Sex and Intimacy After Divorce

Nobody prepares you for the moment after divorce when dating turns into real physical intimacy and your body doesn’t know how to respond. The logistics get plenty of airtime, but the quiet fear of being touched again, not knowing what you like, or worrying you won’t feel anything at all can be just as intense. So we're talking about it in this episode. 

I dig into why women so often treat sex as something they provide instead of something they get to want. That people-pleasing pattern shows up as self-abandonment: staying quiet, focusing on someone else’s experience, and making your own pleasure optional. I also share a piece of U.S. history that explains why consent inside marriage is a much newer cultural expectation than most of us realize, and how that legacy can shape the way intimacy feels even years later.

Then we move into the nervous-system side of post-divorce intimacy using the dual control model of sexual response, popularized by Emily Nagoski. Think accelerator and brake: desire rises when enough accelerators are on and enough brakes are off. After divorce, brakes like body image fears, stress, grief, finances, kids in the house, and distraction can keep you from feeling turned on even when you’re genuinely interested. I also talk about the myth of spontaneous desire, why “watching yourself” during sex shuts down sensation, and the questions that help you relearn what you like without treating intimacy like an audition.

You’ll leave with a simple somatic practice to help you reclaim body ownership, consent, and presence before you share your body with anyone else. If this resonates, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a rating or review so more women can find this support.

Listen to Ep 273: From Body Judgment to Body Neutrality: A Path Back to Yourself.

To download your FREE "Becoming You Again Podcast Map" click here. 

To schedule your complimentary consult with Karin click here.

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If this podcast resonated with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts.

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DISCLAIMER: THE COMMENTARY AND OPINIONS AVAILABLE ON THIS PODCAST ARE FOR EDUCATIONAL, INFORMATIONAL AND ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY AND ARE NOT FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROVIDING PSYCHOLOGICAL, COUNSELING OR PROFESSIONAL HEALTHCARE ADVICE. 

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Transcript

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The Intimacy No One Mentions

Karin Nelson 0:00

These are the things that everyone talks about when you get divorced. The lawyers, the custody schedules, whether you should keep the house, what's going to happen with your finances, how to tell the kids what's going on for you emotionally. Like all the things that I talk about typically on this podcast, right? But here's the thing that not a lot of people are actually going to talk about. And that is at some point, possibly, probably, potentially, somebody new is gonna want to be with you and with your body, right? Not a lot of people talk about the fact that you might not have been touched by anyone other than yourself, maybe, anyone unfamiliar to you in terms of like the partner that you were with for 15, 20, 25, maybe even more years. And that you might be genuinely scared that you don't know what you like anymore. You don't know how to feel when someone touches you anymore. You might be worried that you'll be bad at it or that you haven't had enough experience, or it's been so long that you don't you're not gonna remember what to do. Or maybe you're worried that you're not gonna feel anything at all, because that's how it was before. So today we're gonna talk about it. And I want you to know I'm right here with you. Welcome to Becoming You Again, the podcast where you learn to step into your power as a woman in this world, where you learn to reconnect to your wholeness, your integrity, and bring into alignment your brain, your body, and your intuition after divorce. This is the podcast where you learn to trust yourself again and move forward toward a life that you truly want. You are listening to Becoming You Again, and I am your host, Karen Nelson.

Setting Boundaries Around This Topic

Karin Nelson 2:01

All right, all of you amazing women out there. So today I'm going to be talking about sex, about physical intimacy. If this is a tough subject for you, if this is not something you're interested in, skip it. It's totally fine. Take care of yourself. Know what is best and right for you. If this is not the episode for you, it's totally fine. Go ahead and skip it. Come back later. But if you're ready to listen, you're maybe ready to dip your toes into the dating pool or to finding somebody else and getting intimate with them, great. Today may just be the day for you. So welcome back to the podcast, all of you amazing women who are sticking around for this. We are in week two of my dating, love, and intimacy series. And I haven't really ever done an episode on this specific topic, which I think kind of goes to this whole idea that like not a lot of people are talking about this. And

Shame, People Pleasing, And Self-Abandonment

Karin Nelson 2:55

I don't think it's because it's not important. I just think that it's because women's sexuality is typically treated as something that is shameful, as something that is shameful, something that's not to be talked about, or something that is only in service to other people, typically the man, our husbands, the people we are in a relationship with, or through porn, right? Either way, whatever, whatever it is, is something that we're not really supposed to enjoy or have much of. We are looked down on in society if we have sex because we want it, sex with multiple partners, all of those kinds of things. It's typically something that we are providing for someone else. And I think that's one of the reasons why we don't really talk about it. Carl Lone Thil, who is a mentor of mine, has written about this and she puts it really plainly. She says, We've been socialized who believe that women's pleasure, and especially women's sexual pleasure, is shameful. And on top of that, people pleasing gets into our sex lives the same way it gets into everything else. Doing things we don't actually want to do, focusing on someone, focusing on someone else's experience while treating ours as optional and not saying anything because we don't want to hurt somebody else's feelings or we don't want to seem difficult. And what I find really interesting about the way Kara explains this is this is exactly what I talk about all the time on the podcast, which is self-abandonment. We do this to ourselves, right? It's the same pattern. It's just showing up in this way, in terms of the bedroom, in terms of sex, in terms of pleasure, in terms of desire, in terms of things that we might want, but we just don't talk about it as a society.

How History Shaped Consent In Marriage

Karin Nelson 4:50

So let's talk about the history because you know me, I'm a history major. I love to look at patterns through history and why things might be showing up for us. So let's just take a little piece of history, which I think might explain kind of a lot about why women just aren't really part of the equation when it comes to sex and intimacy and what we want, what we desire. In this country, in the United States, a husband could not be prosecuted for raping his wife. It was law. It came out of a 17th-century English legal idea that by marrying the woman was automatically giving consent to having sex. That consent was given in advance. It was given through the vows, it was permanent, and it could not be taken back. A woman could not say, I don't want to have sex. Like that just wasn't a thing. The states started to repeal the marital rape exemptions in the mid-70s. The last state to repeal this law and to actually enforce the idea that marital rape was a thing was North Carolina. And that didn't happen until 1993. 1993. We are not in the Victorian ages anymore. 1993. I was in high school at the time. So this is part of a history that nearly everyone, I would assume everyone who is listening to this has grown up around or has been a part of. So when I'm talking about your body being fully yours to consent to, to be inside of, and to be present in inside your marriage, this is a really recent idea. And I'm not saying that you were being raped in your marriage. Maybe you were. Maybe you weren't consenting and you would do it anyway just to be agreeable. Maybe there was marital rape. I don't know. I don't know if that's like the most common thing. I can't say. I haven't done the research around that. But what I'm telling you is it does explain a lot about why some women, about why so many women describe sex in marriage as something that happened rather than something that they actively and excitedly participated in. That framing didn't necessarily come from you. It was, like so many other things, built into the structure that has been handed down. So now we are in a place where we actually get to decide what do I want when it comes to sex? What

Safety As The Foundation Of Desire

Karin Nelson 7:29

are my desires? So researchers talk about how safety is the foundation of desire. There is a model of sexual response that researchers at the Kinsey Institute developed. Eric Jansen and John Bancroft were the researchers, and then Emily Nagoski popularized this idea in her book, Come As You Are. If you don't know who Emily Nagoski is, she is an author. She and her sister have written a different book that I have talked about on this podcast all about burnout. But Emily has a separate book that she wrote on her own called Come As You Are. And the idea of this model of sexual response is called the dual control model. And Emily describes it as an accelerator and a break. So basically, she's talking about your accelerator picks up everything in your environment that your brain reads as sexually relevant. And your break picks up everything your brain reads as a reason not to engage in sex or to be present in sex. So threats, stress, discomfort, distraction, or anything unsafe. And the key here is that desire is going to show up when enough of the accelerators are on and enough of the brakes are off, which can mean like you can be genuinely attracted to somebody, genuinely interested, genuinely wanting to have sex with this person, wanting to feel excited and wanting to feel desire, but you still might not feel much or be turned on in the way that you want to, or be open in the way that you want to because your foot is on the break. And the accelerator cannot overpower if your foot is on the break. So let's think about this in terms of divorce. What

The Post-Divorce Brakes On Turn-On

Karin Nelson 9:22

would be on your break list after divorce? It could be like being afraid of what your body looks like, being afraid of somebody else seeing your body and then having them judge you, wondering if he's comparing you to anybody else that he's been with. Maybe there are kids in the house, like your kids are sleeping in the other room or something. Maybe you're worried about your day. Maybe you're worried about your finances. Maybe you're going to school and working three jobs and you're like, I don't even know if I have time for this. Maybe you're still feeling a lot of grief. Maybe you've just got a thousand things on your mind and you cannot get out of your head. Those are things that would keep your foot on the break. But if you don't know about this idea of having the break and the accelerator in terms of desire, you could look at like trying to get intimate with someone and not feeling that desire and think, this must be me. Like I'm broke and there's something wrong with me. When what's really going on is you have your nervous system showing up in exactly the way your nervous system does, which is not allowing you to relax in a situation that it hasn't decided you feel safe in yet, because your foot is on the break in all of these different ways. And then another piece to this is like this idea of things being spontaneous and having like automatic desire that just comes out of nowhere. Like if you think about like any like rom-com or anything like that, this idea of spontaneous desire is all over the place. Like a woman will be like emptying the dishwasher, and the man will come in and he'll just like step up behind her and like grab her behind the waist, and then all of a sudden they're like having sex on the kitchen counter. Like it just spontaneously erupted out of nowhere. And maybe it does happen like that, but I think more often that is like this idea that we have been fed that this is the only way desire can happen is out of spontaneity. And that if it doesn't happen that way, there is something wrong with

Body Image And The Inner Watcher

Karin Nelson 11:36

you. So I want to talk a little bit about body image. I'm not gonna go into like tons of detail here. I touched on, I talk about this topic on episode number 273. So if you haven't listened to that episode, it was just a few episodes ago. If you haven't listened to that episode, go back and listen to it because I talk a lot about body image and loving yourself. But I do want to add something to it, which is this idea of being present in the moment for many of us, when we get physically close to someone, we will like kind of be a watcher of our own body. Almost like we are monitoring ourselves. We will question things like, oh my gosh, how does my stomach look from this angle? Is he looking at that? What does my what do my private parts look like? Do they look like anyone else's? Is he comparing it to someone else? What does this look like? Is my face doing something weird? We are constantly like monitoring every part of ourselves because we don't want to feel judged or be judged in that moment. And I want you to understand where this is coming from. This is old habits of experiencing yourself from the outside as an object that is to be evaluated, rather from the inside as a person having an experience inside your body. And this goes along with that idea of putting on the brakes in intimate moments. You cannot really feel much of anything when you are constantly monitoring what your body is doing, how your body might be looking to the other person, rather than allowing yourself to be in your body, enjoying opening up to and having the experience that you are meant to have, that you are allowed to have. So the work here is being willing to come back into the body that you have and staying there during these intimate moments. And I'm gonna give you a practice that you can do in terms of claiming, reclaiming your body and being able to stay in your body in moments. And it's a somatic practice that I've taught before, but I'm gonna go over it again just to like give you a refresher on how you can like create bodily autonomy for yourself before you go into this act of being intimate with someone else. So

Figuring Out What You Actually Want

Karin Nelson 14:19

the next thing that I want to talk about and point out is you might be somebody who's like, I don't even actually know what I want, what I want in sex, what I want to feel, how to feel, how to like tap into that desire, that pleasure, all of that. I'm gonna talk about pleasure specifically in the next episode next week, but I do want to talk about this idea of I don't even know what I like, because I think there are a lot of women who just go through their marriage, go through their relationships doing what their partner liked, or like not feeling completely satisfied in terms of their sex life, but maybe like brushing that off as like, and that's okay, it's not really my place to feel satisfied, or this is just how sex is for women, or whatever the excuses are, like societally, what we've been talking about this whole episode is that yeah, sex is for men and women are there to like give it to them, right? To be the vessel. And I'm here to tell you, I don't think that's true. I think that it's totally okay and acceptable for you to figure out what it is that you actually want, what it is that you like, what you prefer, and take some time to figure that out. So here are some questions that you can kind of ask yourself to open up to this idea of what is it that I actually want when it comes to my sex life and my desire and the pleasure that I'm going to allow myself to feel. How do I actually like being touched? Do I know? Or has it always been based off of what my partner liked doing? When did I stop saying what I wanted? And what happened right before that? Or did I ever even allow myself to say what I actually wanted? Like those are some really important questions that you can kind of know for yourself. Was there something that I used to want that I quietly just like filed away because of a reaction that I got, or because I was scared to speak up, or because I was embarrassed to say it? Do I know what my own body feels like when it is enjoying something separate from whether anybody else is being pleased or enjoying it in the moment? And if nobody was watching and nobody would ever know, what would I be curious about in terms of my body and what I want to feel? Now you don't have to have the answers to these before you are allowed to, or before you are intimate with someone else. You're allowed to figure them out as you go. You're allowed to be a beginner again at 48 or 55 or however old you are. You've been a beginner before, you've survived, you've found things out, you've learned things. It's totally okay for you to be a beginner again. But I don't want you to go in as if you're auditioning for someone. I want you to go in as if you are like learning about yourself and gathering information about yourself rather than auditioning for a part for this other person. Because remember, we are done with the self-abandoning. We are truly stepping into self-awareness and self-acceptance.

Somatic Practice This Is My Body

Karin Nelson 17:53

Okay, so let's get into this somatic practice that I want to go over to help you reclaim your body and your body and your bodily autonomy. This one is called This Is My Body. I've taught it before. I taught it, I taught it in episode 212. Um, it's really about body ownership. And I think it will help you like get into this minds, this mindset of this is my body, and I want to stay present in it during these moments of desire, of pleasure, of allowing myself to experience all kinds of things that maybe I haven't experienced in a very long time, if ever. So you can do this anywhere, but basically, I just want you to like sit comfortably, give your arms kind of a shake, shake your hands, roll your shoulders, do like a little, just do a little shimmy, move some of that energy around in your body. Now I want you to just orient yourself to the here and now, like I'm in this room. Name five things that you can see or hear. Um, and then with one hand, I want you to touch your other arm, hold it, squeeze it, run your hand down and up your arm. Say out loud, this is my arm. This is my arm. This is my arm. This is my hand. These are my fingers. And as you are saying those words, I want you to touch and grab and caress and feel that part of your body. Say it out loud. Own it. And then do it with the other arm. And then you can move through your whole body doing this as far as you want to go. You can do your shoulders, you can do your neck, your stomach, your thighs, your face, however you want to, but just work through owning and being present in and recognizing this is my body. Your body is yours. It was yours before you were married to anybody. It is yours now, and you will have it with you for the rest of your life. Whether anybody ever touches you again, whether you desire that to happen to you ever again, your body is not an offering to someone else. It is not an object for someone else. It's not to be graded, it is not a before and after picture. It is the place that you live in, and it has carried you through every single day, including the hard ones, including the good ones, to right now. Your body isn't anybody else's to enjoy. It is yours. It is yours to take back, it is yours to own. And when you can own that moment, that is when you are going to step into and allow yourself that desire and that pleasure that you deserve.

What’s Next And How To Work Together

Karin Nelson 20:53

All right, my friends, I hope that you found some of this information useful and helpful as you move into maybe this next phase of your life after divorce. Remember, next week I will be back with one on pleasure. And then the week after that is going to be my interview with Jenny Young about dating apps and how to spot all of the red flags if you're getting back into the dating world. So make sure and check back for that one. Thank you so much for being here. I'll be back next week. Hi, friend. I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life with weekly coaching, real life practice, and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to Karen Nelson Coaching.com. That's www.karin, N-E-L-S-O-N coaching.com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. And for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married, make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.