How to Get Lucky by Creating More Emotional Safety

I'm kicking off a March series on “getting lucky” by showing why great intimacy isn’t luck at all. Real emotional safety and compassionate curiosity create the right context for desire to grow, and I'm giving you my Green Light Conversation tool to help you start.

• debunking the myth of effortless, spontaneous intimacy
• how stress, resentment, and distraction cool desire
• why desire needs safety and play to thrive
• what blocks safety: criticism, pressure, feeling unseen
• the rejection–pressure spiral between partners
• shifting from obligation to compassionate curiosity
• green light questions that build anticipation
• listening without fixing or defending
• emotional safety as real foreplay
• practical ways to reduce pressure and increase appreciation
• preview of desire discrepancy and upcoming interview

Go to https://monicatanner.com/getlucky to download the Get Lucky Guide

Transcript

Kicking Off The Get Lucky Series

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Hello and welcome to the Secrets of Happily Ever After podcast. I'm your host, Monica Tanner, and welcome to a new month. It's March, and I thought we would do something fun this month because of St. Patrick's Day, and I don't have a lot of great ways to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. So why not do a whole podcast series on getting lucky? I thought we would spice it up a little bit and we would talk about something that's important to so many of the couples that I work with. In fact, I have found that right now I'm having the opportunity to work with so many couples that are otherwise relatively happy together. They're good partners, they raise their kids well, they get along, but they're not getting lucky as much as one or both of them would like. And so I thought I would take some time during the month of March and talk about how to get lucky. But I don't mean getting lucky in the random, hopefully it happens, cross your fingers kind of way. I want to talk about today creating the conditions for intimacy because this is such an important topic and one that I haven't talked about a lot. Because here's the truth long-term intimacy doesn't have a lot to do with luck. It's actually a skill set. And most couples are waiting for it to spontaneously happen. Like maybe when the kids are older or we have more time or less stress, or maybe when we get in better shape, sexual intimacy will just resolve itself. But I'm here to tell you that it will probably not ever happen by accident. Because what's actually needed for good sexual intimacy is emotional safety, curiosity, and a lot of intention. So if you've ever thought, what happened to that spark we used to have? Or it doesn't happen naturally anymore, or I don't want to be the couple that has to schedule it, this episode is for you. So in true secrets of happily ever after form, we're gonna start with a myth. And this myth is the idea that great intimacy should be spontaneous, effortless, magnetic, automatic. That if you have two people that love each other, the sexual intimacy should just happen, right? But that model mostly works in the movies, or maybe a little bit at the beginning of the relationship when hormones are doing the heavy lifting. In long-term committed relationships, desire changes. Why? Because life gets busy, stress increases, resentment starts to creep in when we start living with another person that's different than us. Kids, phones, and other distractions, right? And just absolute exhaustion when we're both busy trying to live the dream. And suddenly we're left wondering where did that spark go? But here is what is really happening. Desire needs two things to thrive. Number one, we need emotional safety. And number two, we need fun. And when I say fun, I mean that childlike curiosity, playful wonder, like going to the playground. When kids go to the playground, they don't have a certain goal in mind. They're just exploring. And that's a hallmark of good sexual intimacy. But we'll talk about that a little bit later. Before we get to that, I want to talk about creating emotional safety because emotional safety is something that is forged. It's built over time. It won't happen by accident. I promise you. What gets in the way of emotional intimacy is when your partner feels criticized, when they feel unseen, pressured, or misunderstood. Their nervous system doesn't say, hey, let's connect sexually. It says protect yourself. You are not safe here, right? So if you want more intimacy, I want you to start by asking, can my partner feel safe around me? Am I a safe place for my spouse to show up relaxed? I guarantee that simple question and creating emotional safety will absolutely change your marriage. So here's what I see happen with a lot of couples that I see. One partner initiates, the other partner pulls away, the partner that initiates feels rejected, and then the other partner feels pressure to meet the other partner's needs. Now both partners are feeling unsafe because one partner feels rejected and the other partner feels pressure. So here is the mistake. We treat sexual connection like it's something that we have to do, like an obligation, duty, and in a lot of cases, control. But it's usually a relational issue. Desire is deeply connected to feeling emotionally understood. We talked a lot about that last month. So go back and review those episodes on how to understand your partner without having to agree with them, but it's also highly linked to feeling chosen and feeling safe enough to let your guard down. If your partner does not feel seen in your daily life, intimacy will start to feel like obligation instead of connection. And this is where this principle or skill of compassionate curiosity is so important. Instead of saying, where did the spark go? Or why don't you want me? I want you to try asking the question, what makes you feel desired? What do I do to make you feel loved, wanted, chosen, cherished by me? So here's the tool I want to give you today. And it's a way of initiating conversations with your spouse. We can call it the green light conversation. So instead of talking about your sexual intimacy in terms of frequency, performance, or what's wrong, where'd the spark go? I want you to ask each other questions like what helps you feel most relaxed around me? What makes you feel tense or shut down or protective around me? What builds anticipation and what makes you feel desired? This is being curious. It's discovering your partner's inner world and what gets that getting lucky process started for them. And the conversation itself builds emotional intimacy. So once you ask those questions, be sure you are listening with an open and compassionate heart. Your partner might say things like, help with bedtime would help me relax, start flirting with me in the morning, physical touch that isn't goal-oriented, or emotional check-ins, like just conversations for the sake of getting to know me better. These are all examples of answers you might get through those green light questions I mentioned above. So notice you're not talking about sex specifically. What you're doing is getting an idea of how desire actually works in your partner. So here's the key: be open to listening with curiosity and compassion. There's nothing for you to fix, you're just discovering. Don't defend your actions and don't explain yourself. Just listen. You are gathering data. Now, if you gain nothing else from this episode, what I want you to take away is the fact that emotional safety is foreplay. This is how you're creating the right context for a good sexual relationship. When your partner feels dismissed, pressured, and unseen, physical intimacy will feel forced. But when your partner feels respected, supportive, chosen, cherished, and playfully pursued, desire has room to grow. Remember, pressure, resentment, scorekeeping all kill passion and intimacy. But what feeds it is curiosity. So in order to help you get lucky, I created a guide for you called the Get Lucky Guide. And in it is conversation starters and ways to approach the idea of learning what creates desire inside of your partner and getting started creating that emotional safety that's required for a good sexual relationship. All you have to do is go to monicatanner.com slash get lucky. Let this guide help you create the right environment for desire to grow. Stop waiting and hoping and crossing your fingers that you're going to get lucky and start creating the environment where intimacy can naturally happen. This means reducing the pressure that your partner might feel, increasing appreciation, initiating connection that has nothing to do with sexual activity, and asking better questions. You're trying to get to the root of how can I support desire within you? So again, I created a download called the Get Lucky Guide, and it's going to help you create the right environment so that you and your partner learn about each other's desire and how to support it by creating emotional safety in your relationship and intentionally cultivating the right atmosphere for an intimate, passionate partnership to grow. And like we've been talking about all year and we'll continue to talk about, the foundation of creating a really fun, healthy, thriving sex life is learning to have compassionate curiosity for your partner's subjective reality, especially when it comes to their desire blueprint. We're gonna be talking a lot about desire discrepancy this month. And I have a super special interview that's going to help us flesh it out even more. But for now, I want you to go download the get lucky guide, start initiating those green light conversations, and notice what happens when you replace pressure with curiosity. And if something shifts for you, be sure to send me an email, moni at monicatanner.com. I can't wait to see how curiosity shifts the conversation for you. And once you create an environment of emotional safety, I guarantee it's going to be a lot easier for you to get lucky. So I'll be here same time, same place next week. And until then, happy marriaging.