Consent Outside of Yes’s and No's
Written by dr. catie buttner, lcsw, phd
Let's talk about something that doesn't get enough airtime in conversations about sexual wellness: the wide, gray, enormously consequential space between "yes" and "no."
Most of us grew up learning that consent is binary. You say yes, or you say no. You get a yes, or you get a no. The message was clear, if incomplete: consent is a gate you pass through or don't. And while teaching that framework was an important step forward, it left out something crucial, the entire emotional and physiological landscape that exists inside a "yes." To illustrate:
Cassandra and Qiana have been together for 5 years, they live together, and they would consider their sex lives to be “healthy”. I start working with Qiana because they’re starting to feel less excited by sex, they feel numb. After a series of sessions Qiana identifies that they are often saying things like “sure” or “I guess I’m up for that” when Cassandra initiates sex. Even things like “let’s go hang out with my friends” often elicits an automatic yes that Qiana isn’t sure they really mean.
As a sex therapist who works with couples every day, I can tell you that some of the most impactful conversations I facilitate aren't about obvious violations. They're about the quiet, habitual "sure, fine" the "I guess so" dressed up as enthusiasm, the compliance that masquerades as desire. This is where I see real damage accumulate, slowly and silently, in otherwise loving relationships.
So, What Do We Actually Mean by Consent?
In its most basic form, consent is an agreement freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific. The acronym FRIES, developed by Planned Parenthood, offers a useful shorthand: Freely given. Reversible. Informed. Enthusiastic. Specific. Notice that word enthusiastic. It's not just agreement. It's genuine want.
But here's where even the best consent frameworks can fall short in the context of longterm relationships: they were largely designed for situations involving strangers or new partners. They don't fully account for the layered dynamics of committed partnerships, where obligation, love, guilt, habit, and history all blur together and where the word "yes" can carry the weight of a dozen unspoken reasons.
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Why Beyond "Yes" and "No" Actually Matters, Especially in Your Body
When you agree to something you don't genuinely want, your body knows.
This isn't metaphorical. Your nervous system is exquisitely attuned to the difference between real desire and performed compliance. Research on the autonomic nervous system, particularly the work of Dr. Stephen Porges and his Polyvagal Theory, explains that our bodies are constantly scanning for safety, not just physical safety, but relational and psychological safety (Porges, 2011). When we feel truly safe and genuinely willing, our parasympathetic nervous system, the "rest and digest" branch, can activate, allowing the body to relax, open, and experience pleasure fully.
When don’t we feel genuinely willing? The body often stays in a low-grade state of activation. Muscles don't fully release. Lubrication may be reduced. Arousal may feel muted or mechanical. The body is present, but it has not been invited to participate in the experience in any meaningful way.
Dr. Emily Nagoski, in her landmark book Come As You Are, describes sexual response through a dual control model, the interplay of a sexual "accelerator" (what turns us on) and "brakes" (what inhibits arousal). She notes that context matters enormously: when the brain perceives a situation as stressful or unwanted, the brakes are activated, and the accelerator has a much harder time doing its job, regardless of physical stimulation (Nagoski, 2015). In short, going through the motions when you're not a genuine "yes" isn't just emotionally unsatisfying it can make it physiologically harder to enjoy sex.
This is worth sitting with, especially if you've ever found yourself wondering why intimacy sometimes feels disconnected, perfunctory, or even vaguely unpleasant despite everything technically being "fine."
What Does It Actually Feel Like to Be a Full "Yes"?
This is one of the most powerful questions I ask clients, and often one of the hardest to answer.
We are so practiced at assessing whether we're willing to do something that we rarely stop to ask whether we want to. Willingness and desire are not the same. Willingness is cognitive: I can do this, it's okay, nothing bad will happen. Desire is somatic: I want this. My body is leaning toward it. There's aliveness here.
A genuine "yes" tends to feel like openness, a sense of ease in the body, curiosity, forward energy, maybe even some anticipatory excitement. It doesn't require performance. It doesn't need to be talked into. A real yes has a quality of “of course” to it, even when it's quiet.
A reluctant yes, on the other hand, often has a contracted quality, a slight tightening, a flattening of enthusiasm, a sense of going through the motions. Sometimes it sounds like "I'm not really in the mood but okay" or "I should want this" or simply the absence of any real feeling at all.
Learning to distinguish between these two internal states is a practice, and it's one of the most important things a person can develop for their own sexual wellbeing. Body based awareness practices, like mindfulness, somatic check-ins, or even just pausing before responding to see what arises, can help strengthen this capacity over time (Menakem, 2017).
The Weight of Relationship "Shoulds"
In long term partnerships, there is a whole invisible architecture of expectation, what a good partner does, what a committed relationship looks like, what frequency is "normal," what saying no too often means about you or the relationship. These expectations don't come from nowhere. They come from family modeling, cultural messaging, past relationship experiences, and all the implicit agreements we make when we commit to someone.
Some of these expectations are spoken. Most are not.
The result is that many people, particularly in committed relationships, regularly engage in sexual activity they don't actively want, not because they were coerced, but because they believe they should. Research supports this: studies on sexual compliance (agreeing to sex primarily for a partner's sake rather than one's own desire) find it to be remarkably common, and consistently associated with lower sexual satisfaction, lower relationship quality, and greater likelihood of sexual distress over time (Impett & Peplau, 2003; Katz & Tirone, 2009).
The "should" is sneaky because it can feel like love. I'm doing this for them. I want them to feel desired. I don't want to create conflict. These are real and human motivations, and they can coexist with genuine care for a partner. But when "should" becomes the primary driver of sexual engagement, something essential gets lost. You stop showing up as a full person with your own desires, and you start showing up as someone managing the relational dynamics. Your partner stops having a real partner and starts having an agreeable one. That's a subtle but real form of distance.
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What Repeated Reluctant "Yeses" Signal to Your Psyche and Your Body
When you habitually override your own internal state to comply with a partner's wants, or with your own expectations of yourself, you are sending a consistent message to your nervous system: my internal experience doesn't matter here. Over time, this has consequences.
Resentment is one of the most reliable ones. Gottman Institute research identifies contempt and stonewalling as the most corrosive dynamics in relationships, and resentment is often their quiet precursor, the slow accumulation of unacknowledged sacrifices and unspoken needs (Gottman & Silver, 1999). When resentment builds around intimacy specifically, it doesn't stay in the bedroom. It begins to color how partners interact generally, small withdrawals, reduced warmth, a growing sense of grievance that neither person may be fully conscious of.
The body registers this, too. Over time, repeated low-consent experiences (even in loving relationships) can contribute to what sex therapists sometimes call sexual aversion, a growing resistance to or avoidance of sexual engagement, as well as physiological patterns like chronic pelvic tension, reduced lubrication, or difficulty with arousal. The body begins to associate intimacy with obligation rather than pleasure, and it prepares accordingly.
This isn't about blame. It's biology, and it's learnable. But it begins with honesty.
Creating a Different Kind of Consent Culture in Your Relationship
The invitation here isn't to introduce a formal consent checklist into every intimate moment. It's something quieter and more fundamental: it's about developing the habit of checking in with yourself before you check in with your partner.
Before agreeing to intimacy, try a genuine internal pause. Notice what's actually there, not what you think should be there, not what you wish were there, but what is there. Is there openness, or is there contraction? Curiosity, or flatness? A real "yes," or a "yes" built on guilt, obligation, or habit?
Then, and this is where real relationship courage comes in, say what's true. A relationship that can hold a genuine "I'm not really in the space for this tonight, but I'd love to connect in another way" is a significantly more intimate, more resilient relationship than one built on agreeable compliance. It requires trust in both directions: trust that the person saying it won't be punished for honesty, and trust from the person hearing it that this isn't a rejection of them.
The couples I see build the most sustainable, genuinely pleasurable intimate lives aren't the ones having the most sex. They're the ones where both partners trust that yes means yes, really, truly, in the body, and where no (or not right now) is received as honesty rather than failure.
That kind of trust is, frankly, one of the most erotic things two people can build together.
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A Note on Getting Support in Your Relationship
If any of this is resonating, if you recognize the pattern of reluctant yeses, accumulating resentment, or a growing disconnection from your own desire, please know this is incredibly common and very workable. A sex therapist or couples therapist trained in sexual health can help you and your partner untangle these dynamics with care and without judgment.
You deserve a yes that feels like one.
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As a pleasure-centered sex therapist, Dr. Catie works with individuals and couples to understand sex and pleasure across the lifespan. Combined with her background in research, dr. catie’s work blends science, body awareness, and the expertise YOU hold to help reconnect with desire, navigate pleasure in perimenopause and menopause, and feel empowered in evolving kink and intimacy dynamics as you age.
Find Dr. Catie on instagram @drcatiebuttner
References:
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Impett, E. A., & Peplau, L. A. (2003). Sexual compliance: Gender, motivational, and relationship perspectives. Journal of Sex Research, 40(1), 87–100. DOI: 10.1080/00224490309552169
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Katz, J., & Tirone, V. (2009). Going along with it: Sexually compliant behavior among young women in heterosexual relationships. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 33(3), 326–336. DOI: 10.1177/1077801210374867
