A podcast to educate and equip women with the information and confidence they need to express, experience and enjoy their sexuality. Cindy Scharkey RN, BSN, brings her 35+ years of experience as a healthcare professional to open the doors to healthy conversations about sex. This is a community where you can listen and learn to give yourself permission for pleasure. Visit www.cindyscharkey.com for educational blogs and newsletter.
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You can learn to talk about sex! It is a skill strengthened through practice. In this quickie episode, I’m offering some helpful tips and conversation prompts to get you started. Listen solo or with your partner to learn practical ways to boost your sexual communication. Topics include: sexual frequency, reasons you want to have sex, scheduling sexy dates, being honest about what you no longer enjoy, and trying new things.
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Welcome to Permission for Pleasure. I'm Cindy Sharkey, your host. I'm so glad you've joined me for this 50th episode. Can't believe that. 50. Oh, I just love doing what my passion is, which is educating and empowering women everywhere to give themselves permission for pleasure. I'm really, really grateful for this listening community and how so many of you are sharing the podcast with others. Thank you so much. I do hope you are following the podcast on your listening platform. If not, will you pause just a moment and hit that follow or subscribe button? It's free. It helps others to find the podcast, and the episodes are downloaded automatically and you don't miss anything. Also, have you found my newsletter yet? I send out education once a month, and you can sign up for that anytime at the link in the show notes. Over on my website, I was looking around and I found that one of the most frequently searched words is communication. Surprise! Not really. Communication is so hard because people find it difficult to talk about sex. We simply do not have the language for it. We don't have practice with it. What we do have is a lot of silence, unvoiced desires, sometimes attempts to read each other's minds, which of course doesn't work well. Every time I do a workshop with women, several ask me afterwards if I will do a couple's workshop or in some way get the information that they're learning across to their partner. I usually say, I would be so delighted if rather you would open the conversation with your partner about one of the topics we've talked about at the workshop. Because the key is for you to start a healthy conversation about sex. And if you start working on sexual communication, first with yourself and then with a partner, you can learn to talk about sex. It is a skill you can learn with that in mind. For today's episode, I wanted to offer something a little different. I want to help you get started by offering some conversation prompts, ideas, starters for you yourself, or for you as a couple. Topics to talk about, ideas to explore. I'm going to keep this a quickie episode, but also include some communication tips thrown in. And here's the first one: not all at once. What do I mean by that? These questions I'm going to bring up or ideas are meant to be thought about and talked about one at a time, over time, not all at once. So I would encourage you to download this episode, save it, and come back to it. You could use it for date nights on a walk together, maybe pause as you're listening together and choose one thing to talk about, and then come back another time and choose something else. If you're listening individually, take time with it. Journal through some of the prompts. Talk to a girlfriend about what you're thinking. Take your time. Before we really jump in, I want to pause here and tell you about a beautiful resource from our episode sponsor, Sex Formation Cards, by Dr. Jacqueline Sherman. Do you remember Dr. Jack? She was a guest on the podcast in episode 35, and she's designed an entire experience with her sex formation card deck. I was positively delighted opening this box from the scent to the tactile feel of the cards, the artwork, all of it. This is a three-step practice to help women increase sexual confidence and deepen intimacy with self and others. The steps are designed to intentionally guide you through sexual self-reflection, conversation, including 25 conversation cards, and exploration. Friends, this is a gift to give yourself, a gift to give your partner, to send to a beloved woman in your life for the holidays, Valentine's, birthday, a wedding shower gift, anytime. Find the link in the show notes, and Dr. Jack has offered you a discount of 15% off your sex formation cards with code Cindy. I love these cards and the experience that you can have with them. So I was delighted to share them with you. Now, let's move into more sexual communication tips and conversation starters. I mentioned at the start not trying to talk about everything all at once. The next tip is it isn't always the best thing to surprise a partner if you want to begin talking about sex. Especially if you really haven't done that very much in the relationship. A lot of people appreciate a little heads up first. It could sound as simple as, I was listening to this nurse on a podcast about sex, and it got me thinking about some things. Could we talk sometime? Can we schedule a time to talk? How about that? Or I'd love to talk about our sex life together. Are you open to that sometime this evening? Or maybe this weekend we could set aside some time. This gives a little bit of heads up and time for a partner to prepare to talk about sex as well. And as with any communication, your next tip is to start with something positive. Here are a few prompts and questions. I've been thinking about what I enjoy most when we are being intimate, and it's fill in the blank. Did you catch that? You're talking about what you enjoy most first. I've been thinking about what I enjoy most when we're being intimate, and it's this. Or what's your favorite part of our sex life right now? And then have both of you share your favorite part. Something positive. That's a good place to start. Another fairly easy place to start would be about your bedroom or intimate space. Well, I don't know, maybe it's easy, maybe it's not. I give you a lot of prompts for that, and you could use episode 46 about sexifying your space and tips for a better bedroom. Like a really easy, quickie episode. You could listen together and then you could ask each other questions, such as, what's one thing we could do to sexify our space and make it more inviting? Or what's one thing you heard in these 10 things that she talked about that I don't know, you think we could do, or it would be meaningful for you? What could we do to level up our bedroom for sex? You could really easily listen to that quick episode, the list of 10 tips, and then talk about it together. I think that's a great, great place to start. Another communication strategy for sexual communication that isn't needed right in the moment, like consent, for example, is to talk about sex outside the bedroom. I don't know if you've heard this before, but generally what we recommend is that you talk about sexual issues or communication about certain things, not right before, during sex, or right after sex. Like I mentioned at the beginning, you know, about why you're driving in the car, or maybe you're out walking together or sitting together for coffee, and a neutral location. This seems to work really well for people. Consider having a broader conversation about sex for yourself or with a partner around these next questions and important topics when you're out of the bedroom. These are questions sometimes people never ask themselves or a partner, and they're healthy questions to ask. The first one is sex is important to me because fill in the blank. Why is sex important to you? Do you know? Have you ever talked about it? Or maybe you want to phrase it a second way. The reason I want to have sex is fill in the blank. Or maybe it's reasons I want to have sex, and there's several. The next question and last one in this section is security or safety in our sexual relationship feels like fill in the blank. When was the last time you talked about why sex is important to you, why you want to have sex, and what security and safety in your relationship feels like? Good questions to ask each other or yourself. Take turns answering the questions, listening, asking follow-up questions to gather more information, use phrasing like tell me more about that, or ask for clarification if you aren't quite sure you understand what your partner is saying. These questions and talking together can lead to a much more intimate sex life together, as well as open the doors to even more and more conversations. Next, the question I really wish all couples would talk about, honestly, and that is sexual frequency. Okay, don't turn the podcast off. Frequency is one of the areas that couples simply refuse to sit down and discuss, and yet it's often one of the biggest sources of conflict. People try to read each other's minds, use sarcasm, pout, or other unhelpful strategies instead of actually talking about it. So talk about it. Ask the question. The real question. How many times a week would you like to have sex? Or how many times a month would you like to have sex? Or how many times a year would you like to have sex? If you want to phrase it a different way, ask how often would you like to have sex? Talk honestly. Again, listen to each other. Work on creating a mutually satisfying sex life. And these kinds of questions, these are ongoing questions. This is not a one and done conversation by all means, because life will change. You will change. And this frequency question is one that you will want to revisit. You know, a great follow-up topic to the frequency conversation is discuss how you feel about scheduling sex. Even asking questions around how do you feel about scheduling sex? Why or why not? What would be the positives to scheduling it? What would be the negatives? If you've been around my platform for even a minute, you know I'm a big fan of scheduling sex. If the word schedule or the idea of schedule, if that's the part that rubs you the wrong way, simply calling it something else can help you think about it differently. Like Sunday fun day or our meetup, you know, afternoon delight, let's meet for a sexy date. The sky's the limit here. Use different language if that helps. But treating sex as a priority, putting it on the calendar, looking forward to it, these are positive things because it comes down to making time for sex so it actually happens. So the frequency conversation and adding and scheduling sex, two topics I think are really important for couples to talk about. On to another solid communication tip that works when talking about sex or anything else for that matter, is beginning your sentences with I instead of you. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Rather than you're not doing what my body needs to get aroused. Try instead. I've noticed some things about my body and how it's changed, especially what arouses me. Can I share that with you? You see the difference here? You get the idea. You might even flip it around and have your partner, you know, share too. You share, then they share. Here are a couple I questions and prompts for you. I like doing fill in the blank. To you, do you enjoy it? How about I like receiving blank? Or I like it when you blank. Or even I used to enjoy this, fill in the blank, but I find that I don't like that as much at this stage in my life. You could change it around a little bit and use, is there something you would like me to do to use sexually that I haven't been doing? Other options to that are, is there something you would like me to try? Or what's one thing you would like to try? Even take it a different direction and ask, what do you fantasize about us doing together? Wow, okay. This quickie episode is turning into a longie, so I think I'm gonna stop here and save my question sections about initiating foreplay and orgasms for another episode. It would be great to hear from you if you find this kind of thing helpful. Let me know. Send me a DM, contact me through the website. There's ways to find me definitely in the show notes, several different ways. I guess I'd like to know if this is helpful for you and we should do more, or not so much. Don't forget to check the show notes for your discount and link to the sex formation cards, and a big thank you for Dr. Jack today for sponsoring this episode. I'd like to challenge you as we wrap up to take one step, just one, to opening a conversation about sex. Learn to be comfortable being a little uncomfortable. It will get easier. But be intentional about trying to communicate in a way that can be received. And let me tell you what Emily Morse is fond of saying. Communication is lubrication. Well, you all know how I feel about lubrication, so let's add communication to that. And ongoing communication. Sexual communication is the key to a satisfying sex life together. Cheers to giving yourself more permission for pleasure.
