Why does love interfere with sex?

There is a crisis of desire in the world today. Desires to possess a lover, desires as expressions of our individuality, our freedom and preferences. Desire, without which we can no longer imagine love.

stability and adventure

We try to keep sexuality as long as possible. And not at all because we are going to have fourteen children, and not because it is the conjugal duty of a woman. We want to prolong our sex life for the pleasure and fusion that desire leads us to.

The secret to retaining desire is to find a balance between two fundamental human needs.

• First is the need for security, predictability, stability.
• The second — the need for adventure and risk, for novelty, mystery and travel.

Previously, these needs seemed incompatible. Marriage provided a partnership for the sake of procreation, social status, continuity of generations.

Today we expect from one person everything that a whole group of people met throughout life used to provide:

“Belong to me, give me identity, integrity, and at the same time help me touch the beyond, give me mystery, awe … Give me comfort, give me boundaries. Give me novelty, give me intimacy. Give me predictability, give me the unexpected.”

«want» vs «have»

The word I associate with love is the verb «to have.» And the verb «to want» is connected with desire. When we love, we strive to have, to know our beloved. We strive to minimize the distance between us. Close the gap. Relieve stress. We need intimacy.

When we are possessed by desire, everything is different. We do not seek to repeat what has already been, to return to where we have already been. We want an Other who is somewhere «on the other side», far from us, and we need a bridge to visit him and spend time with him. Desire needs space.

In more than 20 countries, I asked people: When do they most feel attracted to their partner? Regardless of gender, culture and religion, the answers came down to several options.

• The first group of answers: “I am most attracted to him or her when he or she is far away, when we are separated and I miss and imagine that we are together.”
• Second group of answers: “Most of all I am drawn to a partner when he is on the set, on stage, in his element, when he is at a party and I see that other people are attracted to him, when she is passionate about something, when I see her surrounded by fans. When I see my partner radiant and confident, not needing anyone’s support.
• The third group of answers: «I’m most attracted to her when she surprises me when we laugh at a joke together.»

Basically, it’s all about novelty. But not about the novelty of postures or techniques, but about what you discover in yourself. After all, sex is not something you do. It is a space where you yourself enter together with another.

People rarely talk about attraction when they are five centimeters from a partner or, conversely, too far from him when he is no longer visible. Desire arises when we see a partner at some distance and he, so familiar, suddenly seems mysterious, slipping away. And in this space between us there is an erotic impulse, an attraction to it.

“Care is a powerful anti-aphrodisiac”

Most often, people who have problems with sex do not want to change its quantity, but its quality: they want fullness of life, brightness, renewal, vitality, eros, energy — in a word, everything that sex gave them before and, as they hope, more will give in the future.

In desire there is no such component as care. Caring is a powerful anti-aphrodisiac. It’s one thing to want someone. But when you need someone too much, the desire turns off. Women are well aware of this: as soon as there is even a shadow of a parental relationship, the erotic impulse goes out.

Love and desire are paradoxically related. What feeds love — interdependence, reciprocity, protection, anxiety and responsibility for the other — it often extinguishes desire. Because desire has companions that are not very suitable for love: jealousy, possessiveness, aggression, power, dominance, mischief.

Each of us has these diametrically opposed needs—for stability and independence, for security and adventure, for intimacy and autonomy.

When a child sits on your lap, he is safe, but at the same time, like any of us, he must escape from your hands and go to explore and master the big world.

How to reconcile conflicting needs?

What if the partner starts telling us: “I’m worried, I’m worried, I’m depressed. I miss attention. What good is there, outside of our little world? Do we both need something else? Many of us will stop our exploratory search and «return» to this call.

We are ready to lose a part of ourselves in order to save the relationship, so as not to lose the other. We have learned a love loaded with super-anxiety, super-responsibility, super-protection.

The second option: a person can go, but he will look around all the time: “Are you going with me? Won’t you scold, curse me?» Often these are the same people who say that at the very beginning of the relationship, sex was stunning. Because then the intimacy was not yet strong enough to suppress desire.

“The stronger our connection became, the more responsibility I felt, the less new things I could afford with you.”

This is such a dialectic. On the one hand, you need to feel secure so you can hit the road. On the other hand, you can’t go anywhere, you can’t have fun, orgasm, experience something amazing, because, figuratively speaking, you are not in your body and not in your head, but in the body and head of your partner.

Find a balance

That’s what those who have everything in order with erotica do. In such couples, everyone has the right to their own erotic space, which belongs to him alone. A space where you can enter, leaving «beyond the threshold» a good citizen, caring and responsible. Because responsibility and desire always clash with each other.

Erotically harmonious couples also understand that passion waxes and wanes. And they know how to resurrect passion. They debunked a big myth about spontaneous desire that suddenly comes down to you from heaven.

Sex in a long-term relationship is conscious sex. Desired. Purposeful. It requires concentration and presence.

Prepared based on the materials of a lecture by the American psychotherapist Esther Perel, author of the bestselling book Captured by Marriage.