Somewhere along the way, "boring" became the worst thing sex could be.
Open any magazine, podcast or feed and the advice is the same. Spice it up. Try something new. Book the hotel, buy the toy, learn the position, explore the kink. Novelty is sold as the cure for every long term relationship, and familiarity as the slow death of desire. If it feels the same as last time, the message goes, something has gone wrong.
This idea has a respectable intellectual pedigree. In Mating in Captivity, the psychotherapist Esther Perel argued that love and desire pull in different directions: love wants closeness, safety and knowing, while desire feeds on distance, mystery and the unknown. It's a compelling argument, and for many people it rings true. But it has quietly hardened into a cultural rule: that the more secure a relationship becomes, the more effort it takes to keep desire alive.
We'd like to make the case for the other side.
Desire needs a body that feels safe.
In the late 1990s, researchers at the Kinsey Institute proposed what they called the dual control model of sexual response.[i] Arousal, they argued, isn't just about turning things on. It's a balance between two systems: one that responds to sexual cues, and one that responds to threat, stress and distraction by applying the brakes. Emily Nagoski later popularised the idea as accelerators and brakes, and it changed how a lot of people understood their own desire.
The insight is simple but easy to forget. For many people, especially those running on stress, the problem isn't too few accelerators. It's too many brakes. And novelty, for all its excitement, can press on both at once. A new setting, a new expectation, a new performance to get right: for a nervous system already on alert, that can feel less like adventure and more like a test.
Familiarity is not the enemy. It's the ground.
The familiar body, the known rhythm, the partner who knows exactly where to put their hand: these are often dismissed as the beige of long-term sex. But they're also what allows a body to stop monitoring itself. When you don't have to wonder what comes next, attention can drop out of the head and into the senses. Repetition, in that sense, isn't a failure of imagination. It's a form of trust.
There's also a quieter point about expectations. Research on couples suggests that, beyond roughly once a week, having more sex isn't linked to greater wellbeing.[ii] The pressure to keep sex constantly new, frequent and exciting may be doing more harm than the sex itself. It turns intimacy into another area of life to optimise, and optimisation is rarely sexy.
Boring is not the same as absent.
None of this is an argument against curiosity. Play, novelty and exploration have their place, and for some couples they're exactly what's needed. It's an argument against the idea that the familiar is inherently lesser, or that a quiet, unremarkable Sunday-morning kind of sex is a sign that something is missing.
Sometimes the most erotic thing a body can feel is safe enough to stop performing. Sometimes the best sex isn't the most surprising. It's the sex you don't have to brace for.
[i] Bancroft, J., & Janssen, E. (2000). The dual control model of male sexual response: a theoretical approach to centrally mediated erectile dysfunction. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 24(5), 571–579.
[ii] Muise, A., Schimmack, U., & Impett, E.A. (2016). Sexual frequency predicts greater well-being, but more is not always better. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(4), 295–302.
For the familiar, done slowly. Start with our prebiotic water based lubricant.
