Anything that is wonderful will become less wonderful over time
I’m not saying switch out your bed for a quickie in an alleyway, but I’m not not saying that
Hello and welcome back to The Overthinker’s Guide To Sex, a sex and relationships newsletter by journalist Franki Cookney.
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Anything that is wonderful will become less wonderful over time
Last month I invited you to suggest topics for me to write about. Actually, I do this fairly regularly but this was the first time someone came forward with a suggestion! So thank you, Rachel!
She sent me a link to this Guardian piece on habituation and asked how we might apply this logic to our sex lives. The article explains how the amount of pleasure we experience from doing nice things decreases over time as we get used to them. The writers use a slightly convoluted example of sitting at the best restaurant table for three hours versus moving halfway through your dinner to another, less good table, before returning to the original table. I don’t think it even needs to be that complicated. Imagine eating at your favourite restaurant every day. You’d get bored of it, right? Whereas only going a handful of times a year means you get to experience the excitement and delight every time. I love Honey & Co cheesecake with something close to a religious fervour, but one of the reasons it holds such a special place in my heart is because I only get to eat it occasionally.
Habituation, then, is “our brain’s tendency to respond less and less to things that are constant, that don’t change.” It’s not about failing to count our blessings or fill in our gratitude journals (although this might help, I don’t know, I’ve never been able to stick to it) it is just what happens when we are exposed to the same things over and over; we stop appreciating them.
One of my favourite details in the show Succession was how many scenes featured lavish spreads of food that no one touched. There were various layers to this, but one of the things it communicated to us was that having access to incredible, delicious, high quality food, was not particularly exciting to these people. It was mundane. Put me at one of those tables, however, and I’d have been loading up my plate with all the decorum of Hugo at the Scandi breakfast buffet.
You’re probably starting to have a few ideas about how habituation might show up in your sex life and relationships.