Whoa, this is unexpected. Normally, we alternate weeks between a full episode and a

quickie. Because Bonnie's quickie last week was a two-parter, we've decided to share that

with you this week to make it easier if you listen to more than one episode at a time. And a lot

of you do tell us that you tend to binge these episodes, which we love. So, we've got one more

quickie for you this week, and then we'll be back

with two back-to-back full episodes. Thanks for joining us.

This is Bonnie Logston Burns with today's sex chat quickie. In my last installment, I talked

about how to align mismatched sex drives, and I promise

that today I would give you pointers on how to start that hard conversation. So I'd like to offer

three things. The first is to pray about it. Pray that God will be involved in this conversation,

he will be the third person in the room, and that you both will

have open hearts to hear each other non-judgmentally and with empathy. The second thing is that

John Gottman says to have these hard conversations, it's best to use a soft startup. And what that means is to say

something like, hey, I'd love for us to sit down and talk about our sexual intimacy. Can we look

at our calendar and pick a good time? And you can also say something to the effect of this will be a

positive conversation. And I do want your honest but not hurtful input. I know neither of us is happy

about the constant conflict we have around sex and I think we both want a marriage that's not

full of pain. Let's try to figure this out together and be a team. The last pointer to having this

kind of conversation is don't do it in the bedroom. We've said this over

and over on different full episodes that this hard conversation needs to be done over coffee at the

kitchen table or in a private booth at a nice restaurant or in a car drive somewhere, but not in

the bedroom where you want to have peace and not think of hurtful past conversations.

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