One of the biggest misconceptions I see around intimacy is the belief that if a relationship feels emotionally safe, erotic desire should naturally follow. And certainly, if a relationship is characterized by chronic conflict, criticism, betrayal, or emotional disconnection, it’s very understandable that one or both partners might struggle to access intimacy. Our nervous systems are remarkably good at prioritizing protection over pleasure, and when we don’t feel emotionally safe with our partner, it makes sense that our bodies may be hesitant to enter into the vulnerability that eroticism often requires.
But there is another experience I see quite often in my therapy office, and I think it can be confusing for couples because there isn’t necessarily anything obviously wrong with the relationship. Sometimes two people feel incredibly safe together: they trust each other deeply, communicate well, genuinely enjoy one another, and know that they can be vulnerable together. There may be a profound sense of closeness and friendship between them, and yet somewhere along the way, desire has become quieter.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the relationship is unhealthy, or that either partner has stopped loving the other. Sometimes it simply means that eroticism asks something slightly different of us than emotional safety alone.
When I use the word eroticism, I’m talking about something much broader than sex. I’m thinking about our relationship with aliveness, curiosity, imagination, pleasure, novelty, play, embodiment, longing, and desire. Sex can certainly be an expression of eroticism, but eroticism also describes a particular way that we experience ourselves. It’s the part of us that can become absorbed in pleasure, that can fantasize and daydream, that can become playful, that can want something simply because it feels good rather than because it accomplishes anything. For many people, that part of themselves hasn’t disappeared. It has simply become more difficult to access.
Emotional safety and erotic aliveness are not the same thing.
A relationship can have an abundance of one and still be asking for more of the other.
There Isn’t One Reason That Desire Changes
One of the things I appreciate most about working with couples is that there is rarely a single explanation for why intimacy changes. Two couples may come into my office describing almost identical concerns about their sex lives, and yet the underlying reasons can be completely different.
Sometimes what is getting in the way of eroticism lives primarily within one person’s individual experience. A history of sexual trauma, for example, may mean that intimacy has become intertwined with fear, shame, painful memories, or certain beliefs about what sexuality means.
Someone who grew up in a highly religious or sex-negative environment may have done a tremendous amount of work intellectually deconstructing those messages, while still noticing that their body braces when sexuality enters the picture. They may have inherited beliefs that sex is selfish, dangerous, shameful, or only appropriate in certain circumstances, and those messages can linger in the nervous system even when we no longer consciously agree with them.
Other times, life itself has simply become overwhelming. Many of my clients describe coming home at the end of the day feeling completely depleted. As some of my couples have put it, there are simply no spoons left.
Their home may feel safe and their partner may feel safe, but after spending an entire day managing deadlines, caring for children, tending to patients, teaching students, answering emails, or navigating an incredibly demanding job, their nervous system isn’t necessarily moving toward play or eroticism. It’s moving toward recovery.
There are also very real physical and mental health factors that can affect a person’s access to desire. Chronic illness, long COVID, depression, anxiety, hormonal shifts, medication side effects, chronic pain, injury, caregiver fatigue, postpartum recovery, and sleep deprivation can all meaningfully shape our relationship with our bodies and with pleasure. Sometimes these factors are temporary or treatable, and sometimes they are ongoing realities that require a person or couple to become more creative about what intimacy can look like.
Our bodies aren’t machines that produce desire on command. They are living systems that are responding to everything we ask them to carry. The postpartum period is a particularly clear example. A new mother’s body and nervous system may have spent months reorganizing around pregnancy, birth, feeding, touch, interrupted sleep, and caretaking. She may deeply love her partner and feel incredibly safe with them, while simultaneously having very little access to the part of herself that feels playful, spontaneous, or erotic. That doesn’t necessarily indicate a problem in the relationship. It may simply mean that her body has other priorities right now.
Sometimes a Relationship Can Be Safe and Still Lack Mystery
There are also times when neither partner is struggling with one obvious individual factor, but eroticism has quietly faded from the relationship itself. This is where it can be helpful to distinguish attachment from desire.
Attachment asks questions like: are you there for me? Can I depend on you? If I become vulnerable, will you respond with care? Desire asks a somewhat different question: can I still experience you as someone separate from me, someone I am curious about, someone I can long for? Those needs aren’t necessarily in opposition to each other, but they aren’t identical either.
Long-term partnerships naturally become places of enormous comfort and familiarity. We learn each other’s routines and stories. We see each other tired, sick, cranky, distracted, stressed, and wearing the same pair of sweatpants for three days. We become teammates navigating careers, children, mortgages, aging parents, grocery lists, doctor’s appointments, laundry, and all of the incredibly unsexy administrative tasks involved in building a life together.
There is something beautiful about that degree of comfort. Sometimes I joke with couples that if you’re farting freely in front of one another every evening, congratulations, you have probably created a relationship with a tremendous amount of ease. And comfort isn’t the enemy. In fact, many couples spend years longing to experience that kind of safety with another person. But it can still be useful to wonder whether, somewhere along the way, all of that comfort has crowded out a little bit of mystery.
Esther Perel writes beautifully about this tension in Mating in Captivity. Desire often benefits from some amount of distance, novelty, imagination, and separateness. Not emotional distance or withholding from one another. Rather, enough psychological space that we can continue to experience our partner as a whole, evolving person rather than exclusively as our co-parent, roommate, best friend, or partner in household management.
Sometimes we don’t want to be seen only as the exhausted mother in flannel pajamas or the tired father who has spent the entire day at work and then come home to take care of children. There may be another part of us that wants to be seen as novel, sensual, interesting, adventurous, powerful, playful, or surprising. In a long-term partnership with a tremendous amount of shared history, it can sometimes be difficult to step into those different versions of ourselves.
This is one reason that, somewhat counterintuitively, I occasionally encourage couples who have a tremendous amount of closeness to cultivate a little more space. Not because they need to become less connected, but because they may need enough separateness to become curious about one another again.
Desire often needs enough separateness to become curious again. We can be too merged to long for one another.
When Life Loses Its Sense of Play, Eroticism Often Follows
I also think it’s important to look beyond the relationship entirely and ask what someone’s relationship with pleasure looks like in the rest of their life.
When life itself feels like it lacks spaciousness, pleasure, play, imagination, or opportunities to daydream, it becomes fairly easy to understand why someone might lose touch with their erotic self. If every waking hour is organized around productivity, caretaking, deadlines, achievement, and getting through the next thing on the list, there isn’t much room for the parts of us that exist simply because they feel alive.
Many of us have internalized values around work ethic, productivity, grind, and hustle without necessarily noticing what those values have taught our bodies. We can become incredibly good at doing and surprisingly uncomfortable with receiving. Even rest can become something we feel we have to earn. And then we expect ourselves to walk into the bedroom at the end of the day and suddenly become playful.
Eroticism asks us, at least temporarily, to release some control. It asks us to enter our bodies, tolerate pleasure, use our imagination, become curious, and allow ourselves to experience something that doesn’t necessarily have a productive outcome. If a person has very little access to those experiences anywhere else in their life, it makes sense that eroticism may also become harder to access.
Reconnecting With Your Erotic Self May Need to Begin With You
When I’m working with couples around these concerns, I often don’t begin by asking them to fix their sexual relationship together. I want to understand what is happening for each person individually first.
Before we can bring our erotic selves into a partnership, it can be useful for each person to become a little more assembled and organized around their own experience. Before I can tell my partner what I need in a way they can really hear, I need some understanding of what is actually happening inside of me. The same is true here.
I might ask each partner to begin taking a fairly comprehensive inventory of their own erotic world. What does your body actually require in order to access this kind of energy? Do you need a life that moves a little more slowly? Are you chronically stressed or overloaded? Are there health factors at play? What kinds of touch feel good to you? What experiences help you feel connected to your body? What turns you on? What helps you feel playful or curious?
For some people, this may involve getting reacquainted with their own body outside of the partnership. That might mean revisiting masturbation, exploring fantasy, noticing different kinds of pleasurable touch, or simply allowing themselves to experience their body without an agenda. And while doing that, I would want them to pay close attention to what gets in the way.
Are there voices that emerge as soon as you begin moving toward pleasure? Do you notice shame? Are there “shoulds” that immediately show up?
I should want sex more.
I should feel differently.
Why don’t I want this?
Sometimes the block itself gives us incredibly useful information.
I also like to ask a question that initially has very little to do with sex: what feels missing from your life right now that would be exciting to explore? Someone who is profoundly overworked may notice that what they crave most is spaciousness and calm. Someone whose life has begun to feel repetitive may find themselves longing for adventure, travel, novelty, or new experiences. Someone who spends most of their time taking care of other people may be craving the experience of being cared for. Those longings may very well extend into the bedroom.
And It’s Also Okay to Ask Whether You Want Desire Back
There is another possibility that deserves much more thoughtful attention than it often receives: not everyone wants to regain access to sexuality or erotic desire.
Some people identify as asexual and have never experienced much sexual desire. Others may have experienced desire at another point in their lives and now find that sexuality simply isn’t particularly important to them. They may feel perfectly content without it.
Before assuming that a lack of desire is a problem that needs to be fixed, I think it’s worth asking: do I actually want to reconnect with this part of myself? If the answer is no, I would want to meet that answer with curiosity rather than judgment. At the same time, if we’re inside a partnership, our relationship to sexuality doesn’t exist entirely in isolation. If one partner wants a sexual relationship and the other doesn’t, that difference is real, and it deserves honest, compassionate conversation about what each person needs and what that means for the relationship. The goal isn’t to convince someone that they should want sex. It’s to understand what is actually true.
Bringing What You Discover Back to Your Partner
Once each person has a clearer understanding of their own erotic world, we can begin to explore what it’s like to bring that experience back into the relationship.
Do you feel safe enough to tell your partner what you’ve discovered? Can you tell them what you enjoy, what you miss, what scares you, or what you might be curious to explore? Can you share a fantasy without immediately worrying about what it says about you? Can your partner hear that fantasy without assuming that it is a demand or an indictment of what the two of you currently have?
These conversations can be extraordinarily vulnerable. Sometimes people feel safer crying in front of their partner than they do telling them what turns them on. And that matters. Because a couple can have tremendous emotional safety in many areas of their relationship and still discover that they haven’t yet built quite enough safety around erotic honesty.
Finding Creative Ways Forward
Once we understand the blocks, the work becomes much less about forcing desire and much more about getting creative.
If the problem is chronic stress, perhaps the intervention isn’t immediately sexual at all. Maybe the couple needs to look seriously at the structure of their life and whether there is any room left for pleasure. If the problem is boredom or predictability, perhaps the couple needs more novelty. They might take a dance class together, travel somewhere unfamiliar, attend a workshop, explore a kink-oriented class if that interests them, or simply find an experience that allows them to encounter each other outside of their usual roles.
If the problem is that touch has become loaded with expectation, I might encourage a couple to intentionally spend time together where nothing has to happen. They might set aside an hour to lie together, breathe together, touch one another, cuddle, laugh, or simply experience one another physically without needing that experience to progress toward intercourse or orgasm.
For another couple, the work might involve trauma therapy, medical support, conversations about medication or hormones with an appropriate healthcare provider, or learning entirely new ways of being intimate when physical limitations have changed what is possible.
There isn’t one intervention because there isn’t one reason people lose access to eroticism. What I am usually much more interested in is whether we can understand the conditions under which each person’s erotic self has gone quiet and then begin experimenting, gently, with creating different conditions.
The goal isn’t to force ourselves to want sex again. Pressure tends to be a remarkably poor aphrodisiac. The goal is to become curious about what helps us feel alive.
Sometimes that means healing something painful. Sometimes it means sleeping more. Sometimes it means creating distance from work. Sometimes it means allowing ourselves to receive pleasure without earning it first. Sometimes it means becoming playful again. Sometimes it means cultivating a little more mystery inside a relationship that is otherwise beautifully safe and familiar. And sometimes it means having a conversation with our partner that we’ve been quietly avoiding for years.
Losing erotic desire doesn’t necessarily mean that a relationship is broken or that two people have fallen out of love. It may simply be an invitation to pay closer attention: to our bodies, our histories, our nervous systems, our relationships, and the broader lives we’re living.
Instead of asking only, how do we make ourselves want sex again, I think there is often a more interesting question available to us:
What would help me feel more alive? And then: what would help us feel more alive together?
