If You Can Talk Openly About Sex — Money Talk In A Relationship Is Easy

I’m about to share something only my girlfriend and therapist know about me.

While I include most details of my personal life in my writing, I hold back in certain areas. For example, I usually disguise the identities of loved ones, friends, and most acquaintances.

While a handful of topics exist I’ll always keep out of view, the number continues to rapidly decrease.

I come from the Tim Denning school. If it makes you feel uncomfortable and you might be embarrassed if others see it, write about it:

Please stop writing dry, lifeless, generic stories that don’t get read. Put a bit of yourself in the story by being vulnerable enough to share something from your life that you perhaps wouldn’t normally.

Using vulnerability is a risk. And when you take risks you leave your comfort zone and enter a whole new dimension of writing.

Uncomfortable writers get all the readers.

Raw vulnerability helps me evolve as a person and writer. I hope it helps you, if only in some small way.

However, I don’t take this approach just for kicks and those beautifully random moments of arousal. My rationale extends to my primary content focus.

There’s more than a loose connection between the dynamics that drive our relationships with money and our relationships with others. Between money and love. You can parallel your experiences in each area to make sense of and do better in both spaces.

As I explained in a recent Medium article:

There’s probably nothing we close ourselves off about more than money, sex, love, and relationships…

We refuse to talk about… credit card and student loan debt; horrible stock trades; burping; farting; how much we miss, love, and see a future with someone; our most intimate and potentially embarrassing sexual fantasies.

Why do we refuse?

Because we’re insecure, we fear being judged. We fear presenting versions of ourselves we think the other person might reject…

We fear the exact same things we should welcome into the discussion or relationship… if you get a reaction that makes you feel insecure, judged, rejected, ridiculed, or embarrassed, you know — right then and there — where you stand.

Should you really be in a conversation or, worse yet, a relationship with this person if that’s how they’re going to react? If you’re afraid to go there, you haven’t done the work — on yourself.

So, here it goes — again.

Deep breath.

Prior to the relationship I’m presently in, I started weaving this narrative between money, love, and relationships. My present situation has intensified my storytelling. When you’re living it, you can’t help it, particularly if you write in this personal style.

I always knew you could take your money-related experiences and equate them to how you behave in interpersonal relationships. However, I generally made this association based on my past. It’s much more fun, insightful, and, I think, useful to the reader, to live and write in the moment. It has also helped enhance my relationship.

Thankfully, I have a partner who’s more than okay with this. I run much of what I write by her. Each time, I think I might have gone too far. Each time, she responds with some variation of:

This girl — “Guapa” — is a keeper.

It’s clear I’m in love with her, which, ironically, brought up a “problem” in our relationship.

When I have deep feelings for someone —and this has only happened once or twice before — I have initial difficulty maintaining an erection when it’s time to have sexual intercourse. I’m fine leading up to the point of intercourse, however, at the moment of truth, I go soft.

It’s an issue I haven’t quite gotten to the bottom of. My therapist tells me I tend to intellectualize and overthink everything. So she said:

Rocco, are we really surprised this happened? You love this girl and you want everything to be perfect, so you got inside your head. You’re going to get over this.

I agree. And I did.

I also think, in some strange way, the immense amount of respect I have for Guapa interfered with my ability to seal the penetrative deal. I can’t quite wrap my head around this, but I’m confident it’s at play. A relic of my working-class, small-town upbringing where respect trumps all else.

(Perversely, some of the same people who preach this conservative dogma have no problem saying repulsive and vile things about women in private. It’s just guy talk! But, digress I do…).

Anyhow, as much as my little issue makes sense, on some level it just doesn’t, even as I write. I’ve spent hours — like many hours — taking this to the highest level of my brain and still can’t make sense of it.

I think I’m about as open-minded as it gets sexually.

I love sex. I crave pushing the limits — mine and hers.

Before we even had sexual intercourse, I let myself do things with Guapa I could never bring myself to do with anybody else. Things I have always fantasized about when I’m alone and considered bringing up to sexual partners. In the rare cases where I put these fantasies out there and attempted to act on them, I felt an unsettling mix of guilt, shame, and embarrassment.

Without a doubt, this goes back to my childhood and repressive notions of masculinity. You wouldn’t dare be open about liking to taste your own cum or wanting to have your ass penetrated where I’m from. At best, you’d be branded “gay” and lose a friend or even a relative. At worst, you’d walk away with a black eye or more.

The reason I’m able to go there with Guapa has everything to do with the way she — the way we — handled my flaccid penis incident. (That would be a pretty cool band name).

We talked about it. Like really talked about it. From just about day one of our relationship, we keep no subject off-limits, sexually-related or not. I feel a level of comfort with this girl I’ve never experienced with another person, my fantastic therapist aside. But, of course, that’s a completely different context.

So how does this all relate back to the idea of making money talk come easier and proceed productively?

Money’s right there with sex in terms of the things we lie about and fear discussing. In fact, some studies indicate that, as a conversation topic, Americans consider their personal finances more taboo than sex.

To that end, here’s what I’ve learned.

Use sex — and frank, explicit talk about every detail of everything you want to do in the bedroom that makes you blush — as a communicative icebreaker.

If you can go there, you can go anywhere.

When I couldn’t get hard in the past, we never properly dealt with it. Given the seemingly delicate nature of the issue, my past partner(s) and I gave in to the embarrassment, opting to ride the situation out rather than openly discuss it. The last time this happened, it took weeks for me to get past it.

Looking back, this served as a harbinger to our collective refusal to be open and honest about other equally as sensitive subjects.

Not only did the lack of sex talk close off other rhetorical relationship spaces, it led to unfulfilling, mediocre sex. As great as it is, at some point the mere function of having an orgasm doesn’t always do it for me. There’s so much fun to be had after you pull out and explode on your lover’s stomach.

I never had the guts to go that extra post-orgasmic mile. Who can blame me?

If I can’t bring myself to talk about it with you, how can I muster the vulnerability and attendant courage to do it with you? Because we didn’t talk, I don’t even know how you’d feel about entering territory most other couples dare not go. It’s probably not something to spring on a lover — out of the blue — without at least a few words and consent ahead of time.

Bad sex can absolutely end relationships or, worse, trigger infidelity. However, there are murkier data in that area. With money, the statistics render crystal clear conclusions:

• A third of people who report arguing with their spouse over money say they have hidden expenditures from them.
• According to some data collection and analysis, your relationship is ten times more likely to break up if you have a partner who’s “bad” with their money.
• Money is the top source of relationship stress for married couples as well as those in a serious, committed partnership. Young people, age 18–54, were twice as likely as those 55 and older to call money the number one source of relationship stress.

But here’s a beautifully optimistic data point:

• One survey indicates that 94% of people who report having a “great” union “discuss their money dreams” together versus just 45% who classify their marriage as just “okay” or “in crisis.”

Guapa and I can talk about money without even talking about money.

We put an issue that so often triggers early red flags and eventual breakups in its proper place. We render it powerless. We do a beautiful dance where we — almost freakishly — just know where the other person stands. Even though we use words — lots of them — it’s almost as if we don’t have to.

Why?

Because we seek out the most potentially intimate areas of our relationship and go there. In an — also freakishly — short period of time, we’re crushing the communication game.

Right place. Right time. Right person.

If I’m uncomfortable thinking about it, I write it.

If I think it’s the creepiest thought I’ve ever had in a relationship, I text it right away or turn my head and smile.

She almost always smiles back. I know she wants to know. The anticipation and subsequent knowing arouses both of us, across the intellectual-to-physical response spectrum.

I spill the creepy details about my love for her or my fantastical daydreams about details of our ongoing journey together or the “taboo” sexual thoughts I’m having. I always get a thoughtful and productive response from Guapa.

The inverse holds true.

People often suggest sex — be it a change to your “routine” or something kinky — to spice up a relationship. We have come to accept this advice as an old, tried and true adage. We do the same with oft-repeated personal finance principles, such as how to save for retirement. In both instances, we miss the point. At the very least, we’re merely addressing a symptom of the larger problem.

If you want to spice up your sex life, talk about sex. A lot. In the rawest way you can.

If you want to spice up your sex life, work on talking about things, like money, that seemingly have nothing to do with sex. Conversations about struggles you have faced, the way you parent, your parents. All of the emotional baggage we carry can generate physical attraction.

It’s a classic — and I argue very real — notion of getting turned on by somebody else’s mind. It’s about establishing a connection and seeing if you have what it takes to be open and vulnerable — together.

At times, you’re not going to sync with what’s in the other person’s mind and how they choose to articulate their thoughts. There’ll be no chemistry. You won’t vibe. You need to find this out.

Along similar lines, if you just can’t bring yourself to be vulnerable enough to go all the way conversationally, you’re probably not in the right relationship.

Don’t settle. Get the fuck out. Find the person you’re supposed to be with.

The partner who just makes sense, practically and on a psycho-emotional level. This elusive combination creates friendly, if not mentally and sexually erotic, lines of communication you want to participate in.

Avoid feeling the sting of past failures, when every talk felt like a battle. Where you felt coerced, manipulated, and played. Where the motives weren’t pure. Where the “discussion” feels more like a job interview or sneaky quest for answers to questions that help significant others play relationship games.

Talking about sex freely can serve as a springboard, as the foundational framework to healthy communication in every area of a relationship. It can also lead to amazing, uninhibited sex and all that this entails, which also facilitates meaningful talks. It’s all about one area fostering comfort in another and vice versa.

Start with sex. If your experience is anything like mine, it’ll make money talks come easier, if they even need to happen at all.