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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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I m thrilled to welcome the hilarious and brilliant Emily Nagoski to the podcast, author of multiple bestsellers, including the just released Come Together.
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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we re here.
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Pulling the Thread is about big questions.
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Why we do what we do, how we can understand our own experiences within a larger spiritual and historical context,
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the ways in which we might begin to understand ourselves and each other better, and what s required to heal ourselves and our world.
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I ll be joined in conversation by luminaries and wise elders, those who have laid tracks in their work and lives to help us bring meaning and understanding to a world that often feels chaotic and overwhelming.
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My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
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The deal is your bodies are going to change over time and people can stay attracted to somebody s body over time even though it is unrecognizable from what it was like when they first met because that body is the home of the human they adore.
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Our attraction to a person s body can be just like superficial something like your toenails are gross.
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or it can be here is the human whose life I have shared in our home for all these years and like their belly and their bum and their varicose veins and their scar from the surgery that saved their life all of it is so fucking hot because this is my person
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So says Emily Nagoski, one of the most exceptional minds at work today on the science, and she would add art, of sexual connection, intimacy, and arousal.
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Emily is brilliant, and she s also deeply human, using her own experiences in the world as the foundational ground for exploring relationship.
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This means that she s not full of heady theory and diagnoses, but focused on what actually works to fuel desire and bring it to fruition.
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She s the author of the mega best-selling Come As You Are, as well as a book called Burnout about the stress cycle that she co-authored with her twin sister.
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And now she brings us Come Together, the science and art of creating lasting sexual connections, which is the natural evolution.
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Well, Come As You Are is a primer on how we all function as sexual creatures.
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Come Together explores what happens when you bring that into a relationship and try to establish and maintain a connection that can endure through seasons of, well, low interest.
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Emily is full of ideas, principles, and methods for getting it going, including a core blueprint for determining what rooms in your house are adjacent to your desire.
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I loved this book.
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I love Emily.
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And I loved our conversation.
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which we ll turn to now.
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The last time I saw you was in New York City, I don t know if you even remember this, with Betty Dodson.
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Yeah, it was like a day and a half before the pandemic started.
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Oh, that s right.
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It would have been January.
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Wild.
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With good old Betty.
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I mean, sharing a stage with you two, although I was moderating, that was a life highlight.
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Yay, Betty.
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Oh, for me to be able to get to meet Betty just a few months before she died was really thrilling.
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Oh, I didn t realize you guys had never met.
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No, never.
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Oh, well, a real passing the baton moment.
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So congrats on your next book.
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I mean, these tomes, clearly they take you a long time, but you are such an amazing synthesizer of research, other thought leaders and therapists in the space, your own experience with people.
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So I know how hard it is to do this.
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Congratulations.
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Another masterpiece.
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Thanks.
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Does it get any faster?
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No, it gets slower.
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It gets harder every time.
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And every time I m like, I m never doing that again.
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Including this, I was like, that is the last one.
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Because the expectations are higher?
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Neil Gaiman says that you never know how to write books.
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You re always learning how to write the book you re currently writing.
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That book is teaching you how to write that book.
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And I absolutely have that experience that every book is entirely different to write.
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And every book is a separate emotional process, too.
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Like for Burnout, I co-wrote it with my sister originally because I thought it ll be easier if I have a co-author.
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It wasn t.
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And it s not that collaboration is difficult.
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It s that the research we were reading about wellness ended up telling us, like, the answer is not self-care.
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The answer is love.
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The answer is love each other.
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The answer is connection.
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The answer is human beings need to be authentic and vulnerable with each other.
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And we were like, oh, shit.
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Oh no, I don t want that to be the answer.
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But like we had to follow our own damn advice and undo four decades of having grown up in an alcoholic family of origin with both parents with significant mental health issues.
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And the rule in the house was like, you just don t talk about that.
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You do not talk about any of it.
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And we had to tell each other the stories from our childhood that we had never told each other before.
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Writing Burnout was hard, not because writing books is hard all by itself, though it is, but because we went through a process that resulted in me having a twin sister in my life for the first time ever in the way that people imagine.
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Oh, you have a twin sister?
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That must be really nice.
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We never had that until, like, I have a sister now because of the process of writing Burnout.
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So even if no one ever read it, it would have changed my life for the better.
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Writing Come Together was also very hard.
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So this is a book about sustaining a strong sexual connection in a long-term relationship.
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And the origin story of this book is that writing Come As You Are, my first book, was so stressful that here I am, this sex expert, writing a book about sex, I was so stressed that I lost any interest in actually having any sex with my partner.
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Which was frustrating.
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And so I did what anybody would do.
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I turned to the peer-reviewed research on how couples sustain a strong sexual connection.
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I learned a bunch of things that turned my brain inside out and completely contradicted everything everyone says about what sex and long-term relationships is like and is supposed to be like.
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So I wrote a book about it and oh yes, writing this book was so stressful that I did indeed lose all interest in actually having any sex.
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But the good news is that at the end of this process, I had a hundred thousand word book about how to fix, how to find my way back.
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to my partner after all the months of it being such a terrible struggle.
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So in the same way that because of burnout I have a sister, because of writing Come Together, even though it was a struggle, it s now better than it ever has been in our 13-year relationship.
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I was thinking about this as I was reading your book and all the ways that you walk head on into these ideas that we have about spontaneous desire, all things that we ll explore, but that are very corralling and make us all feel like, what s normal?
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How am I failing?
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What s the rate?
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I think so many of us subscribe to this idea that there s some magical number or duration that will ensure a happy, ongoing relationship, that there s some barrier, some level that we need to achieve.
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Otherwise, we re in trouble or we re healthy.
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So, obviously, you dispute and dispel all of that.
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But where did those ideas originally even come from?
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When did this become something that was pushed onto us as an imperative that needs to be met?
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Like, where did this whole specter
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originate.
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It s complicated but it s quite new.
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Yeah.
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When you read sex manuals from the early 20th century and even the middle of the 20th century, those books are still assuming that all the marriages are going to be heterosexual and the women are mostly going to
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go along with sex that the husband wants to have so that he can be satisfied.
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And if she wants more sex than he does, she is a sex-crazed monster who needs to get control of herself.
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And then the field of sex research turned into what it is.
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We had Kinsey and Masses and Johnson.
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And the Masses and Johnson model was the foundation for what is now modern sex therapy, where we
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now have effective behavioral interventions for things like erectile dysfunction and lack of orgasm.
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And then in the 1970s came Helen Singer Kaplan, this genius feminist sex therapist who looked at all the couples in her practice, all of the other therapists in her practice, looking at the treatment failures.
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Who were the people they could not help?
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And it turned out the people they could not help were the people where the problem wasn t a lack of physiological response or pain.
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It was the couples who lacked desire.
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And desire doesn t show up anywhere in Masters and Johnson s model of how sexual functioning works.
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So there was this feminist essential revolution in the way we understood what healthy, normal sexual functioning looks like.
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And it started with desire.
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And then over the next 20,
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plus years, what other feminist sex therapists like, for example, Rosemary Basson began to recognize was that desire comes in a lot of different colors.
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For some people, it is the spontaneous, out-of-the-blue, woo, woo, woo, sexy, like, I would like to come.
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Erika Moe in the cartoonist-to-illustrator Come As You Are draws it as a lightning bolt to the genitals.
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Kaboom!
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You just want it.
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And that absolutely is one of the normal healthy ways to experience desire.
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But what we learned over the course of the 80s and 90s is that it is just as normal to experience what the researchers call responsive desire, where spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure.
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Responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure.
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And that is also normal.
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And what it tells us is that what matters most
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is not the desire per se, but the pleasure.
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And since the 90s, especially like as we get deep further into the 2000s, it s becoming clearer and clearer that the couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term are not the ones who have the spontaneous kaboom, can t wait to get their hands on each other.
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Astaire Perel talks a lot about this model of marriage that we have where one person is going to meet all of our needs and fold it into this model, this very nothing-to-do-with-reality model, is that you re going to have a hot and heavy fallen-in-love stage of your relationship where you can t wait to put your hands on each other and that can last a while.
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But eventually, things get harder at work, or you buy a fixer-upper house, or you have kids, or things get complicated in your life, and that hot and heavy, fallen-in-love feeling sort of goes away, and your body s age and change, and, you know, by the time you get to menopause, you re left to hold hands at sunset with your sexless seniority, apparently.
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And this narrative, I would say, dates to approximately the 90s or 2000s.
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It s very new, because it used to be that people were taught that once you get to menopause, phew, you never have to worry about that again.
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And some people still feel that way.
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But I mean, you ve got two options as the hot and heavy goes away.
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You can either accept it, phew, hooray, don t have to worry about that.
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Or you can fight really hard.
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You can invest time and energy and money trying to keep the spark alive to try and sustain your sexual connection the way it was when you fell in love, to have it be the same as when you fell in love.
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And that is the real myth, is that if it changes from the hot and heavy fall in love,
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that change means that something has gone wrong.
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And that is sort of the central judgment that is making people look at their sex lives and feel like there s a problem when there super isn t any problem that could not be solved simply by
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liking their sexuality the way it is instead of judging it as being a problem.
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I m Rachel Martin.
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After hosting Morning Edition for years, I know that the news can wear you down.
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So we made a new podcast called Wild Card, where a special deck of cards and a whole bunch of fascinating guests help us sort out what makes life meaningful.
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It s part game show, part existential deep dive, and it is seriously fun.
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Join me on Wild Card wherever you get your podcasts.
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Only from NPR.
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I think that you glossed over it, but it s a really important part of your book, which is instead of fixating on spontaneous desire as we re culturally taught to do, that sort of like, oh, I want it and I want it now, let s do it in the kitchen, which haunts so many couples, right, who feel like the absence of spontaneous desire invariably means that something s wrong and that they don t really want their partner in the same way or they re not wanted.
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That there s something wrong with one of the partners or that there s something wrong with the relationship.
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Oh, no, our relationship is doomed because I no longer am willing to tolerate the discomfort of the kitchen counter.
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Right.
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Exactly.
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But that you talk about how, which is so subtle, but it s quite revolutionary, I think, to center pleasure.
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Once you make it less about desire and more about pleasure, you can have a much wider conversation about what that means and what s involved in delivering that.
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elaborate a bit more.
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So one of the most important researchers here is Peggy Kleinplatz in Canada.
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She and her team interviewed dozens of people who self-identify as having extraordinary sex.
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They have magnificent sex lives.
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And so of course some of the questions for them were, what is magnificent sex like?
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And you know what s not on that list?
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desire is not in like the top 10 it s in the extended list but it s not in the top 10 things of like what counts as a great sex life and so Peggy took what she learned from what she calls the extraordinary lovers and
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uses it in her work with clients.
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So she talks about, like, if a couple comes in, partner A says, you know, I m really sorry, I would hurt my partner s feelings, but actually, I d be totally fine if we never had sex again.
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And assuming this is not an asexual person, Peggy says, well, so tell me about the sex you do not want.
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And they go on to describe sex that is, in Peggy s words, dismal and disappointing.
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And here is the completely obvious when you hear it.
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First time you think it,
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It s not dysfunctional not to want sex you do not like.
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And so Peggy would say, you know, I rather like sex, but if that s the sex I were having, I would not want it either.
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So tell me, what kind of sex is worth wanting?
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When the sex is worth the time and effort that it takes to have it, the desire is beside the point.
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You like the sex you are having.
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And so your motivation to create a situation in your relationship, in your life, to get access to it is intrinsic because you like it.
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Yeah.
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There is on the other side of it, as I said, the origin story of the book is that I lost my interest in having any sex.
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And I was not that couple.
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I was not, I d be happy if I really missed sex.
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I missed that part of myself.
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I missed that part of our relationship.
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But I couldn t get there.
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I lost the ability to can.
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I could not.
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I was stuck somewhere in my brain.
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And I knew that if I could just get there, it would be so great.
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But I just can t get off the couch and out of my pajamas.
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In fact, I would try.
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I d follow my own advice.
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My responsive desire advice is like, you show up, you put your body in the bed, you let your skin touch your partner s skin, and your body wakes up and goes, oh, great.
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I like this.
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I like this person.
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So I did that.
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I put my body in the bed, I let my skin touch my partner s skin, and I burst into tears and then fell asleep.
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Clearly, I needed something else.
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And this is where what I call the emotional floor plan
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comes in, and it s two chapters in the book, so I m not going to try to explain the whole thing.
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But basically, I was stuck in the emotional fear space in my brain, and I needed to teach my brain how to transition out of the fear space, which is a thing I know how to do.
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It s chapter one of Burnout.
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Out of the fear space, and then find my way, follow a path that took me to the lust space in my brain.
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It took a few months
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for me to figure this out.
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It took therapy and talking with my partner to find out how to get out of the fear space, the stress, the overwhelm, the exhaustion, how to get out of that space and into, hey, sexy lady space.
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And that s the transition that did it for me.
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So if you re like, I d be happy if I never had sex again, the solution is what
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pleasure exists for you in the sexual space?
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What kind of sex is worth having?
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And if you re like, I know it would be good if only I could, the solution is figuring out what is the context you can co-create with your partner that makes it easier for your brain to get
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of the sexy space.
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to climax and conclusion and that spontaneous desire is enough, right, to get us there.
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And then you tell a story in the book about someone that you were, should not have been having sex with in college and the conflation of wanting and desire and that how it felt really important to distinguish between wanting and liking
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and how sometimes interrupting the desire to reset the stage, and it sounds like you had great sex.
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Yeah, it was very fun.
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I remember it vividly.
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Yeah, because in a way, you had reset the stage.
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You d taken out that spontaneous desire by interrupting what was happening in a way that seems counterintuitive to everything that we ve been fed, which is like, you got to write it, write it, write it, write it.
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That s the only way to get into it.
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that really stuck in my mind as, oh, actually, again, going back to this idea of re-centering pleasure rather than feeling like you re trying to hold on to a horse.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Oh, I m so glad.
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That s a really embarrassing story.
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Because like you said, like, that was a relationship I shouldn t have been in.
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That was a person I should not have been having sex with.
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He was still in love with his ex.
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Like, it was a bad situation.
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We were really good friends, and we were destroying our friendship.
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Like, why were we doing this?
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Oh, well, you could not pay me to be in my 20s again.
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Boy, we had had like long conversations about how we re like, we re not going to do this anymore because like we want to be friends with each other and we re destroying our relationship and you re still in love with your ex and then you behave like you re my boyfriend and then I think you re my boyfriend but you re still in love with your ex and this is no, no, we shouldn t do this anymore.
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And then one night, I m over at his apartment and he starts like kissing on my neck.
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And it like absolutely has that like, oh, I shouldn t, but it feels so good kind of energy that is very like desiry, very full of spontaneous, that wave like you re talking about.
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And we had talked about this.
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We were not going to do this anymore.
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So I said, we said we were not going to do this anymore.
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We had very good reasons for not doing this anymore.
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What are you doing?
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And he said, well, what if just this one time?
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And I was like, but all these XYZ happens.
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And he says, well, what if I don t do the things I usually do afterward?
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What if we actually create change?
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And I believed that he could.
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And I went, all right.
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And he got up to lock his apartment door.
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It took approximately three seconds.
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And in those three seconds, that tension, the wave just deflated.
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And all I was left with was like tingly pleasure in my body, but not that tense like, oh, what do I do?
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I want to, I want to, I want to.
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There was no more, I want to.
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And fortunately, I had already started to learn about responsive desire and the importance of pleasure.
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And so I can imagine a lot of people, man, especially if you re the kind of person who like, oh, I have to talk about it.
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I kind of don t want to do it.
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Or if you really believe that riding that wave is the way to do it, you wouldn t keep going.
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You would stop there and be like, you know what, never mind.
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Yeah.
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And instead, I was like, drag me into your bedroom by my ankle.
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It was fun.
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We ended up having a great time and he did not revert to his old patterns and like we were able to maintain our friendship.
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We re still friends to this day.
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Yeah.
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He does not know that I told this story in the book.
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He ll probably never know.
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And I wanted to tell that story because there are so many important reasons why we have to pause
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When we re in the hot and heavy, this is really sexy.
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And also, do you have a condom?
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And also, didn t you tell me you and your partner are monogamous?
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And also, I have to go put my diaphragm in.
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And also, we re not in a place where I feel safe enough.
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Right?
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There are all kinds of good reasons why saying, let s pause this and talk about it and get rid of this ambivalence that I have.
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A lot of sex educators want to be like, no, it doesn t kill the mood.
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It doesn t kill desire.
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Like maybe it doesn t for everybody.
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It did for me.
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And I want to be honest with people about that.
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And look how it doesn t matter because we avoided all of the potential unwanted consequences and we got to have really fun sex.
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And all it took
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was believing that the pleasure was the thing that mattered.
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And then it contextualizes it and reframes it as something that, yes, you need to talk about.
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And again, we re talking about long term, hopefully functioning relationships, whether they re monogamous or open or whatever happens to be.
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happening, but that conversation is required.
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Advanced planning.
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These things that we have demarcated as deeply unsexy or certainly not spontaneous, but that if we hold on to this fantasy that this is what it s supposed to be, where like your partner s taking their arm and swiping everything off of your desk, it s not going to happen.
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SPEAKER_01
And please don t do that.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t want that.
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SPEAKER_01
I like my desk as it is.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, please don t do that.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t want that is a really important part of like, it makes a good story.
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SPEAKER_00
But in reality, like somebody s got to pick all that stuff up off the floor.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, who s it gonna be?
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SPEAKER_00
And we absolutely have absorbed these ideas that if you have to talk about sex, we have been trained that that automatically means that there s a problem.
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SPEAKER_00
You shouldn t have to talk about it.
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You should just know somehow, instantaneously, spontaneously, and continuously everything that your partner needs and wants without ever having to have a conversation about it.
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People find it harder to have a conversation about sex than to have sex, even if the conversation is with the person that they have sex with.
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And I think a big part of why it s so difficult is that we believe we ve been trained that the conversation itself is a sign that there s a problem.
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SPEAKER_00
I think another part of it is that we re really worried about hurting each other s feelings, which is so wonderful and soft and warm of us.
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And also, our relationship needs to be able to tolerate these conversations.
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We need the skills to
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talk about it and be robust enough in our sexual selves to be able to have a conversation, especially to talk about change.
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Because the whole, like, in a long-term relationship necessarily implies that things are going to change because things change over time.
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That is the one promise that we have in life, is that things are going to change.
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SPEAKER_00
And being able to talk about it is how you stay connected, even as the world around you and your bodies change.
2
SPEAKER_01
Before we get into the floor plan, and is it yonk-sep, or is that how you say it?
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SPEAKER_01
Yonk-pank-sep.
2
SPEAKER_01
OK.
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SPEAKER_01
I ll let you say it.
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SPEAKER_01
I m terrible at pronunciation.
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SPEAKER_01
But I just wanted to just quickly say, too, because we jump past this, but because I thought this was also deeply clarifying, that when you actually poll people about what they want, they want connection, shared pleasure, being wanted, and freedom.
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All beautiful things.
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What do you think we ve been culturally programmed to believe should be on that list that s not?
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So the reason I started asking people what is it that you want when you want sex is because people thought that what they wanted when they wanted sex was sex, whatever that was.
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Like they wanted to put their body parts against somebody else s body parts and that s all there was to it.
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And humans have sex for so many reasons.
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We are not like most other animals.
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Almost all the sex we have is non-reproductive.
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Even before there was the kind of reproductive technology we have now, almost none of our sex
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resulted in babies.
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Basically the egg s only there for a little tiny window of time and all the other times that you could be having sex or all the other combinations of people who could be having sex is non-reproductive.
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Most of our sex is not about reproduction, it s about social stuff.
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So what is it that you want when you want sex?
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Because you re not just being driven by like
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salmon depositing their eggs at the bottom of the river.
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That s not what human sexuality is.
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So what is it that you want?
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People think the answer is orgasm.
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They think the answer is just sex.
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SPEAKER_00
And those are the top four that you mentioned.
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People want connection with the other person.
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Because if all you wanted was orgasm, chances are you can do that by yourself.
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And if you can t do that by yourself, then there s whole books just about that.
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SPEAKER_00
So connection, shared pleasure, because we don t just want to rub our body parts against someone else.
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We want the someone else to enjoy the sensation of our body parts being rubbed together.
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That s an important part of what we want when we want sex with a partner.
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And the experience of freedom is this quality of being able to close the door on all the other things that are so important in our lives.
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Maybe we ve got kids to
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Maybe we ve got jobs to go to.
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Maybe we ve got school to pay attention to, other friends and family to pay attention to.
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Sometimes we just want to watch an episode of The Golden Bachelor and then go to sleep.
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We re busy.
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So what we want when we want sex is not to have to do any of those other things and just pay attention to the pleasurable things that can happen in our bodies when we connect with each other in this way.
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But there s more.
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People want their identity affirmed.
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People want to know that these parts of themselves that they have been trained their whole lives are not just unlovable but maybe like disgusting and repulsive are actually fully lovable and desirable, right?
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People want all kinds of things.
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They want to feel
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like they are being a good partner to their partner.
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There s all kinds of things people want.
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SPEAKER_00
And when people talk about what is it that you want when you want sex, and just as importantly, what is it that you don t want when you don t want sex, instead of saying, why don t I want sex?
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Or why don t you want sex with me?
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it opens up a much more authentic conversation that pulls it out of the realm of the power struggle, of like who gets to gatekeep whose access to what, and is just about like, there s this experience that we share, that we are interested in sharing in this relationship.
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Let s explore more deeply what this experience really is so we can make sure people s needs are getting met.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, beautiful.
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Without shame, without blaming anyone, and without guilt.
3
SPEAKER_01
I love that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Not to take us off topic, but have you watched Naked Attraction on, well, the Channel 4 show that s now on HBO Max?
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It s one of the TV shows that s included in Mediated Intimacy, which is the book from which I got the term.
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The sex imperatives, the desire imperative, the coital imperative, the sex imperative itself.
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SPEAKER_00
They talk about what are the imperatives laid onto us culturally by the media, and Naked Attraction is one of the shows that they talk about.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, interesting.
3
SPEAKER_01
Do they have a negative view of it or a positive view?
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Or mixed?
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I mean, the book is a cultural critique, so they re critical of it.
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So the question is, what does it say or do about us as human beings that we are consuming people s consumption of another person s naked body when we watch that show?
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Like, what s happening?
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SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was curious for your thoughts.
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It s very puzzling.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s an interesting show to watch.
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Yes, there s the certain level of separation.
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It s not at all, as you would imagine it would be, it doesn t feel at all pornographic or particularly sexual.
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I find it interesting to watch because one, you know, to Betty Dodson, not that you re getting inside vulvas, but to just see the breadth of bodies is interesting.
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And to see people s reaction to those bodies is also interesting and often against type.
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So for people who haven t seen it, it s a dating show where they start by lift, people are in boxes and then you move from the feet up.
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SPEAKER_01
So it s about physical attraction rather than personality.
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SPEAKER_01
But it seems to be a very affirming show for people who are competing on it.
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Like they all say almost invariably, I feel so much more confident.
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It s also really interesting because people will find like the most, they ll eliminate people because of like their hygiene or, I mean, it s so random, Emily.
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SPEAKER_01
I really want you to watch it and I want to hear your feedback because it wasn t what I expected.
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SPEAKER_01
It s been on my list.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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I thought I would feel sort of debased and upset about it.
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And instead I was like, oh, this feels like a positive, but I want to know what you think.
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SPEAKER_00
In mediated interviews, they re very clear like this is not sexy.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s nothing sexy about it.
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SPEAKER_00
My thing is, like, I don t talk about physical attraction in the book, like, at all.
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Except insofar as I talk about, like, in this whole, like, happily ever after, till death do you part type situation.
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The deal is, your bodies are gonna change over time.
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and people can stay attracted to somebody s body over time even though it is unrecognizable from what it was like when they first met because that body is the home of a human they adore.
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Our attraction to a person s body can be just like superficial something like your toenails are gross.
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Or it can be, here is the human whose life I have shared in our home for all these years, and their belly and their bum and their varicose veins and their scar from the surgery that saved their life, all of it is so fucking hot because this is my person.
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So I don t talk about physical attraction in the book.
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And I will also say that naked attraction, it s very unsuccessful.
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People go on the dates and invariably don t want to go on another date, which is also really interesting.
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But it does, one, play against type, because you ll see someone and be like, they re definitely going to go for that body that seems like most conforming.
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And invariably, like, that s the first person booted off.
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Conforms to the culturally constructed aspirational ideal.
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But it s often not.
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It goes against that.
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And I feel like they do a good job with just a lot of different people.
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And there s polyamory, there s trans, there s gender fluid people, pansexual people.
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SPEAKER_01
It s very interesting.
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We ll have a second conversation after you ve watched it.
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But yeah, it s not a good way.
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I would say I m here to report that I d say naked attractions hit rate in terms of minting successful couples, I would say maybe 10% even make it to a second date.
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SPEAKER_01
All right, let s talk about the floor plan.
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And let s talk about these seven rooms.
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You mentioned fear, then there s rage and panic grief, and people can probably figure out what the rooms are that are farthest from lust.
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So let s focus on the rooms that are most accessible.
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The reason I chose Jak Panksepp s model of seven primary process emotions, pause to note that here we are in 2023, 2024.
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science still has not picked a model of how human emotion works.
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There are at least three dominant models, and I picked this one because it s the only one that includes lust.
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The model that Inside Out is based on, that Pixar had emotion research consultants, that model does not include lust, even though mammals
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This is about like mammalian brain processes.
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Mammals are sexually reproducing.
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They all have a sexual motivation system.
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So I picked this one and it has seven primary processes emotions.
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Some of them are what I call pleasure adverse, which means it s very unlikely you re going to experience pleasure when you re in them and you were motivated to avoid them.
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And then there are the pleasure favorable spaces.
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Lust is one of those pleasure favorable spaces.
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And the question is, which other spaces are also pleasure favorable because they re the ones that are likely
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to be easy to transition from that space into lust.
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Space number one that most people are probably going to think of is care.
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So this is feeling cared for, love, and affection.
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Care is very complex for humans because it is very big and accommodates a lot of different kinds of relationships.
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So I do think of that as like an open floor plan space in an emotional floor plan of how all of our emotions are laid out relative to each other.
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So caring for is the sort of like living room, lying on the sofa, Netflix and chill kind of care.
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Just watching the fireplace, feeling really held and supported and present with your certain special someone.
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But there s a difference area in care that is, I call it the kitchen of care, where you are taking care of all the things that need to be taken care of.
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In the way that you take care of your children, and in the way that some people, in particular heterosexual women and heterosexual relationships, feel like they are taking care of their spouses, that is not close to lust.
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Whereas the Netflix and chill couch fireplace living room caring for, that might have
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have a doorway that like enters right into the lust space, that when somebody s feeling really cared for, feeling very affectionate and connected in that way, can lead right into lust.
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Whereas if you re like trapped in the kitchen of like taking care of somebody, not so much.
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And this complexity is why you hear some therapists talk about intimacy as the key to a sexual connection, to the erotic.
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And why you hear some people talking about intimacy as the opposite, the enemy of the erotic.
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And it s because care is so many different things for us.
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So recognizing the experience of care that feels like, oh, this could be adjacent to the experience of lust for me.
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That s one.
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And the tricky thing is that everyone s floor plan varies.
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Actually, in my emotional floor plan, I cannot get directly from care, no matter how cared for and loving I feel.
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I cannot get directly from care to lust.
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I have to go through a different space to get to lust.
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So there s two more spaces.
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One of them that I think is like the surprise winner for so many people who were early readers of the book,
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who were, I was talking about the floor plan, they were like, oh, this room, it s play.
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Play is the mammalian motivational system of friendship.
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It is engaging in behavior for no purpose except that everyone involved enjoys it.
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And there is nothing at stake.
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I always think of my dog and the play bow, invitation.
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Like everything that happens from this point on, I mean no harm.
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We re just going to play because we both enjoy playing.
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And there s rough and tumble play like dogs do.
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There s object play where babies and children manipulate objects and they splash water to see like, what does this thing do?
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And what can I do with this thing?
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SPEAKER_01
And oh, sex can be such object play.
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SPEAKER_01
Your partner s genitals.
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SPEAKER_01
What does this thing do?
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SPEAKER_01
What can I make this thing do?
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What can I do with this thing?
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Object play.
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Because everybody involved likes it and there is nothing at stake.
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I know that in, like, romance novels and in TV shows and a lot of media, the stakes are high with sex because, like, I mean, that s storytelling.
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SPEAKER_01
You want the stakes to be high because why would we just watch people have sex for the sheer plain old fun of it if it s not going to advance the plot?
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SPEAKER_01
I get why, but man, I want to live in a world where
4
SPEAKER_01
There are stories about people having sex and playing erotically for the sheer flippin  fun of it.
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SPEAKER_01
When people have great vacation sex, they re like, oh, it s because I can step away from all my work stuff and I can just play.
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SPEAKER_01
Play.
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SPEAKER_01
Roleplay.
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Oh, the reason I love roleplay is because I can step out of all the other stuff and I can feel like nothing is at stake.
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SPEAKER_01
I can just disappear into this joyful, fun situation without feeling like I might lose something if things don t go right.
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SPEAKER_01
And it s that nothing being at stake that s absolutely essential because so many of us were raised to believe the stakes are really high.
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SPEAKER_01
around being sexually, like, successful or adequate, that we have to do it right or else there will be some terrible consequence.
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There will be no terrible consequence if things don t go according to plan.
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The other.
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The last.
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Pleasure-favorable space.
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is seeking or exploration, research, curiosity.
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SPEAKER_01
Ooh, what s this?
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SPEAKER_01
Ooh.
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For some people, this is intellectual.
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For me, it s intellectual.
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When I was in graduate school, it was very easy.
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I would talk about my research.
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My partner would talk about their research.
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And it s basically a slip and slide from talking about affective neuroscience into the love space.
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SPEAKER_01
I am not like most people.
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I know that.
4
SPEAKER_01
But, so I have friends who sold all their stuff and traveled all around the world.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that sounds like a nightmare to me, but they loved it.
4
SPEAKER_01
They loved the adventure of it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Things went wrong all the time, especially in places where neither of them spoke the language.
4
SPEAKER_01
And they got to solve these problems together and be in the adventure of it all the time.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it went right into the erotic space for them.
4
SPEAKER_01
For some people, it is going to art museums.
4
SPEAKER_01
For some people, it is going to lectures or taking classes and learning new things.
4
SPEAKER_01
For some people, it is the adventure of cooking a new recipe and exploring flavor profiles.
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SPEAKER_01
Everyone s different in what kind of seeking, curiosity, exploration, experimentation, adventure is the one that for them is like, oh, that.
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SPEAKER_01
For me, seeking was definitely a way in.
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SPEAKER_01
and play, it turns out, is the primary way in for me and my partner.
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SPEAKER_01
My partner, who s a cartoonist, he writes jokes for a living.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it sure is a good thing that laughter and play is our primary way in.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
No, I loved the way that you wrote about your husband, particularly in the context of, like you, I want to go deep with people mentally.
4
SPEAKER_00
And my husband is, you know, he went to RISD.
4
SPEAKER_00
He s an architect by training.
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SPEAKER_00
He does not want to talk about metaphysics with me or Tolstoy.
4
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But that s part of me.
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SPEAKER_00
But like you, it was a good reframe where I realized, too, that I get a lot of that in other parts of my life.
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I host a podcast.
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I have many friends who I like to wrestle with intellectually.
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SPEAKER_00
It was interesting reading your book and hearing you talk about your relationship.
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SPEAKER_00
I m like, oh, yeah, maybe that is not my primary
4
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room next to Loss, and maybe it was when I was younger, and I ve not outgrown it, but my floor plan has changed.
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SPEAKER_00
I ve remodeled.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that happens.
4
SPEAKER_00
This was interesting.
4
SPEAKER_00
The Gottmans are on last week, and we were talking about anger, and he might be also talking about the same research, but he was saying how anger, which is not in one of the pleasure adjoining spaces,
4
SPEAKER_00
but he was talking about how it actually should be coded in the brain.
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SPEAKER_00
It s coded as an approach emotion that it actually does have some curiosity, which is so interesting.
4
SPEAKER_00
Can you talk a little bit about that was a good cultural sidebar about quote unquote hate fucking or the way that we re also fed anger as a lustful emotion.
4
SPEAKER_01
John Gottman absolutely has read this research.
4
SPEAKER_01
He wrote a book, I think it s The Relationship Cure, where he talks about the primary process emotions and he gives each one a character, like the jester in his play.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I have found this metaphor of the floor plan to be more useful.
4
SPEAKER_01
But like a lot of us nerdy sex folks are like, how do we get more people to start thinking about
4
SPEAKER_01
all of their primary process emotions and their sexuality in the context of all of their emotions.
4
SPEAKER_01
So he definitely, like we re talking about the same research, anger is an approach.
4
SPEAKER_01
So there s approach motivations and avoidance motivations.
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SPEAKER_01
Fear is an avoidance motivation where you want to run away.
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SPEAKER_01
And that s the space that I was in when I couldn t fear.
4
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is the flight of fight or flight.
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SPEAKER_01
Rage is the fight of fight or flight.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it is approach to destroy something that is in your way, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
So it s everything from slight irritation and annoyance to frustration and anger up to rage itself.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it includes hate.
4
SPEAKER_01
When you hate someone, they re in your way.
4
SPEAKER_01
and you want to approach and destroy them.
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SPEAKER_01
I think it goes without saying that if you feel an impulse to destroy someone, don t have sex with that person right then.
4
SPEAKER_01
Except under really specific circumstances where you are mutually consenting to, metaphorically, somebody s going to destroy somebody with sex.
4
SPEAKER_01
Like, that can be a game people play, it can be
4
SPEAKER_01
a way that people therapeutically work through stuff, but it takes a very specific context.
4
SPEAKER_01
But because it s an approach motivation, in the same way that lust is an approach motivation, lust is motivation to move toward for courtship and sexities, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a very different energy, and it matters what energy you re moving toward with.
4
SPEAKER_01
unfortunately live in a world where, in particular, some people are born with a packet of genitals that make everybody around them go, it s a boy.
4
SPEAKER_01
And they raise that person as a boy.
4
SPEAKER_01
And sometimes that person will grow up into someone who identifies as a boy and then as a man.
4
SPEAKER_01
And over the course of that person s lifetime, they re trained in a packet of rules and regulations about how to use their bodies, what emotions they re allowed to feel and how they re supposed to express them.
4
SPEAKER_01
The emotions that an it s a boy type person is allowed to have
4
SPEAKER_01
are winning, anger, and horny.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, if the emotional vocabulary we grant approximately half the population doesn t include lonely, longing, sad, afraid,
4
SPEAKER_01
no wonder they re going to have an emotional experience and categorize it as like, I wanna move toward, but there s only a certain limited number of moving toward motivations.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so I m gonna decide that this is moving toward to fuck.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so because of toxic masculinity and the frickin  frackin  patriarchy,
4
SPEAKER_01
We live in a world where people believe that anger and sex are opposite sides of the same coin, when on the emotional floor plan you will find that they are usually miles apart.
4
SPEAKER_01
There are several illustrations in
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book of different people s floor plans and one of my favorites is a townhouse where anger and fear and panic grief, which is the third pleasure adverse space, they re in the basement and care is on the sort of main level and on the second floor where the bedrooms are, that s where play is and lust is on the roof.
5
SPEAKER_00
So this person is in their anger space or their fear space.
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SPEAKER_00
They ve got three
5
SPEAKER_00
flights of stairs to climb before they get to the lust space.
5
SPEAKER_00
That is much more typical of a person s floor plan.
5
SPEAKER_00
Some people do have connections between their rage space and their lust space.
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SPEAKER_00
And like I said, it takes very specific circumstances to have that go really well.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, and I think you write about this, but I would imagine too in long-standing relationships, you write about Terry Real and real marital hatred and all of these things that are quite typical, right, in an enduring relationship.
5
SPEAKER_01
There s going to be moments when you hate your partner.
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but that often the quick route to lust is through play, right?
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Where someone can crack a joke and it becomes funny enough where you can start to engage with each other out of that rage space, but maybe adjacent to it.
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Yeah, so anger is a normal part of human experience and it s important not to get stuck there, not to get trapped in the rage space.
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So knowing ways to help each other get out of that space is absolutely essential because there are going to be times when your partner drives you up the wall.
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That s normal because humans are human and so being able to self-regulate and co-regulate are both absolutely essential and learning to notice what state you are in and ask for help in transitioning to
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more pleasure-favorable state is, man, if everybody could have that kind of conversation with their partner, first of all, to be able to recognize what state they re in.
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Oh, I m in the rage state.
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That s why I feel this way.
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That s why this is happening in my body.
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That s why I m having these thoughts.
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Oh, I m in the panic grief space.
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That s why I feel so self-critical.
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That s why I m spiraling in a sense of loneliness.
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Let me ask my partner for help.
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Hey, I m in this space.
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Could you
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lie on the couch with me for 15 minutes so that I can feel held by you, which will draw me out of the panic grief space, being able to co-regulate.
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Can you imagine a world where everybody can identify which emotional space they re in and ask for help in transitioning into one that s more comfortable?
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I can t imagine that world, but it sounds amazing.
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You open the book this way, and I think it can t be overstated, which is you write, some people think it s sexual frequency.
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It s not.
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There s very little relationship between frequency of sex and sexual or relationship satisfaction.
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Hardly any of us have sex very often.
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We are busy.
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So how do we change that?
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from being the primary mechanism of comparison for people.
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So there is data about how frequently couples have sex on average.
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And I never, ever talk about that number because it s impossible to hear that number and not judge yourself against it as like, therefore my sex life is fine, or therefore my sex life is a failure.
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Mo, the co-host on my podcast, Googled the number.
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and spiraled.
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She s like, there s something terrible going on in my relationship.
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I must be completely failing because she was not having sex with her non-binary partner at anything like the average frequency.
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Average in heavy scare quotes.
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So don t look up the number.
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Here is my cure for worrying about frequency.
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Suppose there s a couple who has sex at a rate that you feel like is a very frequent rate, whatever that number is for you.
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Now suppose that someone is doing well in their sexual relationship.
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Both people being glad to be there,
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and free to leave with no unwanted consequences is much more important than how often you have sex.
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For this book I talked to someone who remains the highest desire person I have ever talked to and she talked about her transition from her teenage and early 20s of feeling like really like she just had to have a lot of sex because she was so horny all the time to realizing that
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If her partner didn t want to have sex, she did not want to have sex with her partner because she would rather have occasional sex where her partner was really into it than frequent sex and her partner was checked out.
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That the quality of the connection is the thing that matters.
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Man, if you try to solve a sexual problem by just having more sex, like more frequent sex, because somebody in the relationship is like, if we just did it, like if we just did it, then we would get into the habit of doing it, it would all be fine.
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But every time you did that, if someone involved was just doing it out of a sense of obligation, if they didn t enjoy the sex,
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then that s training their brain to associate sex with the idea that their pleasure doesn t matter, their desires don t matter, their interest doesn t matter, and that sex is something you only do because you have to.
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And if you get into that situation, you re digging a deeper and deeper hole from which you re going to have to escape when you ultimately decide to advocate for your own pleasure and desires.
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I love Emily Gnagoski.
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She is funny and wise and incredibly smart.
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And I think that come together, particularly for people who are part of Pears or Thrupples or whatever your flavor,
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might be it is relieving always to be assured that there is no quote-unquote normal or quote-unquote healthy or quote-unquote standard way to be and that these things invariably evolve and change and also require work.
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And this is from the beginning of the book, but she essentially outlines three mandates, really, of couples that endure.
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One, they are friends, or to put it more precisely, they trust and admire each other.
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Two, they prioritize sex.
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That is, they decide that it matters for the relationship.
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And three, instead of accepting other people s opinions about who they re supposed to be as sexual people and 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.
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I know it s so much easier when there are templates and roadmaps and certainties but as we ll continue to learn as we grow it s just not that simple unfortunately.
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It s not that simple but it s in some ways liberating to figure out how to do it on your own.
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If you liked today s episode, please rate and review and tell a friend.
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You can find show notes and full transcripts of the episodes at EliseLoonan.com.
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While there, please sign up for my sub stack.
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I send a short note every Wednesday about topics that are aligned with this show and a deeper dive most Sundays.
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Or follow me on Instagram at EliseLoonan.
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And finally, if you haven t already, please consider picking up a copy of my New York Times bestselling book, On Our Best Behavior, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good, available wherever you get your books.
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It s an exploration of how women have been conditioned for goodness, men for power, and all the ways we ve been programmed to police ourselves and each other according to these cultural ideas of what it is to be a good woman.
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I d also like to give a huge thank you to my sponsors who make this show possible.
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Please support them the way they support this podcast.
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This has been a presentation of Cadence 13 Studio.
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If you enjoyed this episode, please listen, rate, review, and follow Pulling the Thread.
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Available now for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I want to give a shout out to Phil Svitek, Lauren Legroso, Mary-Kate McDonough, Ali Brockman, and the entire Kedans13 team for producing these episodes, and to Valero Deval for my key art.
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Take care of yourselves.
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I ll see you next time.