How to have better sex | Esther Perel, Emily Nagoski & more
How is it that three, four decades after the sexual revolution we're having less sex than ever?
The reason people struggle so much with desire is because we have been lied to, fundamentally, about what desire is, and how it works.
It's not about statistics and performance. How often, how hard, how long, how many - that's a very different question looking at the meaning of sex rather than doing sex. My interest has been to probe the nature of erotic desire in long-term relationships, but also in general, and in particular because of the profound change that sexuality has experienced in the context of committed relationships, which for most of history, was about procreation and about a woman's marital duty, but not anchored, rooted, in this concept called 'desire,' which is to own the wanting, which is so much a part of an individualistic culture in which there is an "I" who deserves to want, and who is entitled to have their wants be met.
And I was interested in why people come to me so often saying "We love each other very much; we have no sex." And that closeness wasn't always what they were missing. They were often very connected, intimate couples whose sex life was either devoid of eroticism or of sex altogether. Why was it that good intimacy doesn't beget sexuality always?
- Any marriage that doesn't have intense strong desire, any marriage that doesn't have lust, is becoming something of a prison. It's where you're kind of there for reasons other than wanting each other. Maybe because it's comfortable, maybe 'cause you appreciate and cherish each other, maybe because of the kids and maybe because you have nowhere else to go and maybe because you even feel that you belong there - that's okay. But it's still a form of external incarceration. You're not there out of a deep desire to be there.
Lust is where you want that person, and that's why you're there. And that has to be the primary reason that we go into marriage, and that we stay in marriage. And I maintain, passionately, that the passion need not be lost. That this idea that there's a transition in marriage from lust to love, that when you're single you can't keep your hands off of each other, but it slowly migrates into this partnership - such a cold commercial expression. It's a defeatist approach to marriage. It's one that I cannot embrace, and it's one that I have to argue against. And it's time that we began to fathom the erotic mind in order not just to bolster the institution of marriage, but actually bring back a certain electricity to the rest of life as well.
The solution has nothing to do with the sex, and everything to do with learning how to navigate through your emotions. Couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term are not couples who constantly can't wait to, like, put their tongues in each other's mouths. They're the couples who know how to co-create a context that allows both of their brains to have access to pleasure. Jaak Panksepp, the father of affective neuroscience, developed what he calls the 'primary process emotions.' Lust is one of them. Seeking, curiosity, exploration. Ooh, what's that? That's a second one. And often, the seeking space, the curious, exploring part of our minds will have a doorway directly into the lust space in our minds.
Creativity is about going outside of the boundaries. It's about being non-linear. It's about expansiveness. It's about connecting dots that are not necessarily so obvious to connect, and then to create a whole new reality with it. And our erotic imagination actually plays along very similar lines. Animals have sex, and it is the nature. It is the primary urge. It is the instinct, it is procreative. We have an erotic life. We transform sexuality, we socialize sexuality through our imagination. And the central agent of the erotic act is our creativity, our imagination, our ability to renew, our ability to anticipate, to imagine ourselves in an act in which we may have a blissful time with multiple orgasms without touching anybody just because we can imagine ourselves in it. We ...