Sex in Long-Term Relationships

This episode contains explicit content so listener discretion advised. (light music) Headspace Studio. Hello, I'm Emily Nagoski, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Wednesday. This week is all about sex and tapping into our authentic sexual selves. So today we're gonna talk about sex and long-term relationships. It can be difficult to keep the connection going when you've been with someone for a while, but I'm gonna break down how to maintain a healthy sexual relationship and discuss some ways to communicate what you want. One of the things I get asked by journalists a lot is so why is it so important that people sustain a strong sexual connection with their partners in a long-term relationship? And the reality is that sex is only as important as we decide it is. There will be times in any relationship that lasts long enough where the sex ebbs, for example, when a new child becomes a part of the family, there's a whole lot of other much more important things that matter. So is sex important? It's gonna depend on the relationship and the season you are in in that relationship. But when it's important, it's important because it's connection, because it's an experience of pleasure and because it is freedom from our stresses and worries of our mundane lives. There are things that the science has convinced me are true about the couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over multiple decades. The first thing is that, yeah, they prioritize sex. They decide that it does matter for them. Maybe they've got jobs to go to, maybe they've got kids to take care of, God forbid they just wanna watch some Netflix and then go to sleep, right? We have all these other things we could be doing. Why? Do they stop doing all those things and just do this frankly silly thing that we humans do which is to roll around together and lick each other's body parts and put parts of our body inside somebody else's body. Why would we do that? Couples decide that there's something about that really silly behavior that matters for sustaining their connection. When people are struggling with sex because they're just stuck in stress or anger or fear, isolation, grief, the key is to learn strategies for getting out of those states of minds. Maybe it is work and traffic or parenting or watching the news that puts you in that space. So one of your solutions is what control do I have over my stimulation that I can make maybe avoid, okay so I can't avoid the traffic or the work of the parenting. Maybe I can reduce my news consumption to reduce the pressure pushing me into the fear space. And then you think about the times when you've successfully gotten out and some people are gonna think, you know what? If I can just go for a run or a bike ride or...