4 Hot takes from a marital intimacy coach
Published on February 3, 2025

Intimacy Coach Sarah Bartel, PhD, draws on her background in Catholic moral theology to help married women who are struggling to experience the fullness of joy that is waiting for them in sexual intimacy.
She says that a common misconception facing faithful Catholics is that if you just follow the moral teachings of the Church and abstain from sex until marriage, you will have a satisfying and flourishing sex life. The reality is it’s actually not enough.
Bartel emphasizes the importance of developing relationship skills, both in your marriage as a whole and specifically in the bedroom, in order to have a flourishing and fulfilling sex life for both spouses.
Sarah’s 90-day program, “My Delight”, developed when she saw a growing need for practical help when new wives found that the Church’s beautiful and exalted language of married love didn’t match up with their lived experience of the messy challenges of lovemaking.
She aims to help women experience the full delight of married love through practical guidance rooted in Christian morality. I recently sat down with Sarah for more details.
Here are her hot takes!
1. What you do outside the bedroom has big impacts inside the bedroom

“First of all, intimacy is part of your experience as a whole person in your relationship with your husband. Your sex life is interconnected with the quality of your relationship with your husband, your communication with him, and the whole rest of your life. It is impacted by your days and your weeks, how much energy you’re spending taking care of your kids or at work, your mental state, what you might be anxious about, your mindset and beliefs, and also your soul. All this really impacts your experience of lovemaking.”
I asked her if there are certain lovemaking techniques she recommends first working on relationship skills outside of the bedroom.
“It’s not just about technique or ‘do this one thing.’ It’s about learning how to care for your whole self, to know that you’re worth that care, and to see how opening yourself up to more good, true, pure delight in your life in general helps you increase your capacity for delight in lovemaking.”
Women in particular struggle to “save up” for lovemaking.
“I think a lot of times women are all about doing and caring and giving, and then they get depleted, and they don’t truly believe at their core that they are worthy of receiving care, rest, attention, and pleasure. And that’s a huge block to experiencing joy in lovemaking.”
2. “Marital Debt” isn’t what you think

“I wish women would know that they can lovingly decline their husband’s initiation, guilt-free, and that they are not under the burden of sin. So many women feel this heavy sense of duty that Christian writer Sheila Gregoire talks about: Obligation sex. The Catholic version of this is an incorrect understanding of ‘marital debt.’ And when women are operating under this in marriage, then they think they can rarely, if ever, say no to lovemaking. It’s all about just being a yes whenever their husband asks. That pressure [whether it comes from their husbands or themselves] is really damaging. Some people have an incorrect interpretation of the teaching that really puts a lot of burden on women and makes them dissociate from their bodies in order to live that out, which is super harmful. The real focus of the Church’s teaching is on mutuality.”
3. Your pleasure in lovemaking is just as important as your husband’s

Dr. Bartel has worked with thousands of couples and has noticed a pattern:
“A lot of women somehow pick up this idea that it’s all about being there to please their husbands. They incorrectly think that men have sexual needs and women don’t. And that it’s a woman’s job to “take care” of her husband’s sexual needs. Women have needs too. We have the need for safety, for rest, for knowledge.”
She encourages husbands and wives to get to know the woman’s pleasure patterns:
“Women need to have an understanding of how pleasure works for us to feel respected and to feel safe. Feeling safe is just huge, huge, huge. Women also need more time to experience pleasure. Women usually need a lot more time to relax and get into it.”
4. Women and Men have different arousal curves – and that’s beautiful!

“Men’s and women’s arousal curves are different lengths and intensities and we can’t measure ourselves against our husbands. We can’t take the male sexuality model to be the norm and then say, oh, women take longer, therefore we’re deficient. That’s not it at all! Women need 20 to 30 minutes minimum of foreplay in order to help their longer, slower arousal curve toward the delight that God has in mind for them.”
This is a difference by design, she says:
“God designed us to go together in this beautiful complementarity to create a situation where men and woman need to do a lot of talking and communicating to nurture the relationship so that there can be this reciprocity of care and attunement and attention, and that all really ties into our Catholic understanding of sexuality. It’s the language of the body that John Paul II talks about.”
Sarah Bartel has a variety of free and paid resources on her website: Cana Feast.
Check out her free PDF download of 9 skills for mind, body, and spirit to enhance marital intimacy as well as a 4 part workshop “The Little Way of Marriage” to increase connection in your marriage.
Married and engaged women can also sign up for her 90 day program My Delight.
More tips and insights from Sarah can be found on her new podcast, now available on:
Sarah is happy to answer simple but particular questions via email at headsteward@canafeast.com