Our eyes locked, but something was different. 

In a split-second, my heart sank as I realized we had a problem as the white-hot spark we took for granted had cooled. We would not tear each other’s clothes off, scattering them all over the room.

We would not revel in the tastes and scents we used to find irresistible. Instead, we talked about children and schedules before retiring to bed. Our relationship had matured, life’s stresses swallowed us whole, and without fanfare or conflict, we found ourselves feeling disconnected and alone. 

This is a common problem for many of us in our relationships—the sex and raw passion we once enjoyed so freely fades with time, and we don’t know how to get it back.

The mundane of everyday life takes its toll, leaving us to deal with the parenting challenges, career pressures, self-image struggles, and familiarity that rob us of the mystery and unknown wonders of our partners we once appreciated.

“If you fix the sex, the relationship transforms,” said Esther Perel in an interview with The Guardian in 2018.

Perel, a Belgian-American psychotherapist and author of best selling-books Mating in Captivity and The State of Affairs, is a practicing marriage and family therapist in New York.

Her work focuses on the contradictory ideals of modern marriages and how that conflict affects erotic desire in our long-term relationships.

“Reconciling the erotic and the domestic is not a problem that you solve with Victoria’s Secret,” she told The Guardian, “It is a paradox that you manage.”

Perel enjoys using simple terms to explain the mysteries of the human condition, helping us confront our joys and our pains while motivating us to change and evolve in our relationships.

In her wildly popular 2013 TED Talk, The Secret to Desire in a Long-Term Relationship, Perel teaches us how to regain the spark of passion and reconnect with our partners:

What is the relationship between love and desire?

>> “This is the first time in the history of humankind where we are trying to experience sexuality in the long term, not because we want 14 children, but because we want pleasure and connection that is rooted in desire.”

>> “At the heart of sustaining desire in a committed relationship is the reconciliation of two fundamental human needs—our need for security and our need for adventure—into one relationship.”

>> “We come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us belonging, give us continuity, but give us transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give us comfort, give us edge. Give us novelty, give us familiarity. Give us predictability, give us surprise. And we think it’s a given that toys and lingerie are going to save us.”

>> “I think in some way, the crisis of desire is often a crisis of the imagination.”

>> “In desire, we tend to not really want to go back to the places we’ve already gone. The foregone conclusion does not keep our interest—in desire, we want a bridge to cross.”

About desire:

>> “Sex isn’t something you do; sex is a place you go. It’s a space you enter inside yourself and with others.”

>> “Responsibility and desire just butt heads—they don’t really do well together.”

>> “Most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day. You know, the erotic mind is not very politically correct.”

>> “We think love comes with selflessness and, in fact, desire comes with a certain amount of selfishness in the best sense of the word: the ability to stay connected to one’s self in the presence of another.” 

There are a few things that I’ve come to understand erotic couples do:

>> “They have a lot of sexual privacy. They understand there is an erotic space that belongs to each of them.”

>> “Foreplay is not something you do five minutes before the real thing; foreplay pretty much starts at the end of the previous orgasm.”

>> “Erotic space isn’t about when you begin to stroke the other, it’s about creating a space where you leave Management Inc., and you actually just enter that place where you stop being the good citizen who is taking care of things and being responsible.”

>> “They understand that passion waxes and wanes; it’s pretty much like the moon—it has intermittent eclipses.”

>> “But they also know how to resurrect it because they have demystified one big myth—the myth of spontaneity, which is that it’s just going to fall from heaven while you’re folding the laundry. They understand that whatever is going to just happen in a long-term relationship already has. Committed sex is premeditated sex. It’s willful; it’s intentional—it’s focus and presence.”

~

Enjoy: