Why sexual novelty doesn’t have to overwhelm long-term couples

By Ian Kerner, CNN

(CNN) — When it comes to learning about sex, I find that most people have been raised in one of three home environments: sex positive, sex negative or sex avoidant.

In the first home environment, sexuality is treated as a healthy and special part of life. Parents encourage sexual curiosity in their children and provide scientifically accurate responses to their questions. They model healthy intimacy outside the bedroom and respect privacy.

In a sex-negative home, sexuality is often treated as something forbidden and inappropriate, curiosity is discouraged, and an atmosphere of sexual shame and secrecy prevails.

Most of my clients, however, were raised in sex-avoidant homes, where the topic wasn’t discussed. It was often deflected and felt awkward when it did come up. People who grow up in such information vacuums often don’t know how to approach the topic of sex with their partners when they reach adulthood.

But for Dr. Nicole McNichols, also known as the “sex professor,” the topic comes up all the time. The renowned psychologist teaches over 4,000 undergrads a year at the University of Washington in her super-popular psychology class, “The Diversity of Human Sexuality.”

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

McNichols provides some much-needed sex ed with her new book, “You Could Be Having Better Sex: The Definitive Guide to a Happier, Healthier, and Hotter Sex Life.” I sat down with her to fill the information vacuum.

CNN: You teach college students about sexuality. What are some of the challenges they face?

Dr. Nicole McNichols: Many young adults today receive almost no formal sex education. At the same time, porn is everywhere. For kids, it sets up this very performative idea of sex: showing ridiculously unrealistic images of genitals and sexual response that digs into dysfunctional gender stereotypes where rough sex is the norm.

I’ve had students in my class come up to me and say, “You know, I feel like because I watched so much porn when I was younger, it kind of ruined sex for me.” They’re bringing into their experiences so much insecurity, so much shame, and these toxic ideas of what sex has to look like.

As an educator, it puts me in a somewhat difficult position, because on one hand, I view my role as advocating for engaging in whatever kind of consensual sexual experience makes you feel fulfilled. But at the same time, basing sexual experiences off what we see in porn creates a very disembodied sexual experience that isn’t pleasurable or healthy.

The second thing that’s challenging is the sex and dating culture itself. There’s this “culture of chill” — young adults worry that wanting a hookup to lead to a meaningful, deeper relationship somehow makes them needy. Social media and online dating apps have helped create these ambiguously defined “situationships” where people are afraid to be vulnerable and honest.

It’s setting up a lot of insecurity and loneliness. It’s not that casual hookups can’t be fun and pleasurable, if that’s truly what you want at this time in your life. But if that’s not for you, and if you want something more, that’s healthy and OK, too.

CNN: You describe the key to better sex as a pyramid or hierarchy of sexual needs. What does that mean?

McNichols: It’s based on the idea that if you want to have better sex, the answer isn’t to first walk into a sex shop and buy the whole full dominatrix outfit, right? First, you need to do the things on the bottom of the pyramid, which involve understanding how your body works and how you experience pleasure.

Before you can get to a place where you’re having sex with a partner, you need to acknowledge that there can be a lot of things happening at the individual level that can hijack the pleasure cycle, like body image, stress, exhaustion, illness, anxiety and depression.

Then we progress to the middle layer: How do you communicate with a partner, whether it’s within a hookup or in a long-term relationship? How do you figure out if there are small resentments in your relationship that you’re not even aware of because of socioeconomic or cultural factors?

In the third, final layer, we get to developing a sense of sexual curiosity and leaning into a sexual growth mindset, meaning that you are open to just understanding the underlying psychological dynamics of things like kink and fantasy, even if you choose not to participate in them.

CNN: What is the three-part pleasure cycle?

McNichols: People often mistakenly think that pleasure is just this one-time neurological event. But pleasure is a sequence of different neurological events, a cycle divided into three parts: wanting, liking and learning. And there are different factors that can hijack that cycle.

Wanting is longing, craving, seeking reward. If we look at the things that get in the way of that wanting — whether it’s body image, stress or anxiety — then we can clear the way for wanting. Then we get into liking and what impedes that phase, such as comparing and bringing you out of your head during sex, and how sexual mindfulness can help put you back in the moment.

The learning phase involves being mindful about what felt good during sex. What do you want to try next time? What do you want to do more? The beauty of that is it helps you to learn more, but it also then feeds back into wanting. Because if you’re thinking about and savoring the experience, that’s also going to feed into wanting. So that’s the pleasure cycle.

CNN: You also write about the idea of a “consent manifesto.” Can you elaborate?

McNichols: The consent manifesto addresses the culture of chill, and the fact that national conversations around sex need to progress beyond just consent in the terms of protecting physical boundaries, and to an understanding that sex is a social, emotional and relational experience as well.

If we want to be having healthy sexual experiences, we need to be intentionally aware of what’s OK — not just at the beginning of the experience but throughout — and learning our sexual communication style to give and seek cues. But beyond that, we need to have emotional honesty. We need to normalize that it’s OK to want some clarity about where things stand before we go further in an experience.

If we’re being dishonest and leading somebody on about the meaning or the context of the hookup, informed consent is not present. Even if you are a willing, enthusiastic participant during sex, but the next day, you find out that they hid their STI status or were married, for example, you don’t have informed consent.

CNN: We hear a lot about how important novelty and new experiences are to keeping sex fresh. How is “micro-novelty” different?

McNichols: The concept of micro-novelty is based on research that looked at couples in long-term relationships and what they do during sex. Novelty was one of the main factors that came up. For a lot of couples, novelty can feel really overwhelming. But when you look at the research, it showed that the effect of novelty flattens about 12 times a year, or about once a month. So, you don’t need to introduce novelty every single time you have sex.

Couples who introduce one new thing once a month or more enjoy heightened sexual satisfaction. And it doesn’t need to be something huge. It can be trying a different position. It can be bringing in a favorite sex toy and experimenting with that. It could be having sex at a different time of day, in a different location. It could be using a blindfold.

Yes, novelty can be huge, grand gestures, if you’re really interested and excited and motivated to try them, but it doesn’t need to be. I think it’s much more motivating to know that micro-novelty is something achievable — and you don’t need to become an entirely different person to be able to do it.

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