Week 4: IGNITE PASSION: Get Sexy and Seductive

Welcome to Week 4! What a journey it has been. In week 1, we hacked our love. In week 2, we cultivated connection through communication. And in week 3, we learned to love ourselves.

Now, for week number 4, it’s time to pour some wine and dim the lights, because this week is all about passion and sexual satisfaction.

Sexual satisfaction has been shown to be the second most important predictor in relationship satisfaction and longevity (the first is friendship, which we have hopefully cultivated in the first three weeks). So there’s no better time than the present to focus on our most intimate and physical form of relating with another person.

This Week’s Tools

The Erotic Equation
The Partner to Lover transition
12 Unforgettable Love Principles
GGG: Good, Giving, and Game

This Week’s Theory

To cultivate more passion in our relationship, we can look at what is known as the erotic equation: attraction plus obstacle equals excitement.

Researchers and sex therapists have found an unfortunate truth about human sexuality: our desires for closeness and connection in relationship can actually be counterproductive to our desires for passion and excitement. Simply put, we want what we don’t have, while we tend to only like what we do have.

Many couples experience a drop in both sexual satisfaction and frequency of sexual encounters as the relationship goes on. This is normal, but not inevitable. Couples who do not experience this drop tend to have more independence and more time away from each other, which allows the desire for the other to grow.

It is not only exciting for ourselves to pursue our passions, it is also extremely sexy to watch our partners do what they are passionate about.

When it comes to living together and raising children, it can be even harder to reconcile the world of desire with the world of the domestic. This is why it’s important to intentionally facilitate the transition from partner to lover. A sex therapist once said, “foreplay is everything that happens 24 hours before sex,” and we can take this advice to prepare the mind and body for an erotic encounter ahead of time.

There are three essential steps in facilitating the partner lover transition:

Build anticipation throughout the day.
Connect with your partner on an emotional level when you see each other first.
Carve out time for activities that facilitate the Partner to Lover transition.

Building anticipation throughout the day could include anything you do to prepare for a night of erotic activity. It could be buying strawberries, sending a sexy text, or even finding a babysitter for the kids.

Next it’s important to connect with your partner on an emotional level once we get home. This could mean a five minute hug or a sit down conversation.

After connecting emotional, the transition to lovers happens by doing things that feel sexy, which could mean putting on a sexy outfit, taking a warm shower, or giving your partner an oil massage. Remember the saying, sex isn’t something you do, it’s a place that you go.

There is a reason that sex is often fiery and passionate at the beginning of the relationship: novelty. Novelty stimulates our brain’s dopamine reward system, which makes us seek out things like food and sex. And When you meet someone new for the first time, everything you learn and most things you do are brand new.

To continue to bring passion into our love lives, we need to stimulate that system with novelty, spontaneity, and even a bit of danger. For that, we turn to Dr. Daniel Amen’s 12 Principles to make your love unforgettable:

Take your partner’s breath away: do something amazingly thoughtful and out of the ordinary.
Do something special on a regular basis.
Do something special on an intermittent or unpredictable basis.
Frequent, loving eye contact.
Learn what pleases your partner sexually.
Teach your partner what you like.
Sexual novelty can boost lasting love
Do something a little edgy.
Use every sense.
Do something great for someone your partner loves.
Summarize and immortalize loving moments.
Learn from parrots: share your food, groom each other, sing constantly, build nests together, repeat each other’s words and actions.

Lastly, educator and activist Dan Savage recommends that partners should strive to be “good, giving, and game,” or GGG. Good means being sexually skilled. Giving means being sexually generous, ensuring that we are giving every bit as much time and pleasure to our partner as he or she is giving to us. Game means being up for anything, within reason. Studies show that partners in healthy relationships tend to be open for trying new things, and even participating when they are not “quite” in the mood.

The sexual desire exercise is designed to discover a sense of adventure and excitement of exploring new sexual territory with a partner.