When two people begin a relationship, they often feel exciting, even overwhelming passion for each other. Yet for many couples, this passion declines when they get married. Sexuality starts to feel like a place of duty and work, rather than a place of life and joy. Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife has seen this story unfold with many couples — and has also helped it change direction. In this episode, she explains why we can lose our passion, or eros energy; what eros truly requires to thrive; and how we can cultivate life-long eros energy within marriage.
At the heart of passionate, spiritual sexuality is a balance of two vital forces: freedom and moral integrity. Freedom makes sex a joyful place where we can be and expand our true selves. Moral integrity – when we also live up to our best selves – enables the genuine intimacy of knowing our partner and letting ourselves be known.
Jennifer Finlayson-Fife is an LDS relationship and sexuality coach with a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology. She is the author of That We Might Have Joy: Desire, Divinity, and Intimate Love and the creator of six online courses that help individuals and couples create happier lives and stronger intimate relationships. She also hosts Room for Two, a popular sex and intimacy podcast, and is a regular guest on LDS-themed podcasts discussing relationships, faith, and sexuality.
Sofia Ashley is a certified intimacy coach and sex educator who supports women, parents and couples to reconnect with themselves and their relationships after children; navigating identity shifts, intimacy changes, low libido and the realities of life after kids with honesty and compassion.
Dan Purcell is a husband, father of 6 children, and an entrepreneur. He is the founder of Get Your Marriage On! and CEO of Virgo Dev.
Laurie Watson is a leading expert in couples therapy, sex therapy, and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). Laurie specializes in working with couples stuck in cycles of emotional and sexual disconnection.
ABOUT ARTICLE 13
Article 13 is a narrative podcast from Faith Matters that brings together cutting-edge research and spiritual wisdom to offer blueprints for a better world. American society is fractured across political and cultural lines. Healing will not happen quickly or easily, but will require a sustained commitment to peaceful discussion and the development of new, creative frameworks for finding common ground.
Hosted by Zachary Davis and featuring deep-dives into vital social issues, extraordinary guests, and beautiful sound design, Article 13 aims to model the kind of hopeful, intelligent discourse our country needs—and to offer ways that each individual listener can start the healing, right where they are.
Article 13 is produced by Maria Devlin McNair, Zachary Davis, Gavin Feller, Sam Clawson, and Music by Steve LaRosa. Art by Charlotte Alba. You can learn more about Article 13 here.
We express our thanks to the Wheatley Institute for their support.
UPCOMING EVENT
TRANSCRIPT
I. Introduction
Finlayson-Fife: So basically the story is, Katie and Eric fall in love, feel lots of attraction, more than they even want to feel because they feel so alive and full of hope – and then she feels this kind of – upon getting married, just, the desire plummets, and it’s very confusing.
This is Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife, relaying a story she tells in her new book, That We Might Have Joy. What makes Katie and Eric’s story so important is that it’s actually a representation of many stories – ones Dr. Finlayson-Fife hears all the time in her work as a therapist and relationship and sexuality coach.
Finlayson-Fife: And this is so many of my clients, like, ‘Why, when I could not keep my hands off him, do I feel no desire now?’ and so the story begins with, really, Katie and Eric coming for help, confused, because they’re coming in with a frequency problem, but what they really have is a desire and passion problem. There is this absence of this magnetic energy that made them feel so alive and so attracted and so hopeful, that now is turned into sort of duty, obligation, and a kind of deadness in the marriage.
These are questions plenty of married people encounter at some point: how did I lose the high desire I had when I first met my spouse? Why doesn’t my desire match their desire? Is there anything I can do about it?
Dr. Finlayson-Fife’s answer is that sexual desire is something you can nurture and grow within yourself – if you understand its real sources.
Finlayson-Fife: But the question is basically, How do we make our marriage feel more alive? And I think this is what so many of us want, we want more of what put us into the marriage in the first place, and that is the experience of Eros. So Eros in Greek mythology is the life force, and it’s what makes us feel joy, it’s what makes us feel alive, it’s what expands our souls.
Finlayson-Fife: Eros is this sense of like, ‘I belong to you and me at the same time, like I can feel the sense of communion with you, but I also feel connected to myself.’ That’s what we feel when we’re falling in love, is that who I am is accepted and valued and I can be with you.
You generate sexual desire and passion as a couple by cultivating this sense of eros energy. And eros requires a balance of two forces: freedom and moral integrity.
Finlayson-Fife: I think in the best, highest meaning, most beautiful form of sexuality, there’s both a freedom in it and a discipline in it. There’s like a moral anchor and also a freedom, and they both are working alongside each other. And when sexuality goes awry, it’s either overly free, as in there’s no morality in it, there’s no kind of anchor – or it’s suffocated by shoulds, and ‘you have to’, and rules, and fear. And I think either one of those are anti-spiritual positions, in my view, and they kill the rejuvenating aspect of sexuality. But there’s a spiritual wisdom in finding this middle ground that requires our development as people into becoming wiser, more loving beings, to find that balance of moral groundedness, but freedom and joy and pleasure, and they belong together.
Welcome to Article 13 – a podcast creating blueprints for a better world. I’m your host, Zachary Davis. In this episode, we discuss how to sustain life-giving sexual connection in marriage. We dive into deep perspectives and practical strategies for cultivating moral integrity and freedom, to find that eros energy that will make your love feel alive.
II. Freedom
Eros energy
One half of the eros energy equation is freedom, which is something all of us crave as human beings.
Finlayson-Fife: The reality, I talk about this a lot in my courses, is that we want two things in life: we want to belong to another person, we want to feel connected and cared about, but we also want to belong to ourselves. And therein lies the struggle. And if being sexual makes us feel even more that we belong to ourselves, we feel a sense of acceptance, we feel a sense of freedom, we feel a sense of ease and aliveness, then we like sex. But if sex lacks that erotic – we may still want the pleasure or the control from having it, but our souls don’t want it.
That lack of freedom was a big part of the problem for Katie and Eric. Once they were married, they felt like sex had become a duty rather than a freely chosen act – which suffocates eros energy.
Finlayson-Fife: Eros is all about agency. Eros does not want to be controlled, constricted, demanded, it cannot handle that kind of pressure. But choice is what drives it, it’s what makes it feel like a place of freedom, because agency is at the foundation of it.
We need a sense of freedom and agency around sexuality. So let’s look at some strategies for cultivating it.
Sex and meaning
The first strategy has to do with meaning. Sex between humans is never just physical. It’s laden with significance and meaning. And some meanings will cause desire to drop. This includes the meaning of “sex as obligation” – the sense that we no longer have freedom and choice around sex because it’s become a duty or expectation. This kind of meaning often gets activated by the contractual commitment of marriage, which is a big reason for the common drop in desire after marriage:
Finlayson-Fife: When we’re dating, often sexual desire happens to us. When you have met someone who thinks you’re attractive and desirable and so on, that’s a very expansive meaning.
But I think that what often happens then when you get married is all those meanings that created desire before have now gone away. It’s now very legal, it’s very predictable, it’s somewhat certain – now, often for women, it’s in the frame of obligation and should, and so all the things that made it so desirable are now not operating.
This doesn’t mean that married couples can’t ever enjoy a great sexual relationship. On the contrary, says Dr. Finlayson-Fife, “the research shows that the group of adults that are having the best sex and the most frequent sex are married people.” The key takeaway is that, for married couples, the meanings that make sex pleasurable and desirable don’t happen automatically. The partners have to intentionally foster those meanings themselves.
Finlayson-Fife: If you’re going to feel sexual desire as a married person, you need to create it, cultivate it, cultivate the meanings between you and your spouse that would make sex desirable for you.
So how do you cultivate positive meanings around sex? The first step is to know what those meanings are for you. If something speaks to you in a romantic novel or film, figure out why that is. Reflect on good experiences with your partner and identify what made them so good. A positive meaning for you might be, “Sex is where I get to be deeply and completely received by my spouse.” Or, “Sex is where I get to be adventurous and unpredictable and try something new.” Sex researcher Emily Nagoski asked hundreds of people the question, “What do you want when you want sex?” The top four answers were connection, shared pleasure, the sense of being desired, and a sense of freedom. Maybe those aspects of sex provide a sense of meaning for you too. Identify your positive meanings, and then look for more ways to activate them.
One way can be through fantasy, as Dr. Finlayson-Fife explains:
Finlayson-Fife: Sexuality is a kind of grown-up play, and part of play is trying on meanings. What are the meaning frames, either in their relationship or within themselves, that makes sex appealing? A lot of times, fantasy is pulling for those meaning frames, it’s a way of making it more immediately available to your mind.
Summoning up a positive memory, imagining new roles for yourself and your spouse, developing a storyline – these are all ways to amplify the meanings that make sex desirable for you.
Finlayson-Fife: For example, I like the meaning that ‘I am chosen, that I am special, that my husband chooses me above all other options.’ This is also in a lot of romantic fiction, that the guy in town that’s capable and strong and even somewhat stoic is really in love with this one woman. He knows her, he values her, he desires her, that’s the stuff that really good romantic fiction is made up of, is that she’s chosen. So women will often use narratives in their minds of being chosen, of being special, that you’re the woman that’s wanted, that they’ll break rules, in fact, to be with you
Some of the meanings that appeal to you – what you find novel or exciting – will violate social rules. They won’t seem polite or decorous. That’s okay. As long as you and your spouse know you’re building something positive together, it can be a good thing to play with what Dr. Finlayson-Fife calls your “shadow self.”
Finlayson-Fife: Sexuality can be a place where you can play with aspects of self in a collaborative way – never against your partner’s will, never against their shared participation, none of those things – it’s when you can actually trust that you’re both able to be honest enough and true enough to yourselves that you can play with these aspects of self. And so it can be fun. You can play with the pretend illegality of your behavior. You can pretend like Phil and Claire, you know, from [the television show] Modern Family – those of you who don’t know that episode, but they’re playing with this shadow self, they’re a couple having an affair (even though it’s really Phil and Claire), but they’re playing with breaking the rules. That’s a fun way to bring the shadow into the legality of marriage. It’s bringing playfulness into the responsibility. And that’s really at the core of passionate marriages.
Some people are uncomfortable with the idea of fantasy because they think it always means fantasizing about someone else – like cheating on your partner in your mind because you’re imagining being with a different person. But fantasies don’t have to be “partner-replacement.” They can be fantasies about your partner – like imagining yourself on a moonlit beach with your spouse. Psychotherapist Esther Perel defines fantasy as “simply anything that enhances excitement or pleasure.” Maybe just start by placing yourself mentally in some place more beautiful or faraway or dangerous than the place you normally encounter your spouse and see if it enhances anything for you.
Accelerators and brakes
Fantasies are an example of sexual accelerators. As researchers like Emily Nagoski and Ian Kerner describe, we have sexual accelerators and sexual brakes. Your accelerator notices stimuli that are sexually relevant or enticing and tells your sexual response, “Turn on!” Your brakes notice threats, anything that would make sex a bad idea in this moment, and tell you, “Turn off!” A key part of getting to know your sexual self is learning your accelerators and your brakes.
Marriage coach Dan Purcell reminds couples that both partners tend to enjoy the experience more when they put the focus first on the woman’s pleasure. So we’ll look at some things that commonly hit the brakes for women.
Women and Moms
Dr. Finlayson-Fife has described sex as a place we go in our minds. If you’re a woman – especially if you’re a mom – you’ll probably have a million things pulling your attention and energy away from that place. With a weighty mental load and a million things on the to-do list, sex can start to feel like just another chore on the list.
Finlayson-Fife: So a lot of people have grown up in the idea that men are the sexual ones, they’re the ones who are naturally sexual and have more sexuality than women do, and women’s role, on some level, is to manage men’s sexuality. Now it’s in the frame of, ‘It’s a job. It’s not play. It’s work. It’s something I’m supposed to do if I’m a good wife.’ I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, ‘I’m just touched out at the end of the day. I’ve had children hanging on me all day, and the last thing I want to do is be touched again by my husband.’
That frame of “sex as a job” slams the brakes. But during this life stage, there’s another way to think about sex.
Finlayson-Fife: I think that a different way of thinking about it is that, ‘I’ve been giving a lot all day to young children’ – which any of us who’ve done that know how challenging that is, what kind of rigor is in that kind of caretaking – ‘and that I want to be taken care of tonight. I want to be loved, and cared for, through my sensuality, and my sexuality, that I’d like to be given to.’ Think of sexuality as a way to be in relationship to yourself, to be in relationship to your spouse, to let yourself be taken care of in this way, being given to physically, as a way of filling you back up, reconnecting you to yourself, and to your spouse.
Of course, it’s not enough for women just to adopt a new way of thinking about sex. To have a new experience of sex, women need the support of their partners. If you’re a husband whose wife is overwhelmed with her daily caretaking duties, ask her what kind of experience she’d like. Talk to her about how she’d like to be taken care of. And remember that a great sexual experience starts well before the sex itself. You prepare the way for a strong partnership in the bedroom by building a strong partnership outside the bedroom.
In her book Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections, Emily Nagoski notes a key trait of couples with great long-term sex lives: they are friends. They “trust and admire each other.” As a husband, you earn some of that trust and admiration by showing your partner that she can count on you, consistently, to share equitably in the work of caring for a home and family. And by taking some of those many distractions off her plate, you make it all the easier for her to relax and receive at the end of the day.
You can also help your wife by giving her space to help herself relax. For many women, it’s hard to move towards sex when they still feel stuck in “mom mode” or “housekeeper mode.” Sex coach Sofia Ashley encourages women to help themselves make that transition with what she calls a “palate cleanse.” It means taking some time – 20 minutes or more is best – to go through some rituals that help your body settle down and let you transition mentally and physically into a new, more erotic identity. This is Ashley in conversation with Dan Purcell on the “Get Your Marriage On!” podcast.
Ashley: There’s that ritual of getting ready for a date, which is almost the ritual of embodying the ‘sexy mama.’ I’m dressing up, I’m putting on the costume of me being my partner’s wife and sexual playmate and getting out of my daily motherhood costume. And that seems superficial, but it also helps you to embody and connect with a different part of yourself. So palate cleansing is huge.
So husbands, help your wife do a palate cleanse. Maybe you put the kids to bed on date night, or you do all the dishes after dinner, so your partner can go upstairs and take a little time for herself – to rest, to recharge, to reconnect with herself in whatever way will make it easier for her to relax and receive pleasure later on.
Stress
A palate cleanse also helps release stress, which is another huge sexual brake for women and for men. Stress distracts us, tenses up our bodies, and floods our system with fight-or-flight hormones that inhibit our capacity for arousal. One way to combat stress is simply to experience more pleasure during the day – any kind of pleasure.
Ashley: It’s actually literally medicine for you, so when you even manage to just deeply enjoy the first three sips of your coffee, even if you only get three sips, or if you’ve got two minutes and you’re doing your makeup routine or your morning routine or you’re in the shower, like actually smelling the lotion deeply, all of those things release hormones in your brain that are the antidote to the cortisol and the adrenaline, which actually supports you just on a baseline level.
Try to find moments in the day when you can replace stress with pleasure. And identify what makes it easier for you to experience pleasure during sex. This is what Emily Nagoski calls creating the right context. Maybe it means getting the evening’s chores out of the way. Maybe it’s taking some time first to shower, or eat food you enjoy, or connect with your partner in conversation. Maybe it’s certain lighting or music or clothing that makes it easier for you to experience yourself as a sensual being. Figure out what contexts make it easy to experience pleasure and plan with your partner how you’ll create them – like Sofia Ashley does with her husband.
Ashley: He knows what playlist to put on that’s going to be supportive for me, he knows how to put the lighting in the room that’s going to be the best support for me, and I know those things and I can do them for myself too, and we have this little pre-launch checklist.
Purcell: I love this idea, Sofia, of the pre-launch checklist. Every couple should sit down and talk about it with their spouse: “What are the things that we can do that really help take the pressure off the brakes?”
Spontaneous and responsive desire
Knowing how to create a positive context for sex is especially important if your desire mainly arises once you’re already in that context.
As Emily Nagoski describes, our standard idea of sexual desire is that it just suddenly happens. You see someone attractive, or you’re just having lunch, and you suddenly think, “I’d like some sex!” That’s “spontaneous” desire.
But sometimes the desire for sex only arises after some sexual things have already started happening. The lights are dimmed. Your partner is undressed. Your bodies are touching – and then you think, “I really would enjoy sex right now.” That’s responsive desire. It’s common in both sexes, but especially in women.
Finlayson-Fife: Women often feel psychological desire after their body becomes aroused. So that is to say, for women, it is not unusual for there to be a decision to step towards sexual behavior, and the psychological, like where their body and mind are working together, happens further down the path.
If you primarily feel responsive desire, you might believe that you’re broken or abnormal because your response doesn’t match that “normal” picture of desire. This belief alone can hit your sexual brakes. But this belief is not true. Responsive desire is normal and healthy. So don’t spend time trying to “make” yourself have spontaneous desire or worrying about why you don’t. Just get to know your sexual self. Identify the meanings, the fantasies, the “pre-launch checklist” that make appealing contexts for you; talk with your partner about how you’ll create them; and it will be easier for desire to emerge.
Anatomy
Desire and pleasure also come more easily if you both know something about your bodies and how they work. You can use books like Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are or Ian Kerner’s She Comes First and He Comes Next [NB: proper title citation should be Passionista: The Empowered Woman’s Guide to Pleasuring a Man], an app like Dan Purcell’s “Intimately Us” to learn more about sexual anatomy and response. For example, it’s helpful to know that the typical arousal patterns for women aren’t the same as for men. Many women do not enjoy starting off with touch in their most sensitive areas. In an unaroused state, genital touch can feel irritating or even painful. Many women enjoy starting off with touch all over their body to build up arousal – and only then focusing in.
Finlayson-Fife: This is part of women’s biological programming, that their whole body is their erogenous zone, and so sometimes men get to the point, so to speak, way too quickly.
Finlayson-Fife: In the beginning of arousal, you want to stay focused on the other parts – that is, focusing on the rest of her body, integrating that into her body, building up that sort of full-body tension.
Tension and release also occur on different schedules for men and women. With direct stimulation, it typically takes men about five and a half minutes to reach peak excitement. For women, it typically takes twenty minutes. So don’t feel anxious or defective if you follow that longer schedule. Talk to your partner about the timing and stimulation that work best for you. Don’t pressure yourself to “hurry up.”
Don’t pressure
Pressure is one of the biggest threats to the freedom eros needs. Often, there’s a higher-desire person in the couple who wants to have sex more often than their partner does. There’s nothing wrong with wanting sex with your spouse. But don’t just pressure them. This will make sex feel like a duty and an obligation, which kills passion right away. Instead of pressuring, figure out what would make sex more pleasurable for your spouse – an easier choice to say “yes” to. Ask them about their brakes and accelerators. Learn what makes an appealing sexual context for them and do your part to create it. You’ll be enhancing your partner’s sense of freedom, and you’ll be living up to your own moral integrity – which is the other crucial half of the eros question.
III. Morality
Dr. Finlayson-Fife explains that it’s easier for women to feel desire when they feel like they are desirable. But “desirable” here means something more than just physical attractiveness. It’s a deep sense of liking who you are as a person.
Finlayson-Fife: “I know I’m a good person. I do good in the world. I like who I am.”
EmyLee McIntyre: We desire to be around ourselves.
Finlayson-Fife: Exactly. We desire to be around ourselves, and others desire to be around us because we’re going back to this eros energy. That eros energy is emanating from us, that life force, that sense of happiness in the world.
That desire to be around ourselves is a key part of why great sexual connection requires moral integrity. It’s because true intimacy depends on our ability to be at peace with ourselves.
Finlayson-Fife: You know, we sometimes think of intimacy as, ‘I’ll tell you all the lesser parts of me and then you validate them,’ and [you] say, “I can understand that,” and that’s what we want intimacy to be. But really, what intimacy is to know and be known, and that pressures us to grow up. That pressures our minds to evolve.
Intimacy means letting our partners know who we are. But we won’t be comfortable with anyone else knowing who we are until we are comfortable with who we are. And we won’t be comfortable with ourselves until we know we are living, as best we can, in alignment with our own moral compass. That’s why true intimacy requires moral integrity.
Finlayson-Fife: We’re taking our own honest assessment, our own honest judgment, more seriously and living in alignment with what we know and believe is true.
Finlayson-Fife: The more you are at peace with who you are, the more comfortable you are with you and you don’t need to use the issues of sex and desire to prove something about yourself to yourself, the more you’re really freed up to really love through your sexuality – because you’re at peace with it, you don’t have to legitimize it and prove it’s okay and prove you’re okay. You’re okay with yourself, and so you’re free to be known and to really love and know your spouse.
A person with moral integrity can respect who they are, which means they’re willing to let others see who they are. They can show up for sex completely as themselves. They are comfortable being naked physically and emotionally. And that true sharing of self really increases the potential for connection and passion with their partner.
IV. Conclusion
We began with the story of Katie and Eric – the couple who had lots of sexual desire as they were dating but found that desire disappearing when they were married. It’s a common phase that many couples go through. But it doesn’t have to be the place where you stay.
Finlayson-Fife: So first of all, eros is easy to have at the beginning of a relationship, and that’s why some people chronically are getting into new relationships, because what happens is once that fades away or once it becomes more challenging, then it requires character development to keep it alive in a marriage.
When you face the challenge of discovering your own true desires; when you also moderate your desires to grant your partner freedom; when you listen to your partner’s needs and share in their burdens; when you can tolerate feedback from your partner and reflect honestly on where you still need to mature, you’re not just creating the circumstances for great sex, you’re also developing your character. Sexual growth takes spiritual growth. When you bring your best self to sexuality in this way, you achieve what Dr. Finlayson-Fife calls “sexual integration.”
Finlayson-Fife: Sexual integration is this ability to accept ourselves as embodied, sensual, sexual beings, that this is a part of the gift of our embodiment, that we’re able to integrate this gift by learning how to live in line with our higher principles, with our higher selves – that we’re going to manage our impulses, that we’re going to learn how to do what is loving and makes our relationships stronger, that opens us up to joy, that nourishes our souls in the way we’re in relationship to our sexuality and our capacity for pleasure.
With sexual integration, there’s a chance for sexuality to become a true blessing in your relationship.
Maybe it doesn’t feel like a blessing right now. But the path forward could start with a conversation about what you would like it to be. Talk to your partner about the positive meanings that you think sex could have in your marriage, that you wish it did have, and share your desire to live out those meanings. Dr. Finlayson-Fife imagines how this conversation might start:
Finlayson-Fife: ‘I want to be better because I really don’t want to spend this life and not ever have something that’s really intimate and beautiful between us that includes our sexuality.’
Finlayson-Fife: ‘I want us to choose each other, to be more wholehearted in this marriage. I love you, I want you, I want us to claim our lives, it’s so brief, it’s so short.’
Finlayson-Fife: I often encourage people, like, Go and cherish your spouse, let them know, let them feel the ways that they matter to you, the ways that they bless your life, that you’re grateful that they’re just simply there, that you love them because they exist, because they’re present in your life, and because learning how to cherish another human being, flawed as we all are, imperfect as we all are, is just part of our spiritual and relational growth – but it’s also where the happiness is, it’s where the freedom is, it’s where the joy is, and it’s a process and it’s not easy, often, to even know what it means to do right by another person, but it always requires more of us, and it requires courage from us, but we’re blessed for it, it makes our lives richer.
Errata: Ian Kerner’s book was incorrectly cited as He Comes Next. Proper title citation should be Passionista: The Empowered Woman’s Guide to Pleasuring a Man.
