Privacy vs Secrecy in a Relationship: What You Keep to Yourself Could Be Ending Your Marriage

Dr. Diane: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Libido Lounge. I’m your host Dr. Diane Mueller and I have a real treat for you all today. I have Brooke Bralove with me on our show today. She’s a licensed clinical social worker, a psychotherapist, a certified sex therapist, an expert in trauma, sexual health, and emotional healing. And I wanted to bring her on today to talk about all sorts of things. We’re going to talk about desire mismatch. We’re going to talk about little t traumas and these small things that happen in our relationship that actually have pretty big impacts on intimacy, both emotional as well as our physical and sexual intimacy and so much more. And as always, we will be talking to Brooke over a series of a couple episodes. So make sure you are subscribed to the channel so that you can get the notification when episode two comes out. So excited to be with you today, Brooke. Welcome to the lounge.

Brooke: Thank you so much for having me.

Why Scheduling Sex Matters More Than Spontaneity

Dr. Diane: So I want to jump right in. One of the things that I am curious about about your work is you work with so many couples. You talk to people all the time in and out every week and I’m curious is there one thing that you see over and over and over again that you find yourself saying like gosh this is like the hardest thing I have to tell people and I have to tell people this over and over and over again. If you could pick one thing what would it be and I know that’s a little bit of a tricky question so if you need to pick two things that’s totally fine.

Brooke: Oh it’s such a great question right off the bat. I would say that the thing I say ad nauseam is you need to schedule sex. People hate it. They’re pissed off, especially men. And at the outset of this, I do want to say that I mostly work with cis hetero couples and so that’s going to be a little bit of my bias today and I just want to own that. So a lot of men really don’t want to do that. And I think partially it’s because of the way they don’t like to schedule a lot of things, right? So you know, often moms and wives are the ones scheduling the social stuff, the playdates, everything, you know, that goes into it, the doctor’s appointments, the camp schedule, everything. And so part of it is I just think there’s resistance to actually scheduling anything or being that organized. But secondly, it’s that men believe that only good sex can be spontaneous or only spontaneous sex is good sex. And that’s simply not true and not what the research shows or what we actually find works in long-term couples. So that’s the biggest barrier is that you know I just got to say you got to schedule it. I don’t really care that you’re annoyed by that answer.

Dr. Diane: So I’m curious because I say this a lot share that that belief and I say this a lot too. Have you found anything especially in talking to the gentlemen? Have you found anything that helps them kind of understand the importance of this and get over that belief that it has to be spontaneous? Like what do you say when you get pushed back to help motivate people to actually start prioritizing the schedule?

Brooke: So I usually say two things. The first is you schedule all the things that matter to you, right? And again this goes for you know any gender. You schedule Pilates, you schedule lunch dates with friends, you schedule time with your kids and activities with them. So we schedule what matters to us. We prioritize things and then we plan for them. And so why do you believe that somehow this is the one thing that’s just going to happen spontaneously in your life? So that’s the first and foremost. The second thing I say is when you create a space for sex, whether that’s intercourse or cuddling or a massage, you actually create anticipation. And anticipation is what leads to desire. And desire can often lead to arousal. So you’re actually setting the stage for yourself and it’s more likely to go well. And especially for women who have trouble transitioning from, you know, wiping snotty noses to take off your clothes and let’s get you wet. That’s a really hard transition. So when you have it on the calendar, when you’ve scheduled this space, you know, this sexy space, this sexy time, it can be anything you want, but it actually creates the anticipation that helps fuel everything around the experience.

Desire Mismatch: Why Comparison Kills Connection

Dr. Diane: I want to talk about desire because I think one of the areas too that people get push back is this comparison thing that happens right around you know what is normal what is not and you know for most people they don’t have exposure to conversations like this and most people are not sitting around the dinner table when they’re having dinner parties talking to their friends about sex. I’m really fortunate I’m in a group of friends where we have regular dinner parties and it’s not that we sit around and talk about sex all the time, but if one of if one couple has like found some sort of new fun technique that they’re enjoying in their sex life or this new thing they’re doing, they share it. And so we’ll have these open conversations around challenges and struggles and things we’re learning and it’s really pretty unique. But a lot of people don’t have that. So what do you find around desire? Like is there a normal amount of desire that happens? Do you feel like comparison is a problem? Like how much how I guess the question is like how much is it important for people to actually be like looking at their relationship and saying okay well this is normal or this is not and how I have a problem.

Brooke: I believe that when you talk about desire there’s no right and wrong. There’s no level. There’s no number we can ascribe to. And comparing desire is futile. It’s just not going to work because sex is comprised of so many things, right? Arousal, desire, closeness, intimacy, did your partner show up for you in other ways that you now desire them? There is no doubt that loading the dishwasher can be a huge point of creating desire in a marriage. Doing acts of service. I mean, and women will tell you, you know, when he just puts the kids down for a nap and just says, “You look a little tired. Why don’t you go lay down? You can have a little nap. I got it.” There is no doubt that that woman is going to be not necessarily turned on that exact second, but I guarantee you she’s much more willing to try. So do not compare. It doesn’t help. And you always feel either better than or less than, but that doesn’t stay forever because you’re going to have weeks, months where you’re not going to have the same kind of desire in a long-term relationship. And so I think that’s not a great idea to do that. And the other thing I say is the only two people who have to be okay with the amount of desire, the amount of sex are the two people in the relationship. That’s it. No one else has to go, I agree with that or that sounds normal to me. Nobody. Now, are there things called sexless marriages where we would say it doesn’t sound like there’s a lot of desire or commitment to work on the relationship? Sure. You know, we sort of decide as sex therapists that a sexless marriage is usually where you haven’t had any sort of sex in a year because that’s really taking the element out of the marriage for a significant amount of time. But there are couples that exist in sexless marriages that are okay with that for a variety of reasons. That’s not the couples that I see, right? I’m not seeing couples who are like, “We barely have sex. We’re totally happy with it.” It is usually a mismatch in desire. So mismatches in desire are super common. In fact, you cannot have the exact same libido as anyone else. You can’t have the same turn-ons for desire. It’s, you know, you hope they line up, but there’s always a mismatch. So what I look at is not in terms of mismatched desires, but how mismatched are they? The name itself is really not important because everybody has them. So I normalize that right away. How could you possibly want sex at the exact same time, the exact same amount, the exact same way as another human? It just doesn’t work like that. And so we are looking at how wide that gap is. And when it’s too wide, that’s usually when I say it sounds like there’s something you want to talk about. And it doesn’t mean they have to come to me. They can talk about it with their partners. The problem is very few couples have any ability to talk about something as vulnerable and touchy as sex without another person helping them. Especially when it’s already a problem.

Dr. Diane: Yeah. We’re really just not given tools about it, you know. And even in education, it’s like the biggest thing I think most of us got in education from a school standpoint was PNV sex and it was just like very anatomical. So it is a it is something it’s like not modeled anywhere. We’re generally not hearing our parents, our elders talk about it, is not talked about in school. So it’s pretty easy to understand I think why this is something that we’re just not skilled at it.

Uncovering Root Causes of Desire Issues

Dr. Diane: So I’m curious in your work like as couples come in and they’re talking to you about low desire or desire mismatch and clearly it’s causing some level of distress in their relationship because they’re sitting in front of you. How do you tease apart in your work some of the root causes? Like how do you tease apart like how much of it is relationship meaning their inter relational dynamic versus the body, hormones, medication, exhaustion from living in our modern day society. So I’m just curious about your process if you would tell us a little bit about like how how people really start to uncover, you know, what the root causes are and and start to rebuild and repair.

Brooke: Yeah. I just want to take a quick break to say one of the number one things that leads to a lack or just a slowing of passion in the relationship is thinking that our partner’s body and mind and spirit is going to be the same today as tomorrow. So one of the things that happens for so many bodies, especially for female bodies, is that with time, the pleasure needs change. And we get into those sexual scripts and those habits of doing the same thing over and over and over again, not always realizing that our pleasure body is wanting something else. This creates a lack of passion, a desire, a lack of orgasm, and is one of the reasons why bedrooms can start to get quieter. I talk about how to fix this and so much more walking you through a step-by-step guide for an entire year if you want on how to improve your pleasure life. Start with a free trial, stay for a month, stay for the year, make it yours. You’ll see all of this and more and how to get started in the show notes below this video. I hope you will join me in my hot monogamy society. Now, let’s get back to our episode. So this is where we want to look at sex and you know relationship sex and as you said desire. We want to look at the bio psychosocial right and so in a first session I’m going to find out what’s bringing them in. When I see couples, I always do one session with each of them individually. And that’s where I’m going to do more of this type of assessment. And I don’t hold secrets. I tell couples all the time, I won’t hold secrets, but your partner doesn’t necessarily need to be there for the details of how many people you’ve had sex with and what positions you’ve tried. You know, some of that is, I think, personal. And I do want to I think there’s privacy and secrecy and those are very different. And so I do think we’re entitled to some privacy around that. So still when I let’s say I’m working, you know, I see the man for one individual session to kind of assess. So I do a sexual timeline kind of first and foremost just tell me when you first were aware of your genitals. Tell me when you first masturbated. Tell me, did you have wet dreams? What messages did you get? Childhood messages are a massive component of to try to kind of tease out what’s going on. And sometimes, I love this, people will say, “Well, my parents were fine about sex.” And I’ll say, “Oh, okay. So they openly talked about it.” And then they’ll say, “No, no one ever said a word.” And I would say that’s a loud message that they never said a word. Right? And people are like, “Oh, I never thought of it that way.” So childhood messages will go through. We definitely go through medications. We go through, you know, have you had your testosterone? Let’s say this is the person with low desire. We would want to go through, have you had your testosterone check? What medications are you on that might be contributing to that? Or if they’re coming in for erectile dysfunction or, you know, inability to have an orgasm. Again, we’re gonna want to tease out the biological kind of as the baseline because if you’ve got low T, like then that’s impacting everything else. So we have to fix that first or address that first. Once we’ve ruled out some biological stuff or maybe even, you know, fixed some biological stuff, then we are certainly looking at stress, relationship, happiness. How we’re looking at other types of touch. Is your partner touching you outside of the bedroom in ways that feel good to you? Are your emotional needs being met? And then most importantly, what do you think is happening? How do you understand this change inside yourself? Does it feel like it’s about aging? Does it feel like it’s about boredom? Does it feel like it’s about attraction? And so I’m really going to want to tease that out, too. But again, you always start biological, psychological, and then the social, meaning the interaction between the members of the couple or throuple maybe even.

Dr. Diane: I love that and I think it’s such an important thing. One of the things I appreciate with what you’re saying that I hope everybody is hearing in this is there’s layers of this and oftentimes there’s more than one layer. And I think one of the problems people get into is like is thinking that there’s only one cause and because of everything that can go awry biologically as well as all the training we’ve had growing up and this the inability to have people around us that are talking about sex in a healthy way. There’s just so many different layers of what can cause a desire mismatch. One of my favorite biological ways to really help people is using pumps. And so pumps are suction devices that have a like vacuum suction tool to it. And they make men’s versions that you have the suction device that kind of goes with this tube. There’s many different sizes of these. And then the female version has like one for the clitoris as well as one for the entire bulbar structure. And what’s so great about these is the ones that are good vacuums, not all of them are the same and some of them can actually cause problems, but the ones that are truly great medical grade devices like this one, one of the things we’ll see is that there’s improvements, major improvements in things like it with ED or even if it’s not true ED, just having imbalances where maybe men are not getting quite as hard or they’re going soft easier. It’s just not as full of an erection as it used to be. And you know, in these things, I think it’s like that that circuitous scenario where if something’s going wrong physically, that can impact the mental. And so we want to dissect the mental, but we also want to work with the mental by saying, let’s fix the physical so there’s not that problem. And for women, there’s so much to be said about getting blood to the vulva and to the clitoris as we need circulation as women just like the men do. It’s just another area that’s not talked about as much.

Privacy vs Secrecy in Marriage: Is It OK to Keep Secrets in a Relationship?

Dr. Diane: So I want to ask you this because you said something that is, I think, really important for people to delineate, which is privacy versus secrecy. And I was watching an episode of Seinfeld last night. You’re making me think of before bed. I was re-watching this episode and it was George was in a relationship. For anybody that’s listening and know Seinfeld, one of the characters was in a relationship and his fiancée was basically saying, “We’re a couple now. So this means we tell each other everything. It’s just a rule.” And so I think there’s some level sometimes of this like expectation around, hey, we’re a couple. It’s wrong if we don’t share everything with each other. But yet there’s this real privacy thing that happens. And oftentimes, like you said, like it’s not beneficial for a couple to maybe know every single thing about a previous about their partner’s previous lovers. So how do you delineate that for people? How do people how do you coach people in therapy around maintaining that healthy privacy without having this like secret thing that could be happening and causing harm to the relationship?

Healthy Privacy in a Relationship vs Keeping Secrets

Brooke: So when you’re delineating between privacy and secrecy, I think there are a couple questions you need to ask. One is if it’s current behavior like should I tell my partner that I’m doing X? The question that matters is would I do it in front of them? And how do I imagine it will make them feel? And I think you need to hold those two things. And mostly it’s really the first one. Would I do? Would I flirt with this man that I work with in front of my partner? The answer for some people might be, oh yeah, it’s harmless. He would think it was funny. That’s fine. And so I think that is simply just privacy. It’s not really important. It’s not really relevant. But if the answer is absolutely not, he’s incredibly jealous and we would have a huge fight and it would lead to a month of, you know, really difficult stuff. That’s secrecy. That’s saying this will impact our relationship in this moment. So I think that’s really important. And then the second question I think that matters when you’re delineating, you know, privacy from secrecy is does this hurt my partner for no reason? It is not necessary. Like you know there’s often this is it necessary, is it kind? You know, when you’re trying to say something and I think it matters here with privacy and secrecy, too. So telling your partner that their dick is not the biggest dick you’ve ever seen and naming the one partner’s dick who you also were madly in love with and said that’s the biggest dick I’ve ever seen. That’s the best sex I’ve ever had. That is hurtful for no reason. There’s nothing to gain from that. So you got to ask yourself these two questions. And I think that’s a great guide.

Telling Partner About Past Relationships: Where Privacy Protects Desire

Dr. Diane: Yeah, I love that. I think it’s a really helpful thing. And the thing that you said that I hear so many people say around like, is this truthful? Is it necessary? Is it kind? Right. And if it’s not if it doesn’t meet all three of those, then maybe we shouldn’t be saying it. This is a really good lead in to what I want to talk to you about in part two. In part two, we’re going to talk about little t traumas. So these tiny little things that sometimes get said to each other or or done to each other, right? These tiny little things that often times actually can have big results in our body. And this could be interrelational little t traumas. This could be little t traumas from our past life, from things that we grew up with. You know, our life before our partner is what I mean by that. So we’re going to talk about all of that in the next episode. But I also want to talk about shame because shame is a really big thing that oftentimes people don’t identify with having shame. But it’s very common that we have these subtle shames or we shame ourselves in certain ways and we don’t even realize we do it because maybe we saw our parents do it. But so it’s modeled to us and it just seems normal and we don’t even realize the harm it’s having. So we’re going to talk about all of that and more in the next episode. Make sure you do subscribe to get that.

How to Work with Brooke Bralove

Dr. Diane: Before we go though, I want to make sure that we allow you to talk about a little bit about what you do as far as your practice, how people get a hold of you, how people work with you. We’ll have all of your links and information in the show notes, but could you just tell us like the next step for people getting to getting to work with you?

Brooke: Sure. So you can send me an email or fill out a contact form on my website, brookebralove.com. You can also follow me on Instagram @broolo.psychotherapy. Same thing for Facebook. I’m also on TikTok. So those are great ways. Sex therapy can be done virtually or in person. And I really at the moment I’m kind of specializing in this brief treatment called Accelerated Resolution Therapy ART. And that has a wonderful connection to sex therapy and can really move things like libido or desire or erectile dysfunction or these little t traumas and can move it in one to five sessions using some rapid eye movement.

Dr. Diane: Amazing. Well, thank you everybody for listening. Thank you Brooke for being here. Please do subscribe so you get the next one coming and we’ll see you all again on our next episode on the lounge.

Dr. Diane: Thank you for listening to the Libido Lounge. Please don’t keep me a secret. Please share this with your friends. You can find me on YouTube, on Instagram, and check out our Modern Libido Club for so much more!