How Scheduling Sex Saved a Sex Coach’s Marriage

When older couples told her that eventually sex would have to make it onto the calendar, slotted in somewhere between dentist appointments and oil changes, stylist-turned-sex coach Sissy Chacon thought the idea sounded so disappointingly unsexy. Scheduled sex was what happened to other people—the couples who'd let the spark go out or who’d traded desire for logistics. It wouldn’t be her and her husband. And for a while, it wasn’t. Then, sure enough, it was.

There's this idea everybody has that scheduling sex is the least sexy thing you could possibly do, she says. “And I understand it, because everything we’re shown tells us sex is supposed to be spontaneous.”

Chacon says the story we absorb from movies, TV, and every steamy scene we've ever watched is that sex and desire simply fall together: two people want each other at the exact same moment, with no preamble, and just like that, clothes come off. It’s a good fantasy. It’s also, for a lot of people, almost nothing like real life.

Over 15 years with her husband, Chacon watched the fantasy slip. It wasn’t that they’d stopped wanting each other. It was that wanting each other kept losing to work, exhaustion, and the thousand tiny cuts of adult life. Sex slid to the back burner, exactly the way people warned her it would. 

It wasn’t until Chacon and her husband opened up their marriage and she started scheduling sex with other people that she put it together: Planning those encounters—including both the practical coordination and the mental foreplay—was the very thing that made them electric. 

“It just started to occur to me,” Chacon says, “that I could have been doing this with my husband, the person that I'm married to, for all these years.”

Now, as a sex coach, Chacon helps guide clients toward the idea that scheduling isn’t the enemy of spontaneity—it just makes more room for it.

It’s Not an Appointment, It’s a Date

Chacon says there was a time you scheduled sex constantly and found it thrilling; you just called it something else. “What was it like when you were first dating?” Chacon asks. “You planned your dates, you looked forward to seeing each other, you thought about what you were going to wear, maybe you were texting or sexting or flirting.” 

The task in a long-term relationship, she says, is simply to bring some of that energy back.

 So treat it like a date. That means both of you show up, and both of you bring something. “It's not sexy to make it one person's job to plan everything,” Chacon says, "unless that's their kink.” 

One partner might set the terms: Booked us a hotel room downtown for the night. The other might build anticipation all day: Here's a picture of the lingerie I've got on for later. The point is that the effort goes both ways, so it feels co-created instead of assigned.

A few of her ground rules for the date itself: Get childcare if you need it, lock up your phones for the duration, and don't schedule it for the end of your longest day or when you might be too full, too tired, or too drunk. (“Try a nooner instead,” Chacon says.) And know that it doesn't have to lead anywhere in particular. “It doesn't always have to lead to sex or penetration or intercourse,” Chacon says. “You could just lie naked together. You could just make out, you could give each other massages. It could just be cuddle time.”

Some of Us Need a Runway

Part of the reason scheduling sex gets so easily written off, Chacon says, is because not everyone can expect to feel full-on desire right on schedule. She points to Emily Nagoski's book Come As You Are, which lays out two desire styles. (It’s helpful to know yours.) The first, spontaneous desire, reliably strikes on its own, no warm-up required. The second, responsive desire, emerges in response to the right environment, enough time, and actions already underway. You might not be thinking about sex at all, and might not be the one to initiate, but once the kitchen is clean, the lights are low, and you're kissing, touching, and easing into it, desire arrives. 

For people with a primarily responsive desire style, certain conditions (Nagoski calls them “brakes and accelerators”) have to be in place before you start to enjoy sex. It might be a shower first, music, less clutter, more foreplay. Whatever they might be for you, Chacon says they’re key to the experience: ​​"Turn up the things that accelerate desire, and turn down the things that don't.”

If Scheduling Really Isn’t Your Thing

If you try planned dates and they aren’t totally working out, Chacon has a semi-spontaneous alternative: a certain knickknack set out on the entryway table, a ribbon tied on the bedroom door, or a particular nightie—some small private signal that means “I'm in the mood.”

One partner puts it forward, the other sees it and gets to answer: give me 15 minutes, give me a couple of hours, I'll be ready at 8 p.m. once the kids are down. "You can microdose scheduling sex," Chacon says: The invitation is on the table (literally) but the plan stays loose.