Couples arrive having already done the math. Ninety percent of this is good, they tell me. It's the sex. Fix the sex. Then I ask how much of an ordinary day sex actually occupies, and the arithmetic falls apart — because the thing they came to change isn't ten or twenty percent of the relationship. It's an order of magnitude. And what I'm about to ask of them is enormous.

This week, Dr. Alivia Stehlik and I get there by way of a business book I refused to read for a year. 10x Is Easier Than 2x, by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy — a title I assumed belonged to the stacks-of-cash genre, until I found Viktor Frankl quoted in the opening pages. The premise turns out not to be about quantity at all. 10x is a category change: when you learn to read or learn to drive, you become someone who was not there before. The mechanism is that roughly twenty percent of what you do generates the value, and the other eighty percent is safe, functional, and the exact reason nothing is moving.

Run that relationally and it gets uncomfortable fast. People come in believing the problem is narrow and contained, and discover they have to reinvent most of themselves.

We get into the conditions that make desire possible long before anyone reaches for anyone — including an argument about coffee that I have finally, after years, lost. Alivia's position is that a Chemex and a hand grinder produce something automation cannot, that intention gets imbued in the making, and that this is sex. Mine was that setting the machine the night before meant my coffee was ready when I woke up. It didn't really matter how good it was. When the Chemex broke, I made her replace it. She was right. From there: the inventory exercise, widening the aperture on what your whole life is doing to the relationship you say you want, and a revision of a line everyone knows. The familiar version is what got you here won't get you there. The book's version goes further: what got you here will keep you here.

What got you here was remarkable. It built the beautiful life you have. So what happens when it's also the thing holding you in place?

Full Show Notes

Made possible in part by Nine to Kind Planners — use code EMMA20 for 20% off.

Send us a comment: Comment Form

Reignite Desire Masterclass waitlist - Aug 14