As philosopher Alain de Botton explains, modern lovers should redraw their expectations from relationships – they should value any satisfaction they get, as the norm really is sexual rejection
Advait Kamath

It’s bad enough how bad our sex life usually feels. All these feelings are worsened by ‘knowing’ that we live in a liberated age, where others must be engaged in sexual relations with frequency, confidence, and joy. We, with our secret agony, must surely be the un-liberated oddities. In committed relationships, such self-flagellation can be worse. Because, isn’t modern love inseparable from frequent and fulfilling sex with a long-term partner? Shouldn’t every good marriage be enlivened by constant desire?

But think about it from the reverse viewpoint. That good sex is actually a rarity. Making this case, particularly in his 2012 book, How to Think More About Sex, British philosopher Alain de Botton pushes back against the idea of ‘normal’ sexual behaviour, including how much of sex one must be having. He advises people to redraw their expectations, and stop beating themselves up for the inevitable facts of biological life.

Domestic chores, financial planning, bringing up children, these are, after all, exhausting. And shifting registers from the everyday to the erotic, isn’t easy. So, de Botton says, there can be wisdom in sometimes just turning over to the other side of the bed, ready to accept without rancour, with stoic calm, some of the necessary compromises of long-term love.

Look for a solution the next morning. Basically, some way has to be figured out to see our lover as if we had never laid our eyes on him or her before. Maybe, check into a hotel room for a night. Rediscover – away from the space where you fold your laundry, argue with a toddler, bicker with the AC repairman – the sexual identities that first drew you together.

Or, think of it as taking a leaf from Édouard Manet’s book. When nobody except chefs, gourmands, and farmers was paying much attention to asparagus, in nineteenth-century France, Manet famously, and giving modern art a new direction, elevated this vegetable into a masterpiece. To rescue a long-term relationship from complacency and boredom, we have to rediscover from under the layers of habit and routine, our sexy lover.

What’s sexy? It starts in the head. But unlike Freud, who sort of made everything about the sex motive, de Botton makes the opposite claim. That a lot of what looks like being about sex is actually about everything else that we care about in life. Its pleasures are continuous with our pleasure in other areas.

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