Vanessa Marin (YouTube) explains how to handle situations when one partner becomes sexually aroused while the other is not. She emphasizes that sex is always a choice and no one is obligated to reciprocate arousal. Marin describes nightly makeout sessions she and her husband use to decouple kissing from sex, offers a two-option negotiation (only make out when in the mood vs. more frequent non-sexual makeouts), and suggests reframing delayed gratification as exciting rather than pressuring. The overall aim is to normalize mismatched desire and teach strategies to stay comfortable and affectionate without obligation.
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Ready with me while I tell you why I don't worry about turning my husband on if I'm not in the mood for sex. So I recently made a video about how my husband and I have makeout sessions every single night before bed. Scroll back and watch that first, if you haven't. The number one thing that people said is, well, I don't want to do that, because what if my partner gets turned on and I'm just not in the mood? Like, what are you supposed to do then? I'd just rather not get my partner turned on at all. So first, I need you to understand that sex is always a choice. I don't care how turned on your partner gets. I don't care how badly they want to have sex. You are not obligated to have sex with them. Also, nobody ever died from not having sex. Like, your partner will survive. And you've been there on the other end of it too, right? Like, you've had times that you wanted to have sex and you weren't able to. And sure, maybe it was a little frustrating. Maybe you really wish you could have sex, but you survived. It's gonna be okay. The reason why my husband and I started making out with each other every night before bed was to break the connection that making out has to lead to sex. We wanted to be able to enjoy making out just for the sake of making out. But there's also another connection to break here. This idea that your partner being turned on means that you have to do something about it. What if you could just allow your partner to be turned on and not feel that pressure to do anything about it? What if you could even see it as a compliment? Like, your partner wants intimate with you. They're attracted to you. They're excited by you. If you distance yourself from that pressure of having to do something about their arousal, you allow yourself to actually enjoy it. If you're really worried about this, you can even turn it into a question that you ask your partner. Tell them, okay, we have two options. Either we only ever make out in times when I am wildly in the mood. And I can guarantee you that we go further and we wind up having sex, but those are the only times we make out. Or we have more makeout sessions, we have more touch, more kiss all throughout the day. Sometimes I'm interested in going further with it, and sometimes I'm not. What would you rather? But I want to take this even one step further. If you really think back to the early days of starting to date somebody, it was that delayed gratification that was super exciting. So, like, you guys would start getting each other turned on. Maybe you're kissing, you're talking about sex, you're thinking about it. But those times when you couldn't have it in that moment was actually incredibly, incredibly exciting. So can we channel some of that energy again? Instead of dreading being turned on and not going through with having sex, can we actually lean into the tension of it, the excitement of it, like, drawing things out between us a little bit? Can it actually be a good thing to have a little delayed gratification rather than a bad thing? The bottom line is that you are always going to have times in your relationship when one partner is in the mood and the other partner isn't. So this is not about trying to avoid ever having those moments. It's about learning to get comfortable with those moments.
