...and then as relationships gets longer, it doesn’t.

We say it’s because we’re too busy, or tired - or just not IN THE MOOD

But why does this important ‘mood’ disappear?

To understand excitement, we have to go back the early days, when we were deeply in the

mood pretty much every hour.

What was exciting was our ability to touch, hold, stroke

in short, POSSESS someone who wasn’t entirely within our reach:

someone who was independent and free to walk away from us - and yet miraculously was choosing

not to do so.

Expressed as an equation: SEXINESS = POSSESSION + FREEDOM

The thrilling desire to be within and inside the body of another person stems from an active,

mesmerised wonder that they’ve allowed us to be so close and, somewhere in the semi-conscious

mind, a worried sense they might not do so forever.

Unfortunately, liking someone means we almost always want to reduce their ability to survive

without us: in the nicest way, we relentlessly try to erode the freedom of the person we

love. And so gradually, we kill the very spirit

of independence that had underpinned our desire from the outset.

There’s something else that wears away at the sex drive: FEAR. Odd though it might sound,

asking someone to have sex with us generally has an element of risk attached to it.

The other person might say NO or even, at the limit:

Sex is a REQUEST.

And in order to make a request, we have to feel reasonably safe about rejection.

At the start, we do feel that safety because - even though we don’t know our lovers so

well - we’re independent: we have our own routines, options and autonomy…

If it didn’t work out, we could walk away.

Out of love, we throw away the supports to our independent lives.

We knit ourselves together. We no longer have very much we can squarely call our own any

more. We also have to make requests of them all the time: we want them to buy that sofa

we like, we want very badly not to go and see their

parents for Christmas… we rely on their income while we go back and

study for a new qualification... In the circumstances, yet another request

seems like it might really be one too many. So we don’t bring up that thing we want

to do with the mask. or with the thigh high boots

We no longer have the will to lose face in front of our daily negotiating

partner. It might just be easier to leave things alone

Strangely, there is one thing that’s almost guaranteed to revive sex: a huge argument

with a genuine possibility of separation Major bust-ups have a curious habit of ending

up in the bedroom because they bring back to light two things

whose apparent absence had gravely undermined sex.

Firstly: the sense that you could both theoretically walk away

And secondly, the sense that you could, though it wouldn’t necessarily be easy, survive

independently You could, if you really wanted, build up

you own castle once more, recover your own destiny, and greet existence

as an independent soul. Good sex needs all this. It is built out of

a feeling of freedom and of buoyant self-confidence - the very things that can become oddly so

scarce with time. To get back to the thrill of the early days,

we need to learn the deepest and best lessons of breaking up, ideally without having to

go through the very sad and painful process of actually doing so.