The secret to a strong relationship is that you merge your love and sexual energies within you and share that constantly. This creates a unique vibration between you, like your own radio frequency. It’s a frequency that has the warmth and support of love yet with a zest, a frission of the sexual. It is a potent energy.

This frequency manifests in myriad small ways throughout the day - in looks, touches, comments, tokens (gifts, surprises, services). I’ve described this in other blogs as sharing ‘quanta of deliciousness’, maintaining the 'mmm' factor, and focusing on the 'beforeplay' .

When you keep this frequency strong it creates a depth of connection, a profound intimacy. It makes it both easier to move into genital sexual connection, as you are already so connected it’s not a great jump (important for people who have resistance or difficulty being interested in genital interaction), and paradoxically genital sexual connection becomes less important because you already have a strong sexual energy flowing between you (important for those who have a strong need or urgency for genital interaction).

Rather than sex being an ‘off or on’ dynamic in your relationship, it becomes a sliding scale. I’ve described this elsewhere as ‘keeping yourselves simmering’: if your sexual relating is like a thermostat with zero degrees being completely uninterested and 100 degrees completely interested, then cultivating this kind of relating enables you to stay in the simmer zone. So it becomes easy to segue into more genital or more passionate sexual relating, and easy to jointly manage how and what you do.

This might be quite a shift from the way you usually think of sex and love. If you’ve found yourself feeling like housemates or ruing the good old days when having sex was easy, then you’re probably stuck in the sex-love duality rather than the integrated approach I’m advocating here. So let’s do a practical activity.

Practical Exercise

Bring your focus to your sense of love. How does it feel? What are the qualities of your energy of love? Does it have a colour? Where do your feel it in your body? Place your hand there and stay with this felt sense of love, this energy of love.

Then bring your focus to your sexuality. This energy of life, creativity, growth, desire. How does it feel? What are the qualities of your energy of sex? Does it have a colour? Where do you feel it in your body? Place your hand there and stay with this felt sense of sex, this energy of sexuality.

Most probably you now have one hand over your heart, the centre of love, and one hand over your pelvis, your sexual centre.

Now I invite you to merge those two energies within you. Bring the sexual energy up and combine it with your love energy. How does that feel? Stay with that sensation for a while, really feel into the potency of merging the two energies within you.

Then share that energy with your partner. Imagine that this is an energy that is constantly being shared between you. Every time you have an interaction, no matter how small, infuse it with this energy. Imagine this right now, think about the difference between these following small things, without this infusion and with:

• a brief kiss on parting or greeting
• coming up to your partner when they’re doing something and lightly laying your hand on them
• handing them a drink you’ve prepared for them
• noticing how attractive they are and commenting on it
• sending them a message during the day
• catching their eye
• simply thinking about them

Can you get a sense of how even these tiny little interactions provide an opportunity to share this energy? How potent this is? This then feeds into bigger interactions - conversations, snuggles, joint activities, and of course, sex.

Well, you come to realise that it’s all sex, not just the genital engagement that we usually think of as sex! But, if we are referring specifically to the physical act of sex, you find that it too becomes so much more profound. That it truly becomes an expression of selves, with a richness and depth that is connection-enriching and life-enhancing.

To learn more about how to cultivate this type of relating I recommend you attend my five-day Couples Retreat in Bali or three-day Couples Retreat in the Blue Mountains or book in for private therapy and coaching sessions.