This TED Talk features sex educator Emily Nagoski, recorded live at TEDx Ferguson Library 2019.

This talk contains mature content.

I'm sitting in a bar with a couple of friends.

Literally a couple, married couple.

They're the parents of two young children.

Seven academic degrees between them, big nerds, really nice people, but very sleep deprived.

And they ask me the question I get asked more than any other question.

They go, so, Emily, how do couples, you know, sustain a strong sexual connection over multiple decades?

I'm a sex educator, which is why my friends ask me questions like this.

And I am also a big nerd, like my friends.

I love science, which is why I can give them something like an answer.

Research actually has pretty solid evidence that couples who

sustain strong sexual connections over multiple decades have two things in common.

Before I can tell my friends what those two things are, I have to tell them a few things that

they are not. These are not couples who have sex very often. Almost none of us have sex very often. We are busy.

They are also not couples who necessarily have wild adventurous sex. One recent study actually

found that the couples who are most strongly predicted to have strong sexual and relationship satisfaction. The best predictor

of that is not what kind of sex they have or how often or where they have it, but whether they

cuddle after sex. And they are not necessarily couples who constantly can't wait to keep their

hands off each other. Some of them are. They experience

what the researchers call spontaneous desire that just sort of seems to appear out of the blue.

Erica Mowen, the cartoonist who illustrated my book, draws spontaneous desire as a lightning bolt

...