Welcome home, co-journers. I'm glad you're here for another episode, and I'm so excited

we have a special guest on today, Dr. Candice Nicole, a leading expert in sex research.

Dr. Candice Nicole Hargens is an award-winning associate professor of counseling psychology at the University of Kentucky, where she studies sexual wellness and liberation.

She is the host of FTS, a sexual liberation podcast, and how to love a human. A liberation podcast that asks people with multiple marginalized identities, what the world would be like if it loved them.

She has published over 50 research articles and has been featured in the Huffington Post, the APA monitor, good housekeeping, women's health,

gravity, cosmopolitan, and the New York Times. Welcome, Dr. Candice.

Hey, thank you so much for welcoming me.

Yeah, I am so glad that you're here, and this is such an important topic. We're going to talk today about the myths regarding sexuality and romantic relationships, and there are many myths out there.

So many.

And so we want to bring truth so that we are not operating in limitation or with false information.

I know that people often get caught in cycles, and it can be based on simply not knowing because many of us never had those conversations about healthy sexuality and intimacy.

So the first myth that we want to really dig into is the myth that sexual desires should remain the same throughout a relationship.

So tell us about that.

Yeah, so this myth is especially pronounced when you're talking about a long term relationship.

So people think that limerence period, that period that you come into the relationship with with the passion and high arousal is supposed to persist throughout the length of a relationship, and typically it lasts 18 months to two years max.

So after that period, there are things that you have to do to work toward maintaining sexual desire, but sometimes partners can become upset with each other or blame each other when there are desire discrepancies.

And so that means that one partner has a higher sexual desire than the other partner.

And instead of having communication about it, that is healthy, the blaming then just exacerbates the problem.

So sexual desire ebbs and flows, and I like to give this metaphor, we need food to live, we need food to survive, but our appetite still ebbs flow.

So the same could be said for sexual desire, if you know that you're not always hungry and that you don't have to have the same level of hunger throughout the day, then you might anticipate that your sexual desire doesn't have to be the same level that it was when you first started relationship and even over life.

So age allows sexual desire to ebb and flow with different hormones and relationship context, whether you're satisfied, happy in your relationship, that allows it to ebb and flow.

There are so many things that impact your sexual desire and when you're able to have healthy communication with your partner and say, this is what I need now that is different than what I need it then.

...