This episode contains explicit content, so listener discretion advised.

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 going to talk about sex in long-term relationships.

It can be difficult to keep the connection going when you've been with someone for a while,

but I'm going to 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 going to 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 want to 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 look each other's body parts and put parts of our body inside somebody else's body.

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