“How Do I Fix It?”

Come Together is out tomorrow! Here's an exclusive excerpt.

Come Together will be officially out in the world tomorrow!

This is the introduction to the book in its entirety for your previewing pleasure.

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INTRODUCTION

“How Do I Fix It?”

Once upon a time (around 2014) I wrote Come as You Are, a book about the science of women’s sexual well-­being. Ironically, the process of thinking, reading, and writing every day about sex made me so stressed that I had zero interest in actually having any sex.

For months, nothing.

My partner was incredibly patient and understanding, even as I felt guilty.

Then the book was published! I went on a book tour! I traveled all over, talking to anyone who would listen about the science of women’s sexual well-­being! And when I got home from these trips, I’d try to connect sexually with my partner, but most of the time I’d get into the bed and ... ​ just fall asleep.

More months! Of nothing!!

It went on for so long that eventually I became distanced from my partner and from my own erotic self, knocked down and carried away by the fatigue, overwhelm, health issues, and existential crises that seemed to come at me in wave after wave of anti-­erotic daily life.

I missed sex. I missed that connection with my partner, and I missed the part of myself that plays in the erotic realm.

I am the kind of person who would like to continue developing a sexual connection with my certain special someone far into our old age. I want to be giggling and licking and snuggling when we’re ninety-­five, if we’re lucky enough to live so long.

And I’m far from alone—­which is why there are so many books and articles and general advice for couples who want to know how to have a happy sex life in a long-­term relationship. Most of us struggle at some point to maintain that connection, and we’re looking for solutions.

As a science-­loving sex educator, I had a nerdy approach when it came to solving my own sexual difficulties: I went right to the peer-reviewed research. What I found there contradicted all the widespread (but false!) narratives about “keeping the spark alive.” You may have an image in your mind of what a great long-­term sexual relationship is like—­ what kind of sex those people have, how often they have it, where and when they do it, and what it feels like when they have it.

It turns out, probably all of those things are wrong.

What do you think is the key to great sex over the long term?

Some people think it’s about frequency. It’s not. There’s very little relationship between frequency of sex and sexual or relationship satisfaction. Hardly any of us has sex very often; we are busy.

Some people think it’s novelty and adventure. It’s not. And it’s not orgasms, sex positions, variety of sexual behaviors, or anything else. Honestly? If there’s a “sexual behavior” that predicts sex and relationship satisfaction, it’s cuddling after sex. Wildly original sex might be enjoyable for you (or it might not), but it is not what makes for a satisfying long-­term sex life for most people.

People think the key to satisfying long-­term sex is monogamy or nonmonogamy; watching porn or not watching porn; being kinky or vanilla. It’s not. Those are all just different ways people engage sexually and emotionally with the world, and whether they work for you or not is a matter of personal experience. People can have great (or terrible) sex lives either way.

People think it’s attractiveness, being conventionally good-looking, or it’s having a perfect relationship or a perfect body, or it’s “skills” like knowing a lot about how to give great oral sex. None of those things predict great sex in the long-­term. The idea of a “skilled” lover is a myth; unless you’re trying technically demanding BDSM practice like breath play, the only “skill” you need is the ability to pay attention to your partner and to your own internal experience at the same time.

Perhaps above all, people think it’s an out-­of-­the-­blue craving for sex, the hot-­and-­heavy horny feeling that makes people constantly want to put their tongues in each other’s mouths. This is often what people mean when they talk about “the spark” that we’re all supposed to want to keep alive.

The science taught me three essential characteristics of couples who sustain a connection over the long term, and none of them were the characteristics you might guess.

I’m happy to give away the ending right here at the start. The three characteristics of partnerships that sustain a strong sexual connection are:

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 their relationship.

3. Instead of accepting other people’s opinions about 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.

And what do they do, these friends who prioritize sex and prioritize each other over any prefabricated notions of what sex is supposed to be?

They co-­create a context that makes it easier to access pleasure.

That’s it.

Once I saw the pattern, it felt so liberating, so forgiving, so darn doable that I wanted to share it with everyone.

So I wrote this book, to explain this surprisingly simple truth about sex in long-­term relationships and to provide concrete, specific tools for maximizing the erotic potential in any happy long-term sexual connection.

This book represents my decades of experience as a sex educator, a decade of advancement in the research literature, and a decade of marriage in which my own sexual connection with my partner ebbed and flowed.

You might be in a monogamous partnership or you might be in an open relationship, or you might be in a committed thruple, multuple (I think I made that word up, but it sounds right, right?), or polycule. Maybe you were in a long-­term relationship in which the sexual connection didn’t last, and you’d like to understand why that happened and how to prevent it in the future. Maybe you haven’t yet been in a long-­term relationship but you would like to be someday, and you want to know how to build a sexual connection, from day one, that will last. If you’re a human who lives in a body and wants to know more about having good sex, ­ really good sex, spectacular sex, and universe-­dissolving sex with another person over the long term, this book is for you.

The promise of Come Together is this: You will learn what great sex over the long term looks like in real life, how to create it in your own life, and what to do when struggles arise—­ which they definitely will.

How to Use This Book

My quarter of a century as a sex educator has taught me that people crave simple, step-­by-­step instructions to help them get from where they are to where they want to be, presented in a series of well-­defined, predictable stages. Sometimes people pick up a book like this, already impatient for answers about their specific situation; they want me to just explain what to do!!!

“Just fix it!” they shout at the book.

I felt that way. I was shouting it at myself.

But.

I can’t tell you how to “fix” your sexuality ... ​ because you are not broken.

Instead of thinking about your sexuality as a problem that needs to be fixed, think of it in terms of the garden metaphor I used throughout Come as You Are (CAYA):

On the day you are born, you are given a brand-­new field of rich and fertile soil—­ the garden of your sexuality. And immediately, your family begins to plant ideas about bodies and gender and sex and pleasure and safety and love. Your culture enters with various weeds and invasive species—­ windblown seeds of myths about the “ideal sexual person” and ropes of vines about beauty standards, spreading like poison ivy under the fence and over the garden wall.

Some of us get lucky. Our families weeded out the invaders and only planted healthy, pleasure-­forward ideas, and so all we have to do is tend and harvest.

Most of us, though, get stuck with some pretty toxic crap. We’re left with the task of going through our gardens row by row, examining what we find there, and making choices about what to keep and cultivate ... ​ and what to pull and throw on the compost heap to rot.

It is not fair that we have to do this work. After all, we didn’t get to choose any of the plants our families and cultures planted in our gardens. No one waited until we could give consent and asked, “Would it be okay if I planted this giant, suffocating vine of shame right here?” No, they just let it grow—­sometimes even fertilized it with their own shame.

It’s not fair that we have these toxic things in our gardens; we never chose them. But it is an opportunity. It is your chance to create a sexual mind that you choose for yourself, instead of one inherited from a family or a culture that offered you little opportunity to express an opinion about what worked for your growing garden.

Your sexuality is not a problem you have to solve or a disorder that needs to be treated. Your sexuality is a garden you can cultivate.

What I didn’t mention in CAYA is what happens when you decide to co-­create a shared garden with someone else, with the idea that you’ll continue to tend this garden for many years to come.

You each bring plants from your individual gardens and help propagate plants from your partner’s garden, too, finding ways to arrange them so that every plant has what it needs to thrive. Because you plan to have years together, you have plenty of time; you can experiment and, if things don’t go as planned, you have opportunities to repair any damage you might inadvertently do.

A shared garden may be started with enthusiasm, but then at some point, the mismatch of the gardens you’re transplanting may feel insurmountable and so you give up. Or changes in the relationship don’t provide a good enough environment for the garden to thrive. Or, other priorities take over and the garden is neglected. It happens. It happened to me.

With time, we can get better and better at cultivating the garden, maximizing its beauty, its bounty, learning from the garden itself how best to tend it. Over years, you learn its cycles, from the barrenness of short, cold days to the abundance of the long, warm days.

When you do the work of cultivating your individual garden and your shared garden, you’re not just doing good for yourself and your erotic relationship, you’re doing good for the world. Every time you pull the invasive weeds of body self-­criticism or sexual shame, you weaken the social vine, making it that much easier for your sister to pull it from her garden, or your daughter or your niece, your clients and patients, your romantic and sexual partners. When you cultivate a garden that is uniquely your own, filled with whatever brings you delight, you make it a little easier for everyone else to do the same.

How the Book Is Organized

Come Together is organized into two parts:

In the first part of the book, “Pleasure Is the Measure,” I’ll describe how couples can sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term. I’ll talk about what matters in a sexual connection, what it means to prioritize sex, what happens in our brains to facilitate or inhibit sexual interest, and what to do about it. I’ll also describe essential tools for creating a context that makes it easier to access pleasure.

In the second part, “Good Things Come,” I apply all those tools to the issues that often arise in long-­term sexual relationships, including both relationship difficulties and cultural barriers. My goal in part 2 is to provide you with practical guidance for building and maintaining a lasting sexual connection. What no one ever told me, and what I want to make sure we all know, is that urgency is the enemy of pleasure. Even as we acknowledge that we don’t know what the future holds, we can approach changes to our sexual relationships as if we have plenty of time.

As in Come as You Are and Burnout, you’ll follow the stories of a number of composite characters. These are real stories that I’ve blended together to create examples of how different kinds of partners can apply the information in this book to their actual relationships. Mike and Kendra, Ama and Di, and Margot and Hugh are not specific individuals I know, but their stories are made from the stories of people I know. I use composites like this to show not just individual moments in a couple’s life but a whole arc of how partners can process and change and grow together over time.

In appendix 1 you’ll find what I call the “But, Emily!” questions—the kind of questions I get from people who may have learned the science but haven’t yet found a way to integrate it into their lives. Questions like “But, Emily, what if the problem is actually just my partner?” or “But, Emily, I just want my partner to want me so much they can’t help themselves! How do I make that happen?” My responses there will direct you to the specific places in this book (or in other books) that can help you find your way to your own answers.

In the end, you’ll have the knowledge and skills to maximize the erotic potential between yourself and a long-­term partner. And maybe most important: You’ll see the vast potential, the enormous opportunity available to us all, when we decide to co-­create a garden with someone through many seasons, over many years.

A Caveat about Science

I love science. It’s a powerful antidote to the false moralistic messages so many of us grow up with around sex. So I rely on it in this and in all of my books. But science is not the only way to learn about the world, and, like all ways of knowing, it has its limits. I put a science caveat in all my books, but it’s even more important here than in the others:

Science is done by people, and people are products of their time. In my search for research that included a wide variety of people, I spent more time sifting through biased, noninclusive papers than reading good stuff. It’s not just that research on “women’s sexuality” is almost exclusively about cisgender women, it’s also that a study that includes 90 percent or more white women participants is described as a study of all women’s sexuality, rather than of white women’s sexuality. A study of autistic people’s sexuality compares people on the spectrum to “healthy controls,” and that got published in the late 2010s as if it wasn’t grotesquely problematic. (Autistic people are not “diseased,” please and thank you.) Polyamorous and monogamous relationships are very often studied separately, as if human connection is somehow fundamentally different, depending on relationship structure. Transgender people participate in sex research, and the researchers write about the results in language that would almost certainly feel deeply offensive to the trans participants. I’m not including endnotes for any of those examples because I don’t think they need to be read by anyone. Until the science is better, I can’t write an inclusive book that’s closely and transparently linked to the research. Because Come Together is for everyone interested in sex in a long-­term relationship, this book relies as much on conversations with actual people, who are the true experts of their own experience, as it does on academic research.

Another caveat—­ the kind of caveat more science should address: I write from a specific social location that involves a whole bunch of privilege. I’m a white, cisgender woman from the northeastern United States, with three academic degrees. I’m not straight, but I benefit from straight privilege. My disabilities are largely invisible, so I benefit from able-­bodied privilege. My age and my body shape are always changing, like everyone else’s, but currently I’m smack-­dab in the middle of the middle—­Gen X and “small fat.”

Despite the limitations inherent in my social location, my goal is for every reader to find themselves in this book, so I’ve included stories and research from people very different from me, including people of different races, religions, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, and sexual or romantic relationship structures; people with different experiences of childhood and parenthood, different experiences of formal education and neurodivergence, and people with differently shaped bodies, different ages, different physical abilities, and different mental health experiences. I hope I’ve done their stories justice.

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So. Deep cleansing breaths. Get ready to take a little time to explore your gardens and figure out what they need.

Begin the first page of chapter 1 by reminding yourself: I’m not broken. No one is broken. We are all doing our best with the imperfect resources available to us in this imperfect world.

Just as a long-­neglected garden can be tended and brought to new life and glory, an erotic garden can bloom again. This book has already done that for me. It can do the same for you.

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Come Together is out tomorrow. You can still preorder!

Signed copies are available in the USA from my friends at Book Moon Books.

I’ll be on tour starting this week!

You can still come see me and my friends in Brooklyn, NY, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Portland, OR, and San Francisco. Those are all links to the events.

The Brookline, MA and Los Angeles events are already sold out!

All the ticketed events come with a copy of the book! Portland is free, but you can get a book at Powell’s. More dates to come.

That’s all for now. Stay safe and be true to yourselves.