Couples Sex Therapy
Many couples care deeply about one another and have built a fundamentally strong relationship, yet find that their sexual connection has become strained, distant, confusing, or difficult to discuss.
Sex may have become infrequent or predictable. One partner may want it more often than the other. Initiation may feel increasingly vulnerable, while rejection carries more emotional weight than either partner intends. Sexual-function concerns, performance pressure, parenthood, health changes, stress, aging, or unresolved tension may further complicate intimacy.
Couples sex therapy offers a structured place to understand what is happening between you, while helping both partners participate in creating change. Together, we work toward a sexual relationship that feels mutually respectful, pleasurable, honest, and aligned with your shared and individual values.
Common Reasons Couples Seek Sex Therapy
Differences in desire or preferred frequency
A recurring cycle of initiation, rejection, pressure, and withdrawal
Difficulty talking about sex openly and productively
Loss of affection, playfulness, or erotic connection
Sexual-function concerns affecting one or both partners
Performance anxiety or pressure surrounding sex
Differences in sexual interests, preferences, or expectations
Uncertainty about communicating boundaries, fantasies, or desires
Pornography concerns or disagreements about sexual agreements
A wish to make a healthy relationship more intimate, pleasurable, and intentional
Couples seek support at many stages of a relationship. Addressing sexual disconnection early can prevent avoidance and resentment from becoming more entrenched.
How I Work With Couples
My approach integrates sex therapy, sexual-health principles, and research informed couples interventions, including concepts drawn from the Gottman Method.
We begin by developing a careful understanding of your relationship. I want to learn about your history as a couple, the strengths that already sustain you, the patterns that leave you feeling stuck, and what each of you hopes will change.
I am active and direct in the room. I help slow conversations down, identify the pattern unfolding between you, and teach you concrete ways to respond differently. Your goals, values, relationship structure, and definitions of sexual well-being guide the work.
What Our Work May Include
Clarifying the concerns bringing you to therapy
Identifying the emotional and relational cycle beneath recurring conflicts
Strengthening friendship, fondness, admiration, and everyday connection
Learning to communicate needs clearly and respectfully
Recognizing physiological overwhelm during conflict, and learning how to pause, regulate, and return to the conversation
Understanding the deeper values, fears, and longings beneath gridlocked disagreements
Developing greater comfort discussing sex directly
Reducing pressure, avoidance, shame, and performance-oriented thinking
Expanding the ways you experience pleasure, affection, sensuality, and intimacy
Creating realistic sexual agreements that respect both partners
Practicing new skills and experiences between sessions
What to expect
1. Understanding your relationship
Couples work begins with an assessment phase. We will discuss your relationship history, current concerns, sexual relationship, individual perspectives, and goals for therapy. Research-informed questionnaires or individual meetings may be incorporated when they would help clarify your relationship's strengths, vulnerabilities, and treatment needs.
2. Feedback and treatment planning
After the initial assessment, I will share my clinical impressions and help you identify specific, mutually agreed-upon goals. Your treatment plan will focus our work on the changes most likely to improve your sexual and emotional connection.
3. Active therapy
Sessions are interactive and purposeful. We may examine a recent interaction, practice a communication skill, explore an underlying emotional or sexual concern, or develop a private exercise for you to complete between sessions. We will revisit your progress throughout therapy so that the work remains responsive to your goals.
Understanding desire in Long-term Relationships
Long-term relationships ask partners to sustain emotional security while continuing to experience one another as interesting, evolving, and erotically alive.
When partners become teammates
Daily life naturally organizes couples around schedules, responsibilities, parenting, work, health, and household management. Partners can become highly effective teammates while losing access to playfulness, anticipation, curiosity, and the freedom to encounter one another outside their familiar roles
Desire works differently in different people
Some people experience desire spontaneously. Others access desire after affection, relaxation, stimulation, emotional connection, or erotic engagement has already begun.
These differences can easily develop into a painful cycle: one partner seeks sex to feel connected, while the other needs connection, or less pressure, before desire becomes available.
The meanings that build up around sex
Over time, each partner may attach increasingly powerful meanings to sex. Initiation can become a test of desirability. Rejection can feel like evidence of being unwanted. Participation can begin to feel like an obligation. Avoidance can become a way to manage pressure, disappointment, or fear of conflict.
What we explore together
Therapy helps identify the personal, relational, and contextual conditions that shape desire for each partner.
We may explore:
How each of you experiences and accesses desire
The meanings you attach to initiation, rejection, pleasure, and sexual frequency
The roles that pressure, obligation, resentment, and avoidance play in your sexual relationship
The influence of stress, body image, health, medication, aging, parenthood, and changing identities
The sexual messages and relationship models you each inherited
The forms of touch, affection, play, novelty, and anticipation that support erotic connection
The difference between physical availability and genuine erotic engagement
The experiences that help each of you feel confident, curious, free, and present possibility to grow.
Creating a more intentional intimate life
A satisfying sexual relationship supports honest communication, meaningful choice, mutual respect, pleasure, affection, and connection. Each couple creates its own definition of sexual well-being.
Therapy can help you interrupt repetitive patterns, understand each other more fully, and create a shared vision for intimacy.
Begin the conversation: A brief, no-pressure conversation about what is happening between you and whether this work is a good fit.
In-person couples sex therapy in Boulder, Colorado. Telehealth throughout Colorado and New York.