How To Think More About Sex (School of Life)

The solution to long-term sexual stagnation is to learn to see our lover as if we had never laid eyes on him or her before.

We should try to locate the good and the beautiful beneath the layers of habit and routine.

It lies in the power of certain great works of art, however, to induce us to revisit what we think we already understand and to reveal new, neglected or submerged enchantments beneath a familiar exterior.

Would there not therefore be a certain wisdom in redrawing our expectations, depathologizing and destigmatizing our so-called ‘failures’ and sometimes just turning over to the other side of the bed, ready to accept without rancour, with stoic calm, some of the necessary compromises of long-term love?

It is not a new person we require, but a new way of perceiving a familiar one.

We may remain ostensibly aware that we are not our partner’s parent, and vice versa, yet this awareness will have a habit of becoming a more porous concept in both of our unconscious minds when we spend the greater part of every day acting in the roles of ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’.

all but the least self-aware among us will sometimes be struck by how distasteful our desire for sex can seem to someone else, how contrary to reason it can appear, how peculiar and physically off-putting our flesh may be and how unwanted our caresses – and therefore how careful we ought to be in going about the business of seduction.

Given the rarity of good sex, is it really right that we should continue to regard frequency as the norm?

the universal tendency to become easily habituated and bored, and to declare that whatever is known is unworthy of interest.