The biggest mistakes couples make when trying to ‘fix’ their sex lives—and what to do instead

When sex educator and researcher Emily Nagoski was writing her now-best-selling 2015 book, Come as You Are — a groundbreaking exploration of how women’s sexuality works — something ironic happened. As she poured her soul into the sexual bible that would go on to transform countless people’s intimate lives, her own came to a halt. Essentially, as she puts it when we speak: “Writing a book about helping women maximise their sexual potential destroyed my sex life in my newlywed marriage.” For those who haven’t read Come as You Are, the book challenges cultural myths about what constitutes ‘normal’ when it comes to sex (spoiler: all of us are normal!), explores the difference between ‘spontaneous’ and ‘responsive’ sexual desire — i.e. the out-of-the-blue urge for sex often seen in media vs. experiencing desire after sexual intimacy has been initiated — and explains how we all have sexual accelerators (flirting, romantic gestures, touch) and brakes (stress, body image issues, conflict) that spur on or shut down our sexual desire. In short: it gives us all the knowledge and tools to understand and embrace our unique sexualities, and, hopefully, have better sex as a result. That is, as it turned out, unless you’re the one giving out the tools. “As far as I knew, it would be the only book I’d ever get to write,” recalls Nagoski. “So the stakes felt extremely high.” Writing it alongside her full-time job, Nagoski found herself so stressed that whenever her skin touched her partner’s — a feeling that she says signalled she was, at last, in a state of safety — she would burst into tears. “The answers I’d written in Come as You Are for what to do in my situation weren’t the answers I needed. So I asked myself: what did I not cover that’s specific to couples?” More From CosmopolitanSagittarius Annual Horoscope Report 2026 And so, Come Together was born. In it, Nagoski turns her attention to sex in long-term relationships, cutting through the noise and myths to ask what it really takes for a couple to create lasting — and fulfilling — sexual connection. “I had to dig really deep into the assumptions even I was still making about how to sustain a strong sexual connection,” she explains. “The most important lesson I kept learning over and over again is that it’s not about desire; it’s about liking the sex you have and, above all, liking your partner.” That sounds simple enough, right? Why would you have sex that you don’t enjoy? Or with someone who you don’t like? Well, because we’ve been taught that a healthy sex life is measured mostly on how often a couple is doing it. With this metric comes obligation sex, ‘spice things up’ sex, and a sex life based on what you think you should be doing, as opposed to what you want. So, we sat down with Nagoski to ask why couples fall into these traps, the biggest mistakes they make when trying to ‘fix’ their sex lives, and what they can do instead to have a happy, fulfilling, and long-lasting sexual connection. Why might sex diminish in a long-term relationship? This sounds obvious but: the longer you’re with someone, the more life challenges you have to face, both as individuals and as a couple. And life challenges are, famously, not particularly sexy. In fact, Nagoski says that the single most common mistake people make in long-term relationships is forgetting that almost everything that hits your sexual brakes — AKA turns you off — happens outside of sex. “It’s body image stuff, trauma history, general stress, exhaustion, overwhelm, depression, anxiety, repressed rage,” she explains. “We’ve got it all. It’s all the stuff you bring with you into the bedroom from the outside world that’s getting in the way [of you wanting sex or having pleasurable sex].” What’s more, when there’s so many other things to worry about, sex can often get deprioritised in relationships, especially if the sex you’re having isn’t something to look forward to. In Come Together, Nagoski admits that ‘sex is kind of silly’, and asks readers to consider what it is that they want when they want sex with their partner. Speaking to Cosmopolitan UK, she expands on this: “Why would we bother protecting time, energy, and space just to lick each other’s bodies? It would only be if you really like it and you feel like it contributes something meaningful to your connection.” When sex in a long-term relationship diminishes, then, it’s not necessarily because your desire for sex has diminished — but that you’re navigating various sexual brakes, including that you may not particularly desire the sex you’ve been having. As Nagoski says: “Many couples don’t have a desire problem; they have a pleasure problem.” Interestingly, Nagoski notes that LGBTQ+ couples struggle less in their sexual connections than straight couples do because they like the sex they have better. “They have more orgasms, they say ‘I love you’ more, they engage in a wider variety of erotic behaviours together,” she says of LGBTQ+ couples. Meanwhile, she adds: “[Many] straight people don’t like the sex they have, but they have sex more often than gay couples, which is so troubling”.

The biggest mistakes couples make when trying to ‘fix’ their sex lives—and what to do instead

Sex educator and author Emily Nagoski also reveals the three characteristics of partnerships that sustain a strong sexual connection.

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