Nicole McNichols

And look, I'm not at all saying

that you have to have all of that figured out before you can have an active, healthy sex life.

For sure, relationships are vehicles for change and partners can help us heal.

I was personally a hot mess in my 20s, and I do believe that my husband and that relationship and that stability and unconditional love helped me to grow into a different person, a better one, I think.

It's beautiful.

But at the same time, you have to be a participant in your own growth.

And if you're not doing that, that is, as we said, sex feeds into all of this.

If you're not a participant in your own growth, if you're not spending time pursuing the things that bring you joy and pleasure, you're going to have a hard time showing up in the bedroom in a place where you can be responsive to pleasure and truly be present.

so the first thing about mismatched libidos is to understand that that exists in virtually every relationship there is almost always going to be one person who craves sex a little bit more and another person who craves it just a little bit less and that is okay and does that oscillate over time

It often does oscillate over time depending on who's busy, who's stressed, what you're going through, and sometimes it's just a constant.

So there are a couple of things that can be really helpful for that.

First of all, it is really important to note that when you look at sexual satisfaction, even couples that have a lot of desire discrepancy can report really high levels of sexual satisfaction

if they report it's something that they actively are trying to work on with their partner.

So then the question just becomes, OK, well, how do you work on it?

So I recommend, let's say you can start from a really practical standpoint.

Let's say your partner's libido leads them to want to have sex five times a week.

And you're more of a once a week or once every other week kind of person.

Are there ways that you can, again, going back to this idea of planning intimacy, build other moments throughout your week when you could try to have sex, maybe not five times a week, but maybe once, maybe aiming for that target of once.

And the idea could just be that

Again, when we know or anticipating a night or afternoon or morning of intimacy with our partner, we're more likely to do things to get ourselves into that mindset.