Couples Tension Areas – Sex & Money

Two of the areas where couples most commonly experience tension are around sex and money. This makes a lot of sense when you consider some statistics, for example, in America 40 percent women suffer from sexual dysfunction. This would include low desire for sex, low arousal during sex, pain during intercourse and inability to climax during sex. For American man 30 percent of American men suffer from dysfunction around sexuality. For men, these issues are: difficulty or inability to get or to sustain an erection, low desire in sex, again pain during sex or an inability to reach orgasm. So, as a general rule, couples experience some sort of sexual issue at some time in the course of a long term relationship. Another reason that couples commonly seek counseling is disagreement around money, financial issues. Often times someone in the relationship is more of a spender, someone is more of a saver, the couples can just have generally overarching disagreement about their approach to money and finances. Now often when a couple comes to counseling they’re not overtly aware of some of these tensions around sex or money but when we dig a little bit deeper in the process of couples counseling we often find that these two issues are at the core of some the their other daily concerns. What a lot of these issues come down to, is a matter of power struggle. What I mean by power struggle is sometimes when the couple is disagreeing about something it’s less about their specific attitude on a given topic. For example, I’ve seen couples where they argue about do they put their child in private school, do they put their child in public school, yet I’ll see them three months later and they may have shifted positions where the other person is arguing for private school or public school. So sometimes it’s less about a particular topic being important to the individual thing it is winning. A power struggle is about making yourself right and your partner wrong. This is one of the things that we work on in couples counseling to minimize as no one wins when both people are trying to gain more power in that relationship.