Perimenopause & Libido: A guide for you and your partner

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Sex Efter Kids Podcast. I'm so excited to have you back. We are on part two of our four part Perry Menopause series. And today I want to dive a little bit more into libido while your partners is not broken. And what you can do to throw a party that it wants to come to, whether you are the lower libido partner who's going through Perry Menopause or the higher libido partner who's trying to support. And I guess I should also note that libido does fluctuate. Maybe let's start there. Welcome to the Sex Efter Kids Podcast, a place for parents to come and learn together about the sometimes bumpy road back into the saddle of their sex life after adoption, childbirth, or joining a blended family. I am your host Sophia Ashley certified sex educator and sex coach, mother and stepmother, and you're totally TMI guides to becoming BFFs with your body and initiating easy, connected, and confident naked sexy fun times. Here we are one part science of sex, one part mindfulness magic, and one part straight up real talk to help you find the spark in your relationship and yourself after kids. I'm so glad you're here. So before we dive in and talk about libido, I just want to mention that if you are struggling as a higher libido partner in particular through Perry Menopause with what to do, how to support your partner to want to continue to get naked and have fun with you, then you want to check out my 14-day roommates to romance challenge. The link is in the show notes below. It's going to teach you how to make nervous system aware and safe invites to connection in touch. Not sex just yet connection and touch outside of the bedroom so that we can create a runway back to the bedroom that your partner's body can get on board with. I'll see you there. Grab the link below. Let's continue on. So first off, let's start with the fact that libido is going to fluctuate wildly. The like biological function of it through Perry Menopause or can because hormones like estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone are fluctuating all over the place. And so we shouldn't assume that just because someone's going through Perry Menopause, they are the lower libido partner. They might actually have fluctuations and actually be experiencing an increase in libido from their baseline norm. So the bottom line is just that we should anticipate a shift, but we don't know exactly what direction it's going to shift in and what it's going to look like. And we never want to assume that what has happened is permanent. We're going to last forever. I've heard of a lot of people who on the other side of Perry Menopause and Menopause experience a significant boost in libido. So you know, we're all along for the ride. We are all our own unique bags of bones and hormones and water and whatever else we're made of. And we're all going to have our own unique journeys through this process. So in the first couple episodes of this podcast, I did a whole series called like what's wrong with my libido or where did my libido go. And we talked about the fact that it's also not just a function of hormones and like physical things in your system, right? It is also a function of your relationship and how healthy it is and the communication that's happening and essentially how safe your nervous system feels. And it's also a function of how you feel about yourself and how you feel about your body. So and your sexuality. So if you have negative associations with your vagina, if you have negative associations with sex, if you have trauma, if you didn't have those things before, but now your body's changing and your labia is changing and you smell differently and and you're like mad at your vagina because she hurts and you're struggling with who is looking back at you in the mirror, all of these things can affect your libido. So I want you to think of this, whether you're the vagina owner in this scenario or not. I like to think of this. My company started as the happy vagina project because this is all a proxy for your relationship with your own body and yourself, right? So as your vagina is changing, you can either be fighting with her about it and be like what's wrong with you, why don't you work the way you used to, etc, etc, or you can be in a healthy relationship with her where you're getting curious and you're listening because essentially these symptoms that are coming up and the experience that you're having are communication from your body about what it needs. And while I may or may not be in the throws of Perry yet, I'm 41, I do have an autoimmune disorder and a lot of the symptoms I experienced have been addressed by diet, sleep, and stress management. And perimenopause likewise is a lot manageable through those things and also additional supports that we might need. So a little off topic there, but what I mean to say is that your body is not broken, it is doing exactly what it's supposed to do and the question is are you listening? And the question is the person who's not going through this is are you creating the space for your partner to listen to themselves and are you supportive of what they need and what they request in this process of supporting their body. So where I want to go today is talking about the dual control model, the dual control, what? Many of you who have read Emily Nagoski's come as you are might be familiar with this, but it's good primer. And if you haven't, this is where this idea comes from for me. I don't think she's the originator of the idea, but it all comes back to this idea of what we call responsive and spontaneous desire, but it's also a little bit deeper than that. So the main like myth here is that libido is like a fixed thing determined by your body that you have no control over and you're kind of at the mercy of whenever the magic libido just decides to fall. The other sort of myth that we try our trap we fall into is some people, a very minimal few people in terms of percentage of the population have a libido this essentially on all the time ready to go all the time and doesn't need a input to make it go. It's just on its spontaneous. Most of us, men, women, gender neutral, whatever identity you have have a responsive desire. And I actually think most of us have a responsive desire. It's just some some people are more sensitive in their response and some are not. We need to receive something that makes our body go, oh, maybe I could. And sometimes that can be really confusing for a partner who's walking around could be ready to go anytime. When they've got a partner who's like over here and needs to be warmed up to go over here. So that's one piece. And I guess the trap we fall into is that we still as a society think that people with responsive desire are broken and that spontaneous desire being on all the time is the norm. It's actually just like the typically male baseline norm because we don't like to study female bodies and science. And the the solution here is really the reframe here is everyone has their own unique body. Everyone has their own unique experiences and traumas and sensitivities and tastes when it comes to sex and sexuality. And nobody has broken everyone works beautifully the way they work. And the main thing is we want to understand how our partner works so that we can make their body work for them and for us so that we can have the ultimate goal of getting naked and having fun together. Okay. So your partner is not broken. Even if their libido is changing from what it used to, it's not broken. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do. And our failure is an insisting, which had a better metaphor up here, but it's like insisting that an apple be an orange instead of just recognizing we have an apple and enjoying the apple for what it can be. So when we know that, when we know how our partner's libido works, we can throw a party that it wants to come to because we get to be in charge. We get to be in the driver's seat. We are not at the mercy of the magic libido dust falling. We can create the conditions. We can create the party that our libido goes, "Oh yeah, I'm showing up for that. How do we do that?" So in the dual control model, here's what you need to understand. Okay. You basically have two systems in your body, hence dual control model. One system is constantly scanning the environment looking for reasons to be sexually stimulated. The other, that's the gas pedal. Sorry. The other is constantly scanning the environment, looking for reasons to not go. The brick. So if we have a car, we have one system that's the gas pedal or scanning for reasons to hit the gas and we have another that's scanning for reasons to hit the brakes. That means the context, the environment matters because if there's no reason to hit the gas and every reason to hit the brakes, my libido car ain't going nowhere. Okay. So that's one dimension. We all have that piece. Second dimension. Some people have very sensitive gas pedals, which means absolutely anything is a yes to sex. Some people have more dull or slow to respond. Gaspedals, which means it takes a lot of consistently applied stimulation for the car to go, or a lot of pressure from the foot. How sensitive it is is genetic. You're just born with that. What turns you on? What your gas pedal is? Is more learned, is more contextual, and can change over time. So maybe the smell of lemons turns me on because of some experience I had and maybe the sight of something else really turns me off because of some other experience I had. We can acclimatize ourselves to and shift what turns us on and excites us over time, but we can't change whether we are slow to go or the hop all the time. And we don't want to judge our either way, and we shouldn't assume that one's better than the other. Sometimes it's inconvenient to be horny all the effentime and not be able to turn it down. And sometimes it's frustrating to be the one who's a slow burn all the time when you wish you could just turn it on. But knowing that you work one way or the other and understanding how to work with that instead of constantly beating yourself up for being broken is a way to go. Same thing with the gas pedal. Anything can turn you off? The baby might be crying. I think I heard someone coming into the house. I'm feeling that today. That music is off. Or it would take a mountain to stop your car from moving. So we are all some combination of those four there's basically four types, right? Am I sensitive gas, sensitive brake, sensitive gas, slow brake? Am I slow gas and sensitive brake? A lot of women are that combination. Slow to go, almost anything turns me out. I would argue when you go through Perry Menopause, you might be somebody who's like anything stimulates me, but Perry Menopause has given your body a lot of reasons to hit the brakes. That could be a new dynamic for you. So understanding this is key. And if you have the book you can look through it, she has a little quiz to identify which quadruter in. Otherwise you can think about how fast and easily do I get turned on and how fast or easily do I get turned off? I myself am slow to go and almost anything can take me out of it. And understanding that means that I know how to create the conditions for my body to show. Okay? The second piece here is understanding most people in a Perry Menopause postpartum, six after kids scenario. So most people listening here who are lower libido have a brake problem, not a gas problem. Okay? Which means there are too many things putting pressure on the body to say not right now. Even if there's a bunch of things saying, yeah, we could. And there's so many brakes it's drowning out what is a maybe we could. So our goal in any scenario to create success is to have as many things to stimulate a razzle that we know work as possible. But more importantly, it's to remove the brakes. And if you think back to the last episode and if you didn't listen to last episode and actually even the episode before that, the sex and stress and the traffic light signals, your Perry Menopauseal partners body changes, transition, emotional sensitivity, how your relationship is shifting. All of that when I said it all comes back to like stress on the system, all that stress on the system is the brakes. And sometimes you can think of it as like acute brakes like slamming on the brakes at a surprise red light. And sometimes it's trying to drive your car with a parking brake on. And like it's going, but not quite. And you're like, what the f's going on. And so all these Perry Menopause symptoms can kind of equate to having a math of parking a break on. So in order to throw a party that your libido wants to come to, you need to understand where you are on the sensitivity scale. Do you have sensitive or dull brakes and gas pedal? And you can start your brainstorm and think about not what used you, but today and get curious about and maybe do some data collecting around what turns you on. And what are the things that turn you off? And if you're the lower libido partner in particular, like don't assume your partner is privy to the noise, if you're anything like me, that's going on in your head when you're trying to make love. And take a moment to notice next time you decide to get a little frisky, what is happening for you? What are all the things? What's the chatter in your brain? And can you either pause until your partner, the chatter that's happening? Or afterwards, can you say, can I tell you a little bit about like what this experience is like for me? And get a little vulnerable and share that you're uncomfortable about your belly and you worried about how you smell and your worries are taking too long and the sheets were bothering you and you were worried about sweating too much. And like what you were worried about the baby waking up, you were worried about the teenager hearing you. Like what is the barrage of breaks in your brain? And you can even literally write them all down on a piece of paper and you can start to think how can I remove this break or ease this break. So do we have intimate times when the teenager's not in the house and that's going to remove the worry that they're going to hear us or walking on us. And can I tell you how sexy you are or can I do a little of my own like body affirmation practice before we make love to just like ease my feelings of focusing on my belly. I also have a wonderful episode on spectatoring if you're wanting a little bit more resources on how to get out of your head and into your body during intimacy. I'll have my VA link that up above or down below in the show notes for you. But this is the key and this is exactly what I teach my clients how to do in the naked fun come back. So bottom line takeaway here is your libido isn't broken. It's not on strike. It hasn't run away. Okay, it's changing and evolving and likely you never understood it properly in the first place because no one ever taught you this shit. Okay, so don't get mad at yourself. Just listen up to me and whoever else supports you and let's figure it out now. Okay, let's figure out how your unique libido works. And instead of hating on it for not being what you think it's supposed to be, let's embrace and love it up and work with it instead of against it. If you need help with that, get on a call with me. Let's chat. Let's figure out your unique libido and what's going on for you. And the next step for you here really is the roommates to romance challenge. So I talked about this a little bit last episode. It's mostly designed for your higher libido partner to start to understand how to create the preconditions to intimacy. So a lot of what we've talked about today is perfect for like if we're having a sex date, how do we make sure that dates optimal? But if we haven't mastered the preconditions, which like I've talked about last episode and go back if you don't remember or didn't catch it, is creating that runway to sex. If we are not touching, if we are not flirting, if we are not connecting in the day to day, then there's no runway for a lower libido person who's got a slow to burn gas pedal to get from not interested at all, too super excited about it. And so this 14 day challenge, which is less than a latte, it's nine bucks. I've got an upgrade for you for one on one coaching that's less than a date and out on the town is going to help you as a higher libido partner to create that runway for your lower libido partner, whose body super stressed out. You can participate in it together or the lower libido partner. You can just be along for the ride and collect data and information with your partner, but the whole idea is to go from not tonight on repeat to let's say I play together or let's book that sex date. Let's throw that party that my libido wants to come to. Grab the link down below. I hope to see you there. If you have questions, hit me up on Instagram and I will talk to you soon. This is where we do the end bit, right? Let's take a mindfulness minute, my friends. Deep breath in. Nice big mouth. Sounded out breath out. Voila, your nervous system. Thanks you. Thank you for being here. I hope your head and your heart have something new to consider and something new to try today. No husbands were harmed in the making of this podcast and a very big thank you to mine for his original music composition and help. I love you babe. This podcast was recorded on the traditional territories of the Kwanlandan and Ton Quachon First Nations in Whitehorse, Yukon, the acknowledge and are grateful to the original stewards of this land where we live and play and raise our babies. You can catch me on the Instagram and Facebook at intimacy after kids where I share tips, tools and inspiration for your naked fun come back or you can join the weekly ish newsletter and find info about how we can work together at intimacy after kids.com. Catch you next time.