The Magic Trick for Reviving Your Sex Life

Emily Nagoski, PhD, is the author of the New York Times bestseller Come as You Are and a coauthor of Burnout. Nagoski trains therapists, medical professionals, college students, and the general public about the science of women’s sexual well-being. Her new book, Come Together (excerpted here) is an exploration of sexual connection in long-term relationships—and proves desire really can last a lifetime.

I want to explain the erotic magic trick our bodies are capable of that liberates us to explore the wildest, most joyful aspects of living. I call it a “magic trick” because that’s what it felt like when I stumbled into it in my early twenties. In the decades since, I’ve learned about the physiological and neurobiological underpinnings of it. All that science means I could write about it like I’m writing about a “biohack,” a way of manipulating the mechanisms of your embodied mind to make it do something really cool. The science behind this, mostly grounded in interpersonal neuroscience, is amazing, but it is not what I’m going to talk about in this chapter, because thinking about it as a way to hack your body will not get you there. Instead, I’ll suggest you think of it as a way of knowing through erotic wisdom.

But let’s start with a definition. What do I mean by “erotic”?

 

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It’s Been Your Aliveness, All Along

Audre Lorde wrote, “I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.”

Ask anyone who had to pee for hours before they finally got relief. Ask anyone who went days without food and then took their first bite. Ask any runner who gets home from a long, hot run and chugs water straight from the tap, then palms more water onto their face and throat and arms. The physical experience of meeting our bodies’ needs is also an emotional experience and a sensuous experience. It is erotic.

Throughout this book I’ve been saying “erotic energy” and “erotic connection” for a reason. I don’t just mean sexual connection. I mean life itself.

Lorde wrote in her essay “Uses of the Erotic”:

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves…. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.

You live in a body. That body needs things from the world in order for it to stay balanced enough to support life. It needs to take in air from the world, it needs to take in water. We need the microscopic organisms that call us home; they make it possible for us to digest the food that itself was once alive and dependent on the Earth, just as we are. And human bodies of all ages and abilities need at least some tender connection.

One of the ways we get that connection is through sex. And that’s erotic. But we can also get that connection need met through hugs and massage, through eye contact and smiles, through playing together, working together, singing, laughing, praying, or dancing together. All of that is erotic, too, if we allow ourselves to notice how our bodies resonate with life force when we accept from the world these resources we need in order to stay alive.

“Am I alive? I’m alive. This is what it feels like to be alive.” That is the doorway to the erotic. It replaces all the imperatives that would have us look away from our own internal experience; it guides us back to who we truly are.

A lot of people whose bodies and sexualities defy the handbooks they were given at birth already have practice at ignoring the rules and choosing for themselves. LGBTQIA2+ folks, BIPOC folks, lots of disabled or neurodivergent folks, fat folks, and aging folks may already know that you can choose what you like, outside the limited offerings of the sex imperatives. In this book, I wanted to offer tools all of us can use to return to our erotic selves, no matter how the world has tried to control, erase, or diminish us, our aliveness.

Not everything about being alive in a body feels magical or even pleasurable. But we can increase our brain’s access to the pleasurable parts of being alive by practicing a skill called “savoring.”

START WITH SAVORING

A large and growing focus in positive psychology is on the phenomenon of savoring, which, in its technical sense, refers to people’s “capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive feelings in their lives.” As researchers measure it, we take mental snapshots of positive moments, using a particular set of strategies, to enhance our awareness and memory of positive moments. The strategies, delineated in the Savoring Checklist, include:

• Sharing with Others. In the moment, we talk to someone with whom we’re sharing the experience, or tell others how much we value the moment. This translates well to an erotic experience shared with a partner. Saying out loud how much we are enjoying an experience while we’re having it, or how much we enjoyed it or how meaningful it was, right after, amplifies the pleasure and solidifies it in our memory.
• Temporal Awareness. Time is our most valuable resource because it is the only thing we have that, once it’s gone, we can never have again. Our body’s energy can be renewed, money comes and goes, but time is limited and fleeting. Temporal awareness is reminding ourselves how transient time is and therefore noticing this moment, cherishing it before it passes. This is an easy savoring behavior to integrate into an erotic experience. “Time is short, and I choose to do this with my time.”
• Behavioral Expression. This refers to the way we enact our positive emotions. We laugh out loud, jump up and down, clap our hands and whoop. We allow our bodies to be so full of the pleasure of the moment that we can’t help flapping our hands in excitement. If we have pleasure shame, as so many of us do, this is a great strategy for cracking open the shell of shame and letting our pleasure fly free. Practicing behavioral expression of positive emotions outside of a sexual context will make it more natural within a sexual context.
• Sensory-Perceptual Sharpening. This might be the strategy people are most likely to think of when they think of “mindfulness.” We slow down and pay attention to a specific sensation or group of sensations, to the exclusion of everything else. We allow our attention to focus on the sensations around our genitals. Or just notice the sensation of your partner’s mouth on yours, shutting out the whole world.

Excerpted from Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections copyright © 2024 by Emily Nagoski, PhD. Used by permission of Ballantine Books an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.