It is a situation playing out in bedrooms all over the world. In research conducted by the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University last year, nearly half of the respondents reported a decline in the frequency of sexual behaviour, including masturbation (although one in five people said they had tried something new in their sex life, such as different positions or sexting).
“It’s definitely affecting people,” says Kate Moyle, a psychosexual therapist and the host of the podcast Sex Wellness Sessions. “Generalised anxiety is at a higher level: there are threats to health, wellbeing, jobs, education or medical treatments. We’re not seeing friends or family. That increased anxiety can affect us inside the bedroom: people are reporting being more distracted, or that they find it harder to be in the moment, that they have more intrusive thoughts or more negative automatic thoughts.”…
Moyle says lockdown – and the overfamiliarity it breeds – goes against desire, which is “triggered by a sense of novelty, or not knowing what to expect”. It is what the psychotherapist Esther Perel has described as cultivating “your secret garden” – maintaining some mystery or space. “If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by familiarity,” she wrote in Mating in Captivity, her book about maintaining a fulfilling sex life in a long-term relationship.
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