Too Scared for Sex
· The Atlantic
A little more than 20 years ago, Esther Perel was not yet an author or a podcast host. She was definitely not a household name. She was simply a psychotherapist with an observation: Many of her clients were in loving, supportive romantic relationships—and they weren’t having good sex, or any at all. At the time, the prevailing wisdom among psychologists was that a couple’s sex life was a reflection of their bond. Cultivate closeness, the thinking went, and you will feel safe to explore and to shed inhibitions. But Perel kept noticing the opposite: Emotional intimacy and desire seemed often to be at odds.
Visit mchezo.life for more information.
That idea is fairly commonplace now—but that’s because Perel helped popularize it. In her 2006 book, Mating in Captivity, she described a kind of Greek tragedy that can thwart couples. Two people in heady early love, fearing uncertainty and aloneness, rush to get closer. But in doing so, they smother the spark of mystery that made the other person so desirable in the first place. Her book was a massive best seller, translated into more than 30 languages. Now she speaks in sold-out concert venues. Earlier this summer, The Invite, a film based partly on Mating’s ideas, was released in theaters. (Olivia Wilde, the director and star, is a stan.) In May, when I went to an event Perel hosted in New York City, a line of attendees young and old stretched down the block, several carrying bags with one of her catchphrases: If you’re too busy for sex, you’re too busy.
Perel has covered plenty of other subjects over the years. Still, her initial thesis has only gained relevance. Two decades after the book’s release, American culture is in a bit of a sensual drought—and people want to know why. According to some data, the average married couple have less sex now. Young adults are entering partnerships later and less often, and a striking number of them don’t even want to see sex on TV.
But Perel has said she doesn’t want to focus on statistics. The endless measurement of sex—how often people are having it, with how many partners, starting at what age—strikes her as part of the problem: It’s a distinctly unsexy and terribly narrow way to understand desire. She’s interested, instead, in eroticism. Perel’s “erotic” can entail sex, but it doesn’t have to. It’s a state one enters into when they’re playful, intrigued, open to the unknown. And because it means venturing away from security, it always involves some risk.
Perhaps the “sex recession,” then, is merely a symptom of something bigger: an eroticism shortage, resulting from a great discomfort with uncertainty. If so, the stakes would be much higher than they were in 2006. It would mean that people aren’t just falling out of lust with their partner but struggling to connect, to feel deeply, and to be present for their own life. “Today, the question is not so much How do you sustain desire in the long haul,” Perel told me, “but How do we ignite it in the first place?”
Eroticism, as Perel sees it, can begin only when one has achieved a baseline sense of safety. She has said she came to this understanding in part because of her husband’s career as a psychologist working with torture survivors. Once, she asked him how he knows when someone has truly come back—when they’ve gone from being not dead to alive. He told her it’s when they can be creative. In order to explore, to be open to new ideas and experiences—all core to eroticism, in Perel’s view—people have to feel stable enough to let their guard down. They have to unclench.
One doesn’t need to be a torture survivor to be in the habit of clenching: scanning for danger rather than being silly or raunchy or mischievous. “If you are in a state of vigilance,” Perel said, “you cannot be playful.”
Americans do seem more vigilant than playful these days. According to one 2025 poll from the Badger Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, 66 percent of 18-to-29-year olds and 60 percent of 30-to-44-year olds agreed that “most people can’t be trusted.” Rates of avoidant attachment style—the tendency to keep distant, essentially—have been rising. Political priorities have become dominated by a yearning for security: protection against financial instability, crime, replacement. And politicians are rushing to acknowledge (or exploit) those fears. These are not the conditions in which eroticism thrives.
[Read: Why happy people cheat]
The result is that while readers have continued lapping up Mating in Captivity, Americans have broadly become worse at taking Perel’s advice. The central premise of the book is that partners can keep the erotic alive by accepting that they will never know each other completely. But the average couple have arguably become more intertwined. For a recent story on Americans’ particularly intense disdain for infidelity, I spoke with a sociologist who said that many people are disturbed by the idea that their partner could have needs and fantasies they don’t know about. Cheating is so despised, she argued, because it’s a reminder that no matter how much of yourself you share and how close you are to your partner, you’ll never be inside their mind.
The fear of an unrecognizable partner is, at the moment, a notable obsession of popular culture. Take Strangers, Belle Burden’s mega-best-selling memoir about being left by her husband—suddenly, with no explanation. Over the course of the book, she replays their relationship in her head, searching for clues; she wonders whether something in his childhood set this in motion. When his previous behavior doesn’t lead a bread-crumb trail straight to his present actions, Burden makes it sound as creepy as if she’d been stuck in the house with her husband’s evil twin. On the Netflix horror series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, the primary source of dread is not the jump scares or the protagonist’s strange in-laws but the looming question of whether her fiancé isn’t who she thought he was. And in the April film The Drama, a man named Charlie (played by Robert Pattinson) learns something about his fiancée, Emma (Zendaya), that upends his understanding of her right before their wedding. Again and again he rewrites his vows, desperately searching for a cohesive story about his relationship.
[Read: The most tortured relationship in America]
You might think that in the past two decades, Americans would’ve grown accustomed to uncertainty. But Perel believes that many people are struggling to cope with that precarity. Why learn how, when you can use Google Maps to see exactly how delayed your train is, or ask ChatGPT to give you a breakdown of anything you don’t immediately understand? In a superficial sense, the world is more graspable and predictable than ever. Sometimes, though, that can make a person more afraid of ambiguity, more attached to the fiction that we can ever know what’s around the corner—or in our partner’s head.
On top of that, Perel said, the kinds of communities and rituals people traditionally relied on when facing enigma and loss aren’t so common anymore. Fewer Americans are looking to religion to answer the big questions—how to live, what happens after death, why bad things happen to good people—or to let them wrestle with these issues communally. Fewer socialize regularly with their neighbors. The average family size keeps shrinking. A lot of people don’t know where else to look for certainty but their partner. So they cling for dear life.
An aversion to the unknown isn’t a problem just for couples; it’s a problem for people without partners too, and for the culture at large. Single people are approaching first dates as if they’re interviews, ready to review the candidate, on the lookout for red flags. Or they’re not dating at all, sometimes even when they want sex or love. In my own reporting on romance, I hear from a lot of people on the defense against hurt feelings or wasted time. The weight of the world—the dismal news alerts, the rent bills, the doomscrolling—isn’t putting them in the mood for lighthearted banter or seductive dancing or organic inquisitiveness.
Americans seem to be losing their taste for pleasure, sexual or not. In growing numbers, they’re short-circuiting their appetites with GLP-1s. They’re covering their homes in beige, following influencers who quietly tidy, and half-heartedly streaming mild comedies while they scroll. “The culture of these years,” my colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote recently, “will be remembered for lots of things that dulled and distracted the senses: easygoing country music, friendly AI chatbots, ketamine nasal sprays.” And dulled senses are an enemy to eroticism.
Perel believes that part of the problem is that people think they’re meant to heal first—to overcome burnout, to process trauma, to somehow refresh themselves until they’re shiny and new, ready for life to get more fun and more dynamic. But if you open the door to the uncertain and unpredictable, you let in suffering along with joy. The erotic isn’t what comes after pain; it’s a way of living with it.
[Read: Teens are forgoing a classic rite of passage]
Maybe that’s the path forward for couples and single people alike: to lean into the precarity, not because it’s easier or more pleasant but because they’re interested in where that will lead. Perel tells partners that they don’t need to try creating distance or adding novelty to their relationships; all they need to do is accept that it already exists. In fact, they should revel in the fact that they’ll always have more to discover about each other. (A lot of couples go out for dinner with friends and have fascinating, deep conversations, she told me—and then as soon as they’re alone again, “they switch to talking about who’s going to the ball game tomorrow.”) And what if single people started treating dates as adventures—opportunities to get to know someone new and do something different? Her advice, regardless of relationship status, is essentially this: Never give yourself over to numbness.
In The Invite, Olivia Wilde’s film, two couples have a dinner party. One of those pairs seems electric with chemistry and presence; they laugh, touch each other with affection, speak aloud the observations that might have been politely contained. The other pair has had the life “seeped out of them,” as Perel put it to me. They’re on autopilot. They’re a little like a lot of people, in an age of blunted pleasure. The question of the film is whether the vitality of that first couple might wake them up.
Spoiler alert: The movie is ambiguous on that point. But it does contain a hopeful note—much like The Drama, actually. Both films show their stunted couples attempting to start over, reenacting the beginning of their relationship, when everything was terrifyingly and beautifully undetermined. “I’m Emma,” Zendaya’s character says, and Charlie returns her handshake across the table. The viewer can only guess whether they’ll be brave enough to remain curious.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.