Every Fight You've Ever Had Is About Sex. Even the Ones That Aren't.

Big thoughts, quick talk, flip facts, tick talk, level up your mind, every single line. Let's talk about sex. Guys, this is a sex podcast episode. Why do 40% of marriages become sexless? Even amongst couples who say and rate, they still love each other. Why do people who describe their marriages as happy, cheap? Why does divorce produce a kind and quality of rage that no other break up, that doesn't exist elsewhere? The answer, these aren't problems with our relationships. These are features of us as a species. This is anatomy of conflict. Let's talk about sex.

When you do divorce mediation, you're seeing sort of the down cascade of a relationship, the unwinding of a relationship, and then when you think to yourself, I want to get better at understanding this process, you need to understand these people and how the force came to be, which is basically what's study relationship and then we have to study how relationships came to be, and sex is a huge part of that.

Sex is part and parcel of how relationships are built, they're a feature of or characteristic of relationships, and so I've been really professionally and personally curious about give me as much data around sex, sexual satisfaction, sexual frequency, sexual desire rates over time, amongst across gender, across culture, across history, across mammal species. Let's get to know this thing that's such a big part of our lives.

That's how I started thinking about this, and through this podcast, which is all about understanding conflict, I thought, man, I wonder if we just take any conflict, conflict between your neighbor, conflict between your boss, is there a thread that goes back to Darwinian theory of evolution that this is all about sex, sort of Freudian theory that this is all the eros, or eros, this is all our core energy is the psychic energy to create and have sex.

So let's plant that flag right there in that soil. In this episode, if you stay tuned to the end, you will have answers to all those questions. You will understand the relationship between the conflict in your life, whatever it might be, from who does the dishes to an in-law, to a money dispute, to an employer problem, and sex. Let's do it. First, we need to talk about our hardware, and you've heard me talk about hardware often during the podcast, and by hardware, I mean, what evolution, I mean our neuro-logical, neuropsychological, our equipment, our brain biology, what we're built on and with.

So the thesis here is simple, I mean, you need to say it straight from the very beginning and we need to remember it throughout, but here's the thesis. We, over time, didn't evolve one's, first principle is, we haven't evolved the sexual strategy, right? That is, our desires, our preferences, how many times a day we think about sex, who we think about having sex with, who we think about not having sex with, what feels good, what doesn't feel good, whether we can commit to a single monogamous partner for life, all of these are evolved over thousands and thousands of years, and so we shouldn't take any one specific thing too personally, you shouldn't take our desires set too personally.

This is core to my thesis, okay, and this is sort of first principle. And it's not just one sexual, it's not just one desire that's that play, it's multiple, the two big ones are on one hand, we men and women alike, like novelty, we like sexual novelty, we like new partners, we like new sex, we like novelty, there's a dopamine nerdgic reward for novelty, and on the other hand, and this is, you can see Esther Perrell's work, meaning and captivity echoing the thesis, we like safety and security and stability and care, and all of those have grown out of survival mechanisms, so that makes sense, we can see that more and more partners increases the likelihood of survival, and also rearing a child is energetically, it's a high energetic transaction, it takes lots of energy and resources to safely bring a human child from birth to able to spend for itself, and so both those values are, both those drives are at the core of who we are, important to know, maybe we could just stop the podcast right there and say that like we are wired for both, and I think you go on Instagram and you see some of these Instagram videos about divorce as liberation and finding your true self, and I think that's their truth to that, absolutely, like relationships can be toxic, and I also, and it could feel tremendously validating and liberating to exit them, and I think, you know, I think lots of times the retort is like, well, the grass isn't greener on the other side, and I think the biological way of saying that is, novelty is exciting, and then by definition, it will wear off, so unless your mating pattern hinges on having consistent access to new mates, you will get bored with your mate, right, as a pure matter of biology, and the novelty will wear off, as because you will have familiarity, and familiarity and novelty are two ends on the anesthesia, now you might have increased sense of safety and security and comfort and attachment, right, but not the sense of novelty, which we dopamine, dopamine energetically crave.

So, let's start with basic natural selection biology 101, natural selection shaped us all to reproduce, males particularly towards quantity and novelty, right, spread your seed, have more partners, females toward selectivity, and this is because men have told us sperm and women have relatively few eggs, females toward selectivity in their mate, and security, because it takes a lot to have a baby and care for a baby, and this whole theory is known as trivers parental investment theory, and it holds basically universally across humans, every culture studied, so that's first, we have this general tension that I talked about, and we also have the Coolidge effect, and the Coolidge effect I also talked about I just did name, the Coolidge effect is a neurological, it is that when sexually satiated mammals encounter a new partner, their dopamine resets and desire returns, so this is seen across rats, cattle, humans, and it's not weakness, it's not selfishness, it's the brain doing its brain thing, the brain responding to novelty, and so the implication for us is that long-term monogamous relationships requires our brain, our nervous system, to work against one of its very own rewards systems, its own reward mechanisms, which is novelty.

It requires us in a monogamous relationship to work against that vector, and it's not impossible, but it's real work, and I think pretending that it's not real work is where more problems cascade. Now, as we said, alongside this, we also have evolved a very powerful pair bonding drive. This is oxytocin, this is vasopressin, these are the attachment systems, which are also equally biological, which is to say equally hardwired.

We have a need to bond, to be known, to build something stable with someone, and these aren't just like cultural artifacts or cultural religious brainwashings, it's as real biologically as the novelty drive, and so the conundrum for us as humans is that both drives are real, both drives are ours to own, and they want and pull us in different directions. And, when we talk about conflict and the anatomy of conflict podcast, this is the crux of the conflict, that we both simultaneously want, and are hardwired for, novelty on one hand, I want to have sex with that other person over there, that new person, and security, and safety, and what the existing bond that's now kind of boring represents.

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Okay, so we have these two powerful, evolutionary driven waves within us, simultaneously, and repressing them is where folks get into trouble, okay? So in modern life, let's just look like it was recap, let's pull back. We have a hardware that's pushing in two different directions. We have lifespans now, they're 80 plus years, versus in ancient times, we maybe had pairing situations, partner pairing for 10 to 15 years, which, yeah, that's a huge expansion. We have smartphones now, which basically give us dopamine on demand, right? We have geographic mobility you could move anywhere. You have online dating, meaning there's an entire marketplace that's never existed before.

There's another sort of like these new social, sexual norms growing, changing that we didn't evolve for. We did not evolve for this particular environment to say the least, okay? And here is the groundwork, the foundation, where tons of conflict as it relates to sex emerges. And I mean, just sex very literally, I mean, sex within a relationship as number one.

Okay, we're going to talk about Freud in a little bit, but now we've set the stage biologically, and now we're going to get into what the evidence is for sex in the modern relationship. So we've, we're at the modern problem, we've traced the hardware, and this is where the stats are.

So let's go through just a few statistics, quote unquote, dead bedrooms, okay? They're not a communication problem, per se, roughly 15 to 20% of marriages are clinically sexless, which means on most surveys under 10 times per year. If you widen the scope to include folks that describe themselves as sort of deeply unsatisfied, or widen the sex frequency to infrequent, you're at 30 to 40% in the population. It's 30 to 40% of marriages, okay? And the stated advice, if you go to a therapist is like communicate more or better, do date nights, prioritize and schedule intimacy. And this advice isn't wrong. In fact, like, like, I think this is where right and wrong are not helpful.

So it's not wrong, like that, that might move the needle forward, that might not hurt, that might be helpful in that net, but it's not, it might be necessary, but it's not sufficient, because it misses the mechanism. And the mechanism is this sort of biological wave that we're writing, right? And that as you get familiar with a domestic partner, novelty wears off, and you get bored, basically. And then so we talk about affairs. What happens when boredom nurses, and affairs don't mean what we think that they mean.

So there's surely glasses research, landmark research found that most men who had affairs 56% rated their marriages as happy at the time that they had the affair. So over half of male affairs happen inside marriages that the husband described is completely good. So it's not the case that affairs are an escape from a bad marriage. And what this points to is again, an underlines and underscores is the coolest effect that we want novelty for its own sake, independent of relationship dissatisfaction.

And so when we say cheating, you know, cheating is one name for it, novelty seeking is another name for it, cheating has a moral bent and it kind of breaks the relationship code, which is also true, but I want to just like name how, from which angle we're looking at these problems.

And so you might eat like the problem, the cool, what the cool, the fact points to you, the problem of cheating, it seems very predictable. And if it's predictable then, for my problem solving lens, it's also preventable. If we can honestly and openly and clearly identify the mechanism, name the mechanism, and let's talk about how, how can this possibly be preventable if we have a biological urge, a biological wiring, it's therefore predictable. What's the next step then to make it preventable? Will these problems that we have ever go away, can we solve them, can we get ahead of them? Well, they won't ever go away. And therefore, we can't solve them.

And this is useful, and it's, it's a reframe that's more intellectually honest than anything I've seen out there, the most self-help books say, the problems won't go away, and that's the most useful thing we can tell you. It's hardwired into us, okay? These tensions aren't solvable because they're not problems in the evolutionary sense, in the engineering sense, right? They're features of our hardware. They are what got us to this place. The novelty drive doesn't get resolved by freaking better communication or date nights, or what was the only thing? Date nights, better communication, couples therapy, yeah, plan sucks. The pair bonding need doesn't get resolved by more freedom.

These things will coexist and have coexisted in this permanent tension. And so the question as well, well, great, now, how do we navigate the tension? And here's what the research says, the couples who sustain long-term desire, which is the goal, right, are not the ones who bullshit, suppress their novelty drive through willpower. And instead, they talk, basically, they talk to each other about sex. They build psychological safety so that their desire doesn't need to express itself in novelty. They don't need to have another partner. They can get novelty somehow through the relationship, and how does that mean?

So, and, according to this is extra-pros formulation, she says, the desire does require mystery, but mystery doesn't require a new person. What it requires is, and this is extra-pros work, maintaining some degree of separateness. That is, this is very hard when you're me, or the paradigmatic me, you're a dad of three kids with a spouse who also lives in the house, you guys are interconnected, everything's dropping off kids, picking up kids, doing the dishes, making the lunch box, is cleaning the lunch box, is taking the violence, taking the dance, taking the grandparents, like, we are in full swing of intermatched mode.

And what the data points out is, if you can maintain some separateness, some unknowability, it's, it does wonders, right, it brings in this dopamine-generic move. And the research shows that it's a skill, and so it's learnable, but you can't learn it if you're in deny mode, and you're like, uh, well, you know, everything's fine. And, you know, you're denying the fact that you have an average of 47 sexual thoughts a day, not that anyone's counting, but there is research that, with wide variance, men have far greater sexual thoughts than women, but not by double, right? I can pull up the data, but it's not, it's not by an order of magnitude.

We all have sexual thoughts, we all think about food, we all think about sex, we all think about having sex, we all think about having food. So this might not be worth the shattering, let's say, but I think it does validate us as people and our competing desires, which I think is foundational to like conflict in general. And we look at conflict in this way that we, not that two people, because often if it's party in party B, regardless of the conflict, let's say it's about offense, right, they have competing desires. Yes.

I think it's helpful to see the competing desires in ourselves, in our own self, in an end of one, in an intra, intra, intra, intra, intra, intra, intra psyche, intra psyche, in one's own psyche, those competing forces, and when you layer upon that, that these competing forces are features of us, not bugs, and if they're evolutionarily driven, I think that's also just like validation, validation, it's not your fault, you're not to blame, it's not your fault, it's not to blame, it's not that you fucked up anywhere, you didn't miss the mark, like stored sin in the Christian sort of iconog, in the Christian word, lexicon yes, means to have missed the mark, you didn't miss any, any mark, right, no mark was missed.

So you're not child of God, no mark was missed, it is the nature of who you are, it is biological, we all evolved with a drive toward novelty, with a drive towards deep attachment and pair bonding, with a drive towards social belonging, and all the like, and this is, they're not purely a cultural imposition, and yet they pull us the same one person, they pull us in different directions, and so the man who then cheats, or the woman who then cheats, and then after cheating, feels some crushing sense, I've, I fucked up some crushing guilt, they're not just experiencing culture, suppressing their biology, the person is experiencing two biological systems fighting each other, which is to say the novelty drive and the attachment system, and this is useful for me as a mediator who does divorces, very useful for me, because the conflict in the divorce mediation room isn't just, if one person cheats, for example, that the social rules failed to control the sex drive, or the person failed to follow the social rules to control their sex drive, it's that the person in the room wanted contradictory thing simultaneously, made choices that served one drive at the expense of the other, and now everybody in the room, both people are paying the price for that internal conflict, and so the social rules that we have didn't create this conflict, the multiplicity of human nature stretched out over evolutionary time did, and the rules that we have are just trying to steer, shape, harness that, and then I want to go one step deeper if you're still with me, I want to just take it one step further, and this is that I want to make the leap now that sex is the primary organizing engine of a social structure, okay, I want to bring this to Freud really, which is if we go to Freud, and I've been doing some research and I really like this, so Freud says that I previously thought that like Freud's sort of bit here is that everything is sex, this is what I had in my brain is Freud's summary, like Clifnode's version, but actually what he said is a little bit more sophisticated, although it took me like seven times of read of studying it to get it right, Freud's claim was that arrows, the life drive, the will drive, is rooted in sexuality, and is the primary energy animating human psychology, so the primary energy behind what we do is arrows, is the sexual drive, and that when that sexual drive, that sexual energy, that primary energy, can't get expressed, it gets sublimated into, you pick the thing, art, religion, ambition, culture, conflict, civilization, boar, whatever, so that when Freud wrote, civilization in his disc contents, he argued essentially that civilization is built on redirected sexual energy, and that interestingly when society, and culture, and rules, and tradition, and all this other stuff, requires us to suppress the drive, that suppression shoots out, it is both what births culture and makes us neurotic, that was his theory, so he wasn't necessarily saying everything is sex, he was saying that the energy behind everything is sex, is erotic in nature, is erotic in origin, and I guess if we're, I always think about first principles, Freud's first principle here is that we want equilibrium, and so we seek pleasure to discharge tension, and that sex is the primary biological offloader of tension, and that culture, reality, rules, forces us to discharge these tensions in different alternative avenues, so we have this drive, this drive to live, this will to live, that expresses itself as sex, and when we can't express it as sex, it gets put into all these other channels, and that this sex is the entire psychoanalytic project, and product, and now they are competing theories with Freud, and I'll just say that one of them is attachment theory, and it says that the primary drive isn't sex or sexual discharge, it's proximity to a caregiver, and that the need to bond proceeds, and is more fundamental than the need to have sex, or the need for pleasure, and I bring us back to these two principles, because these are the two principles that we already traced and set up with everyone, and have evolutionarily, that it's not just libido, it is, it's not just attachment, it is, it's both and, and that is what has brought us to today, into the modern family, into modern questions of intimacy, and sexual frequency, and romantic love, and religious notions of what's appropriate in the sort of domestic landscape of love, and I think that when we take that Freud and attachment theory, and we bring it all the way forward, and we talk about sex as we currently experience it, again, the data says that sex is one of the most reliably distressing, meaning if you ask couples what their problems are, it's usually money, sex, money again, sex again, in-laws, domestic labor, and sex is also the most reliably under-discussed flashpoints in the modern relationship, and I think for our purposes today, the point that I wanted to convey is that given, I mean, we've been described as in a sexual recession now, I'm not going to go into that, we'll save that for another episode, another podcast episode, we're not going to go into sort of, we're not going to zoom in on this present moment, and go age group by age group generation by generation, study by study through the various ways in which perimenopausal women experience sexual desire, the various ways amongst 18 to 25-year-old men experience sexual desire and compare time periods, but we are, in a period of less sex, and there are a number of reasons for that, we talked about smartphones as one contributing factor to increased loneliness.

These contemporary phenomena, let's just say the smartphone contributing to higher numbers of sexlessness, not only amongst married couples, but amongst younger men as the group who's been in most studies, younger heterosexual men, this has real and profound consequences in terms of loneliness, depression, suicide, etc. And I think the the meta point here is that I want to make the connection between our biology, our biological constraints, our hardware, and the problems that we see in our life.

I begin to see if we can bridge the gap, we're getting to see if we can think interdisciplinary, more interdisciplinary, more multi-disciplinary, more cross-disciplinary, what are the ways in which physics, seven brief lessons of physics, I'm listening to this book, I'm almost done, what are the ways in which physics cascades into our relationships, what are the ways in which meteorology cascades into our relationships, what are the ways in which smells and cooking and location and time and begin to think about these factors and not just think on the surface of the specific issue of like, oh couple partner one once $10,000 a month's power support, partner B wants to only give $5,000 a month's power support.

We're going to weave a tapestry and that's the hope here is that when we in the anatomy of conflict, the promise that we're making the bet that we're making the query that we're hoping to satisfy is can we deepen our interest in an excavation of conflict with the wider, wider lens sometimes, narrower lens other times to change vantage points.

It's like we do this exercise in dance class where you know when you watch a dancer, you watch a dancer, right, you're sitting down, whatever, what happens if you lay down on the floor and watch the dancer, what happens if you lay down upside down and watch the dancer, what happens if you cover your right eye and watch the dancer, what happens if the dancer is dancing and you walk up closer to the dancer and circle them, how does it change your experience, how does you changing your perception, placement, change the outcome of the thing, change the experience, change the texture, guy, my name is Ryan McLaughlin and I am a mediator and this is the anatomy of conflict podcast, if, if, if, if you scratched your head, said, huh, thought about something like sex and are wiring in a different way, my ask of you to let up, to let me know dopamine, dopamine, dopamine allergic, dopamine, dopamine, I could say it earlier, no, I can't say it, from my own dopamine itself, right, to pass on dopamine from one human to another in a way that will, right, because dopamine, consider dopamine like the building block of stuff, where dopamine goes, energy goes.

So to see more of this good stuff in the world, to send me some positive love, follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcast, click follow, give us a five star rating if you feel we earned it, because I checked that stuff, I checked the stats, I checked the listens, I read all the comments, I respond to all the comments, so that's huge and helpful and could take you seven seconds but it'll make a huge, it'll be like a huge pound in the back for me, I'll feel that and feel warm and fuzzy, it'll be a novel experience, so that's a wrap for today, that's a parkour.