Nicole McNichols

Because when you both commit to doing that and you make time, and this is the critical part, to then connect, you're essentially coming back to each other each time as a slightly different version, right?

That's introducing that micro novelty over time that's sustaining desire.

But this idea that we're going to be most attracted to our partner when we don't know them is just, I mean, there's literally decades of research by the Gottmans showing that it's when we have developed love maps of our partners, when we know about their hopes, their dreams, their fears, who they are, who they want to be, what they want to achieve.

When we look at that and validate that,

that's when we feel turned on.

Yes, a million percent.

I think that there's for sure more what Masters and Johnson's called spectatoring among younger women.

And so spectatoring is, if you're not familiar with their research, they in the 1960s brought people into a lab

hooked them up with electrodes and literally had them have sex and measured all of the different physiological changes in their body.

Enormously helpful research when helping people to treat with sexual dysfunction.

But they also discovered this psychological phenomenon that happens where

you are having sex, but instead of being present in your own body, you're observing yourself almost as if from a third person perspective, hence the term spectatoring.

And so this might look like thinking, oh, what does my butt look like?

Or my breasts bumping in the wrong way?

This is only being exacerbated.

I've had students show me TikTok accounts of influencers who literally they show you different sex positions to show the most flattering angle of your stomach or your thighs to your partner.

I mean, if you think about how that's just robbing you of that sense of presence, it's terrible.

But I think that as women get older and also as men get older, body image still stays sort of a factor in all of this, right?

And just this feeling that even if you know it's not real, you know social media is fake, you know that you're not supposed to look like a way-thin model, the reality is that those are still the images that we're seeing in the media and that we're seeing on our Instagram feeds.

Body image is still at some unconscious level going to threaten, if it really becomes an issue, your own ability to be present.