Dhru Purohit

If you're going out for the night and you have a nanny coming, have the nanny come a couple hours earlier, right?

Spend time getting together.

There's Dan Savage has a very famous phrase, first.

Which is this idea, literally, that you have sex before you go out for the evening, that you don't try to do it when we're all taught is the time of day to have sex, which is, oh, at night when we're falling asleep.

Why are we designating the time of day when we're the most exhausted, the most spent for...

intimacy, which is so critical to our happiness, right?

Just because we happen to be in bed and we happen to also be going to sleep at that time.

It's just ridiculous.

But it goes back to this point that we don't prioritize sex.

We expect it to happen and that we don't think of it as something that we need to plan or really prioritize in any way in order to enjoy it.

I really, you know, back to this idea that mystery is what breeds desire, I think that what kind of gets conflated sometimes is this idea that, yes,

we don't want to become so over-familiar with our partners that we don't have any boundaries at all, right?

It's, you know, yes, things can become stale in a relationship, but only when we're not continuing to sort of dive deeper to discover new aspects of each other.

And what's been shown to really drive passion in relationships, you know, there's new research from Dr. Amy Muse and her

lab showing that when couples are able to focus on their own individual growth and then have time to come back and reconnect, that that is going to drive passion more than if couples are not invested in their own self-growth.

And so this kind of comes back to taking care of yourself individually, falling in love with yourself individually before you can connect with a partner.

Because if we are developing aspects of ourselves that are new, that are driven, that are passionate,

And then we're coming back and sharing that with our partner because that's what was critical, right?

In these same studies, couples who are off and investing, this was looking at people who had just started new jobs and relocated.

Couples who are just sort of focused on that new life, that new job, that new passion, but not coming back and sharing that.