Emily Nagoski, PhD: On Maintaining Desire
Emily Nagoski is one of the most exceptional minds at work today on the science—and she would add, art—of sexual connection, intimacy, and arousal. Emily is brilliant and she’s also deeply human, using her own experiences in the world as the foundational ground for exploring relationship: This means that she’s not full of heady theory and diagnoses, but focused on what actually works to fuel desire—and bring it to fruition.
She’s the author of the mega bestselling Come as You Are, as well as a book called Burnout about the stress cycle that she co-authored with her twin sister, and now she brings us Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections, which is the natural evolution. While Come as You Are is a primer on how we all function as sexual creatures, Come Together explores what happens when you bring that into relationship—and try to establish and maintain a connection that can endure through seasons of, well, low interest.
She is full of ideas, principles, and methods for getting it going—including a core blueprint for determining what rooms are adjacent to your desire. I loved this book, I love Emily, and I loved our conversation, which we’ll turn to now.
MORE FROM THE EMILY NAGOSKI:
Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle
Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life
Watch Emily’s TED Talk
Emily’s Website
Follow Emily on Instagram
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: The last time I saw you was in New York City. I don't know if you even remember this with, Betty Dodson.
EMILY NAGOSKI: Yeah, it was like a day and a half before the pandemic started.
ELISE: Oh, that's right. It would have been January. Wild with good old Betty. I mean, sharing a stage with you two, although I was moderating, that was a life highlight. Yay, Betty.
EMILY: Oh, for me, to be able to get to meet Betty just a few months before she died was really thrilling.
ELISE: Oh, I didn't realize you guys had never met.
EMILY: No! Yeah, never.
ELISE: oh, well, a real passing the baton moment. So congrats on your next book. I mean, these tomes, clearly they take you a long time, but you are such an amazing synthesizer of Research, other thought leaders and therapists in this space, your own experience with people. So I know how hard it is to do this. Congratulations. Another masterpiece.
EMILY: Thanks.
ELISE: Does it get any faster?
EMILY: No, it gets slower. It gets harder. Every time. And every time, I'm like, I am never doing that again.
ELISE: Why do you think it gets harder?
EMILY: I was like, that is the last one.
ELISE: because the expectations are higher?
EMILY: Neil Gaiman says that you never know how to write books. You're always learning how to write the book you are currently writing. That book is teaching you how to write that book. And I absolutely have that experience that every book is entirely different to write. And every book is a separate emotional process, too. Like, for Burnout, I co wrote it with my sister originally because I thought it'll be easier if I have a co author. It wasn't. And it's not that collaboration is difficult. It's that the research we were reading about wellness ended up telling us like, the answer is not self care. The answer is love. The answer is love each other. The answer is connection. The answer is human beings need to be authentic and vulnerable with each other. And we were like, Oh, shit. Oh, no. I don't want that to be the answer. But like, we had to follow our own damn advice and undo four decades of having grown up in an alcoholic family of origin with both parents with significant mental health issues. And the rule in the house was like, you just don't talk about that. You do not talk about any of it. And we had to tell each other the stories from our childhood that we had never told each other before. Writing Burnout was hard, not because writing books is hard all by itself, though it is, but because we went through a process that resulted in me having a twin sister in my life for the first time ever, in the way that people imagine. Oh, you have a twin sister? That must be really nice. We never had that until, like, I have a sister now because of the process of writing Burnout. So even if no one ever read it. it would have changed my life for the better. Writing Come Together was also very hard, so this is a book about sustaining a strong sexual connection in a long term relationship. And the origin story of this book is that writing Come As You Are, my first book, was so stressful that here I am, this sex expert, writing a book about sex, I was so stressed that I lost any interest in actually having any sex with my partner, which was frustrating. And so I did what anybody would do, I turned to the peer reviewed research on how couples sustain a strong sexual connection. I learned a bunch of things that turned my brain inside out and completely contradicted everything everyone says about what sex and long term relationships is like and is supposed to be like. So I wrote a book about it and oh yes, writing this book was so stressful that I did indeed lose all interest in actually having any sex. But the good news is that at the end of this process, I had a hundred thousand word book about how to fix, how to find my way back to my partner after all the months of it being such a terrible struggle. So, in the same way that like, because of burnout I have a sister, because of writing Come Together, even though it was a struggle, it's now better than it ever has been in our 13 year relationship.
ELISE: I was thinking about this as I was reading your book, and all the ways that you walk head on into these ideas that we have about spontaneous desire, all things that we'll explore, but that are very corralling and make us all feel like What's normal and quote unquote, how am I failing? What's the rate? You know, I think so many of us subscribe to this idea that there's some magical number duration that will ensure a happy ongoing relationship, that there's some barrier, some like level, right, that we need to achieve. Otherwise, we're in trouble or we're healthy. So obviously you dispute and dispel all of that. But where did those ideas originally even come from? When did this become something that was pushed onto us as an imperative that needs to be met, like, where did this whole specter originate?
EMILY: It's complicated, but it's quite new.
ELISE: Yeah.
EMILY: When you read sex manuals from the early 20th century and even the middle of the 20th century, those books are still assuming that all the marriages are going to be heterosexual, and the women are mostly going to go along with sex that the husband wants to have so that he can be satisfied. And if she wants more sex than he does, she is a sex crazed monster who needs to get control of herself. And then the field of sex research turned into what it is. We had Kinsey and Masses and Johnson. And the Masses and Johnson model was the foundation for what is now modern sex therapy. Where we now have effective behavioral interventions for things like erectile dysfunction and lack of orgasm. And then in the 1970s came Helen Singer Kaplan, this genius feminist sex therapist who looked at all the couples in her practice, all of the other therapists in her practice, looking at the treatment failures. Who were the people they could not help? And it turned out the people they could not help were the people where the problem wasn't a lack of physiological response or pain. It was the couples who lacked desire and desire doesn't show up anywhere in Masters and Johnson's model of how sexual functioning works. So there was this feminist, essential revolution in the way we understood what healthy, normal sexual looks like and it started with desire. And then Over the next 20 plus years, what other feminist sex therapists like, for example, Rosemary Besson began to recognize was the desire comes in a lot of different colors. For some people, it is the spontaneous, out of the blue, woo, woo, woo, sexy, like, I would like to Erica Moe in the cartoonist to illustrator, Come As You Are, draws it as a lightning bolt to the genitals. Kaboom! You just want it. That absolutely is one of the normal, healthy ways to experience desire. But what we learned over the course of the 80s and 90s is that it is just as normal to experience what the researchers call responsive desire, where spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure.
Responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure, and that is also normal. And what it tells us is that what matters most is not the desire per se, but the pleasure. And since the 90s, especially as we get deep further into the 2000s, it's becoming clearer and clearer that the couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term are not the ones who have the spontaneous kaboom, can't wait to get their hands on each other. Esther Perel talks a lot about this model of marriage that we have where one person is going to meet all of our needs and fold it into this model, this very nothing to do with reality model, is that you're going to have a hot and heavy fallen in love stage of your relationship, where you can't wait to put your hands on each other and that can last a while. But eventually, things get harder at work, or you buy a fixer upper house, or you have kids, or things get complicated in your life, and that hot and heavy, fallen in love feeling sort of goes away, and your bodies age and change, and, you know, by the time you get to menopause, you're left to hold hands at sunset with your sexless seniority, apparently.
And this narrative I would say dates to approximately The 90s or 2000s, like, it's very new, because it used to be that people were taught that once you get to menopause, phew, you never have to worry about that again, and some people still feel that way, but I mean, you've got two options as the hot and heavy goes away, you can either accept it, phew, hooray, don't have to worry about that, or you can fight really hard, you can invest time and energy and money trying to keep the spark alive, to try and sustain your sexual connection the way it was when you fell in love, to have it be the same as when you fell in love, and that is the real myth, is that if it changes from the hot and heavy fall in love, that change means that something has gone wrong, and that is the central judgment that is making people look at their sex lives and feel like there's a problem when there super isn't any problem that could not be solved simply by Liking their sexuality the way it is instead of judging it as being a problem.
ELISE: I think that you glossed over it, but it's a really important part of your book, which is instead of fixating on spontaneous desire as we're culturally taught to do that sort of like, oh, I want it and I want it now. Let's like do it in the kitchen. Which haunt so many couples, right? Who feel like the absence of spontaneous desire invariably means that something's wrong and that they don't really want their partner in the same...
EMILY: ...that there's something wrong with one of the partners or that there's something wrong with the relationship. Oh, no Our relationship is doomed because I no longer am willing to tolerate the discomfort of the kitchen counter.
ELISE: Right. Exactly. But that you talk about how, which is so subtle, but it's quite revolutionary I think, To center pleasure. Once you make it less about desire and more about pleasure, you can have a much wider conversation about what that means and what's involved in delivering that. Can you elaborate a bit more?
EMILY: So one of the most important researchers here is Peggy Kleinplotz in Canada. She and her team interviewed dozens of people who self identify as having extraordinary sex. They have magnificent sex lives. And so of course some of the questions for them were, what is magnificent sex like? And you know what's not on that list? desire is not in like the top 10. It's in the extended list, but it's not in the top 10 things of what counts as a great sex life. And so Peggy took what she learned from what she calls the extraordinary lovers and uses it in her work with clients. So she talks about, if a couple comes in, partner A says, you know, I'm really sorry it would hurt my partner's feelings, but actually I'd be totally fine if we never had sex again. And assuming this is not an asexual person, Peggy says, well, so tell me about the sex you do not want. And They go on to describe sex that is, in Peggy's words, dismal and disappointing. And here is the completely obvious when you hear it, revelatory the first time you think it. It's not dysfunctional, not to want, sex you do not like. And so Peggy would say, you know, I rather like sex, but if that's the sex I were having, I would not want it either. So tell me, what kind of sex is worth wanting? When the sex is worth the time and effort that it takes to have it, the desire is beside the point. You like the sex you are having, and so your motivation to create a situation in your relationship, in your life, to get access to it, is intrinsic because you like it.
ELISE: Yeah.
EMILY: There is on the other side of it, as I said, the origin story of the book is that, I lost my interest in having any sex. And I was not that couple. I was not, I'd be happy if, I really missed sex. I missed that part of myself, I missed that part of our relationship, but I like, I couldn't get there. I lost the ability to can. I could not. I was stuck somewhere in my brain, and, I knew that if I could just get there, it would be so great, but I just can't get off the couch and out of my pajamas. In fact, I would try. I'd follow my own advice. My responsive desire advice is, like, you show up, you put your body in the bed, you let your skin touch your partner's skin, and your body wakes up and goes, Oh, right! I like this! I like this person! And, so I did that. I put my body in the bed, I let my skin touch my partner's skin, and I burst into tears, and then fell asleep. Clearly, I needed something else. And this is where what I call the emotional floor plan comes in, and it's two chapters in the book, so I'm not going to try to explain the whole thing, but basically, I was stuck in the emotional fear space in my brain, and I needed to teach my brain how to transition out of the fear space, which is a thing I know how to do, it's chapter one of Burnout, out of the fear space, And then find my way, follow a path that took me to the lust space in my brain. It took a few months for me to figure this out. It took therapy and talking with my partner to find out how to get out of the fear space, the stress, the overwhelm, the exhaustion, how to get out of that space and into, hey, sexy lady space. And that's the transition that did it for me. So if you're like, I'd be happy if I never had sex again, the solution is: what pleasure exists for you in the sexual space? Like, what kind of sex is worth having? And if you're like, I know it would be good if only I could, the solution is figuring out what is the context you can co create with your partner that makes it easier for your brain to get to the sexy space.
ELISE: I want to go into the floor plan with you in a second, but just going back to desire too, because you tell the story, and this was a major unlock for me because I think, in movies and TV, we're all fed this idea again of this spontaneous desire, a wave that people are going to ride to climax and conclusion and that spontaneous desire is enough, right? To get us there. And then you tell a story in the book about someone that you were should not have been having sex with in college and the conflation of wanting and desire and that how it felt really important to distinguish between wanting and liking and how sometimes interrupting the desire to reset the stage and Sounds like you had great sex...
EMILY: yeah, it was very fun. I remember it vividly.
ELISE: Yeah, because in a way you had reset the stage, you'd taken out that spontaneous desire by interrupting what was happening in a way that seems counterintuitive to everything that we've been fed, which is like, you gotta write it, write it, write it, write it. That's the only way to get into it. That really stuck in my mind as, oh, actually, again, going back to this idea of re centering pleasure rather than feeling like you're trying to hold on to a horse.
EMILY: Yeah, yeah. Oh, I'm so glad. That's a really embarrassing story, because like you said, like, that was a relationship I shouldn't have been in. That was a person I should not have been having sex with. He was still in love with his ex. Like, it was a bad situation. We were really good friends and we were destroying our friendship. Like, why were we doing this? Oh, you could not pay me to be in my 20s again, boy. We had had long conversations about how we're like, we're not going to do this anymore because, like, we want to be friends with each other, and we're destroying our relationship, and you're still in love with your ex, and then you behave like you're my boyfriend, and then I think you're my boyfriend, but you're still in love with your ex, and this is, no, no, we shouldn't do this anymore, and then one night, I'm over at his apartment and he starts like kissing on my neck and it like absolutely has that like, oh, I shouldn't, but it feels so good kind of energy that is very, like, desiry, very full of spontaneous, that wave, like you're talking about. And we had talked about this, we were not going to do this anymore. So I said, we said we were not going to do this anymore. We had very good reasons for not doing this anymore. What are you doing? And he said, well, what if just this one time?
And I was like, but all these X, Y, Z happens. And he says, well, what if I don't do the things I usually do afterward? What if we actually create change? And I believed that he could. And I went, yeah, right. And he got up to lock his apartment door. It took approximately three seconds. And in those three seconds, that like tension, the like wave just deflated. And all I was left with was like tingly pleasure in my body, but not that tense, like, Ooh, what do I do? I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, there was no more, I wanna. And fortunately, I had already started to learn about responsive desire and the importance of pleasure. And so I can imagine a lot of people, Man, especially if you're the kind of person who like, ugh, I have to talk about it, I kind of don't want to do it. Or if you really believe that like, riding that wave is like, the way to do it, you wouldn't keep going. You would stop there and be like, you know what, never mind.
ELISE: Yeah.
EMILY: And instead, I was like, drag me into your bedroom by my ankle. And it was fun. We ended up having a great time, and he did not revert to his old patterns and, like, we were able to maintain our friendship. We're still friends to this day. Yay. He does not know that I told this story in the book. He will probably never know. And I wanted to tell that story because there are so many important reasons why we have to pause when we're in the hot and heavy, this is really sexy, and also, Do you have a condom? And also, didn't you tell me you and your partner are monogamous? And also, I have to go put my diaphragm in. And also, we're not in a place where I feel safe enough. Right? There are all kinds of good reasons why saying let's pause this and talk about it and get rid of this ambivalence that I have. A lot of sex educators Want to be like, no, it doesn't kill the mood, it doesn't kill desire, like it, maybe it doesn't for everybody, it did for me, and I want to be honest with people about that, and look how it doesn't matter, because we avoided all of the potential unwanted consequences, and we got to have really fun sex, and all it took was believing that the pleasure was the thing that mattered.
ELISE: And then it recontextualizes it and reframes it as something that, yes, you need to talk about. And again, we're talking about long term, hopefully functioning relationships, whether they're monogamous or open or whatever happens to be happening, but that conversation is required, advanced planning, these things that we have demarcated as deeply unsexy or certainly not spontaneous, but that if we hold on to this fantasy that this is what it's supposed to be, where like your partner's taking their arm and swiping everything off of your desk, It's not gonna happen. And please don't do that. I don't want that. I like my desk as it is.
EMILY: Yeah, please don't do that, I don't want that, is a really important part of, like, it makes a good story, but in reality, like, somebody's gotta pick all that stuff up off the floor.
ELISE: Yes.
EMILY: Who's it gonna be? And we absolutely have absorbed these ideas that if you have to talk about sex, we have been trained that that automatically means that there's a problem. You shouldn't have to talk about it. You should just know somehow, instantaneously, spontaneously, and continuously, everything that your partner needs and wants without ever having to have a conversation about it. People find it harder to have a conversation about sex than to have sex, even if the conversation is with the person that they have sex with. And I think a big part of why it's so difficult is that we believe we've been trained that the conversation itself is a sign that there's a problem. I think another part of it is that we're really worried about hurting each other's feelings, which is like so wonderful and like soft and warm of us. And also our relationship needs to be able to tolerate these conversations, we need the skills to talk about it and be robust enough in our sexual selves to be able to have a conversation, especially to talk about change, because the whole, like, in a long term relationship necessarily implies that things are going to change, because things change over time. That is the one promise that we have in life, is that things are going to change. And being able to talk about it, is how you stay connected, even as the world around you and your bodies change.
ELISE: Mm. Totally. Before we get into The floor plan and is it 'yonks up' or is that how you say it?
EMILY: Jak Panksepp.
ELISE: Okay, I'll let you say it. I'm terrible pronunciation. But I just wanted to just quickly say too, because we jump past this. But because I thought this was also deeply clarifying that when you actually poll people about what they want, they want connection, shared pleasure, being wanted, and freedom. All beautiful things. What do you think we've been culturally programmed to believe should be on that list that's not?
EMILY: So the reason I started asking people what is it that you want when you want sex is because people thought that what they wanted when they wanted sex was sex, whatever that was. Like they wanted to put their body parts against somebody else's body parts and that's all there was to it. And humans have sex for so many reasons. We are not like most other animals. Almost all of the sex that we have is non reproductive. Even before there was the kind of reproductive technology we have now, almost none of our sex resulted in babies, basically the egg's only there for a little tiny window of time, and all the other times that you could be having sex, or all the other combinations of people who could be having sex is non reproductive, most of our sex is not about reproduction, it's about social stuff, so what is it that you want when you want sex, because you're not just being driven by, like, Salmon depositing their eggs at the bottom of the river. That's not what human sexuality is. So what is it that you want? People think the answer is orgasm. They think the answer is just sex. And instead, and those are the top four that you mentioned, people want connection with the other person. Because if all you wanted was orgasm, chances are you can do that by yourself. And if you can't do that by yourself, then there's whole books just about that. So connection. Shared pleasure, because we don't just want to rub our body parts against someone else. We want the someone else to enjoy the sensation of our body parts being rubbed together. That's an important part of what we want when we want sex with a partner.
And the experience of freedom is this quality of being able to close the door on all the other things that are so important in our lives. Maybe we've got kids to raise. Maybe we've got jobs to go to. Maybe we've got school to pay attention to, other friends and family to pay attention to. Sometimes we just want to watch an episode of The Golden Bachelor and then go to sleep. We're busy. So what we want when we want sex is not to have to do any of those other things and just pay attention to the pleasurable things that can happen in our bodies when we connect with each other in this way. But there's more. People want their identity affirmed. People want to know that these parts of themselves, that they have been trained their whole lives, are Not just unlovable, but maybe like disgusting and repulsive are actually fully lovable and desirable, right?
People want all kinds of things. They want to feel like they are being a good partner to their partner. There's all kinds of things people want. And when people talk about what is it that you want, When you want sex. And just as importantly, what is it that you don't want when you don't want sex? Instead of saying, why don't I want sex? Or why don't you want sex with me? It opens up a much more authentic check conversation that pulls it out of the realm of the power struggle of like who gets to gatekeep whose access to what and is just about like there's this experience that we share that we are interested in sharing in this relationship. Let's explore more deeply what this experience really is so we can make sure people's needs are getting met
ELISE: Hmm. Yeah. Beautiful.
EMILY: Without shame, without blaming anyone, and without guilt.
ELISE: Yeah. I love that. Not to take us off topic, but have you watched Naked Attraction on, well, with the Channel 4 show that's now on HBO Max?
EMILY: It's one of the TV shows that's included in Mediated Intimacy, which is the book from which I got the term, the sex imperatives, the desire imperative, the coital imperative, the sex imperative itself. They talk about what are the imperatives laid onto us culturally by the media, and Naked Attraction is one of the shows that they talk about.
ELISE: Oh, interesting. Do they have a negative view of it or a positive view? Or mixed.
EMILY: The book is a cultural critique, so they're critical of it, so the question is, what does it say or do about us as human beings that we are consuming people's consumption of another person's naked body when we watch that show? Like what's happening?
ELISE: I don't know. I was curious for your thoughts.
EMILY: puzzling.
ELISE: Well, it's an interesting show to watch. Yes, there's this certain level of separation. It's not at all as you would imagine it would be. It doesn't feel at all pornographic or particularly sexual. I find it interesting to watch because one, you know, to Betty Dodson, not that you're getting inside vulvas, but to just see the breadth of bodies is interesting. And to see people's reaction to those bodies is also interesting and often against type. So for people who haven't seen it, it's a dating show where they start by lift, people are in boxes, and then you move from the feet up. So it's about physical attraction rather than personality. But it seems to be a very affirming show for people who are competing on it. Like they all say almost invariably, I feel so much more confident. It's also really interesting because people will find like the most, they'll eliminate people because of like their poor Toenail hygiene or I mean, it's so random, Emily. I really want you to watch it. And I want to hear your feedback because it wasn't what I expected.
EMILY: It's been on my list.
ELISE: Yeah, I thought I would feel debased and upset about it. And instead I was like, Oh, this feels like a positive. But I want to know what you think.
EMILY: In mediated interviews, they're very clear, this is not sexy. There's nothing sexy about it. My thing is, like, I don't talk about physical attraction in the book, like, at all. Except in so far as I talk about like in this whole like happily ever after till death do you part type situation, the deal is your bodies are going to change over time and people can stay attracted to somebody's body over time, even though it is unrecognizable from what it was like when they first met because that body is the home of a human they adore our attraction to a person's body can be just like superficial something like your toenails are gross, or it can be here is the human whose life I have shared in our home for all these years and like their belly and their bum and their varicose veins and their scar from the surgery that saved their life all of it is so fucking hot because this is my person. So I don't talk about physical attraction in the book.
ELISE: yeah, and I will also say that naked attraction, it's very unsuccessful. People go on the dates and invariably don't want to go on another date, which is also really interesting, but it does one play against type because you'll see someone and be like, they're definitely going to go for that body that seems like most conforming and that invariably like that's the first person booted
EMILY: Conforms to the culturally constructed aspirational ideal.
ELISE: But it's often not, it goes against that and I feel like they do a good job with just a lot of different people and there's polyamory there's trans, There's gender fluid people, pansexual people. It's very interesting. We'll have a second conversation after you've watched it. But yeah, it's not a good way. I would say, I'm here to report that I'd say naked attractions hit rate in terms of minting successful couples, I would say maybe 10 percent even make it to a second date. So it's not how I would date. All right, let's talk about the floor plan. And let's talk about these seven rooms. You know, you mentioned fear, then there's rage and panic grief, and people can probably figure out what the rooms are that are farthest from lust. So let's focus on the rooms that are most accessible.
EMILY: The reason I chose Jak Panksepp's model of seven primary process emotions, pause to note that here we are in 2023, 2024, science still has not picked a model of how human emotion works. There are at least three dominant models, and I Picked this one because it's the only one that includes lust, like the model that Inside Out is based on, that Pixar had emotion research consultants, that model does not include lust, even though mammals, this is about like mammalian brain processes, mammals are sexually reproducing. They all have a sexual motivation system. So I picked this one and it has seven primary processes emotions. Some of them are what I call pleasure adverse, which means it's very unlikely you're going to experience pleasure when you're in them and you were motivated to avoid them. And then there are the pleasure favorable spaces. Lust is one of those pleasure favorable spaces. And the question is which other spaces Are also pleasure favorable because they're the ones that are likely to be easy to transition from that space into lust. Space number one that most people are probably going to think of is care. So this is feeling cared for, love and affection.
Care is very complex for humans because it is very big and accommodates a lot of different kinds of relationships. So I do think of that as like an open floor plan space in an emotional floor plan of. How all of our emotions are laid out relative to each other. So caring for is the sort of like living room, lying on the sofa, Netflix and chill kind of care. Just watching the fireplace, feeling really held and supported and present with your certain special someone. But there's a difference area in care that is, I call it the kitchen of care, where you are taking care of all the things that need to be taken care of, in the way that you take care of your children, and in the way that some people, in particular, Heterosexual women and heterosexual relationships feel like they are taking care of their spouses. That is not close to lust. Whereas the Netflix and chill couch fireplace living room caring for, that might have a doorway that, like, enters right into the lust space. But when somebody's feeling really cared for, feeling very affectionate and connected in that way, can lead right into lust. Whereas if you're, like, trapped in the kitchen of taking care of somebody, not so much.
And this complexity is why you hear some therapists talk about intimacy as the key To a sexual connection to the erotic and why you hear some people talking about intimacy as the opposite, the enemy of the erotic, and it's because care is so many different things for us. So recognizing the experience of care that feels like, oh, this could be adjacent to the experience of lust for me. That's one. And the tricky thing is that everyone's floor plan varies. Actually in my emotional floor plan, I cannot get directly from care, no matter how cared for and loving I feel, I cannot get directly from care to lust. I have to go through a different space to get to lust. So there's two more spaces. One of them that I think is like the surprise winner for so many people who were early readers of the book, who were, I was talking about the floor plan, they were like, Oh, this room, it's play. Play is the mammalian motivational system of friendship. It is engaging in behavior for no purpose except that everyone involved enjoys it, and there is nothing at stake. I always think of my dog and the play bow, This invitation. Like, everything that happens from this point on, I mean no harm, we're just going to play because we both enjoy playing. And there's rough and tumble play like dogs do. There's object play where babies and children manipulate objects and they splash water to see, like, what does this thing do? And what can I do with this thing? And oh, sex can be such object play. Your partner's genitals. What does this thing do? What can I make this thing do? What can I do with this thing? Object play. Because everybody involved likes it, and there is nothing at stake.
I know that in, like, romance novels and in TV shows and a lot of media, the stakes are high with sex because, like, I mean, that's storytelling. You want the stakes to be high because why would we just watch people have sex for the sheer plain old fun of it if it's not going to advance the plot? I get why, but man I want to live in a world where there are stories about people having sex and playing erotically for the sheer flippin fun of it. When people have great vacation sex, they're like, Oh, it's because I can step away from all my work stuff and I can just play. Roleplay! Oh, the reason I love roleplay is because I can step out of all the other stuff, and I can feel like nothing is at stake. I can just disappear into this joyful, fun situation without feeling like I might lose something if things don't go right and it's that nothing being at stake that's absolutely essential because so many of us were raised to believe the stakes are really high around being sexually like successful or adequate that we have to do it right or else there will be some terrible consequence. There will be no terrible consequence if things don't go according to plan.
The other, the last: pleasure favorable space, is seeking or exploration, research, curiosity. Woo! What's this? Woo! For some people, this is intellectual. For me, it's intellectual. When I was in graduate school, it was very easy. Like, I would talk about my research, my partner would talk about their research, and it's basically a slip and slide from talking about affective neuroscience into the lust space. I am not like most people. I know that. So I have friends who sold all their stuff and traveled all around the world. And that sounds like a nightmare to me, but they loved it. They loved the adventure of it. Things went wrong all the time, especially in places where neither of them spoke the language. And they got to solve these problems together and be in the adventure of it all the time. And, it went right into the erotic space for them. For some people, it is going to art museums. For some people, it is going to lectures or taking classes and learning new things. For some people, it is the adventure of, like, cooking a new recipe and exploring flavor profiles. Everyone's different in what kind of seeking, curiosity, exploration, experimentation, adventure is the one that for them is like, oh, that. For me, seeking was definitely a way in, and play, it turns out, is the primary way in for me and my partner. My partner, who's a cartoonist, he writes jokes for a living, so it sure is a good thing that laughter and play is our primary way in.
ELISE: Yeah. No, I loved the way that you wrote about your husband, particularly in the context of like you, I want to go deep with people, mentally, and My husband is, you know, he went to RISD. He's an architect by training. He does not want to talk about, metaphysics with me or Tolstoy, but that's part of me. But like you, it was a good reframe where I realized, too, that I get a lot of that in other parts of my life. I host a podcast, I have many friends who I like to wrestle with intellectually, and it was interesting reading your book and hearing you talk about your relationship. I'm like, oh yeah, maybe that is not my primary room next to lust. And maybe it was when I was younger and I've not outgrown it, but my floor plan has changed.
EMILY: Not in this relationship. Yeah, that happens.
ELISE: This was interesting, The Gottman's are on last week and We were talking about anger and he might be also talking about the same Research, but he was saying how anger Which is not in one of the pleasure adjoining spaces, but he was talking about how it actually should be coded in the brain. It's coded as an approach emotion that it actually does have some curiosity, which is so interesting. Can you talk a little bit about that was a good cultural sidebar about quote unquote hate fucking or the way that we're also fed anger as a lustful emotion.
EMILY: John Gottman absolutely has read this research. He wrote a book, I think it's the relationship cure where he talks about the primary process emotions and he gives each one a character like the jester is play. And I have found this metaphor of the floor plan to be more useful. But like a lot of us nerdy, sex folks are like, how do we get more people to start thinking about all, like, all of their primary process emotions and their sexuality in the context of all of their emotions? So he definitely, like, we're talking about the same research. Anger is an approach. So there's approach motivations and avoidance motivations. Fear is an avoidance motivation where you want to run away. And that's the space that I was in when I, like, couldn't. Fear is the flight of fight or flight. Rage is the fight of fight or flight. And it is approach to destroy something that is in your way. Right? So, it's everything from slight irritation and annoyance to frustration and anger, up to rage itself. And it includes hate. When you hate someone, they're in your way. And you want to approach and destroy them. I think goes without saying that if you feel an impulse to destroy someone, don't have sex with that person right then. Except under really specific circumstances where you are mutually consenting to metaphorically somebody's gonna destroy somebody with sex. Like, that can be a game people play, it can be a way that people Therapeutically work through stuff, but it takes a very specific context, but because it's an approach motivation in the same way that lust is an approach motivation, lust is motivation to move toward for courtship and sexities, right? It's a very different energy, and it matters what energy you're moving toward with.
We unfortunately live in a world where, in particular, some people are born with a packet of genitals, that make everybody around them go, It's a boy! And they raise that person as a boy, and sometimes that person will grow up into someone who identifies as a boy, and then as a man. And Over the course of that person's lifetime, they're trained in a packet of rules and regulations about how to use their bodies, what emotions they're allowed to feel, and how they're supposed to express them. The emotions that an It's a Boy type person is allowed to have are winning, anger, and horny. So, if the emotional vocabulary we grant approximately half the population doesn't include lonely, longing, sad, afraid, No wonder they're going to have an emotional experience and categorize it as like, I want to move toward, but there's only a certain limited number of moving toward motivations. And so I'm going to decide that this is moving toward to fuck. And so because of toxic masculinity and the frickin frackin patriarchy, we live in a world where people believe that anger and sex are opposite sides of the same coin when on the emotional floor plan, you will find that they are usually miles apart.
There are several illustrations in the book of different people's floor plans, and one of my favorites is a townhouse where anger and fear and panic grief, which is the third pleasure adverse space. They're in the basement and care is on the sort of main level and on the second floor where the bedrooms are, that's where play is and lust is on the roof. So this person is in their anger space or their fear space, they've got three flights of stairs to climb before they get to the lust space. That is much more typical of a person's floor plan. Some people do have. connections between their rage space and their lust space. And like I said, it takes very specific circumstances to have that go really well.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, and I think you write about this, but I would imagine too, in long standing relationships, you write about Terry Real and real marital hatred and all of these things that are quite typical, right? And an enduring relationship. There's going to be moments when you hate your partner, but that often, the quick route to lust is through play, right? Where someone can crack a joke and it becomes funny enough where you can start to engage with each other out of that rage space, but maybe adjacent to it.
EMILY: Yeah. So anger is a normal part of human experience and It's important not to get stuck there, not to get trapped in the rage space. So knowing ways to help each other get out of that space is absolutely essential, because there are going to be times when your partner drives you up the wall. That's normal because humans are human. And so being able to self regulate and co regulate are both absolutely essential. And learning to notice what state you are in and ask for help in transitioning to more pleasure favorable state is, man, if everybody could have that kind of conversation with their partner, first of all, to be able to recognize what state they're in, oh, I am in the rage state. That's why I feel this way. That's why this is happening in my body. That's why I'm having these thoughts. Oh, I'm in the panic grief space. That's why I feel so self critical. That's why I'm spiraling in a sense of loneliness. Let me ask my partner for help. Hey, I'm in this space, could you lie on the couch with me for 15 minutes so that I can feel held by you, which will draw me out of the panic grief space, being able to co regulate. Can you imagine a world where everybody can identify which emotional space they're in and ask for help in transitioning into one that's more comfortable?
ELISE: Hmm. I can't imagine that world, but it sounds amazing. You open the book this way, and I think it can't be overstated, which is, you write, "some people think it's sexual frequency. It's not. There's very little relationship between frequency of sex and sexual or relationship satisfaction. Hardly any of us have sex very often. We are busy." So how do we change that from being the primary mechanism of comparison for people?
EMILY: So there is data about how frequently couples have sex on average. And I never, ever talk about that number because it's impossible to hear that number and not judge yourself against it as like, therefore my sex life is fine, or therefore my sex life is a failure. Mo, the co host on my podcast, googled the number and spiraled. She's like, there's something terrible going on in my relationship. I must be completely failing because she was not having sex with her non binary partner at anything like the average frequency. Average in heavy scare quotes. So don't look up the number. Here is my cure for worrying about frequency. Suppose there's a couple who has sex at a rate that you feel like is a very frequent rate, whatever that number is for you. Now suppose that someone is doing well in their sexual relationship. Both people being glad to be there and free to leave with no unwanted consequences is much more important than how often you have sex.
For this book, I talked to someone who remains the highest desire person I have ever talked to and she talked about her transition from her teenage and early twenties of feeling like really like she just had to have a lot of sex because she was so horny all the time to realizing that it if her partner didn't want to have sex, she did not want to have sex with her partner because she would rather have occasional sex where her partner was really into it, than frequent sex and her partner was checked out. That the quality of the connection is the thing that matters. And Man, if you try to solve a sexual problem by just having more sex, like, more frequent sex, because somebody in the relationship is like, if we just did it, like, if we just did it, then we would get into the habit of doing it and it would all be fine. But every time you did that, if someone involved was just doing it out of a sense of obligation, if they didn't enjoy the sex, then that's training their brain to associate sex with the idea that their pleasure doesn't matter, their desires don't matter, their interest doesn't matter, and that sex is something you only do because you have to. And if you get into that situation, you're digging a deeper and deeper hole from which you're going to have to escape when you ultimately decide to advocate for your own pleasure and desires.
ELISE: Beautiful. Thank you, Emily.
I love Emily Nagoski, she is funny and wise and incredible smart. I think that Come Together, particularly for people who are a part of a pair or throuples, or whatever your flavor might be, it is relieving, always, to be assured there is no “normal,” “healthy,” “standard” way to be and that these things invariably evolve and change and these things require work. And this is from the beginning of the book, but she essentially outlines three mandates, really, of couples that endure: “1. They are friends—or, to put it more precisely, they trust and admire each other. 2. They prioritize sex—that is, they decide that it matters for your relationship. 3. And, instead of accepting other people’s opinions about who they’re supposed to be as sexual people and how they’re supposed to do sex in their partnership, they prioritize what’s genuinely true for them and what works in their unique relationship.” I know it’s so much easier when there are templates and maps and certainties; as we’ll continue to learn as we grow, it’s just not that simple, unfortunately. It’s not that simple, but it’s in some ways liberating to figure out how to do it on your own. Alright, I’ll see you next time.
