Sarah Corbett-Winder is direct about this in a way most people aren't. The starting point for a healthy sex life, she says, has nothing to do with your partner. "You have to want to have sex with yourself." The alternative — not wanting to, not feeling anything for your own body — produces a very specific outcome: "If you feel crap and hate your body and hate yourself, you're checkmate."
Checkmate. Not struggling. Not in a rough patch. The game is already over before it starts.
She knows this because she has been through the other side of it. After having children, she was deliberate about not letting the physical distance between her and her husband become a drift that hardened. "I was very conscious to kind of have sex as quickly as I feel I physically could," she says — not as a duty, but as a way of keeping the thread. "It can still be fun. Just to have that connection I think is really important otherwise it becomes overwhelming and I think all it does is bring you together if you can do that."
But the connection she is really describing isn't with her husband. It is with herself.
"I am much more aware of my body since having children," she says. Bodies change — she says this as fact, not complaint. What changes alongside them, or doesn't, is the relationship you have with what's left. Exercising matters, she says, not mainly for what it does physically: "I think it's actually mainly the mental thing — that you feel that you've done something for yourself and for your body." The thing that shifts is not the body. It is what you think of it.
"It's nice if our husbands are like, 'God, you look amazing.' And all of that can obviously help, but it's actually what you think about you that actually matters and actually counts."
And if the answer to that is: I feel terrible about myself, I hate this body, I don't want to be in it — then nothing a husband says changes the equation. The work is internal first. Pilates, yoga, breath work. Something that puts the investment back in. "Putting that into yourself I think will empower you more."
She spent years doing wardrobe consultations and personal styling, and she noticed the same pattern there: "the amount of lack of confidence that women had with not knowing what to wear or how to dress themselves." The confidence missing when a woman doesn't know how to dress herself is the same confidence missing everywhere else. It is not about clothes. It is about whether she has any relationship with her own body, any sense of what it needs, any habit of doing something for it.
The starting point is always the same. Not the partner, not the relationship, not the frequency. You, first. Whether you feel like someone worth wanting.
"You have to want to have sex with yourself."
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If any of this sounds familiar, this is the conversation it came from:
You Have to Want to Have Sex with Yourself! — Sarah Corbett-Winder