and caressed. Different motivations can support each other within an experience both people freely enjoy.

The Twelve Intelligences

In The Architecture of Human Systems (AHS), my model of mental health, I describe twelve intelligences, the capacities through which we meet life. They are separate enough to be spoken about one at a time, and they all interplay. Sexuality draws on every one of them, and better sex is better in each.

Intelligence	What it is
Identity	What it isRemaining ourselves across contexts while staying connected to others
Relational	What it isParticipating in relationship without losing ourselves or taking over the other
Somatic	What it isSensing, trusting, and regulating through the body
Emotional	What it isDistinguishing, tolerating, expressing, and integrating feelings
Cognitive	What it isThinking clearly and flexibly across perspectives and contradictions
Kinetic	What it isCoordinating movement, timing, and responsiveness within an environment
Volitional	What it isChoosing, committing, persisting, pausing, and returning
Strategic	What it isOrganizing and sequencing action so effort serves an intention over time
Ecological	What it isRecognizing and responding to the larger systems we participate in
Existential	What it isCreating meaning within uncertainty, limitation, and mortality
Spiritual	What it isExperiencing transcendence while remaining grounded in ordinary life
Creative and Playful	What it isExploring, improvising, expressing, and accessing delight

Relational and emotional intelligence overlap enough to need separating. Relational concerns how we participate with another person. Emotional concerns how we work with feeling. The two interact, and being sensitive to someone’s feelings does not necessarily mean we can maintain boundaries, negotiate differences, or remain ourselves in relationship.

1. Identity: Knowing That We Are a Person

Part of sexuality is knowing that we are a person. We have the ability to attune to the person in front of us, to understand and connect with them, without fully embodying and becoming them. Differentiation is the name for that ability, and it matters most in newer relationships, where being enmeshed can lead us to confuse our own experience with our partner’s.

Differentiation informs the other intelligences. Strategy depends on it: what do I specifically like, what does my partner specifically like, and how do we engage in a sexual dance that satisfies the nuances of our two physiologies and orientations?

Identity is also the most paradoxical of the twelve where sex is concerned. At the sublime, spiritual level of sexuality, sex lets us pass through dualism, the ordinary experience of being a self separate from another, into a euphoric singularity in which the two participants are one. Sex depends on knowing that we are separate people, and at its height the separation falls away.

A rigid identity gets in the way of all of this.

Loosening those positions, and substituting cognitive flexibility for them, lets us take influence from our partner, letting what they show us change what we do, and pick up the information of the moment.

2. Relational: Responding to the Person in Front of Us

Relational intelligence is the efficacy of our interaction patterns: how well the ways we respond to each other work. Much of what gets called relational has to do with responding, especially in communication, to the person in front of us. Responding well requires empathy, so that we can deduce what the person means instead of projecting onto what they say.

In sexuality, many of the cues are non-verbal, especially in the beginning stages of a relationship. Even a direct question such as “Do you like it when I do this?” may not have an answer yet. Our partner may not fully know. They may not have been given permission to be open and curious in that domain, or other variables may have impeded a more open relationship with their own sexuality.

How do I give feedback so that my partner can meet the needs I have? How do I receive feedback? What do I do when the feedback is ambiguous?

Relational communication feeds strategy directly, because much of strategy in sex is figuring out the type of sex that benefits both partners. Two hardworking professionals are stressed and have a few minutes. They want sex as a way to de-stress, the quickest method for two people to connect inside five minutes. One of them says so.

Relational intelligence reads the sentence as a need related to the constraints of the day. A rigid identity over-identifies with the sentence, taking it as a statement about who we are, and hears a personal attack.

3. Somatic: Getting Into the Body

Somatic intelligence is how we move toward the full, interconnected, attuned form of sex, in the physical sense and in the spiritual one. How can I embody myself enough to feel the full pleasure of what my partner is doing to me? How can I release myself from the cognitive constraints of the day? How can I let the past and the future be less of a burden, so that I can immerse myself in this moment of connection with my partner?

One technique is close to sensate focus, and it begins with what I do in my somatic work to help people get into the body.

The exercise starts with being within ourselves, within our own skin, with increased specificity and articulation. The next step is the same attention directed toward our partner, as if we were embodying them. When we are fully in that state, we can almost wire into our partner, so that our motions and our technique are directly influenced by their desire. Being wired in to that degree is the highest level of attunement.

4. Emotional: What We Want to Feel

Sex is an act of connection, so emotional intelligence carries many facets of it.

Emotions inform the type of sex we want. The desire for passion, adventure, surprise, novelty, and spice are all emotions. Sex that is exciting and more about passion requires a high level of a consensual kind of fear: an unknown, the excitement of being right on the brink of novelty, of not knowing, of losing control. Emotional intelligence tells us which of these we want to feel, and relational intelligence lets us communicate it.

Sex is also a functional way of feeling intertwined and bonded with a partner while we are experiencing difficult emotions. Two people share an emotional field, each nervous system responding to the other, and the connection offers co-regulation: comfort, holding, nurture.

Which Comes First, Emotional Closeness or Physical Closeness?

A common dynamic in sex therapy has each partner naming a different starting condition.

The two positions form a feedback loop, and each person can wait on the other for the starting condition. The good news is that the loop also spins the other way. The more ways of having sex a couple integrates, the more the loop turns in the right direction. We become more connected, and we can use sex more freely to satisfy more individual and relational needs.

5. Cognitive: The Beliefs We Carry About Sex

Cognitive intelligence holds all of the constructs we have about sexuality, the ones that enhance it and the ones that impede it. We all carry schemas, the thoughts and beliefs that shape every part of our lives.

Food gave me a recent example. I am 47 at the time of writing, and I have had to radically change my diet, including dramatically reducing the dairy and gluten I eat, especially from cheap flour. In the process I found a construct I had never examined, one that seems harmless: eating is for pleasure, as opposed to eating is for health. I am a pretty good cook, and my wife and I try to make a balanced meal. The reality is that without the more caloric things, like butter and a lot of salt, a meal does not always reach a pleasure profile of ten. A meal below ten is okay. The schema, left unexamined, could interrupt my ability to meet another objective.

Exercise is another. There are many times I do not feel like exercising. I took a run today because I know that I will feel better afterward, that my system will be more regulated, and that my mental health will be more positive and hopeful. Knowing what we want from sex, and knowing that it is good for us, works the same way.

The main cognitive work in sex is being flexible enough to see our beliefs about sex and how they may be helping or impeding our own sexuality, or the sexuality and preferences of our partner. “Sex is not for play” is one such belief. We can laugh during sex.

One way to find these beliefs is to finish a set of sentences. Each one can be used more than once.

For each rule we then offer ourselves a reason it might not always be true, or look for a time in our lives when it was not true. The rules we critique are our own and not our partner’s.

Some of our beliefs come from a skewed sample. I go skiing often, and the stories my friends have heard a few times are the really bad days and the really good days. Sex stories from friends, family, and the media work the same way, and we rarely hear about everything in between, which distorts our sense of what sex is like most of the time. Ordinary sex is great sometimes, okay sometimes, bad sometimes, and good most of the time. Metz and McCarthy built their Good-Enough Sex model around that expectation.

6. Kinetic: The Dance

Kinetic intelligence is the performance. It is the dance: how good a dancer someone is, how well they rip scales on a guitar, how agile they are on a soccer field. Some people can do a backflip without having been to a gymnastics lesson in their life. Kinetic intelligence is that full understanding of the body and the ability to encourage it to do as we would like, here in the service of meeting our partner’s sexual and sensual needs.

What counts as good performance or good technique depends very much on the type of sex we are having. Sex for bonding has much less to do with porn-star athleticism. Sex for play, excitement, and passion, and the orgasms some people achieve through penetration, can be more analogous to athletics. The questions become the ones a soccer player asks. What are the controls of my body? How do I use my volition to make lifestyle choices so that my body is able to perform in the way I would like it to?

A couple with less rigid identities, more flexible and more willing to take influence, can look at themselves the way two members of a sports team would. There is a part of sexuality that has to do with athleticism for certain types of sex, and the question for both people is whether we have the volition internally, and the relational support, to be an instrument of it. The body is an instrument of pleasure for another person, and the instrument needs maintaining, from not drinking too much, to our diet, to how much we stretch.

Kinetic intelligence also covers the dynamics and specificity of touch. Does someone like it harder? Does someone want it softer? With oral stimulation of a woman, a slow build is often necessary. Pressure that is too high and speed that is too fast right out of the gate usually work against clitoral stimulation. The better technique is the one described under somatic intelligence: focus most of our energy on attunement, so that we receive direct feedback about when to increase speed or pressure. Sometimes the feedback, which is not necessarily verbal, says the opposite, and an anticipatory refraining is what is most pleasurable to our partner.

Timing matters in the other direction as well. A man may want to last longer, and certain ways of being stimulated will end the event too quickly. The kinetic question for the couple is how to maximize pleasure while taking the time differences between them into consideration.

Performance can also be interrupted by thinking about it, which is the paradox in kinetic intelligence. An erection is like walking. Try to walk “correctly” and we find that we no longer know how. An erection happens somewhat automatically, and thinking tends to get in the way. When overthinking is the problem, the thought to hold is release and not flex.

7. Volitional: Choosing That Sex Matters

Volitional intelligence is where sexuality becomes committed. What are my values? What are my relational values, my ecological values, my systemic values related to sex within our marriage?

An ecological value about sex comes from how systemically I look at anything in life. Asked whether I would like to go on a hike, a non-systemic orientation answers only whether I want to go hiking. A systemic orientation asks about the implications. Would I like to show support and connection to my partner? Is the hike good for the health of my system, and for the modeling of good behavior to my children?

The same two orientations meet the question of sex. I can answer “do I want sex?” only by whether I am horny, the way I might answer “do I want to go to dinner?” only by whether I am hungry. Or I can look through a systemic lens and see the impact of engaging on the entire system. Sometimes the answer through that lens is: I am really full, I am tired, I am burnt out, and I do not want to go to a restaurant right now. Other times it is: I am not particularly hungry, but I would love to spend some time connecting with you, being entertained, and having a good time at dinner, and I would much rather not clean up the kitchen.

Values create a dedication. Volition is choosing and committing that sexuality is important in our relationship. The commitment shows in how we choose to maintain our bodies, how we choose to flirt with each other throughout the day, and how we choose to read the signals of our partner so that they feel important, safe, and accommodated. The commitment also shows in continually keeping excitement and passion in the relationship, which requires constant growth and change and a willingness to experience a degree of novelty.

Novelty gets talked about often, and people tend to jump to extremes, as if novelty at the end of its trajectory means that everybody needs to open up their relationship. Opening a relationship is right for certain people and not for everyone.

There is no correct thing. Excitement has to do with the subjective experience of immersion, and immersion is facilitated by a healthy amount of excitement or anxiety. That relationship between immersion and the right amount of challenge is flow theory.

8. Strategic: Setting Up the Sex We Want

Strategic intelligence is operational. It concerns the dance of sex as a sequence: the type of sex we are having, what leads into it, and how much of what we call foreplay is needed.

What Is Foreplay?

The word foreplay means very different things to different people. For one person, foreplay is someone softly caressing their shoulders or their groin three hours earlier in the day. For another person it is flowers. For another it is a long, lingering gaze. For another it is a prolonged time of sensuality, cuddling with a favorite show. For another it is an overt expression of importance or validation. For another it is being touched sexually, such as oral sex before penetration.

The last form is what usually gets called foreplay, and it is one of a million. For many women, continual clitoral stimulation is needed throughout the sexual experience, so for some people foreplay is not the play before the sex. It is the sex.

Foreplay is about meeting the unique needs of the person in front of us: what makes them excited for the type of sex we are going to be having. If the sex is more emotional, the foreplay may have more to do with being compassionate. If the sex is more about play, the foreplay may be removing logistical responsibilities, so that both people can be freer from their minds in the moment.

Doing all the dishes left in the sink and cleaning the counter is in many ways the most effective foreplay we can do for another person.

Dishes as foreplay is what I mean by strategy.

Foreplay can also come before desire. Not feeling like having sex is very common, and with good communication about our foreplay needs, we can use foreplay to increase the desire for sex.

9. Ecological: Sex and the Whole System

Ecological intelligence is the systemic way of looking at sexuality. Sex and orgasm bond people. The bonding creates a greater sense of attachment and of regulation between the participants, which means they feel safer and become more attuned, useful, supportive, and reciprocal to each other.

Running is the single most effective mental health intervention I can do on myself, and looking at running systemically shows me all the reasons it works. Looking at sex systemically does the same. It helps us arrive at all the different reasons why the intervention of sex might be particularly useful to the system. Are we using sex as a stress-releasing technique? Is it a method of bonding in a time of grief? Is it play and entertainment that moves us away from boredom? Is it a quick way for two busy people to achieve pleasure and connection?

The system works on sex in return. Sex has a positive impact on stress, and stress has a negative impact on sexual frequency and desire. The upstream conditions reach sex as well: work phones left on at home, overcommitting, and leisure treated as less important than work.

The more systemic we are, the less sex is a matter of me versus you, and the more it becomes something we do for the fulfillment, regulation, and care of the whole system.

10. Existential: What Sex Means to Us

Existential intelligence concerns the meanings we place on sex. The fourteen purposes belong here. Each one is a method of fulfilling something that is a value to us. Depending on the existential orientation of each person and of the relationship, some of the purposes will be more meaningful than others, and hopefully there is congruence and a lot of overlap between the individual and the relational.

For some people the spiritual purpose is the most important, and sex is a mechanism for transcending dualism. For someone else, an orgasm is almost the only time in the day when they are in the present moment. For others sex is how we connect, or a stress reduction tool.

The more ecological we are, the more we can validate the subjective interpretation of each person. Sex might not be for play for me, and it is for my partner. Sex might not be the way I process difficult emotions, and it is for my partner.

11. Spiritual: Transcending Dualism

Spiritual intelligence is how sex transcends dualism, the experience described under identity in which the two participants are one. An activity that can do fourteen things can feel like an incredibly important purpose, and it has a spiritual draw for that reason.

Sex also has the purpose of reproduction, which takes us to the other half of the mortality question. We are often fearful of our own mortality, and we spend less time in contemplation of the other side. Where did we come from? Where did the consciousness come from which is now inhabiting this material form?

The deeper practice is sincere gratitude.

12. Creative and Playful: Adult Playtime

In my own relationship, sex is looked at as adult playtime. Of all the purposes of sex, one of the predominant ones is the same reason we go skiing or hiking or play guitar. Sex is a way of having communion with another person. It is a game: we have to be immersed in the present moment, aware of the needs and rules of the game, attuned to it, and caring of the person in front of us while caring for ourselves.

Play and creativity raise the degree to which we can disidentify from our schemas, holding a belief as something we have and can set down. In play we take ourselves less seriously and enjoy sex with an immersed gratitude for how wonderful it is.

The flow state comes back here in the question of what game we can play. Some people have a thing about whether they are going to get caught. Certain kinks come in here. Much of play is asking how we can increase excitement and immersion through an openness that also respects boundaries.

A self-reflection with one question for each of the twelve intelligences, applied to our own sexuality, accompanies this post.

Permission

Perhaps the purpose of life is immersion in our story: the experience of a consciousness materialized into a human form, living through a timeline in which we get to see, feel, and experience what happens.

Sex is one of the plots in that story, alongside climbing a mountain, playing the guitar, making a vase, or starting a law firm. Some of the plots are continual and some happen once. Sex offers connection and immersion, and it engages all twelve intelligences.

The purpose of this post is permission. The more openness, connection, curiosity, and flexibility we afford ourselves, the more of sex there is for us to experience. Sex is one of the wonderful things we get to experience within this incarnation, and coming at it from different angles increases our opportunity to feel meaning and fulfillment within it.