Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Wendy Strgar. Wendy Strgar is an award-winning entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Good Clean Love, a pioneer in the organic personal care product industry. A sexual health educator and “loveologist,” Wendy is the featured writer at the award-winning blog Making Love Sustainable.
She’s the author of Love That Works: A Guide to Enduring Intimacy, and with Sounds True, a new book called Sex That Works: An Intimate Guide to Awakening Your Erotic Life, where she offers healing insights, potent practices for you alone and with your partner, and guidance drawn from her marriage of over 30 years and her work with thousands of people to encourage the full awakening and expression of your erotic life.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Wendy and I spoke about her company, Good Clean Love, and how she found her vocation as a loveologist. We also talked about what some of the biggest obstacles are that people face for achieving sexual pleasure, and how a true definition of sexual freedom is taking responsibility for one’s own sexual needs. We talked about long-term monogamy, and how to keep a committed relationship passionate and sexually engaging; the importance of being sexually educated and informed; how to have a healthy fantasy life; and what it means to grow up sexually. Here’s my conversation on Sex That Works with Wendy Strgar.
Wendy, we’re going to spend the next hour or so talking about your new book, Sex That Works. I notice right here at the outset that I feel a little nervous, you could say even shy. Something like that—that it’s edgy to talk about sex publicly for an hour. I wanted to begin there—with your thoughts on having these kinds of open conversations about sex, especially for people who find it edgy.
Wendy Strgar: I guess I’d say a couple things. One is that the more comfortable the person you’re talking to is about sex, the more comfortable we become, right? I used to see this when I would try to sell product. You could never have somebody in that role that was not really solid in their own sense of who they were as a sexual human being. And so, I think partly a lot of times the conversation is so uncomfortable because we bounce off of each other’s discomfort.
So, anyway, you don’t need to be uncomfortable because my comfort will carry you and bring you into that. It’s a strange thing to have something that is so fundamental to who we are as human beings be also at once so taboo.
I think there’s a lot of things to that, but after we eat, sleep and drink, the next thing we are is sexual beings. And so my whole thing for much of my life has been, if we could just get over it and just be comfortable in that space, so many other issues would be alleviated as well.
TS: What do you mean by that—other issues would be alleviated?
WS: Our sexuality is so central to our soul, to how we know ourselves. And so to the degree that we give it so little language and airtime, and we push it down and we repress it, it twists up all these other parts of who we are and our ability to interact in the world. That’s what I mean. In my mind, having a sex life that works is so foundational to having a life that works.
TS: Let’s talk about this title, Sex That Works. You see lots of books—passionate sex, erotic sex, ecstatic sex, blissful sex. Sex That Works—how did you come up with that title for what you wanted to communicate to the world about sex?
WS: Sigmund Freud said this thing that love and work are just the cornerstone of our humanity. So, I really believe that sex—as being part of a loving relationship, which is really how I teach about sex—is that it’s a really important physical engagement of a loving relationships. But, I think it’s foundational to a life that works, like I was saying.
It’s like sometimes our sex life is not blissful, or ecstatic, or orgasmic. But if we continuously come to it with curiosity and courage, and we just get to a place where our sex life works—which is to say that we don’t abandon it, we don’t blame other people for it. We can hold it as a part of our own integral responsibility of what it is to be whole. Then, from that workable place, sex can grow and evolve through all life stages into something that will surprise you continuously.
TS: OK, Wendy. I am going to lean into your comfortableness in talking about sex, and here we go. I think it would be wonderful if you could tell our listeners how this became the vocational focus of your life—sex education, and being what you call a loveologist.
WS: Yes, I get a lot of heat for that loveologist word, and I mean I want to say that it’s sort o—first of all, the term was coined for me one time, early on when I met you years and years ago, and I was just trying to figure out really what my job was. I was selling different kinds of love products, but really the thing that I always had passion about was really helping people love. And so, the one guy in some green festival in LA said to me, “You’re like a loveologist.” And I thought, “Yes, I kind of am,” because in my mind that’s somebody that studies, and writes, and thinks, and teaches about love—sexual love being part of that. And so, for me, when I started making love products and thinking about selling them, I was at a really challenging crossroads in my marriage.
Sex was the one thing that generally worked for us, but after I had four kids, was not working as well and the products on the market made me sick. So, I was really driven to save my own marriage. I was doing a lot of investigating and trying to come up with solutions. So yes, necessity was the mother of invention in that.
Then I think growing up in an extremely dysfunctional home, where love was not leading at all. I think probably that upbringing made me—I just feel like everything that you look at in my life is geared back to trying to resolve those issues and understand what family [is], and how people love over time. So the sexual love, as a really critical component of that—which in some ways came easily to me as a child. I was pretty early orgasmic, even though I didn’t understand it. Probably had a lot of shame about it, but was intrigued anyway, and not afraid of it. I didn’t grow up in a church setting, so I didn’t have a lot of that stuff blocking me, I think—about knowing that and understanding it. I probably had some freedom about approaching it.
And maybe I’m kind of bold. I’m a Scorpio, for whatever that’s worth, so probably pretty sexual in that way. I think it was just all those things that came together. And when my kids were little, when I first started this business, they were like 3 to 14 at the time, and they used to say to me, “OK, you don’t have a job, mom. Don’t talk about what you do.” Even just in my own family unit, there was a lot of fear, shame around that, because I’d come from school reform work right before that, and actually started Good Clean Love so that I could fund a peace academy for children. It wasn’t like some business plan that got me here. It was just like life that just—if you pay attention, it’ll teach you where to go, I think.
TS: Now, for listeners who are just getting introduced to Good Clean Love for the first time, you mentioned that you and I met. We met at a trade show that was for the natural products industry almost two decades ago—15 years ago, something like that. Good Clean Love sells natural lubrication. You said that there were no products on the market that would fit the needs that you had. What were the needs that you had that you couldn’t find products for?
WS: Most of the products on the market at that point were petrochemical-based products. If you’d go to the doctor, which I did, it was like, “Well, I have a lot of pain with sex.” It’s extremely common. Very, very common symptom. And so, when pain with sex goes unattended, then what will happen is that you tend to lose your libido because your body’s already preparing to have pain, and then your desire doesn’t come up. Then you get dryness, and it’s like this whole syndrome that one thing creates the next. I was pretty dependent on a sex life that works, because I had four kids, I grew up in a divorce, I didn’t want to get divorced. We started experimenting, first with more natural aphrodisiac products that I could make at home.
For a long time, we made our own products. Then, as it grew and people started asking for more like the personal lubricant line, we spent a long time trying to learn how to do that without any petrochemicals. Now we have—really I think the fastest. Actually, we do have the fastest-growing organic lubricant product on the market.
That was an interesting journey, and really was the only thing. I’m not a sex professor. I don’t have a degree in sexology. But, talking to people for decades about their intimate lives and writing columns—that’s how I learned about everything I wrote in Sex That Works.
TS: Now, I want to get right into some of the teachings, if you will, from Sex That Works, because it’s a remarkable book, Wendy. There’s so much in it, and I want to start off right with your introduction, where you say, “Having good sex—sex that works—depends on learning to feel.” And I want to talk right about that. You end the book on the note, “Feel everything,” and you’re emphasizing this idea that we have to be willing to feel the painful parts of our lives as well as the blissful parts if we’re going to have the kind of ecstatic sex life we want. And so, talk about that—the emphasis you place on feeling everything.
WS: Yes. You have so many teachers in your Sounds True family that talk about feeling, and the capacity to feel, and how frightening it is—how we lose touch with that through our digital devices and all that. But certainly, our sexuality and our libido is completely tied to that capacity to feel. And so there’s this strange idea we have that we can discern or that we can choose, “I’m not going to feel this bad thing.” I mean it’s just kind of this naïve craziness where we think we can choose not to feel this, but that it won’t impact our capacity to feel everything. The truth is that the more things we refuse to feel, the more other things we lose the capacity to feel. I think that explains a lot about what is happening in so many people’s sexuality.
For me, when I am unable to experience my own emotions, I’m not really capable at almost anything else. So, that might be specific to me, but I don’t think it is, and so that’s why I think the book really, in a lot of ways, is about having the courage and the curiosity to feel in general so that you can focus that attention and that sensation on your sexual self. But you can’t do it if the door is closed anywhere else. That’s the point.
TS: Then you have a whole chapter later in the book on courage, and you state that it takes courage to overcome our sexual inhibitions and fears. Talk about the kind of courage you mean, and also how do we cultivate it? How do we actually cultivate the kind of courage you’re pointing to?
WS: Courage is that word that comes from “the heart” in French, and so I think courage is actually—I think—at the base or the foundational experience of feeling. It’s the thing that allows us to open and let things move through us.
And so, the most mysterious place that we experience ourselves in terms of boundary and in terms of inhabiting each other’s bodies is our sexual self. So, if you can’t bring that opening of your heart and the vulnerability to it, then it’s compromised.
So I think in the chapter—and I don’t have the book right in front of me. I can’t wait until I get the copies; I think they’re coming soon. But in the chapter, it’s broken down into four different qualities of courage. One is about vulnerability, and we know that there’s many, many books that are written about vulnerability.
It’s not like anybody has the master’s degree on that, because truly every time we face a situation that makes us feel more vulnerable than we felt before, it’s a real challenge. It’s a heart challenge, of courage. I think maybe persistence is in there—of just coming back to it and asking a different question. Looking at the same place, but with an open heart, with a vulnerable space in you, and that you can try and see it with fresh eyes.
TS: Now, I’m wondering if you can talk more about courage and communicating about sex with your partner, and helping people to do that.
WS: Yes, that’s actually probably one of the most frightening places of all, for most people, partly because I was saying earlier, a lot of people don’t have their own, much language at all for their sexuality. This goes back to the last 30 years of “Just say no” education. So, in many states in this country, sex education is maybe body parts, and in separate rooms girls and boys. There’s nothing relational that’s mentioned, and not even really correct anatomy in a lot of situations. We’re really groping in the dark—a lot of people are groping in the dark when it comes to having a language that they feel they can express what they want, or that it’s even OK to say what they want about their sexual desires. So, it’s a multilayered problem, and I think one of the things we talk about in the chapter there is just really, one of the most courageous things you can do is take charge of your own education. Right?
We give a lot of resources in the book, and you have a lot of other writers in the Sounds True family that address these things, too. So, you become comfortable with some words.
We do a lot of things where we try to help young people develop language. and I know I was in a focus group with like 20 19-year-olds. I’m like, “OK, what words could we say if this doesn’t feel comfortable for you?” It was a conversation about consent, and the only thing this room of 20 19-year-old kids—smart people—that they could come up with is, “Are you down with what’s going down?” Literally, those were the only words they had.
It’s a big problem. It’s a big problem to own a language that you can express yourself sexually. I want to say that I myself—even though I wrote this book and I feel like there’s a lot of things I understand about it—I myself struggle sometimes.
I talk about it in the book—about these places, about how to reflect back what’s working or not working for me with my husband. That’s like 30 years in, right? I’ve had sex, I don’t know, three million—well, not three million—but 3,000 times, let’s say in 30 years. Maybe more, I don’t know. Still, there’s these moments where I have to overcome something to say “This doesn’t work,” or, “Why is this happening like this?” Or, “Can we try this? You have all these fingers, they’re so dexterous. Can you experiment with your fingers?” We’re afraid we’re going to hurt somebody’s feelings, or we’re going to somehow turn them off, but really there’s a lot of studies that are mentioned in the book that, if you would only give somebody a little bit of information, it’s like it gets better.
That is really a big place where courage evolves in us. Education, as you know, is sort of the basis, I think, of all of those turns in our lives. Where we start to gain language, and then we start to have confidence in that language, and then we start to have confidence that we know what we know, and we can say it.
TS: Well, a different way of getting at courage would be: what have you seen stops people from really owning their own sexuality and their own sexual pleasure? What do you see as the biggest obstacles?
WS: I think for a lot of people, shame is a big, big one. Shame is such an interesting and challenging emotion, because it’s another thing that doesn’t have a lot of language, usually. A lot of times actually, people can’t even figure out where it’s sourced from, and it’s so layered culturally. Like I said, I didn’t have this happen to me in a religious setting, but so, so many people do. If it wasn’t that, then the discomfort that we get ancestrally—whether it’s our parents, or each time it goes down a generation, there’s another kind of twist that happens to it.
I mean, think about this: It was only 100 years ago that they medically used to put these sharp pronged belts on a boy’s penis if he would have an erection. And that was like a medical treatment.
So, when you think about how archaic our history has been—and even to this day. I mean, I talk about it in the book a couple places this global unconscious thing that I believe that we all participate in when it comes to human sexuality. On this planet right now today, sex is used as a weapon, and there’s a lot of terror. Young children are—and have been in every country—engaged in sexual activities that was way beyond their capacity to understand what was happening to them. Those fears filter into some space that really affects all of us. I think it’s a spiritual thing, because really, if you think about sex at its purest form and who we are as erotic beings, that is—I believe—really deeply connected to our soul.
To the degree that that has been a silenced part of us, and an inaccessible part of us, and that there has been so much hurtful action that’s happened over centuries on this planet, we all battle that when we come to find our own sexual courage.
TS: I love the way, Wendy, you begin the book with Chapter One being on freedom. It’s very surprising because of course thinking about sexual freedom, I wasn’t sure what to expect with chapter one being called “Freedom.” Then I read, “Authentic sexual freedom means taking responsibility for our own sexual needs.” I’d love for you to unpack that a little bit. That’s freedom? Taking responsibility for our own sexual needs?
WS: Yes, it’s so weird because, especially in our culture in the last 10 to 20 years—but I have really seen it a lot in the last 10, partly maybe because raising kids; I’m watching this happen as they go to university. I think partly it’s these digital apps, where somehow there’s been this weird—there’s been some super interesting books written about this, too, from women’s perspectives—where somehow this equality of sexuality meant now everybody was hooking up. So, instead of how it was when I was younger, you didn’t just give your sexuality away without even going to dinner—and this whole slut-shaming and all this stuff that goes with it—it’s like they came to this place of this free-for-all, this “swipe right, swipe left.” The idea that you could just have sex with a stranger and enjoy it, I think is such an odd circumstance that we’ve come to.
Many women realize, of course, now that it’s not that pleasurable—that women’s pleasure really gets left behind in this form of freedom, and that there is a lot of emotional responsibility that, when you don’t have that, it does. It just interferes with your capacity for pleasure.
I think there’s a slow waking up to that, but I think that the combination of those events has made people misunderstand sexual freedom as sexual license—like, “I can do whatever I want. Doing whatever I want, it doesn’t matter what the consequences of that are.” But truly, young women who go ahead and do whatever they want—and I’ve seen this happen with my daughters—then really suffer the consequences of this erotic damage that we can do to ourselves at a pretty young age. [This is] where we have sex with somebody who doesn’t care about us, and we have sex that maybe is a dangerous situation where we start to lose confidence in our own ability to judge what’s safe for us.
The whole thing is just sold short as though it was nothing, even though you’re giving the deepest part of yourself to somebody, and that’s supposed to feel normal afterwards. All of those things create these erotic damage points that [if] you stack up just a few of them, [people] start to really not trust themselves sexually.
So, that’s why I think this idea that real freedom—and not just sexual freedom, but any freedom—comes from this mature understanding that you alone are responsible for the situations that you create in your life. I mean, I’m not saying in this ultra-independent way, but I’m just saying to the degree that we are not blaming somebody, or waiting for somebody to make it right for us, but that we really have that responsibility to make choices for ourselves that we can live with. That’s what I’m saying.
TS: I think it’s a very profound idea in terms of Sex That Works—starting the book on that note—in that it’s not, “My partner doesn’t do this, or doesn’t do that, or I wish my partner wanted to have sex more,” or whatever it might be. You’re saying that this grown-up quality, and you talk about that growing up sexually, comes from beginning in the place of, “I’m responsible for my own sexual needs.” I mean, maybe this is really obvious to people. I thought it was a very, very important point.
WS: I don’t know if it’s obvious to people. Again, that comes back to the thing we were talking about earlier, which is that when you think about language acquisition, and even refugees who come over—I knew some people who adopted children who were like 9 and 11. It was so important that they learned words that could keep up with their thinking, because otherwise what happens when you don’t have a representation for your thoughts, for your emotions [is] you lose the capacity to know them. When that happens over time, then it’s super easy to see how people blame other people or hold other people responsible for their sexual pleasure. If you’ve never had an orgasm on your own, and the only time you’ve ever had one—even though you might not be able to repeat it—is with Peter, or this guy, or this woman, then you’re dependent on that person to know that really intimate part of who you are.
One of the things I would always teach my kids and anybody who would listen is that masturbation is such an important foundation. They call it the foundation of our sexuality, because if you don’t have that language with yourself, then how could anybody else learn it from you?
TS: I thought it was interesting in Sex That Works that you had a pretty balanced view of masturbation. On the one hand, you were very enthusiastic about people masturbating even in the midst of a long-term relationship, or even while with one’s partner, but at the same time you talked about not getting overly dependent on masturbation as the only way that you could experience arousal. Maybe talk about that balance, if you will.
WS: It’s a strange thing. There have been people who have come to me and said, “I can’t even say that word to my partner. I’ve been married to this person for 20 years.” I don’t even know what to say sometimes, when people say things like that to me. But what I would say is that—
TS: Well, it’s like an admission of defeat or something. “I’m masturbating because there’s something between us that’s not fulfilling enough.”
WS: Well, maybe. I don’t know. But the thing is that—what I would say about masturbation is that it is the way we—it’s the most common sexual act on the planet, so it’s totally normal. More people do it than you would imagine do it, although it seems like recently some women are doing it less. But historically, it is the most common act, and it’s even something that little babies do that. Before they know they’re doing that, they find their way to that part of their body, and they have pleasure that’s very innocent but genuine. I remember when I would see that with my sons and I’d be like, “Oh wow, they already found that.”
But a lot of people, like I’ve said, for all those reasons like shame and this shrouded pain over sexuality really are afraid of discovering that, and they’re certainly afraid about sharing the fact that they do that, or there’s this idea that, “If I’m in a relationship . . .”
I think somebody actually said this to me in a blog. It’s like, “Why would I do that? He should be responsible for that. My partner. I’m in a relationship; why would I need to do that?” And I think it’s just totally missing the boat because nobody is going to know the kind of touch, and where you like to be touched, and what it is that turns that on for you better than you. And when you’re comfortable with that, you start to have a language to share of how you want to be touched by somebody else. When you’re with somebody for a long time, mutual masturbation is really exciting, where people are either touching each other simultaneously, or touching themselves simultaneously. It’s not something that gets a lot of airplay, but it’s definitely a skill. At that same time, the balance part is that if that’s the only way you have access to your sexual pleasure, then that’s going to be challenging for your partnership.
I think I talk about that—not just about masturbation, but about fantasy life in general which is a really interesting chapter in the book.
TS: Oh yes. We’re going to get there. We’ll get there right now. To be honest with you, I thought it was, for me, the most, “Now here we go, OK,” exciting part of the book, and I think some of it was the intensity in which you also shared your excitement about sexual fantasies—and you call it “erotic fuel.” I want to hear you talk more about that, and how you work with fantasies so you don’t feel that you’re in some way betraying your partner. I should be focused on the deep love I have for my partner, not fantasizing about XYZ while we’re having sex.
WS: Yes. Anyway, that was a really hard chapter to write, and I think we rewrote that chapter maybe seven times, because it’s really charged. There’s a lot of really, really charged ideas in that chapter, and it’s—I think that it was treated with a lot of great respect. I think that there’s still going to be people who read that book and hit that chapter, and struggle with it because it’s not something that we are comfortable with.
One of the reasons is because most people’s fantasy life is outside of what is politically correct. So, let’s just get that out of the way, and just agree, and know that. I talk about a book that I read and the author I interviewed. Stanley Siegel wrote this book, Your Brain On Sex. He’s [been] a sex therapist for like 30 years in New York City, so he saw a lot of people. He was a really well-known writer on Psychology Today, until he started actually writing about some of these ideas, and they became uncomfortable with it, and they didn’t just take him off of the column, but they took off everything he ever wrote. It was kind of a big—this sort of situation was very charged.
That said, I think that many people miss the most critical and exciting and passionate erotic fuel in their life when they don’t allow themselves to dive into or at least look at what’s happening in their fantasy life. One thing I learned from Stanley was that our fantasies evolve in us subconsciously as we become adolescent. It’s not like you pick them. There’s no conscious action that happens, but rather it’s the subconscious act of the brain that is taking some really painful history—and we all have that when we’re growing up. It could be an overbearing mother, it could be a sense of abandonment, it could be a sense of powerlessness among peers, whatever. We all have something that we bring to our adolescence and that the brain—this is the concept—then takes that material and tries to turn it into something pleasurable.
An obvious example that you can look at is how a girl who has a lot of shame growing up in church would then have this really erotic fantasy about having sex with a priest—I’m just saying. You can kind of see how that connects. But for some of us, it’s not that clear a connection. Somebody who has an overbearing parent might not come to the same fantasy of submission as somebody else who has an overbearing parent. It’s not like A to B to C. It’s not linear in that way because our brains are all unique, and we do different things with them.
The premise is that if you start to know, or accept what that fuel is, even if it’s something you might never share with somebody else, it’s really going to—that’s your access point for really intense pleasure.
TS: How does somebody work with it? If I were to share this fantasy with my partner, it might be very hurtful, so I’m not going to. I’m not going to say it to my partner.
WS: Right, and I talk a lot about that in the book—that for me, most of my fantasy life goes on between my ears, and I don’t talk about it. I can’t talk about it, even with my husband. I’ve tried a few times, and no words come. I do give a couple of examples in there.
Let me just say this about fantasy: Of all of the fantasies, and really, if you want to learn about fantasy, just as a way to even start to think about what your own are, there’s so much erotica that’s written for women, even, and for men. Current levels of pornography [are] not that erotic because it’s really mostly without story, but there [are] a lot of things available. Of all the things that are out there, submission and domination—which is the whole 50 Shades of Grey, right? I mean, we all have some version of that that cranks something in us.
For me, it was as simple as letting these really erroneous, sometimes frightening images happen for me when I was having sex. Instead of suppressing it, instead of turning it off, I just let myself look at it. At first, it was terrifying. I was like, “Oh my God, was I raped as a child?” I couldn’t even imagine how I had those ideas. Where did they come from? And then, like I said, I talked to Stanley, and then I kind of calmed down about it, because I realized that this is just something that my subconscious created, and I have the responsibility and the right to use it however I want. It’s not like I’m fantasizing—when I think about fantasy for me, I think about it as historical fiction. Because it’s not like I’m with a different man or a different partner. It’s like we’re caught up in these historical stories in places and times, having sex that’s very different than our married sex life that are all kinds of things—things that are totally socially inappropriate, but that are pretty sexually compelling.
And so, I just let them go by in my head, and that is—they’re never the same. It’s not like the same story plays over and over for me. Mostly, I would say my husband doesn’t know what those stories are. Sometimes I’ll vocalize things, and I think he gets the gist of what’s happening in me. Even like the one I talk about in the book is this idea of having a third woman join us that I would be able to direct. That one I think I have mentioned to him, and we thought, “Oh, we could go to Vegas,” but the truth is that when you start to act out fantasy in 3D, there’s so much at stake. There are so many ways that could create a different result than you would anticipate.
I don’t advocate for that, and I actually really talk about in the book using caution about bringing fantasy into your day-to-day. Like going into a dungeon—I mean, people do it in all kinds of ways. A lot of people do it online. For me, it’s sufficient to have it in my head, but what I would say is just for advice about where to start, just stop suppressing it. Stop turning away from it—which is I think what happens for a lot of people.
TS: One of the through lines, if you will, in Sex That Works—and I think it’s even apparent in this conversation—is your 30 year marriage (more than 30 years) and your four children—that you have found tremendously sexually satisfying at this point in your life. It’s kind of a statement that long-term monogamy can also be hot, passionate, interesting, and sexually fulfilling. I think a lot of people have this idea that in long-term, monogamous relationship, sex just dies out and that’s just the way it is. My question to you is: if you were going to summarize for our listeners what keeps a sexual life hot and alive in a long-term marriage, what is it, Wendy?
WS: I actually want to say I think it’s a really great question. I so appreciate you asking it, because there’s so many books right now that are being written about expiration-dating on relationships, and how you can’t expect—all these reasons why monogamy can never work. There’s really a lot that’s being written about it, and it makes me feel like some weird anomaly, but I don’t think I am an anomaly. I think it’s just a lack of understanding, and so I would say two things:
One is that, my husband and I are very different people. He’s a psychiatrist, he’s very quiet. In all the ways that I seek out community and putting myself in the world, he would rather spend time in the woods by himself. I mean, we’re very different in many fundamental ways, and I think for us one of the big things was that we never really tried to make each other like each other. I mean, not like each other like admire each other, but we never tried to become like the other person. I think that is one danger in marriage in general, where people are so averse to conflict that they give up all these critical parts of who they are to become more similar to their partner. Neither of us did that, and neither of us asked our marriage to do that.
One of the consequences, which I think I talk about in the book too, is how lonely it is to be married to him sometimes, especially now that my kids have gone. There was a lot of buffering space that I had with the children, but now that it’s me and him again, we are trying to figure out how to find this space where he’ll want to do anything that I want to do, because really, we don’t. I mean, we both enjoy nature, we enjoy good food, we do things together, but we’re not like one of those couples that’s just always doing stuff together, or interested in the same things.
I think in some ways that makes us pretty passionate with each other. So, I think that’s one thing that’s really important. But the other thing is that I—and it wasn’t always like this. Our sex life—and I talk about this in the book—at the beginning was not that great. In fact, it was so bad that I thought that it was going to go away before this turn happened in our marriage. I kept trying to convince myself that I could stay with it, even if it were to go away, but we had very long, challenging years of arguments about who wanted who, and what I call “the initiation question.” Every long-term couple, I think, has that problem. I try to do some justice to that problem in the book, but I think it’s actually the problem that ends many marriages, and certainly ends many sex lives, because there’s probably nothing that’s more painful in a relationship than to be turned away continuously, or to turn away somebody in an intimate way.
We don’t have a lot of skills around that space. I think getting beyond that space, where we were able to reach some level of forgiveness—which I share that story in the book—was critical. That was a really critical thing. The first thing I would say is in a marriage, not trying to become so not yourself and like the other person, that’s kind of a passion killer. Then this problem about who wants who more, and you’ve got to get to the other side of that so that people don’t feel rejected, or less than. That’s the thing that causes a lot of people to go looking for somebody else.
TS: Let’s talk about that—the initiation question, as you put it. The initiation problem, if you will. Who’s initiating? Who wants who? How do you suggest couples who find themselves in a situation like that—no one’s initiating; both parties are too afraid at this point to initiate—how do you get beyond that?
WS: I wish I had some golden kernel that I could just say, “This is the thing.” But in my experience, what happened is that—I still don’t really know why it happened, or how it happened. I tell this story about how my husband came home from San Francisco and brought this gift of lingerie to me, and we were pretty deep into our marriage, and he was like asking me to be that for him again after this long time. Partly, we used to fight about sex a lot because I wasn’t very good at knowing what worked for me, and so he wasn’t really good at it. The truth is we’re not really good at sex through most of our twenties, and we think we should be, but it takes a long time to learn how and what it is that works reliably for each of us. I would have an orgasm, or we’d have some great orgasm together or something, and we would think, “Oh, if we could do this in just this order, we could find this space again.” But of course we couldn’t, right?
Then he would come too soon, and I would be just furious. I would just want to kill him. We would get into these huge arguments, and then he stopped. It was so hard when it didn’t work that it was easier for him to just stop wanting it, I think. Then I just had this terrible rejection problem about feeling like, “What is wrong with me? Why doesn’t he want me?” That went on.
I’m telling you we were caught in this for years. It was so painful. It was so painful, and so challenging, and I hear this story from many people. I know this is a really common thing. He gave me that lingerie, and I decided to wear it, and I decided to step into the dance with him again. As simple as that sounds, I think sometimes it is that simple—that you decide that you’re going to come back to this with new eyes, with courage, with an open heart, and ask to be met. Then the other person has to meet you, right? Both people really need to bring the same amount of courage.
And then there is this exquisite forgiveness, which is not something that we create, but it’s something that we open to—that holds us, and we know it happens to us because we can’t remember how it was before. It’s like that just recedes from view. I think it’s actually one of the most blessed, divine spaces we experience with somebody else. It’s what makes me believe in forgiveness. But, I also know that I don’t control that. I can only move towards it with a willingness to be held in that place. What I’m saying [is] it’s like soul work. It’s soul work.
So, he stepped forward, and I met him, and then we had this crazy, three-week, every night we’re having sex affair. It’s like. whoa, I got honeymoon cystitis 17 years into my marriage. Then it was like we never had that fight again. It just stopped meaning that. We stopped having that meaning attached to that space.
So, I think a lot of couples don’t get past that point, and then that actually will kill your sex life. Then you either become, you’re just living together and there’s no intimacy, or eventually somebody is having an affair with somebody else. You know what I mean. So there’s those two pieces, and then the third thing is the fantasy thing that we were just talking about—that in this 30 year relationship, I’m a different woman when I’m having sex. I’m not the same girl that’s talking to you right here. I don’t really know who that wild girl is, or where she hides when I’m not having sex, but I don’t—I’m not afraid to be that woman with him.
Whatever comes, I let it come, and he meets me there. And so, we have this crazy—I have to cover my eyes kind of sex every time. Every time I have sex, I have sex like that with him. Sometimes I feel like the relationship container isn’t even really big enough for the kind of intimacy we have, because—like I was telling you—there’s a lot of places where we don’t meet each other. I write this in the book even, about how making that transition back from that wild woman to the wife that’s going to go down and make dinner—it’s a weird space. It’s like multiple lives, which I think we all live with people we love anyway.
TS: Now Wendy, you mentioned that at the end of Sex That Works, you offer [an actually] very extensive suggested reading list for people who are interested in furthering their sex education. Honestly, just that appendix in the book, I thought was worth purchasing the book. Just for that, I thought it was so useful.
But what I’m wondering here is, if you could summarize for our listeners what you think some of the most important sex education, if you will, discoveries have been in the last couple decades [are]. Like, “God, I wish everybody just knew this, or that.” Maybe they don’t have time to read all the books that are listed at the back of Sex That Works, but people should know this.
WS: Yes. I think that sexual anatomy is something that a lot of people don’t understand, and most people have not learned. In fact, I didn’t even know much about it until—because actually it really wasn’t even something that was available until 10 years ago. Then there was some really important books like The Clitoral Truth, and other books like that, where I started to understand what sensations I was having for the first time. So, I think coming to a better understanding of your physical sexual anatomy—and how much more similar men and women are than we would think. That actually has been pretty fascinating.
TS: Can you tell me a little bit about The Clitoral Truth?
WS: Well, the clitoris is this—when we were growing up it was this thing that we thought was just on the top of the vagina—this button that was seriously enervated and highly charged. But what we know now is the clitoral mound on the top of the vagina is actually connected to these legs that circle all the way back through the vagina, and into where the G-spot is. Suddenly that G-spot is not just some mysterious thing inside. It’s connected to—it’s a whole structure. It’s an anatomy system, and if you compare that anatomy system to the male anatomy, you see that they’re made much more similarly than they are differently. Places that are erogenous that you don’t think about in a man, like behind his scrotum, are erogenous for a lot of the same reasons that a woman would have this sensation inside her vagina that she’s not quite sure why, or how to find that. You know what I mean?
Seeing pictures of that, I think, is really helpful. I mean, it was life-changing for me to understand that.
So, that’s one thing. Like we had talked about, I can’t even remember everything that’s in that appendix. But I agree with you, it’s quite lengthy. I’ve had mentors through all these years—people that I really deeply admire, and that just really know so much about sexual relationships and our sex therapists—you know what I mean. They have the degree. And so, I list a lot of those people’s books, like Tammy Nelson. I feel like I need to give her a shout out, always. She’s written these books, Getting the Sex You Want and other books, really amazing books. She’s somebody that I barely can keep up with.
Ian Kerner is another one that I’ve mentioned in there, who writes some of the best, most beautiful books ever about oral sex and why it’s important.
TS: I’m curious though: even outside of the actual specific book recommendations, if there are things you’ve learned that have been new findings or findings that maybe haven’t been well distributed that people aren’t aware of [and] that really were life-changing for you?
WS: Like I said, definitely the clitoral thing was pretty life-changing for me. I was like 44 before I read that. I had been doing the work for quite a while, and I was like, “How did I never know this?” I couldn’t believe that I never knew it. Like I was saying in some of those books I just mentioned, I feel like some of the exercises that I’ve read in some of those sex books about how to say what you need to say sexually—that’s how I learned to do it. When I talk about communicating and having the courage to say what you want, I learned that stuff in these books that I put in that thing. It was challenging, and it was life changing.
So, yes. You know, I want to mention one other thing, because I thought you were going to ask me this when you were asking about the appendix. At the very end of the book, before the appendix, I talk about gratitude. One other thing, when you were asking me about a long-term relationship, is that I talk about this at the very end of the book—about practicing the last time in your mind.
It’s like one thing that happens in relationships—long-term relationships—is that you get to take people for granted, and their annoying qualities overcome what you love about them. One way that I learned to stop doing that was to imagine, just for a minute, that I would never see them again. This was the last time I was going to drop them off, this is the last time he would drive away. Then, it would bring tears to my eyes, and that would teach me how to remember what I loved. I feel like we have to get better at that practice if we’re going to really open to our sexual potential.
We have to get better at the idea that this is not a forever thing—that this could really be the last time. And a lot of times when I have sex, and I have this amazing sex, I sometimes start to cry when I think, “What if this is the last time?” Because we never know the last time. Some people say it’s morbid, but I think it’s actually a really genuine way to stay connected, to just keep yourself conscious of the fact that this isn’t like some—this life is short. It’s so short, and so if we start to really appreciate how brief this time we have is, if it does any one thing, it should make us want to love more. It should make us want to love better.
TS: You know, Wendy, there’s something that I think has been implicit in our conversation that I want to ask you about, because we’ve been talking about passionate sex in the context of a long-term, committed relationship, which is: what do you see as the connection between sex and intimacy? Can’t I have great sex without any real, deep intimacy? Or in your work, do you see them as intertwined in some way?
WS: Well, my life speaks for that, right? I’ll tell people, even when I hand them out free product, “Don’t waste it on anybody you don’t love.” All the experiences that I’ve had of casual sex in my life don’t come close—anything near—to the kind of sex I have with somebody that’s invested in me and my life, and shows up for me, and cares about what happens to me. That’s what I believe. I know that there are people who would argue that, and would say that illicit and exciting sex that you’re sneaking away for—I know people get really charged by those experiences, and they have access to a pleasure mechanism that they can’t find in their long-term relationship. I just think it’s kind of tragic because you get so much other baggage when you’re hiding that. There’s so much else.
I just feel like it would be so great if we could learn how to build this into long-term loving. It would just be so much healthier. It would be so much easier on our nervous system if we could actually really anticipate and want to grow sexually with the person that we love. And it makes everything else manageable, too.
I mean, I’m telling you: my husband would say that I’m annoying, and he’s annoying, and the fact that we have this really great sex lets us manage how different we are, and how annoyed we get with each other. Another thing we never talked about, but the sexual response mechanism is the only thing that we have access to in our life that does a system reset on the emotional, mental, spiritual level. I think that people who don’t have that experience available to them, it’s harder to stay as healthy because it was built into us for a reason.
TS: Now, just as a final question, and in a way I think a kind of summation, if you will here. In the beginning of the book, you talk about how we can “grow up” sexually—that we can grow up in all kinds of ways in our life, and sexually is also a way that we can grow up. I’m curious: if you were to characterize what it means to grow up sexually, what [is that?]
WS: I think that it’s in the summation kind of way, all the things we’ve been talking about. If you can get over this idea that—I mean, just come to terms with the fact that you are a sexual, erotic person just as a step. And then be curious about that. What does that mean? Start to ask real questions about it, and when it’s challenging, bring an open heart of courage to it, and that you trust that part of yourself. That you allow that part of yourself to expand, in whatever ways its asking you, and that might be different than the ways it asks me. But, I think to the degree that we make peace with who we are is growing up sexually, because such a foundational part of who we are is a sexual part of us.
Like I said, I believe that the soul is the erotic voice of us—at least in part. And so when we make space and we treat that part of us with respect, we’re more creative, we’re more loving, we’re more well in every way.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Wendy Strgar. She’s the author of a beautiful and inspiring new book called Sex That Works: An Intimate Guide to Awakening Your Erotic Life. Wendy, thank you. Thank you for putting all of the time, energy, heart, soul and hotness into Sex That Works. It’s a great book to read. I learned so much from it. Thank you.
WS: Yes. Thank you, Tami, and I really am so deeply honored to be part of your Sounds True family. I’ve been an admirer for such a long time, and I’m so grateful for this conversation. So, thank you.
TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
