by A decade ago, while sex educator Emily Nagoski was researching and writing her first book, “Come as You Are,” an upcoming bestseller exploring the science of women’s sexuality, she and her husband stopped having sex.
Nagoski began appearing everywhere, assuring women that their sexuality was not a problem that needed to be solved or treated. She spoke with author Glennon Doyle and his wife, soccer player Abby Wambach, about body image and shame on her podcast. She published a workbook to help women better understand their sexual temperament and sexual cues. His Ted speaks They have been viewed millions of times.
But at home, she and her husband, Rich Stevens, a cartoonist whom she met on the dating site OkCupid in 2011, went in and out of months-long sexual dry spells stemming from work stress and health problems. When I spoke with Nagoski at her cozy home in Easthampton, Massachusetts, in the fall, and then again by phone in January, she declined to offer details about how long her droughts lasted. (She didn’t want people to compare themselves). But she didn’t repress how they made her feel.
“Stressed. Depressed. Anxious. Lonely. Self-critical,” said Nagoski, 46. “Like, how can I be an ‘expert’ (and I say that in very, very heavy quotes) and still struggle like this?”
After all, Nagoski had written the book about women and desire. He popularized the metaphor of the sexual response system as a car with an accelerator (which detects erotic stimuli) and brakes (which detects all the reasons not to have sex. Like housework. Or a new baby. Or, simply put, the patriarchy ). When women struggle with arousal and pleasure, she explained in “Come as You Are,” it’s not because the accelerator isn’t being pushed; It is usually caused by applying too much pressure on the brakes. Her talent was not producing original research (this dual control model of sexual response, for example, is not her idea), but she had a knack for examining the science and discovering what she believed was most relevant to the day to day of women. everyday life and find simple ways to describe it.
“He often reminds people that they are whole, not broken,” said Debby Herbenick, director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at the Indiana University School of Public Health, who studied graduate school with Nagoski.
However, Nagoski’s fractured sex life left her full of doubts.
“I did my best to do what I tell other people to do, which is to turn to what was happening with kindness and compassion,” he said, acknowledging how saccharine that advice can seem. “I tried to give myself permission to allow these things to be true. Recognizing them would not always be true. And that I would overcome this spell more easily if he didn’t punish me.”
As a true self-proclaimed “sex nerd,” Nagoski also delved into the science of what good sex looks like in a long-term relationship and how to cope when problems arise, which became the backbone of her new book, “ Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections,” which will be published later this month. At almost 300 pages, two appendices, and 22 pages of scientific notes and references, it is the product of a scholar who loves data. But Nagoski, who earned a doctorate in health behavior and a master’s degree in counseling from Indiana University, is happy to give up what she believes are the three secrets of couples with happy sex lives in the book’s introduction: 1 . They are friends. 2. They prioritize sex. 3. They ignore outside opinions about what sex should be like and do what works for them.
“When I finished,” he said, “I got all the advice in this book that we used to fight for each other.”
‘Pleasure is the measure’
Nagoski believes that most people obsess over the wrong metrics when it comes to sex. It’s not about novelty or orgasms, nor about frequency. “People always want to know: How often does a typical couple have sex?” she said, sitting on her living room couch next to Stevens, 47, while one of her two rescue dogs, Thunder, took a nap between them. “Which is not a question I answer, because it is impossible Listen to a number and not compare yourself to it.” (Plus, he added, people rarely talk about the quality of said sex.)
Most of us are too obsessed with libido, or the desire to have sex, he said, which has caused a lot of unnecessary stress and insecurity. “Desire is the No. 1 “which is why people of all gender combinations seek sex therapy,” she said. “Even I need to be reminded that it’s not about desire. “It’s about pleasure.”
It’s a somewhat surprising insight from someone who has spent much of the last decade helping women better understand how desire really works, banging the drum on the difference between spontaneous desire (the feeling of wanting sex out of the blue) and receptive desire (arising in response to erotic stimuli). In other words, there is nothing unpleasant about planning or scheduling sexual relations.
Nagoski has been a sex educator since the mid-90s. She worked for eight years as director of wellness education at Smith College, before transitioning to writing and speaking full-time in 2016. She has also built a brand that now includes a podcast, a newsletter with over 30,000 subscribers and a growing presence on social media, where he sometimes posts with a Similar puppet called Nagoggles.
Much of what Nagoski preaches, he said, is a transformation of how most of us have been taught that sex should work: that it is always pleasurable and easy.
“Pleasure only happens under really specific circumstances, and the post-industrial world of the 21st century doesn’t naturally create those circumstances very often,” he said. “We are all overwhelmed, exhausted, stressed. Of course, you have to work on moving from your everyday state of mind to a sexy state of mind.”
But in “Come Together,” Nagoski argues that desire is almost beside the point. “Focus on pleasure, because long-term good sex isn’t about how much you want sex,” she writes, “but how much you like the sex you’re having.”
Put more succinctly: “Pleasure is the measure.”
This concept may seem obvious to some, and Nagoski doesn’t say anything that sex researchers don’t already know. But Rosalyn Dischiavo, president of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists, who described Nagoski as “delightfully geeky” and a “rock star” in the field, called it a “radical truth.”
“As sex educators, one of the most beautiful parts of our job (and one of the most frustrating) is ringing that bell over and over again to wake people up and say, ‘Pleasure is good.’ ” she said. “’Pleasure is healing.'”
Following your own advice
Nagoski knows that telling couples to “just access pleasure together” is easier said than done. For most people, including herself, a long list of things can hold back her sexuality. In recent years, she has had to deal with perimenopause, a back injury and then long Covid, which has caused serious vascular problems. For months, Nagoski could barely walk to her mailbox. And she is still healing.
In 2021, Nagoski was diagnosed with autism, after her therapist noticed that she felt unusually relieved not to have to see or talk to other people during the height of the pandemic. Around that time, she saw the Pixar short “Loop,” in which two teenagers, one of whom has autism and does not speak, learn to communicate on a canoe ride. “It’s just this six-minute animated thing,” she said, as she cried. Seeing him, she realized: “I’m autistic.”
The diagnosis, Nagoski said, was a “huge relief.” People on the autism spectrum are sometimes direct and unfiltered, and the diagnosis helped explain why she might be so good at what she does. “I think one of the reasons talking about sex comes so easily to me is that I haven’t absorbed the same ‘shoulds’ in the same way,” she said.
“Come Together” is the first time Nagoski has spoken publicly about his sex life, a decision he initially felt ambivalent about. “Before writing the book, I wondered if revealing something like ‘I, too, have struggled with desire in a long-term relationship’ would undermine my experience.”
When asked what she and her partner did to overcome their dry spells, Nagoski summed it up as follows: First, she spent a lot of time talking to her therapist (whom she has seen for years) about how to talk to her husband about his problems. . topics in a way that made her feel loving and not accusatory. Then, before trying to start anything physical, the couple spent a lot of time talking about sex. Nagoski realized it was important to let Stevens play dumb about her situation, she said. (His inside jokes about her genitals cannot be repeated here.) She brought some levity to their conversations and helped them realize how important joy is to their dynamic in the bedroom.
Finally, she asked her husband to be more affectionate with her outside of sexual situations. Her sex life isn’t perfect now, although if she weren’t recovering from long Covid, Nagoski said, he would describe it as better than ever.
They also made small changes. The couple began closing the bedroom door so their dogs, who “want to be in bed with us,” Nagoski said, couldn’t interrupt the sex. They also brought all the intimate items they needed to the bed. The two tried to eliminate all possible barriers and inconveniences.
But there are risks, Nagoski acknowledged, when couples start having conversations about what’s not working in their sex lives. “None of us want to hurt our partner’s feelings,” she said. If a couple can’t navigate those conversations on their own, or even bring themselves to initiate them, then, “yeah, therapy,” she said.
“It’s hard work,” she said of maintaining sex in a long-term relationship. “And you have to worry. It is not necessary to survive. It is not even necessary to have a spectacular life. “I don’t require anyone on Earth to make any kind of change in their sex life if they don’t want to.”
But Nagoski said that for her “it’s a priority.” The couple now views sex as a “project” that they work on together and make time for it on their calendar.
“We talk about it more than what we are going to have for dinner. I modify my schedule so I don’t have anything that drains me so much that I have no energy left on our calendar day,” Nagoski said. She tries to give herself grace when that doesn’t happen, like when she recently canceled a scheduled sex date because of a migraine.
“What matters,” he said, “is that you are co-creating a context that facilitates access to pleasure.”
