Sex, Breakups and Childlessness: Normalising Challenging Topics

When it comes to talking about sex, breakups and childlessness, awkwardness or pain often reign. Here’s a look at how we can normalise these.

I’ve always liked “going there” with people. Talking about, reading about or opening up in-person or online conversation or thought about challenging topics is one of my calling cards. Even when people disagree with things I say or write, it’s good that people are at least thinking about some of the most profound things that we usually skirt over or take for granted, usually to our detriment. I think there’s too many things that everyone is struggling with or thinking about that we don’t really address properly, exacerabating our issues beyond where they need to be.

And one such set of conversations at a bucks party a while ago got me seriously thinking about how abnormal we are around certain topics. We either don’t talk about them enough, or talk about them properly, or worse – we make it super awkward to the detriment of our relationships or ourselves.

Some topics that immediately come to mind are sex, breakups, and childlessness. Or at least I’ve been in enough conversations over the last several months that have reminded me time and time again how much better we need to be at approaching these.

I firmly believe we need to normalise how we go about talking about each of these. And the good news is it’s entirely possible.

Let’s get right into it

#1: Sex

So at this buck’s party I mentioned, inevitably the conversation goes where you think it’s going to go to get the buck all primed for this part of his life and what it’s like in a marriage relationship. We all had some good laughs, some good advice was shared and we all have some great memories from that weekend. One of us said “You know sex is always going to be talked about at a buck’s party”.

And one of the guys said something in response that he was absolutely right about. He said “yeah, and never again. People talk about it at bucks parties and then that’s it”.

If you’re reading this, you know who you are. It was a great observation.

But it’s true that buck’s weekends, hen’s nights, maybe before or after a sexually oriented romcom or conference people will chirp in for a little while, but it’s not always something that’s talked about in a normalised fashion.

Oh sure, it gets joked about. Sure, sexual content gets watched (although I still think that sex scenes can ruin your love life). Sure, men think about sex 19 times a day and women 10 times a day. But the level of honesty and openness that we share at a buck’s weekend talking sexy shop with the lads or a hen’s time away with the girls isn’t very well revisited.

And it’s true – we give a bit of advice about how to go about certain things or products that might be useful or what percentage of your married life should be taken up by it or frequency or being respectful or what have you. And then off you go sail off into the sunset and you’re never going to have any problems or challenges with it in your married life.

Not the case at all.

The first person we need to normalise the sex conversation with is our partner. The Gottman Institute calls this out in their research when they found that there was one huge determining factor that made a sexual relationship healthy or unhealthy (or how satisfied both people in the relationship were with it) – and that was talking about it. 91% of couples who did not enjoy their sex life also couldn’t or didn’t talk about it with their partner. Turns out your mouth is not just useful in the bedroom – it’s also incredibly necessary outside.

Don’t look at me like that ya prude you’re proving my point.

The second is probably trusted community. I still believe in the old adage of “a gentleman never tells” and keeping conversation respectful about your marriage, but there is a way of talking about some of these issues that honours your partner and also honours yourself. Many people are trapped in a sexual prison of guilt, uncertainty, doubt, shame, and a lack of fulfilment because they don’t have healthy conversations about it or advance in the knowledge that they have today from healthy sources. If you learn about sex from porn, or from a comedy, or from one line in a movie, that’s not enough to sustain you for life.

Should you be blasting every intimate detail from the rooftop or speaking in a way that degrades or exposes your partner? No way. Honour is such a foundational aspect of a healthy marriage. But silence is destructive and may be keeping you trapped in a life you really don’t want to have.

#2: Breakups

Here’s a less “oooooooooh” one than sex but whenever a breakup is mentioned I think way more people go “ooooooooooooooooooh” like a bunch of high schoolers “oooooooooooooooh they broke up”.

One of my young adult pastors growing up had a really healthy attitude he tried to enstill in our church community and that was to normalise breakups. If people are heading the same direction, in close community, doing life together constantly, inevitably someone is going to fall for someone else. That’s kind of what you want to happen. So when people try it out and it doesn’t work out, it should be perfectly normal and accepted that hey, it didn’t work out, treat it with maturity, move on, allow people to grieve, don’t make it weird.

It’s only weird if you make it weird.

Even as people go beyond their 20s, 30s, 40s, or whatever age applies, or whatever community one might find themself in, as the old advice said, if you want to marry a millionaire, you need to go to where the millionaires are, and you find your said millionaire, or family man, or blue collar worker, or what have you, if you put yourself in an environment where dating can happen, then breakups are also going to happen.

And one way you kill your future chances or the chances of others is gossip and slander. It makes me nuts when I hear “Oooooh did you hear they broke up? Did you hear that he said and she said and that that that”. Guess what? It’s probably being spoken by someone who is ruining it for their “friend” longterm.

Some old school advice from Dr Gary Chapman, Nicky and Sila Lee, and a few mentors growing up really helped me approach everyone I ever pursued a relationship with, and it was this: “If it didn’t work out between you, have you done anything that the next guy would hate you for?”. In other words, are you leaving people better than you found them, or are you a taker?

And an additional way is how we talk about it after it happens. I do actually think we should be warning people of severe red flags before someone else gets involved – violence, gambling addiction, substance abuse, things that will destroy anyone else who gets close. But if it’s personality clash, different life direction or something more surface level, do we really need to run this person’s reputation through the ground?

Now we’re talking about normalising. You can talk about your breakup in a way that also honours yourself – getting the help you need, the advice you need if you want to try again or not, dealing with triggers or things that came up or happened. But we all know the difference don’t we? Between when we’re talking about things as friends to help people, or just gasbagging

I know so many people, men and women, who have lost the potential to date someone they would have been interested in because that person heard the way they either talked about their ex, or the way they handled or gossiped other people’s breakups.

If there’s going to be so much community backlash and gossip if it doesn’t work out with someone, many people won’t even want to try. We need to create environments where people can get together, try things out, pursue each other, and have a safe environment for both of them if it doesn’t work out.

And same with marriages to be honest. The divorce rate is non-zero in almost every country on earth and could be 30-55% depending on where you lieve. TD Jakes in Before You Do highlighted this by referencing a time he was on the Dr Phil show and got cornerered about a husband and had an affair and tried to push him for a harsh comment on it and he said “Please, we don’t get to decide what goes on in their marriage just because we’re in the audience. Besides, what has he had to forgive about her?”.

The truth is unless we’re there, we don’t and won’t always know unless we were there behind the scenes. Divorce is not the unforgivable sin and yet the obsession people can have with being all aboard the gossip train is destructive. Besides if you talk about things more and normalise accountablity, help, and support, those breakups that are unnecessary can be avoided and fixable issues in your marriage most certainly can be fixed.

Once again, the mouth matters. Normalising the topics of sex, breakups and childlessness really does come down to what we choose to say and how we choose to say it. We aren’t the victims of what we say – we’re the perpetrators.

#3: Childlessness

Now here’s a difficult one for many people, but unfortunately I’ve seen so many of my friends hurt by well meaning people who aren’t giving a lot of thought to the way they approach the topic of having children.

Unfortunately a US presidential hopeful and his running mate who has 2 years of political experience also have been bashing the “childless cat ladies” of America for the last few months in the news so this one has been beaten over everyone’s heads a bit lately.

Did you know that in Australia, with advanced medicine, great support, IVF, great nutritional information and potential, that even still 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage? That’s not couples – that’s pregnancies. And some people have or have tried for multiple in their lifetime.

So the chances that you’re talking to a married couple or an individual who’s had a challenge in this area are quite decently high.

Now I must say I’m very fortunate to have two kids and did not have any challenges personally going about it, but know so many who do and have.

And guess who Little Miss or Mr Been Single for 30 years or Had No Issues or “Just Curious” comes up to the couple and says “when are you having kids? It sucks that you don’t have kids when you’ve been married for 1/2/4/10/15/x years”.

They’re such a good friend. Not.

If you’re blissfully unaware or ignorant of this fact and you’re heckling people who haven’t had kids or more kids in the timeframe you set in your head, you are the destructive voice in other people’s lives. May I suggest some ways you could normalise talking about it:

One option is don’t. There are a number of couples who would prefer this. If a marriage hasn’t resulted in kids yet and you’re not in Putin’s Russia where they’re talking about bringing back a tax on families for having no kids or for only having one kid (true story), maybe that’s the way it is or they want it to be. Not everyone wants kids, and not everyone who’s tried really hard has been able to have kids either.

Another option is keep the stat in your mind so you speak with appropriate sensitivity. Sometimes the topic of children comes up or people ask for recommendations for parks or books or whatever and when it does I’ll try to always lead with “whatever happens or if you end up down that road”, something like that, depending on the context. Something to acknowledge that they may or may not have gone down that road and aren’t under obligation or pressure to do so. Sometimes people do want to talk about their miscarriage or their loss or whatever happened, and being too closed off can rob healthy and helpful conversations about it, especially if the couple is the instigator of the conversation.

Probably the safest option is you personally don’t be the person to bring it up, but we can’t be so weird or foreign to people’s suffering or experience that we can’t talk to them about something that deeply affects a lot of people if they want or need to talk about it.

Haven’t we seen and heard enough people who felt pressured by their parents, grandparents, friends, other married couples or whoever else who rub the vinegar in the painful wound of how hard they’ve already tried or lost in this area.

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Relationships can be hard. Doing life with people can be challenging. But man, the way we talk about big topics like sex, breakups and childlessness can make things way worse than they need to be.

Let’s normalise being people who are good at speaking about sex in an honourable and helpful way. Let’s normalise that people may break up and they need environments where it’s safe to do so without fear of gossip or slander. Let’s normalise sensitivity to the topic of children.

And then we can be much healthier communities and friends.

How about you? Any other tips going around these topics?