When sex educator and researcher Emily Nagoski was writing her now-best-selling 2015 book, Come as You Are — a groundbreaking exploration of how women’s sexuality works — something ironic happened. As she poured her soul into the sexual bible that would go on to transform countless people’s intimate lives, her own came to a halt. Essentially, as she puts it when we speak: “Writing a book about helping women maximise their sexual potential destroyed my sex life in my newlywed marriage.”
For those who haven’t read Come as You Are, the book challenges cultural myths about what constitutes ‘normal’ when it comes to sex (spoiler: all of us are normal!), explores the difference between ‘spontaneous’ and ‘responsive’ sexual desire — i.e. the out-of-the-blue urge for sex often seen in media vs. experiencing desire after sexual intimacy has been initiated — and explains how we all have sexual accelerators (flirting, romantic gestures, touch) and brakes (stress, body image issues, conflict) that spur on or shut down our sexual desire. In short: it gives us all the knowledge and tools to understand and embrace our unique sexualities, and, hopefully, have better sex as a result.
That is, as it turned out, unless you’re the one giving out the tools. “As far as I knew, it would be the only book I’d ever get to write,” recalls Nagoski. “So the stakes felt extremely high.” Writing it alongside her full-time job, Nagoski found herself so stressed that whenever her skin touched her partner’s — a feeling that she says signalled she was, at last, in a state of safety — she would burst into tears. “The answers I’d written in Come as You Are for what to do in my situation weren’t the answers I needed. So I asked myself: what did I not cover that’s specific to couples?”
And so, Come Together was born. In it, Nagoski turns her attention to sex in long-term relationships, cutting through the noise and myths to ask what it really takes for a couple to create lasting — and fulfilling — sexual connection. “I had to dig really deep into the assumptions even I was still making about how to sustain a strong sexual connection,” she explains. “The most important lesson I kept learning over and over again is that it’s not about desire; it’s about liking the sex you have and, above all, liking your partner.”
That sounds simple enough, right? Why would you have sex that you don’t enjoy? Or with someone who you don’t like? Well, because we’ve been taught that a healthy sex life is measured mostly on how often a couple is doing it. With this metric comes obligation sex, ‘spice things up’ sex, and a sex life based on what you think you should be doing, as opposed to what you want.
So, we sat down with Nagoski to ask why couples fall into these traps, the biggest mistakes they make when trying to ‘fix’ their sex lives, and what they can do instead to have a happy, fulfilling, and long-lasting sexual connection.
Why might sex diminish in a long-term relationship?
This sounds obvious but: the longer you’re with someone, the more life challenges you have to face, both as individuals and as a couple. And life challenges are, famously, not particularly sexy.
In fact, Nagoski says that the single most common mistake people make in long-term relationships is forgetting that almost everything that hits your sexual brakes — AKA turns you off — happens outside of sex. “It’s body image stuff, trauma history, general stress, exhaustion, overwhelm, depression, anxiety, repressed rage,” she explains. “We’ve got it all. It’s all the stuff you bring with you into the bedroom from the outside world that’s getting in the way [of you wanting sex or having pleasurable sex].”
And that’s before you get into all the brakes that stem from your relationship. “If there’s build-up resentment and frustration, not even necessarily about sex but the relationship overall, and you’re barely tolerating being in the same room, then of course you don’t want to have sex with that person,” says Nagoski.
What’s more, when there’s so many other things to worry about, sex can often get deprioritised in relationships, especially if the sex you’re having isn’t something to look forward to. In Come Together, Nagoski admits that ‘sex is kind of silly’, and asks readers to consider what it is that they want when they want sex with their partner. Speaking to Cosmopolitan UK, she expands on this: “Why would we bother protecting time, energy, and space just to lick each other’s bodies? It would only be if you really like it and you feel like it contributes something meaningful to your connection.”
When sex in a long-term relationship diminishes, then, it’s not necessarily because your desire for sex has diminished — but that you’re navigating various sexual brakes, including that you may not particularly desire the sex you’ve been having. As Nagoski says: “Many couples don’t have a desire problem; they have a pleasure problem.”
Interestingly, Nagoski notes that LGBTQ+ couples struggle less in their sexual connections than straight couples do because they like the sex they have better. “They have more orgasms, they say ‘I love you’ more, they engage in a wider variety of erotic behaviours together,” she says of LGBTQ+ couples. Meanwhile, she adds: “[Many] straight people don’t like the sex they have, but they have sex more often than gay couples, which is so troubling”.
What not to do to ‘fix’ your sex life
1. Don’t just have more sex
First thing’s first, forget the idea that high frequency of sex = a good sex life. Simply having more of the same sex that you’re not really enjoying is not going to make your sex life any more satisfying. This seems so simple and yet, says Nagoski, it’s actually a very hard sell. “People really struggle to wrap their heads around the idea that it’s not about being horny for each other or how often you have sex, it’s whether or not you like it.” Think of it like this: would you rather have sex that you don’t particularly like every week, or sex that you love every second of, once a month?
2. Don’t keep adding ‘spice’
Next, advises Nagoski, don’t just try and add things to your sexual accelerator. “People think it’s about adding role play, porn, handcuffs, and lube — and those things are great if you like them — but most often, when people are struggling in any way, it’s not because there’s not enough stuff happening that they like, it’s because there’s too much stuff happening that they don’t like,” she explains, adding that, as mentioned above, “that stuff is mostly happening outside of the bedroom. People think it’s about adding ‘spice’, but really it’s about getting rid of the obstacles.”
3. Don’t turn to porn
And, particularly for younger people who’ve grown up with easy-access pornography (and still-dire sex education), try to steer clear from applying what you see in porn and other media into your own sex life. “People get to their own sexual relationships with this map in their head based on what happens in porn, as opposed to a map based on what pleasure feels like in their bodies,” says Nagoski. “They’re performing the behaviours they’ve seen and assuming that whatever that feels like must be what sexual pleasure is, even if it hurts [or isn’t particularly pleasurable].” Instead of going in blind with whatever you’ve watched this week, talk to your partner about your desires; ask them what feels good; and do it constantly, not just once.
4. Don’t move too quickly
Finally, if you’re not feeling in a sexy state of mind, don’t have sex. In Come Together, Nagoski introduces the concept of the ‘emotional floor plan’, which positions emotional states like rooms in a house. There are ‘pleasure-favourable’ spaces and ‘pleasure-averse’ spaces, and often you have to move through one to get to another. For example, Nagoski says that when she was writing Come as You Are, she didn’t have access to the lust space in her brain because she was trapped in the fear space — these rooms were not adjacent to each other, so she couldn’t jump from fear to lust and miraculously be ready for sex. “I had to learn to navigate my way emotionally out of that stress space, back into a place of being rested enough to be curious and playful, so I could then get to the lust space,” she tells Cosmopolitan UK.
Essentially, don’t try to jump from the panic, grief, or fear rooms into a sex space — aim for the room next door, which might be care, playfulness, and exploration. And then you can see how you go from there.
How to have a fulfilling, long-lasting sexual connection
1. Talk, talk, talk
The million-dollar question! And Nagoski has a simple answer: “Couples who create lasting sexual connections collaborate to create a context that makes it easy for their brains to access pleasure, which means looking at the whole context — what happens in bed, what happens immediately before that, and what happens further away in time from that.”
“And,” she continues, “here’s the part that everyone hates: they talk about it. The couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long-term talk about sex all the time. A lot of us are carrying around this idea that if you have to talk about it, that automatically means something is wrong; that sex should happen naturally and spontaneously. That’s not how couples who sustain strong sexual connections do it.”
If you want to have sex you like, continues Nagoski, you should see your sex life as a shared interest or hobby — as if you are in the same fandom. “You don’t just talk about a particular musician or sports team when you’re at the concert or game, you talk about it all the time because it’s a shared interest,” she explains. “You have to orient your enthusiasm in the same direction — and that can be toward your sexual connection. Talk about it when it’s going great, when it’s not going great; talk about it because you’re both enthusiastic about it.”
2. Be proactive
Nagoski is also a proponent of scheduling sex — that doesn’t have to mean setting aside an exact hour to go down on each other or have penetrative sex (though it can mean that if you want it to!), but establishing a window of time for intimacy of any kind to happen, whether that’s touching, talking, or just spending time with each other. “You could also make a rule that you’re not allowed to have sex outside that window,” suggests Nagoski, “which means that you really have to make the most of it during the time you’ve agreed to.”
3. Shut out the noise
Finally, notice when you try to measure yourself against bullshit rules, like how often you’re having sex or how you’re having it, and try to resist it. “The starting place is to know that the sexual person you are is a sexual person worth being,” says Nagoski, “and that all the ways in which you’re beating yourself up for falling short of some external standard are noise and nonsense. The only person whose opinions matter about your sexual connection is you and the person or people you’re having sex with.”
“I’m not saying any of this is easy,” she concludes, “but I am saying that when you banish patriarchy and puritanical sexual imperatives from your bedroom, that leaves so much space for pleasure to come flooding into the places where somebody else’s ideas about who you’re supposed to be used to live.”
Read an extract from Come Together
What do you think is the key to great sex over the long term?
Some people think it’s about frequency. It’s not. There’s very little relationship between frequency of sex and sexual or relationship satisfaction. Hardly any of us have sex very often; we are busy.
Some people think it’s novelty and adventure. It’s not. And it’s not orgasms, sex positions, variety of sexual behaviours, or anything else. Honestly? If there’s a ‘sexual behaviour’ that predicts sex and relationship satisfaction, it’s cuddling after sex. Wildly original sex might be enjoyable for you (or it might not), but it is not what makes for a satisfying long-term sex life for most people.
People think the key to satisfying long-term sex is monogamy or non-monogamy; watching porn or not watching porn; being kinky or vanilla. It’s not. Those are all just different ways people engage sexually and emotionally with the world, and whether they work for you or not is a matter of personal experience. People can have great (or terrible) sex lives either way.
People think it’s attractiveness, being conventionally good-looking, or it’s having a perfect relationship or a perfect body, or it’s ‘skills’ like knowing a lot about how to give great oral sex. None of those things predict great sex in the long-term. The idea of a ‘skilled’ lover is a myth; unless you’re trying technically demanding BDSM practice like breath play, the only ‘skill’ you need is the ability to pay attention to your partner and to your own internal experience at the same time.
Perhaps above all, people think it’s an out-of-the-blue craving for sex, the hot-and-heavy horny feeling that makes people constantly want to put their tongues in each other’s mouths. This is often what people mean when they talk about ‘the spark’ that we’re all supposed to want to keep alive.
The science taught me three essential characteristics of couples who sustain a connection over the long term, and none of them were the characteristics you might guess. I’m happy to give away the ending right here at the start. The three characteristics of partnerships that sustain a strong sexual connection are:
- They are friends — or, to put it more precisely, they trust and admire each other.
- They prioritise sex — that is, they decide that it matters for their relationship.
- Instead of accepting other people’s opinions about how they’re supposed to do sex in their partnership, they prioritise what’s genuinely true for them and what works in their unique relationship.
And what do they do, these friends who prioritise sex and prioritise each other over any prefabricated notions of what sex is supposed to be?
They co-create a context that makes it easier to access pleasure.
That’s it.
Once I saw the pattern, it felt so liberating, so forgiving, so darn doable that I wanted to share it with everyone.
Come Together by Emily Nagoski (Vermilion) is out now, and is available in hardback, paperback, and as an audio book
