What you need to keep in mind:
Explore the full spectrum of sensuality.
If you want to master the Sensuality side of the Passion Triangle, you need to engage your imagination and awaken all five senses. Like many couples, your lovemaking may have turned into what I call “Good night between nipple and crotch”. You know what I’m talking about. Or you know what I’m talking about. We tend to reduce our sex lives to the familiar and the habitual, forgetting that there is almost no limit to what two bodies, two hearts, two imaginations can do. That’s like playing a golf hole, over and over again, the same way, when all the gorgeous, sexy golf courses in the world are waiting for you. So here’s a challenge. Every time you make love, do at least one little thing differently. After all, novelty creates that sense of excitement: the unexpected, the exciting and the pleasurable.
Never again say, “I’m not in the mood”.
Look, you’re not broken if you make love less often than you used to. In fact, welcome to the club. According to researcher Rosemary Basson, most long-term couples begin sex from a place of sexual neutrality. Okay, what does that mean? Well, it means that they start making love when neither of them is turned on.
But before we go any further, I want to break down the term “turned on”. There are two keys to your erotic engine: the key to desire and the key to arousal. Desire is the mental interest in lovemaking and arousal is the physical part. But the sex drive in long-term couples is even more complex than that. There are two types of mental desire. Spontaneous desire, which is that feeling when you can’t keep your hands off your partner, and responsive desire, which arises in response to other triggers.
Tips to help you keep desire alive in the long term
If you rarely feel spontaneous desire anymore, you are normal. Instead, you need to cultivate responsive desire. Then, instead of waiting for spontaneous desire, a partner may choose to make love for all sorts of other reasons. Maybe you want to feel emotionally close, or you know you’ll be relaxed and sleep more soundly afterwards, or you realise it’s been a long time and you think sex is important to your relationship. Then you choose to start connecting sexually. Then, as you slow down, let the day fade away and touch each other: physical arousal arises.
But when your beloved comes up to you while you’re frying eggs and thinking about your taxes and looks at you with that look, you probably say, “I’m not in the mood.” Of course you’re not in the mood. Good news? If you choose to make passion a priority, and say “not now, honey, but ask me later”, you can get into the mood by choice. If you want to start your erotic engine, you must first decide that you want to take it for a spin, then pull out the key of mental desire and then turn it on, which is the first step to getting aroused.
