Sex is something we have been led to believe, is as natural as breathing. But we fail to mention our deep dark desires to just anyone because we don’t want people to think of us in an inappropriate fashion. When our mate tells us “not tonight” it makes us ask our self if it’s because of the way we look or something we did or are they just not interested in us anymore? It feels good to have that wanted attention. A kiss is pleasurable because of the sensory receptivity of our lips, but a good deal of our excitement has nothing to do with the physical dimension of the act: It stems from the simple realization that someone else likes us quite a lot.
Just as uniforms can inspire lust by their evocation of rule-breaking, so can it be exciting to imagine sex in an unobserved corner of the university library, in a restaurant's cloakroom, or in a train car.

Why is impotence an achievement?

We are grievously mistaken in our interpretation.

All but the least self-aware among us will sometimes be struck by how distasteful our desire for sex can seem to someone else, how peculiar and physically off-putting our flesh may be, and how unwanted our caresses.

Impotence is at base, then, a symptom of respect, a fear of causing displeasure through the imposition of our own desires or the inability to satisfy our partner's needs—a civilized worry that we will disappoint or upset others.

What do religions know about sex that we don't?

Couple in fetish attire
Does marriage ruin sex?

Most innocently, the paucity of sex within established relationships has to do with the difficulty of shifting registers between the everyday and the erotic.

Sex, with its contrary emphases on expansiveness, imagination, playfulness, and a loss of control, must by its very nature interrupt this routine of regulation and self-restraint."

Sex also has a way of altering and unbalancing our relationship with our household co-manager.

The satisfaction of our needs may force us to ask for things that are, from a distance, open to being judged both ridiculous and contemptible so that we may prefer, in the end, not to entrust them to someone on whom we must rely for so much else in the course of our ordinary upstanding life."

Why are bread crumbs in the kitchen bad for sex?

In an average week, each partner may be hit by, and in turn fire, dozens of tiny arrows without even realizing it, with the only surface legacies of these wounds being a near imperceptible cooling between the pair and, crucially, the disinclination of one or both to have sex