The Science of Lasting Relationships

This episode contains explicit content, so listener discretion advised. (beads rustle) (mouse clicks) (gentle music begins) Headspace Studio. (gentle music ends) (mellow upbeat music begins) Hi, it's Emily Nagoski here. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Friday. Thank you so much for having me as your guest host this week. It has been great to share some ways to tap into our authentic sexual selves with you all. Today is all about relationships which are pretty complicated. The good ones are hard to find but they're even harder to maintain. I actually found this topic so interesting that I have devoted a lot of my research to it. So today I'm gonna break down the research on what makes a relationship work and how we can thrive with our partners. Everything I thought I knew about sex in a long-term relationship turned out to be contradicted by the science. It is not about how often a couple has sex. It is not about how often they do it or where they do it or keeping things spicy. It is not about reigniting the spark. It's about pleasure. It's about whether or not they like the sex they are having. It is about the nature of their relationship; the nature of their relationship with sex itself, and the nature of their access to their authentic sexual selves. We are taught that in the beginning it is a hot and heavy, flush, easy-to-access sexual desire. Then we add on things like commitments to paying a mortgage or to taking care of a dog, or maybe even having children, and sex kind of goes away because of that. Then you get to middle and old age, and for people with uteruses, menopause; and the standard narrative is you go: Well, phew, I never have to worry about sex again, that's over. None of those things are true by which I mean that might be a way that people experience their relationship, but everything about that can be experienced differently by different people. How do you not try to force your relationship to conform to this preexisting mandate that somebody handed you about how it's supposed to work? Look, I can tell you this: If you are interested in having pleasurable sex in a long-term relationship, the key is confidence. Knowing what's true, loving what's true. I'm gonna talk about me and my relationship. So I went through this experience of having no interest in having any sex at all, and I had this guilt inside me about it, and I told my partner about this guilt that I have: that I'm not there for you in this way that I feel very sure you would like me to. He's a cartoonist, and he draws our bed and a hedgehog and a little hedgehog-sized escalator going off the bed, and he is like, "We can let the guilt just go down the escalator and hide in the hedge over in the corner of the bedroom if...