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Reflect with Juliane – M. Sc. Psychology and Systemic Counsellor
When couples talk about wanting a better sex life, the conversation often turns quickly towards frequency: How often should we be having sex? Who initiates? Why don’t we do it as much as we used to?
But good sex is about much more than frequency. From a systemic perspective, sexuality happens between two people who bring their bodies, histories, identities, attachment needs, expectations, insecurities and relationship patterns into the bedroom.
Laurie Watson’s Wanting Sex Again reflects this complexity. Rather than treating desire as something we either have or do not have, she explores the emotional, physical, relational and psychological factors that can interfere with it – including closeness and distance, orgasm and pleasure, seduction, body image, everyday strain and sexual communication.
So what actually helps couples maintain – or rediscover – satisfying sexuality over time?
Dr Sue Johnson’s work on attachment and Emotionally Focused Therapy helps us understand why emotional safety matters so much for physical intimacy. Sexuality makes us vulnerable. We allow another person close to our body while also exposing something deeply personal about wanting, being wanted and being accepted.
Sex can therefore carry attachment questions that are much bigger than the sexual act itself: Do you want me? Can I reach you? Am I safe with you? Will you respond to me?
When a relationship feels secure, partners can often tolerate moments of sexual mismatch without experiencing them as a threat to the entire relationship. But when there is already emotional distance, sex can become loaded with reassurance and fear. One partner may need sex to feel that we are okay, while the other needs to feel that we are okay before wanting sex.
That difference matters.
Feeling emotionally connected does not automatically create desire. Esther Perel describes an important tension in long-term relationships: love often thrives on security, familiarity and togetherness, while erotic desire can also benefit from separateness, imagination, novelty and discovery.
David Schnarch approaches something similar through differentiation: our ability to remain ourselves while being emotionally close to another person.
Can I be close to you without losing myself?
If I spend much of my relationship monitoring what you need, adapting to you and trying not to disappoint you, I may eventually lose contact with what I want. I know how to keep you happy, but do I still know what excites me, what interests me, what I enjoy and what I desire?
Sometimes the way back to one another is therefore not to become even more fused. It is for each partner to become more fully themselves.
This is why our sexual selves cannot be completely separated from the rest of our identity. Reconnecting with sexuality may involve reconnecting with ourselves outside the bedroom too: friendships, hobbies, exercise, creativity, work, personal goals, time alone and the freedom to make our own choices.
When we see our partner doing something they love – confident, engaged, laughing with friends, creating something or completely absorbed in an activity – we may suddenly see them differently again. Perel describes this experience of seeing our partner “in their element”: for a moment, they are not simply my partner. They are another person, separate from us, whom we can look at again with curiosity.
Sometimes desire grows in the space between us, not only in the closeness between us.
Many couples talk about how often they have sex but surprisingly little about the sex they actually have. What do you enjoy? What turns you on? How do you like to be touched? How do you like sex to begin? What makes you feel desired? What do you tolerate but not particularly enjoy?
Watson places considerable emphasis on sexual communication and seduction. Partners often have expectations about how they want to be approached without ever communicating them. Perhaps you need flirting. Perhaps affectionate touch before sexual touch. Perhaps you want to hear explicitly that your partner desires you. Perhaps you need much more time before your body begins to respond.
Does your partner actually know how you like to be desired?
Saying, “I like this” requires vulnerability. Saying, “I actually don’t enjoy this” can require even more. Yet good sex depends on being able to reveal ourselves rather than expecting our partner to guess.
One particularly useful idea in Watson’s work is the importance of seduction. In long-term relationships, sex can become something that happens – or is supposed to happen – when we get into bed. But desire may need a much longer runway.
The erotic encounter might have started with a message in the afternoon, flirting while cooking dinner, affectionate touch without an immediate expectation, humour, anticipation or simply feeling noticed.
For many people, the psychological and emotional lead-up is already part of sex.
What happens between you during the day that makes you want to move towards each other later?
Sex becomes difficult when it starts to feel like an examination. Instead of experiencing what is happening, we begin monitoring ourselves: Am I attractive enough? Am I taking too long? Will I stay aroused? Will my partner orgasm? Am I doing this properly?
Performance anxiety can affect both partners. Men may feel responsible for maintaining an erection, lasting long enough or ensuring that their partner reaches orgasm. Women may worry about their appearance, whether they are becoming aroused quickly enough or whether they “should” orgasm.
The more attention moves towards performance, the harder it becomes to remain present with pleasure, sensation and connection.
Perhaps a more useful question is:
What would happen if neither of us had to prove anything here?
Not every sexual difficulty reflects a deeper relationship problem. Sometimes couples also need better information about bodies, arousal and pleasure.
Watson pays particular attention to female pleasure and orgasm and to understanding what actually works for an individual woman rather than assuming intercourse itself should automatically be satisfying. Research also suggests that penetration alone is sufficient for orgasm for only a minority of women, while many need or prefer additional clitoral stimulation.
But the larger message is not that there is one technique couples need to learn. Bodies are different.
Instead of asking, “Am I good at sex?”, we can ask:
“What works for you?”
Good sex is not something one partner successfully performs for another. It is something two people learn and create together. That requires enough safety to give feedback and enough openness to receive it.
Some couples become exceptionally good at maintaining harmony. They compromise quickly, suppress irritation and try not to disappoint one another. But intimacy also requires the ability to tolerate difference.
Sexual desire requires a person who can want something – someone who can choose, express a preference, say yes and also say no.
The goal is not more conflict. It is being able to say: This matters to me. I see this differently. This is what I want. And then remain connected.
If I cannot tell you what frustrates me outside the bedroom, it may be equally difficult to tell you what I want inside it.
Long-term relationships naturally become predictable. We know how our partner drinks their coffee, what they will order at a restaurant and sometimes even what they are about to say.
There is something beautiful about this familiarity. But eroticism also benefits from curiosity and discovery.
Maintaining our own interests, friendships, passions and experiences does not necessarily take us away from our relationship. Sometimes it gives us something new to bring back into it.
And novelty does not need to mean doing anything extreme. It can mean having sex at a different time, going somewhere together, changing the context, sharing a fantasy, slowing things down, dressing differently, flirting again or simply interrupting a routine that has become automatic.
The point is not novelty for novelty’s sake. It is curiosity.
What have we stopped discovering about one another because we assume we already know?
There is no final version of a couple’s sexual relationship. Bodies change. Parenthood changes us. Work, stress, illness, grief, ageing, menopause and other life transitions can change what we want and what our bodies need. Watson’s work emphasises this changing nature of desire across different stages of life.
A healthy sexual relationship therefore does not mean that sex remains effortlessly exciting forever. It means that when something changes, we can become curious rather than immediately assuming that something is wrong with us or with our relationship.
What has changed for you? What has changed for me? And what might we need now that we did not need five years ago?
Perhaps good sex in a long-term relationship ultimately requires two things that initially sound contradictory: enough connection to feel safe with each other, and enough selfhood to remain interesting to one another.
It grows in the space between:
“I am here with you.”
and
“I am still me.”
Laurie Watson – Wanting Sex Again: How to Rediscover Your Desire and Heal a Sexless Marriage.
Sue Johnson – work on Emotionally Focused Therapy, attachment and couple relationships.
Esther Perel – Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence.
David Schnarch – Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships.
This article is educational and does not replace individual medical, psychological or sex-therapy assessment. Changes in sexual desire, arousal or sexual functioning can also have physical, hormonal, medication-related, trauma-related or other health causes.
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