Everyone wants a happy and secure relationship. Unfortunately, it squelches erotic desire. Steven Lake explores how to transcend this paradox.
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This is for folks who have been in a relationship for a few years, or people who want to be proactive and avoid the dreaded and inevitable down slide of erotic energy that occurs in a relationship over time. Ester Perel talks about this in her book Mating in Captivity. Her thesis is that as people become intimate and stable in their relationship, this comfort and closeness is the antithesis of what makes for exciting sexual encounters.
Erotic energy feeds on novelty and once your relationship is past the honeymoon phase, unless you are conscious about bringing newness into the relationship, it becomes predictable and this leads to boredom in the bedroom. She phrases this as the battle between domesticity and eroticism.
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Therefore, in order to keep your relationship hot and juicy, even after having kids, a demanding job, or decades of being married, here are seven elements to keep in mind that engender eroticism. They are:
1) Be wary of sexual complacency when becoming best friends with your lover.
This is an all too common process which demands a consciousness on your part to meet the needs of an erotic life. When we begin a relationship we are striving for closeness. Unfortunately, desire needs a certain distance, or mystery, to be effective.
Balancing these two opposing needs is a challenge today when “intimacy” is the sine quo non for a healthy relationship. Healthy ways that distance can be encouraged by keeping up your outside relationships, not doing “everything” together, and avoiding a fusion of personalities.
Just for the record. Some of us (me, and a number of friends with whom I posed this question to recently) have always desired their partners. Not everyone experiences a cliff effect over time, though, both male and females in this talk expressed a desire for more sex. It seems that life often gets in the way of one’s sex life, rather than it being a lack of desire per se.
2) Cultivate the mysterious, the novel and the unexpected.
Fan the flames of desire by imagining where your sexual relationship can go. Avoid the same old, same old. The problem with this one is that it takes time, energy and creativity. To counterbalance these challenges, focus on the long term. Your investment now will pay off with a future that still has a fulfilling sexual life.
“No bill of rights can hold its own against the lawless, untamable landscape of the erotic imagination.” Daphne Merkin
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3) Appreciate that there are more ways to communicate than just words.
Before language there was the body and movement. For many men, expressing our physicality through sex is the path towards intimacy. In this vane, a touch, a look, sharing a task, or blowing a kiss, are actions that can communicate a message of love, mystery, and desire.
4) Look for opportunities to experience your partner in new ways.
Go to the same party separately and pretend you don’t know each other. Watch your partner do an activity, old or new, as if you have never seen them do it before. Really look to see who this person is as they are engrossed in their sport, hobby, or even work.
5) Hot sex is not democratic.
Kinks, fantasies, desire and sexual energy are not rational. They are the constructs of the interaction between our biology’s, our lived experiences, and our psyches. If we are always equal, the same, then there is no charge.
Power differences in relationships are a fact of life that we need to come to terms with. And it is not static. Sometimes I have more influence as to what happens, sometimes my wife does. Sometimes I am dominant in certain areas, she in others.
Likewise, in bed there is a flow of energy that is affected by many variables including hormones, how I feel about myself, energy level, and my partner – how sexual is she feeling and how is our relationship doing?
Playing with dominance, for example, can wake us up with unexpected realizations. We might discover that we like to be submissive or that we are bored with always being the dominant partner.
In the same manner, if we are always submissive, moving into a dominant posture could release all sorts of erotic energy. A relationship charged with libido, or “life force” as Freud would say, is an awake partnership that is fused with the willingness to explore and see the other in new and exciting ways.
6) Beware the work ethic!
The old adage that all work and no play makes for a dull person is certainly true when it comes to having both a healthy relationship and a lively sex live. I am constantly amazed at the young men I see in my practice who have virtually no sexual desire. They are exhausted and stressed out with the responsibilities of work and home. If they do have some desire they spend it with the computer – not good.
From a Western perspective, whether Catholic guilt or the Protestant work ethic, pleasure was seen as problematic. It gets in the way of production on one hand and draws us away from focusing on God on the other. Carnal pleasure is a sin and dangerous – look what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah.
How many of us take the time to discover what turns us on, what is pleasurable not just in the act of sex, but in living. Do we take the time to infuse our life with erotic delight and sensuous pleasure?
“Eroticism is inefficient. It loves to squander time and resources.” Ester Perel
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This can be done with food (Europeans are good with this), drink, aesthetics in nature and art, moving our bodies in sports and dance, and appreciating the human form to name a few. However, we must take the time and do this deliberately lest we drift from day to day with unseeing eyes or relegate this way of being to the weekends only.
7) Develop your imagination and playfulness.
Or is it really allowing yourself the time to use the creative aspect of yourself, that fun loving child within, the opportunity to come out and play? We all have that ability, but are we willing to take the time, to prioritize, and acknowledge that an erotic life needs attention to thrive (much like your relationship does).
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Bringing the erotic into your life is best seen, as Ester Perel would say, as “a paradox to manage, not a problem to solve.” It is in living with the dialectical pull between these seeming opposites, domesticity and erotic desire, that a tension or erotic vibrancy is created that lends a vitality to your relationship. In creating this space, an envelope where self-reflection and awareness exists, time becomes the medium within which a culture of eroticism grows. Take the time to create an erotic life – it’s worth it!
Photo: Flickr/Torbakhopper/ underwater kisses and everything i love you: manhatten (2007)
Thanks Brina!
This is an excellent proposal for thought. Well-written and very informative. Thank you!
And to think I took 2 years of Latin. Thanks. 🙂
ahemmm…. sine quA non.