UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Emily Nagaski. Let me tell you a little bit about Emily. She is a sex educator and, in my words, someone who stands for, speaks for, and writes about our erotic well-being. She has an MS in counseling and a PhD in health behavior, both from Indiana University, with clinical and research training at the Kinsey Institute. For eight years, she was the director of Wellness Education at Smith College. And in 2016, after the huge success of her first book, Come as You Are, which became a New York Times bestseller, Emily became a full-time writer and public speaker. She’s the coauthor, with her sister, Amelia, of the book Burnout and a new book, which is what we’ll be focusing our conversation on. It’s called Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections. Emily, welcome.
Emily Nagoski: Hello.
TS: I heard from many people in my circle who are huge advocates of your work and your writing. I’d say they’re ambassadors saying, have you read Come Together? Have you read Come as You Are? And I have to say now, after reading Come Together, I’m joining the ranks. Yes, it’s true. And I want to tell you why, and I want to have you speak to our listeners about it right here at the beginning of our conversation, which is this shift from focusing on desire to focusing on pleasure.
And this has been absolutely huge for me. I realized that I was judging myself according to this desire imperative as you call it. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a desire imperative, but I knew I was judging myself, but I actually thought there was something wrong with myself, which is why I was judging myself. So go ahead and explain what it means to shift from the desire imperative to centering pleasure.
EN: Oh, I love that you were starting with this. It tells me that you all, you got it exactly what I was going for with this book. So the desire imperative is this sort of cultural script that tells us how sex is. Heavy air quotes supposed to work in especially long-term sexual relationships, which is that you meet somebody and the sparks fly and that spark lasts some time in the relationship and then life gets complicated. Maybe you have kids, maybe you buy a house, maybe you get busy with work, who knows what happens, but that spark sort of fades and then you sort of have two chances. You can either just sort of let sex disappear from your life floating away on a sea of your hormones, I guess, or you can fight. You can invest time and energy and money in trying to keep the spark alive.
And here’s the thing, when you look at the research on couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term, they do not talk about spark. They don’t talk about desire. Desire barely scrapes into the top 10 on the list of characteristics of great sex, extraordinary sex, magnificent sex. What they talk about is pleasure. They talk about enjoying the sex that they have regardless of how often they have it, regardless of the kind of sex it is sex that they actually are interested in having because they like it. So the the most common reason why couples seek sex therapy is because of what they call a desire differential, where one partner wants sex more than the other one. But very often when these couples go in to talk to the therapist and the therapist asks them, well, so tell me about the sex that you do not want.
They’re not describing pleasurable, vulnerable, authentic, meaningful, connected sex. They describe sex. That is to quote Peggy Orenstein, dismal and disappointing. And if you don’t like the sex, of course you don’t want it. This is going to sound so obvious when you say it out loud, but it is not dysfunctional not to want sex you don’t like, which is why you center pleasure instead of desire. And how this actually shows up in a lot of people’s lives is scheduling sex. We can talk about alternatives to scheduling. It is not for everyone, but imagine a world where you set a time and you protect time and energy specifically for sharing pleasure with your certain special someone, and you put your body in the bed, you let your skin touch your partner’s skin and your body goes, oh wait, I really like this person. I really like this. What a good idea this was. We should definitely do this again. So that’s centering pleasure, creating time and space and energy for pleasure as a priority in your life and your relationship.
TS: So just to keep going with this, because I did find it such a profound aha, scheduling pleasure feels to me like there’s not a lot of pressure in that, whereas scheduling sex feels like, yeah, this is going to have to happen, but pleasure. I already schedule all kinds of pleasure with my partner. No, I mean it might not be time in bed, but I’m just saying things we do that we find pleasurable together, going swimming in the ocean, going on long walks, all kinds of things. And so I noticed though when I was under the spell of the desire imperative and I want to talk more about what that spell is and how we get it, I felt so pressured, like I was always trying to go over some pole vault that I couldn’t quite reach to have sex the right number of times a week,
EN: Oh boy.
TS: Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So how is it that we so many of us at least internalize this imperative about what our sex lives are supposed to look like? How does that happen to us?
EN: So part of the fault lies honestly with the sex research and whisk sex therapists because the number one reason why couples seeks sex therapy and back in the 1960s when Masters and Johnson were doing their original research, they were just studying the sexual response cycle, so they didn’t include desire at all in their therapeutic approach. In sensate focus, what you do is you set up homework times when you get together and you put your body in the bed and you touch each other in prescribed ways. But when Helen Singer Kaplan, the genius sex therapist in the 1970s looked at practice outcomes in her clinical practice, all the sex therapists she collaborated with, the number one kind of case where they were not helping them was in the case where desire was the problem as opposed to arousal, erection difficulties, orgasm difficulties, those are comparatively easier to treat compared to desire difficulties.
And so Helen Singer Kaplan in her wisdom in this profound feminist moment in the late 1970s was like, we need to work on desire because people don’t want sex, and if you don’t want sex, there’s no reason to have sex. It just turns out, and it took 20 years for the research to figure this out, that when you start with pleasure instead of desire, that’s how you get people resolving their difficulties around sexual desire. Don’t target desire, targeting desire, trying to improve desire on its own is trying to get a flock of birds to fly in a different direction. You can’t convince it. You have to create a context that allows it to organize itself in that direction.
TS: When we see examples, TV sex of throwing our partner onto the counter and all of that, I think some of it is this notion is am I supposed to be wired like that and in a long-term relationship or are some people actually like that?
EN: Yeah, some people are actually like that. The mechanism in our brain that governs sexual response is called the dual control model. Once you learn it, it’ll feel like you always knew it, but boy, when you find out, it’s called the dual control model for the simple reason that it has two main parts and all credit to Eric Janssen and John Bancroft who were at the Kinsey Institute in the late nineties and had this wild idea, what if sex works in our brains the way everything else works in our brains, which is partnerships of excitatory and inhibitory impulses. So it turns out they were right. There is a sexual excitation system or the accelerator which notices all the good sexual things in the environment, all the everything that you can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, everything that you feel in your body, sensations and everything that you think, believe or imagine that your brain codes as sex related and it sends a turn on signal that many of us are familiar with and it’s functioning at a low level all the time, including right now.
Here we are talking about sex and a little bit of sex related stimulus. So there’s a tiny bit of turn on signal happening. Fortunately at the same time, in parallel, your breaks, the sexual inhibitory system are noticing all the good reasons not to be turned on right now. All of your extra perceptive senses, everything that you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, all of your internal body sensations and everything that you think, believe or imagine that your brain codes as a potential threat in response to any of that stimulus, your brain sends the turn off signal. So the process of becoming aroused is this dual process of turning on the ons and also turning off the offs. And it turns out there’s a lot of individual variability in the sensitivity of these mechanisms. Now, most of us are, it’s a bell curve distribution, so most of us are like 85% of us are heaped up in the middle and somewhere between five and 15% of us have a really sensitive brake or a really not sensitive brake, and some of us have a really sensitive accelerator or a really not sensitive accelerator.
And it turns out when people have, for example, a really not sensitive accelerator, those are folks who are most likely to identify as asexual. It is not that they have a very responsive break that’s stuck, it’s that they have a very low sensitivity accelerator, so it takes just a lot of stimulation for them to become even remotely aroused. And then there are people who either have a low sensitivity brake or a high sensitivity accelerator, and those are folks, if you imagine a car that’s got a really sensitive gas pedal and a really not sensitive brake, that’s a car that’s going to go room, right? And it sounds like it’s going to be fun, and that totally is the model of sexual response that shows up in TV shows it’s the most exciting, but those folks are actually the most at risk for sexual risk taking or sexual compulsivity feeling like they’re not in control of their sexuality. Does that make sense?
TS: Yeah, it does make sense. I think the question I’m asking myself is how centering pleasure works with the accelerator and the break such that we find our way in a kind of easeful way into our sexual ecstasy and wellbeing.
EN: Yeah, so because almost all of us are heaped up in the middle with just average sensitivity breaks and accelerator, it’s not so much that we vary in the sensitivity of our brain mechanism. It’s that our context, all the things that are influencing the breaks and accelerator are the things that we have control over, and they’re the things that vary tremendously from person to person. So maybe early on in that relationship, the context is very much hitting the accelerator and very much not hitting the brakes, whereas later in the relationship you have to get a little bit more intentional about creating a context that allows the accelerator to be stimulated. But above all, one of the most important things about the dual control model is that it turns out when people are struggling with any aspect of their sexual response, pleasure, desire, arousal, orgasm, it’s generally not. Sometimes it’s because there’s not enough stimulation to the accelerator, but mostly it’s because there’s too much stimulation to the brakes. So when you center pleasure, you’ll look at your context and you think, what is getting in the way of pleasure? What’s getting in the way of my brain’s ability to interpret sensations as being pleasurable? And almost none of those things have anything to do with sex.
TS: Give some examples of the breaks that people identify and how they work through them.
EN: Sure. So stress has got to be the number one most universal people vary 10 to 20% of people when they’re very stressed, it actually increases their interest in sex, but for everybody else, it may have no impact on sex, but a lot of people it’s going to be, obviously if you’re stressed out physiologically, your body’s like I am being chased by a lion now is not a good time to be engaging in a pleasurable activity. So stress is number one. So I’m going to say it like it’s easy and simple. So managing stress and reducing your stressors, it’s really important to helping to center pleasure in your life. And that’s why my whole second book is about stress management. It’s called burnout, as you said, body image stuff really, really common in particular for people who are raised as girls, body image stuff is really difficult for trans non-binary people.
It can be particularly complicated. I had a non-binary beta reader of the Cums you are workbook who said that as they transitioned, they would go into, they were born and raised as a girl identified as non-binary, and as they transitioned, they went into the boys and men’s shopping areas in a department store and were like, oh, now there’s two impossible standards for me to fail to meet. Cool. So body image is another one, and there are lots of evidence-based strategies for improving body image, and you can imagine why if you’re taking off some clothes for your partner to see and or touch and you have self-critical feelings about your body, are those self-critical thoughts and feelings about your body going to hit the accelerator? They’re totally just going to hit the brakes. So those are two really common ones. Trauma history is distressingly common still, of course when a person has had the experience of having sex used against them as a weapon, even as the sex related stimulus is activating the accelerator, the brain has learned that that sex related stimulus is itself a threat. So as the accelerator gets hit, the break comes onto and that’s how trauma can interfere with sexual response. And there’s great evidence-based therapies for teaching your brain that you can have experiences of arousal and pleasure and connection and also be safe.
TS: What’s interesting to me as you’re talking is I’m also feeling into the reciprocal nature. So as you were talking about stress, I was thinking pleasure. I’m not even talking necessarily about sexual pleasure, but the pleasure of which I guess you would put in a category of erotic wellbeing, erotic pleasure, but just the pleasure of stroking my arm. It reduces stress, it reduce that. There’s a reciprocal nature here with each of these, like my sense of my own body image
EN: In the right context. If your relationship with the person who is touching your arm is not easy, easeful is this beautiful word, if your relationship with that person is fraught or you’re in the middle of conflict or you don’t fully trust that person enough, then them touching you can actually be interpreted as painful, irritating, annoying, frustrating. You want them to leave you alone. Whereas if your relationship with that person is good enough, then when they touch you, it absolutely can help to reduce stress,
TS: Which I think is a really important point in Come Together, you emphasize the importance of the relationship status to our ability to center pleasure, meaning the quality of our relationship that we can’t just have this terrific pleasurable experience in a relationship that’s filled with rage and hatred.
EN: Yeah, it has been a surprisingly controversial aspect. So I talk about the three characteristics of couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term, and the number one characteristic is that they are friends, they admire and trust each other, and it turns out a lot of people truly were raised to believe that sexual desire and friendship can’t coexist. This is like men and women can’t be friends, is because sexual desire is sort of antithetical to friendship. So for me to say that liking your partner matters more than wanting your partner is it’s a really big shift in how you think about how sex functions in a relationship.
TS: Tell me underneath that statement, because I understand personally, but I can also hear the people who are like, what liking is more important than wanting? What’s the science behind that or what backs that up in your research?
EN: It’s a combination of a whole lot of factors. One, when you talk to people who have great sex, the best research, there’s a book called Magnificent Sex by Peggy Klein Plots and Dana Mayard, and they were working with the Peggy as the lead of the optimal sexual experiences research group. She’s interviewed dozens of people who self-identify as having extraordinary sex. And so the obvious questions are what is this extraordinary sex like and how do you get to be a person who has it? And the characteristics of extraordinary sex are all about vulnerability, authenticity, connection, exploration. Again, desire barely scrapes into the top 10 characteristics, and they only really include the top eight characteristics as these are the universal commonalities of great sex. So liking your partner is a necessary prerequisite for the kind of courage that it takes to be vulnerable and allow yourself to be seen fully, not just physically seen fully, though we are talking about turning on the lights and looking into each other’s eyes and letting your bodies be seen and letting the things that happen to your body as you’re becoming aroused be witnessed by another person.
That takes a lot of courage in a world where we have been taught that those things are shameful. It’s also that our brains literally shift how they interpret any given sensation depending on the state that they are in. So neurologically switching away from just, we know from the descriptive research, we know neurologically that the wanting system, the desire system, the dopaminergic, oh, I want to go get that system, is this vast network that spans all throughout the brain, whereas the liking system, the oh, oh, that feels good. They’re just these tiny hedonic hotspots that overlap in places of the big wanting system, and they only interpret sensations as being pleasurable when the context in which they’re receiving that stimulus is favorable. So some of the contextual characteristics that influence whether or not our brain is willing to interpret a sensation as pleasurable, your partner touches your arm, is that going to feel good or not?
It depends partly on your own wellbeing. When I’m stressed, I don’t want to be touched. There’s nothing, no matter how glorious my partner is, and no matter how our relationship is, my brain is just going to feel irritated by touch when I’m stressed out, which people vary in that. For some people the touch is going to be not irritating, it’s going to feel really good and helpful. So your own wellbeing, your partner characteristics, not just how they look, but in particular a sense of pride that like, oh, this is, I get to be a partner to this person, this person is, I get to be connected. I’m so lucky that I get to have this person. And then there’s the relationship characteristics and key among those characteristics of course are admiration like, wow, when you watch your partner interacting with their work colleagues or you watch your partner move the lawn or do any of the things in life, like I feeling proud of them and trust is absolutely essential.
And I’ll just very briefly say that trust as Sue Johnson would describe it is are you there for me, a RE emotionally accessible? Are you emotionally accessible to me? Are you emotionally responsive to me and are you emotionally engaged with me? Will you turn toward in particular, my difficult feelings with kindness and compassion, with empathy and maybe even a sense of play? That’s trust is when you show up with a difficult feeling and your partner says yes and turns towards you and attends to you. So relationship characteristics absolutely essential. Then there’s just other life circumstances. You’re worried about money, you’re worried about the kids, you’re worried about the state of the world, you’re worried. My favorite contextual characteristic is called ludic factors, and ludic comes from the same root word as ludicrous and it just means to play. Play from a neurological perspective is the universal mammalian emotional system of friendship. Play is any behavior we engage in just for the sake of it because everybody involved wants to and there is a nothing at stake. So if you feel free to roll around like puppies to lick any body parts to engage in any sort of creativity and exploration, whatever idea pops in your head given the enthusiastic participation of everybody else who’s there, that sense of play and freedom is a key characteristic of a context where your brain is going to be ready to interpret a sensation as being pleasurable.
TS: What do you think about the connection between playing in ways that aren’t sexual and then sexual play?
EN: Because play, it shows up in every domain of human life. It is one of the tragedies of late capitalism that we believe that play is frivolous for adults. It is absolutely essential for our mental health because it is, like I said, the motivational system of friendship. It is how we build bonds with each other, and when you give yourselves permission to play in other domains of life which maybe are less wrought with social and cultural shoulds, it helps to build that muscle. It helps to give you practice and permission to explore sex with play also.
TS: Okay. I want to pick up on one thing because you were saying the evidence is there that if you’re going to be in a long term sexually fulfilling relationship, it is very helpful to be friends. That’s one character. It sure is, and that there are other main characteristics, and I don’t think we got there. I think, and I want you to, but I also think there’s this overarching idea that our sex drive or interest in sex, it’s going to diminish as we age with our long-term partner. And it sounds to me like you’re saying that is very much a myth that we don’t have to buy into.
EN: So it may be true that the characteristic of the standard narrative of life under white supremacist, cis, hetero, patriarchal, rapidly exploitative late capitalism, it might be that the narrative of our lives is structured in a way that means that early on in a relationship it’s easy to prioritize pleasure and later in life as we are overwhelmed by responsibilities and other domains of life, that context shrinks the space that pleasure can have in our life, but that is cultural. We can as an act of resistance against late capitalism, say, no, no pleasure belongs in my life. Pleasure is a part of my health and wellbeing. Pleasure is my birthright as Joanie Blank used to say, and I am going to create the time and protect the energy to prioritize. This is actually the second characteristic of couples who sustain a strong sexual connection, which is that they prioritize pleasure.
They decide that sex contributes something unique and important to their lives, and so they protect the time and energy that it takes to have sex because there’s a lot of things we can be doing in our lives. We could be taking care of our kids, we could be going to school, we could be going to our job, we can be protesting any number of things. We could be taking care of our own parents and other family members. God forbid, we just want to watch some TV and take a nap. Why would we invest time and energy in erotic play when we could just be watching parks and recreation? What makes sex more worthwhile than just watching your favorite TV show for the 78th time? That question, what is it that I want, what I want sex, and also what is it that I like when I like sex will help to give you an understanding of why prioritize sex, why protect time and energy for it? Because the deal with prioritization, the reason it’s so difficult is it means there has to be something that is less worth your time and energy than pleasure. What are you willing to get rid of to create the time and energy for sex?
TS: Okay, that’s the second characteristic. Let’s just get out the third characteristic,
EN: Third characteristic, and they sort of go in order of difficulty. One friends two prioritize not easy because it requires bucking capitalist pressure. And the third one is that you recognize you’ve been following somebody else’s rules for how your sex life is supposed to work. For example, you’ve been believing the desire is the thing and you’re supposed to be trying to get to desire and you stop. You decide that you’re going to understand what’s truly your own sexual pleasure, what’s truly your partner sexual pleasure, and what is truly this partnership’s sexual pleasure at this season in your relationship and you prioritize whatever is true for you regardless of anybody else’s opinion about what is heavy air quotes supposed to be true.
TS: Now, early in our conversation you mentioned this notion of scheduling sex as part of setting up a context that could be filled with acceleration and not filled with the brakes and that we would talk about that and there’s a quote from you that made me laugh and that it’s easier to have sex than it is to talk about sex. So many people. I want to talk about why it’s so hard to talk about sex and why so many people are like, look, I’ll do anything except have a conversation with my partner about scheduling a sex date. I mean, we’re not going to schedule it. It should just happen. If it’s not just happening, then we’re working on our sex life,
EN: Then we don’t want it enough if it doesn’t just spontaneously happen.
TS: You’ve heard it all. Are these people not busy? I feel like people are busy, right?
EN: Indeed. I’m busy. If it’s not on my calendar, it does not happen, which is why I have to protect time and space for it. And people often say, if you have to do it that way, you don’t want it enough or your partner doesn’t want you enough or there’s something wrong with the relationship. My frame is if my partner is willing to protect to cordon off time and to protect energy just for sharing erotic pleasure, that means that it is that much of a priority and what could be sexier than someone being like, I am not going to do anything else during this time. This is a time where all we’re going to focus on is exploring each other’s bodies with pleasure and a sense of play. That’s hot to me, but it doesn’t work for everybody. If you schedule sex and you feel a sense of doom or dread, scheduling is not for you probably if you feel a sense of do more dread, the sex you see on your calendar is not sex that you enjoy. So figuring out what kind of sex is worth having is the starting place. What could be happening in that window of time where you’d look forward to it instead of feeling a sense of dread. Does that make sense?
TS: It does. What I’m thinking through are what the obstacles are for people when they say, I’m going to go sit with my partner and we’re going to have this conversation, and one that occurs to me is just a fear of rejection, and that’s very painful. I don’t want to be, I’d rather not bring something up than be rejected.
EN: Yeah, just preemptively be like, this isn’t going to happen.
TS: It’s just preemptively shut that down because rejection’s so painful, especially in such a vulnerable place.
EN: And when people, this is why those questions, what is it that I want when I want sex and what is it that I like when I like sex are so important and also what is it that I don’t want when I don’t want sex? And what is it that I don’t like when I don’t like sex are such important questions because when you sit down, if you’re going to try and have the conversation and the goal with a conversation about sex is for it to be an invitation to greater closeness, and the fear is that it’s going to result in more distance either because one of you hurts the other person’s feelings or because you ask for something or say that you want or something and your partner is shocked and appalled and can never look at you the same way again.
Of course, it’s difficult to talk about sex. We don’t get taught, I didn’t get taught how to talk about sex until I got an actual master’s degree in sex therapy. That’s how I learned to talk about sex. Not everyone’s going to do that. When I did an event with Ian Kerner, the author of She Comes First and so tell me about the last time you had sex. He mentioned that it is actually really common and helpful for couples who are just starting to sort of untangle the knots they’ve discovered in their sexual connection to come in just for a very small number of sessions because a sex therapist is professionally trained in how to talk about these things and can coach you in how to have the conversation so that it is a process that creates greater closeness rather than a process that breaks the relationship apart.
If therapy is not for you, I really recommend a meta conversation. Like if you’re not ready to have the conversation about sex, have a conversation about the conversation about sex. I would really love for our sexual connection to maximize its potential or to be all that it can be, and I’m just really worried about talking about it with you because I’m worried that you’re going to reject me. I’m worried that we’re not going to be able to be honest with each other. I’m worried that I’m going to say something that’s going to horrify you or make you feel pressured to do something that you don’t want to do, and maybe there’s a safety net we can build for each other to make sure when we talk about these things, we stay feeling safe and connected with each other.
TS: I want to ask you a real beginner’s mind question here, Emily, because as you’re talking about our sexual flourishing or erotic flourishing, you are bringing forward what makes good communication, trust, admiration, connectivity between people, people who can talk about, and what about that person who’s listening? And I’ve never really understood this, but I’ve thought maybe it’s like that for some people who says, look, I don’t need all that to have a healthy erotic life. I like sex. It could be, I don’t even need to know who the person is, et cetera. Do you know what I mean? It’s more anonymous. It’s not all this connectivity stuff.
EN: Yeah.
TS: Why is Emily leading with all this mushy trusted admiration nonsense?
EN: Because, but honestly, it’s because it’s a book about sex and long-term relationships and sex and long-term relationships is not for everyone. And if the kind of sex that really brings you the most pleasure and feels safest and most playful, then read Come as Your Are, not Come Together basically. And people do vary tremendously, but even if you are that kind of person where you don’t need this deep connection with a partner, it could well be that your partner does. And just because you don’t need it doesn’t mean it’s not acceptable for your partner to need it and that it’s not going to be necessary for you to create a context that allows your partner’s brain to get to where your brain sort of already is all the time, collaborate with your partner. The couples who sustain strong sexual connections collaborate to create a context that allows both of their brains to interpret the world as a safe, fun, sexy, pleasurable place. And for some people it’s almost any context is that context. And for some people, a pretty narrow band of contexts is that context
TS: In Come Together, you write about how you went through, I’ll just call it the way I would name it, like a dry spell in your own long-term relationship and that you had to really do some deep work to discover a way through. Tell us a bit about that and your own discovery of your way through.
EN: Yeah, so I’ve been talking mostly about when people struggle with desire and it’s because they don’t like the sex they’re having. That was not my situation. My situation was one of the benefits of doing what I do for a living is I’m great at communicating about sex mostly. And good communication gets you good sex, great communication gets you great sex. And so my relationship was real good and I had never experienced any difficulty until I started writing Come as You Are, and you might think it would be really sexy to think and write and talk and read about sex all the time. Turns out, no. I was so stressed out by the process of writing the book that I lost all interest in actually having any sex with a certain special, someone. I finished the book, things got better, and then I went on and book tour and it got way worse because it wasn’t just about me being stressed out, it was about us being separated.
And when you get separated, there’s a sort of emotional gunk accumulation that happens. And so this gunk was accumulating between us, and I would follow my own advice that I give in Come as You Are. You put your body in the bed, you live, let your skin touch your partner’s skin. And instead of my body going, oh, right, I like this, I would cry and fall asleep. So I needed more advice, which is what led me to the Google Scholar search of how to couple sustain a strong sexual connection. And what ended up being most important for me was alas, some of the densest affective neuroscience I’ve ever put into a book. It takes me two chapters to explain it, but the super quick version is that there are seven primary process emotions. One of them is lust. So if we think of each of these seven primary process emotions universal to the mammalian brain, let’s think of these as spaces that you can be in.
And let’s imagine that those emotional spaces are related to each other like a floor plan. I want to get to the lust space. If I want to get to lust, I need to understand which of these emotional spaces I’m in, how to get out of it and follow a pathway that gets me into lust when it turns out, and it took me months of therapy to figure this out when I would get into the bed and let my skin touch my partner’s skin and burst into tears, that’s because I was in the fear space. I was anxious, I was stressed out. I was so worried about whether or not I was doing it right, whether or not I was doing enough, all the mental chatter that we’re all familiar with. And when I let my skin touch my partner’s skin, my body would go, like I said, when I’m stressed out, it doesn’t feel good to me at first, but I would stay because I’m trying to do a thing here.
And eventually my brain would interpret the sensation of my partner’s body as, oh, I’m safe now because our relationship was strong enough, my body could be like I’m connected to someone with whom I am safe with whom I don’t need to worry about whether I am doing it right or doing enough. And I would burst into tears as a way to release the stress, move my way through the stress response cycle out of the fear space in my brain. Okay, great. I’m out of the fear space. Does that dump me into the lust space? No. It dumps me into the fact that my body is physically exhausted, which is why I would fall asleep, because what my body needed most at that time was the rest. And I would wake up with a cup of tea on my bedside table and man, that cup of tea goes a long way.
It means I know that my partner was not having difficult feelings about the fact that I cried and fell asleep and instead was being really supportive, which improves our sense of connection, which made it easier the next time. So the emotional floor plan is what helped me figure out, because I was in a relationship where I knew if I could just get there, wherever there was, and it turns out it’s the lust space in my brain, then I would like the sex that I could get to. But I was so trapped. I was so stuck in this fear space and I didn’t know how to get out of fear and then rest my body. And then it turned out I needed to go through the play space. And we’ve talked about plays the mammalian motivational system of friendship where there’s nothing at stake. My partner is a cartoonist. He writes jokes for a living. He goes to the play space very naturally. And me learning to spend more time in play space has been maybe the most single important change that has happened in our sex life as a result of me reading a whole bunch of affective neuroscience.
TS: Thanks for sharing that. And I think it’s helpful for people to see that even with all the work you did, that you had further breakthroughs to go. Which brings me to a question that person listening who says, oh God, really my sex life is work. I need to do work I don’t want, this is one part of my life. I don’t want it to be relational work.
EN: Really, I think of it as a hobby. If you prioritize it, you prioritize it because it matters to you. It contributes something valuable to your life. It’s not drudgery. This is not something you’re doing because if you don’t do the dishes, then critters move into your kitchen. It just doesn’t matter how you feel about the dishes. They just have to get done. Sex is not like that. I often use a garden metaphor to talk about sexuality and in the beginning of a relationship, you’re sort of going to visit each other’s gardens, but when you’re in a long-term relationship, you are collaborating to cultivate a shared garden. And yeah, there’s going to be seasons when everybody is too busy and the garden gets overgrown with weeds and man, you show up, you’re like, I want to work on the garden again. And it’s just like a shambles and all your favorite pleasure plants are being stifled by the weeds that have grown in.
And why on earth would you do all that work? Because there’s something satisfying and beautiful that gets created when you collaborate with your partner to create the sexual connection that you are choosing for yourselves. Maybe it’s work. I would say it’s for sure effortful and there will be phases in a relationship where it is not effortful when it just happens. And there will be phases when it’s really effortful. And whether that effort feels like work depends on how you feel about it. Is it because drudgery, if your sex is drudgery, don’t have that sex. I want to live in a world where nobody ever has sex they don’t like. I want to live in a world where all of us only ever have sex that we enjoy. And here’s the difficult part. I want us not even to feel bad for not having the sex we don’t like, we just have sex that we enjoy. Is the process of creating a context where our brains will interpret sensations as sexy? Is it effortful? Yeah. We don’t live in a world where we have lots of permission, much less energy and time to enjoy pleasure. We get told that it’s frivolous, that it’s selfish, that it’s a waste of time. We should be spending that time doing literally anything else. It takes the decision that pleasure is worth the effort to create, to protect your time and energy, to devote it to sharing sexual connection.
TS: So two people come together. They’ve been in a long-term relationship. They’re going to talk about this, they talk about talking about it, and they start talking about it. And one person is, okay, let’s schedule our pleasure time five times a week. And the other person is, let’s start with once a month. And they’re already now off to like, wow, we just see this so differently. We have a different sense of prioritizing this. What would you suggest to such a couple, therapy?
EN: I mean you probably can’t. If it’s as simple as how many times a month are we going to try this? That’s a simple way to solve that is just negotiate to somewhere in the middle. But the thing is it’s windows for pleasure. When someone feels obliged or obligated or required to show up however often for something that is not a context where their brain is going to find it easy to enjoy pleasure. So they may show up for the daily pleasure windows and be like, I’m only here because you told me I had to. And their brain is just not going to get to pleasure. And so it’s counterproductive.
TS: And what happens in the conversation which is also going to be counterproductive to pleasure, somebody says, here’s what I really fantasize about what would pleasure me? And the other person is like, absolutely not.
EN: Yep, that does happen. Sometimes there’s such a thing as sexual incompatibility and again, therapy because it could be that there is some reason absolutely not, is an absolutely not. For example, if you were just raised to believe that some things are acceptable sexually and other things are not acceptable sexually, that’s all just other people’s opinions about how you’re supposed to live your sexual life. And a lot of that stuff can be excavated, and that’s ludic factors feeling permission to play and try things. And there’s usually a smaller scale version of what someone wants to try that can be a beginner, get your toes wet experience that they might be able to just see whether or not it’s what they’re interested in. And also sometimes people are just incompatible sexually.
TS: Now I want to ask you a question that’s occurring to me in our conversation because when I talked about biological joy of sex without the context of relationship, you said that’s what my first book Come as You Are, is about this book coming together is about sexual fulfillment and long-term relationships. And I’m curious if you, from the research you’ve done, have found that there’s any inherent value, real intrinsic value in long-term relationships versus like, no, look, we hit our, it stopped getting sexually interesting after X number of years time to move on versus no, let’s do this crucible work. Let’s work through work.
EN: I’m saying that our trust and admiration issues, and just to underscore, you gave a great suggestion, I thought about turning annoyance into admiration, saying that how long-term relationships, the thing that attracted you to someone could be the thing that ends up annoying you about them, but then you can remember how it links to that thing that you absolutely love about them. And that was all my worst traits are directly tied to all my best traits.
TS: And I’m just curious, do you think there’s some kind of intrinsic value in long-term relationships that’s worth coming together in the ways you describe?
EN: Yeah, this is not an evidence-based answer. This is just a gut level. I find it valuable for me to consistent. It took me 15 years of therapy to get to the point where I could fall in love with someone as spectacular as the person I married. I often say that I got really lucky, but in truth, I earned him through, as you say, the crucible. And I continue to be challenged to grow as a person in order to be the person I know he deserves in a relationship. And I like myself better when I am working toward being a person who is worthy of his love.
That’s not true for everyone. Not everybody wants to go there. One of the, a relatively superficial example is when people talk about not being attracted to their partner anymore. The deal with a long-term relationship, when you sign up in particular for the till death to us part version of a long-term relationship you’re signing up for, their body’s going to change, my body’s going to change. We’re going to stay with each other and cherish the opportunity to watch each other’s bodies change over time. And when people tell me they’re not attracted to their partner anymore, it is rarely the case that they’re purely not physically attracted to their partner. It’s that when they look at their partner, they’re seeing that person through the lens of accumulated emotional gunk, the frustrations and unresolved conflict and disappointments about their way, their partner turned out not to be the person that they imagined they were at the beginning of the relationship before they fully got to know them. They’re not attracted because the partner is distorted by all of this emotional gunk. When you can clear away the gunk and see the person for who they truly are and that person is admirable and trustworthy and shows up when you need them, then they’re attractive to you. It’s not about how they actually look. It’s how you feel about the whole human. When you feel good about the whole human, you stay attracted to them. Does that make sense?
TS: It does. It makes a lot of sense.
EN: And that’s not true for everybody. It turns out there are some people who, for them what attraction means, the only thing it means for them is that my partner conforms to a culturally constructed aspirational beauty ideal so that when I have them with me, I know that I have a partner other people will be attracted to. And if my partner stops conforming to the culturally constructed aspirational aesthetic ideal, then I no longer have someone who I know other people will be attracted to. And it was other people’s attraction to my partner that made me feel like I was acceptable because I had the toy that everyone covets and that makes me a valuable person. If that’s all attraction is in a person’s life, then it’s not about the person. It’s about having someone whose attractiveness to others gives you a sense of self-worth.
TS: You talked about the bikini industrial complex. It was the first time I’d heard that phrase when I was reading Come Together and I laughed.
EN: My sister invented that because she’s a coral conductor and she teaches college students, all of whom have been trained that bellies are supposed to be flat. And if you try it, bellies are not flat. They’re built to be round and to flex a lot as you breathe. And if you try to hold your belly and make it flat, you can’t breathe. And if you can’t breathe, you can’t sing. So she went on a tear with her choir about the bikini industrial complex, lying to them about how the shape their bellies are supposed to be. Soften your belly, let it be round so that you can breathe so that you can sing.
TS: And you mentioned earlier in our conversation that there are evidence-based ways that we can relate to our own bodies. And as I’m reflecting on the aging body that I have and that my partner has, but in relating to my own aging body, what are those evidence-based ways that we can be loving and not let body image get in our way of our pleasure?
EN: Yeah, my favorite, and maybe the one for which there’s the strongest evidence is actually from a syllabus called The Body Project, where you stand in front of a mirror as naked as you can tolerate, and you look at what you see there and you write down everything you see that you like. And of course, what’s the first thing that’s going to happen in your head? You’re going to be flooded with all the things that you have been told. You are supposed to feel critical of the things that are wrong with your body, your imperfections, your floss. Sure, you can have those self-critical thoughts literally any other time right now, what you’re going to do is you’re going to write down what you like. If it is your kneecaps, break kneecaps, if it is your spirit, because that’s what you see in your eyes, that’s write that down.
If it is your fingernails, write that down. And then you’re going to do the same thing again tomorrow and you’re going to do it the next day and you’re going to do it the next day. And gradually you’re going to shed all of those things that you have been taught are wrong with your body and begin to see it for the working miracle that it genuinely is. And as you build up your ability to see your body for the miracle that it is, you build up a kind of immunity to those outside cultural messages that tell you that there are parts of you that do not belong.
I go a little further than some people are willing to go with this. I’m all for just body acceptance, body neutrality. If you can get just to a place where you’re not sending hateful, disparaging messages to any of your body parts, great. But I genuinely believe that all human are beautiful by virtue of their being human bodies the same way. Every tree is beautiful. Every river is beautiful. You can hear my cat. Every cat is beautiful, every dog with its teeth removed and its tongue hanging out is beautiful because it is a body and it is a life. So with a practice like the mirror exercise, you begin to see the beauty that is being alive truly like this. Even I, so I’ve been going through perimenopause it, it’s been years already and it will not stop and it’s torture. And I also have lung covid, which are aspects of illness and aging that have been really confronting for me.
And even I, after all the work that I have done, all the work have had to confront a lot of internalized ableism around what my body is capable of and messages that I have been subconsciously sending myself of what my body should be able to do and feeling that my body was getting in the way of me being able to live my life. And the reality is, my body is the way. There is no life without this body and the kinder and more compassionate I can be with it, the gentler I can be with my own body as it is right now, the less my breaks are going to get hit, the less that stuff is going to interfere with my ability to access pleasure in every domain of my life.
TS: Just to ask a question about this exercise, what if when a person’s looking in the mirror and they see something about their body that really disgusts them, I realize they’re just supposed to write down something you like again and again. But what do they do with that feeling of like, holy God, that’s ugly when that comes up
EN: For this exercise? You set that aside. There’s a decluttering expert I really like named Dana K White, who talks about leaving all the most difficult things for last. You make the easy decisions first. You look for trash. There’s always trash. Get rid of trash. You look for things that are just like in the wrong place. They have a space and they’re just not in that for whatever reason. You do the easy stuff first. And as you clear away the easy stuff, it changes how you see what’s left. All those difficult decisions feel different when you’ve cleared away the easy stuff. So as you build up your affection for the parts of your body that are easy to love, that shifts. If you imagine that every part you learn to see love like your hands and your elbows and your shoulders, imagine every body part you learn to see with love is glowing gold. That’s going to shine a different light on the part of yourself that you find really difficult to love and accept. It’s going to become easier as you love the easier parts.
TS: Alright, Emily, I have one last thing I’d love to talk with you about. It’s a big topic, but we could perhaps talk about it briefly, which is in preparing for this conversation, I learned that in 2021 you were diagnosed with autism and you’ve been very forward about talking about your experience in different online forums. And what I’m curious about is how that diagnosis came about and how it’s informed you about your own unique brilliance, which as I started our conversation, I said, I’m one of your evangelists now because you’ve helped me in a way that no other sex educator has.
EN: Oh my gosh, thank you so much. Writing books is agony, so there’s no such thing as hearing too often. The work you have done has helped me because writing books requires a lot of lying on the kitchen floor and crying. So finding out that it was worth it, it helps somebody every single time. It fills me with, I get warm in my heart, Les. So I was diagnosed in 2021. I have had the same therapist since 2008. And a few times between 2008 and 2020, she had sort of wondered out loud, have you ever thought you might be on the spectrum? And we would both go, nah, because we both had a stereotype in our heads about boys who were obsessed with trains. Honestly, we just didn’t understand what autism was. But when the pandemic hit, my response to it was so atypical, so different from all her other clients that it came up again. And then I watched Douglas Hannah Gadsby’s comedy special about autism. And I was like, that’s really funny, but that’s not about autism. That’s just my life.
And then I saw the Pixar short loop, which is this little six minute cartoon about an autistic boy that is a non-autistic boy and a non-speaking autistic girl in a canoe. Her name’s Renee. And at first the boy is like, I don’t know how to communicate with this person, but she uses her phone, she uses emojis in her phone to communicate, and they start getting along and they start exploring sensations together because sensations are a thing for people on the spectrum. But then she gets triggered by a very loud motorboat and she rose the canoe to the shore, flips it upside down and hides underneath it, screaming. And there’s a scene of this boy sitting next to the canoe having no idea what to do with this screaming, panicking girl who can’t explain what’s happening. And he says, you’re intense, and I don’t know what to do, but I’m going to sit here and wait until you can tell me what we should do.
And I saw the two of them and I was like, oh, I am both of them as a high masking. And I didn’t know that masking was a thing, a high masking autistic person. I am both the melting down, screaming child, hiding under a canoe. And I am the little kids sitting there watching, going, I don’t know what this is, but we’re just going to wait and you let me know when you’re ready. I have had uncountable experiences where inside I am melting down and my mask is just like, we’re going to cover this up. And I dunno what’s going on. So that’s when I was like, oh shit. If that’s what autism is, then I’m autistic. And so I signed up and I spent several thousand dollars in many hours undergoing comprehensive neuropsych evaluation and knocked it out of the park. It was not close, it was not ambiguous. My neuropsychologist actually said, I’m happy to include any notes you have about this diagnosis, but I am not going to change it.
TS: And how would you say to the second half of my question that it has informed, if you will, and as a factor and the brilliance and the breakthrough nature of your work?
EN: I think it, well, one, because sex is my special interest, I can stay focused on it. One time I had lunch with another writer and she was like, oh, it’s so hard. I can barely get three or four hours in. And I was like, I can sit down at a desk and 12 hours disappears. So part of it is simply that I have this persistence, which I have always known is true about myself. And it also because I don’t process social rules the way other people do, I do think that that has helped me to understand the research and explain it to people in a way that is not bound by the typical socially constrained ideas of how sexuality works. And I would
TS: And I would also say to help us as your readers and listeners break out of the constraints of the social rules, the various imperative.
EN: Yeah, because the way I live is like, why do we have to live? That’s true. Why is that? Why is that a rule? Basically, I ask it to you, do you have to follow that rule? Do you want to follow that rule? Because you don’t have to follow that rule. That rule is invented by somebody. Mostly that rule is invented by the patriarchy. And are you sure you want to be following the Patriarchy’s rules? Because what if you didn’t? How about that? What if not that you got to decide exactly how and when you got to be touched? What if that
TS: Emily Nagoski, author of the new book Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections. I have so enjoyed meeting you and meeting your work. Thank you so much.
EN: Thank you. This was a lot of fun. I hope it wasn’t too much.
TS: Was not too much at all. It was just right. Very pleasurable.
EN: Oh, hooray. For me too.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundtrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
