The greatest sexual revolution begins tonight at 8:00pm in your bedroom. Congratulations.
The 1970s weren’t magical because people fucked a gazillion strangers. They were magical because people still believed sex could be playful, adventurous, uninhibited, and gloriously delicious. Somewhere along the way, long-term couples lost that energy… along with their erections. This chapter is about getting it back—with the one person who’s seen you at your worst and still thinks you’re hot as hell.
So let’s ask the obvious question first, the one nobody wants to say out loud at dinner parties or in therapy offices or in the church parking lot after the second service. Somebody’s saying it in that parking lot right now. I’ve met that couple. They tithe generously and they haven’t touched each other since the Clinton administration.
When exactly did adults decide they had to become so damn serious?
Somewhere between the wedding toast and the mortgage statement, a switch got flipped. The same person who once left lipstick on your collar on purpose now leaves a Post-it on the fridge that says “we’re out of oat milk.” The same person who used to pull you into a coat closet at a party now schedules “quality time” between soccer practice and a Zoom call, and somehow it’s still fifteen minutes shorter than promised. Nobody signed a contract agreeing to become boring. Nobody stood at the altar and said “I do” to loading the dishwasher in stony silence for the rest of their natural life. It just happened, the way sediment happens—slowly, quietly, one deposited layer of responsibility at a time, until one day you look up and you’re standing on a canyon wall made entirely of laundry, permission slips, and unspoken resentment.
Here is the good news, and I want you to actually let it land instead of skimming past it the way you skim past everything else in a self-help book: none of that sediment is permanent. It is not bedrock. It is not your personality. It is a habit, and habits—unlike character—can be blown apart in an afternoon if you’re willing to look a little ridiculous doing it. Preferably in a wig. We’ll get there. Oh, we’ll get there.
I want to make you a promise before we go one sentence further, because I think you deserve to know exactly what you’re signing up for. I’m not going to teach you how to have better sex. I’m going to teach you how to become impossible for each other to get bored with.
Those are two very different projects, and most books about “spicing things up” only ever attempt the first one. They hand you a list of positions like a dealer handing you a menu, as though the problem with your sex life is a lack of furniture arrangements. It isn’t. I have sat across from hundreds of couples in my therapy practice over more than two decades, and I can tell you with total clinical confidence: nobody’s marriage went cold because they ran out of positions. There are only so many, and geometry stopped being the problem sometime around the Bush administration. Marriages go cold because two people quietly, mutually, and without ever discussing it, agreed to stop being interesting to each other. Nobody ever fixed that with a diagram.
The 1970s—God bless that gaudy, mustached, shag-carpeted decade—understood something we’ve forgotten. Not the specific mechanics of what people did in vans with fringed curtains (please, God, don’t picture it too hard, I already have and I need to see my own therapist about it), but the underlying spiritual technology: play is erotic. Irreverence is erotic. Refusing to take yourself so damn seriously is, in fact, one of the most reliable aphrodisiacs available to the human species, and it doesn’t require a prescription, a therapist, or a trip to the lingerie aisle you feel too self-conscious to walk down.
This chapter is going to hand you ten rules. Some of them will make you laugh. A few of them might make you blush. At least one of them is going to make you put down the book, look across the room at the person you’ve built a life with, and think, “Oh, we could absolutely do that.” Good. That thought is the entire point of the next eight thousand words. Everything else is just me talking until you get there.
Buy the disco ball. We’re just getting started.
The greatest sexual revolution isn’t sleeping with hundreds of people. It’s spending a lifetime discovering that the person you love still has beautiful surprises waiting for you.
Rule #1: Buy the Fucking Disco Ball
I am fully aware that a disco ball is not, strictly speaking, a marriage intervention. It will not repair your communication patterns. It will not help you divide the household labor more equitably. It will not resolve your long-simmering disagreement about his mother’s Thanksgiving invitation policy. I want to be upfront about its limitations before you get your hopes up.
But I want you to buy one anyway. A cheap one. Six dollars on Amazon, the kind with a little motor and a light that throws fractured rainbows across your kitchen ceiling like a low-rent planetarium. Hang it somewhere absurd—over the stove, above the bed, dangling from the rearview mirror if you’re feeling truly committed to the bit and don’t mind explaining it to a police officer someday. And then, at some entirely unscheduled moment, turn it on.
Here is why this matters more than it has any right to.
The disco ball is not magical. It’s cheap plastic and glued-on mirror tiles manufactured in a factory that also makes plastic flamingos and inflatable pool toys. I looked it up. It’s probably the same factory. What the disco ball does is not physical. It’s declarative. The moment that thing starts spinning, it makes an announcement to both of you, wordlessly, instantly, and unmistakably:
“We’re done taking ourselves so damn seriously.”
Think about the last time you and your partner did something in your own home that could be described, charitably, as ridiculous. Not “cute.” Not “sweet.” Ridiculous—the kind of thing that if your teenager walked in, they’d need therapy, and frankly so would the therapist. If you can’t remember the last time, that’s not a character flaw. That’s just what happens when two responsible adults spend years optimizing a household. You’ve gotten so good at running your life together that you’ve accidentally engineered all the delightful nonsense right out of it, the same way you alphabetized the spice rack and can no longer remember why you were happy.
Here’s my claim, if your relationship never looks ridiculous, it probably isn’t playful enough. Playfulness and dignity have an inverse relationship in long-term partnerships. The couples I’ve watched thrive over decades are, without exception, the ones who are willing to be a little bit stupid together. They dance badly in the kitchen. They sing into spatulas. They have nicknames for each other’s body parts that would mortify their adult children, their pastor, and possibly a federal agency. Nothing about this behavior looks impressive from the outside. It looks unserious, undignified, and occasionally undignified in a way that involves a lot of laughing so hard someone nearly falls off a countertop.
That undignified nonsense is doing enormous erotic work, and almost nobody realizes it, because we’ve been trained to think eroticism has to look like a perfume commercial—slow-motion, candlelit, mysterious, shot on a beach nobody in the ad can actually afford to fly to. Real, sustainable, decades-long desire looks almost nothing like that. It looks like two people who trust each other enough to be completely absurd in front of one another, because they know—they know in their bones—that neither of them is going anywhere.
Vulnerability, not polish, is the actual engine of long-term desire. Nobody has ever stayed married thirty years because of good lighting. Two people willing to look foolish for each other, on the other hand, absolutely can. So put on music that embarrasses you a little. Something you’d never admit to liking in public—Barry Manilow, Neil Diamond, the Bee Gees at full volume, whatever your particular guilty pleasure happens to be. (You know exactly which song I mean. You just felt your face get warm. That’s the one. Don’t write to me about it, I don’t want to know.) Dance in your socks on the hardwood. Let the disco ball throw its ridiculous little constellations across the room. Movement wakes the body back up. It reminds the body that it is, in fact, a body, and not merely a vehicle for transporting your responsibilities from the office to the grocery store to the school pickup line.
Joy is not incidental to eroticism. Joy is the substrate underneath it. You cannot manufacture genuine desire on top of resentment, exhaustion, and grim duty, no matter how many candles you light—and believe me, I’ve watched people try to candle their way out of a decade of silent resentment. Bath & Body Works cannot save your marriage. It has tried. It has failed.
A running joke worth adopting in your own house, one I’ve stolen from a client who now insists on saying it every single time the disco ball comes out: no platform shoes. We’re trying to have sex, not visit the emergency room. Humor and horniness are not opposites. They’re roommates. Bad roommates, occasionally, who eat each other’s leftovers and never replace the toilet paper, but roommates. The couples who laugh together in bed are, in my clinical experience, the couples who stay in bed together for the next thirty years.
Buy the disco ball. Hang it somewhere ridiculous. Turn it on for no reason at all next Tuesday. Watch what happens to the temperature in the room.
Rule #2: Stop Acting Like Responsible Adults
Let me be extremely clear before you misread this entire section: I am not telling you to abandon your responsibilities. Pay your mortgage. Pick up your kids. Show up to the meeting on time. Be, in every practical and financial and civic sense, a fully responsible adult. I am a licensed professional. I am contractually obligated to say this part before I get to the fun part.
But responsible and terminally serious are not the same word, even though somewhere around age forty we accidentally merge them into one indistinguishable blob, and that merger is quietly killing marriages that would otherwise be perfectly fine.
Adults mistakenly believe that maturity means becoming predictable. I understand where this belief comes from—predictability got you here. Predictability paid off the student loans, got the promotion, kept the household functioning through two kids and a pandemic and one plumbing incident we’ve all agreed never to discuss again. Predictability is not the enemy of your life. It is, however, the quiet, patient enemy of your erotic life, and almost nobody warns you about this trade-off until it’s already cost them a decade of intimacy. It’s like discovering the extended warranty you skipped was actually for the good part.
The happiest long-term couples I have ever worked with—and I mean the ones who, twenty-five years in, still light up like teenagers when the other one walks into the room—remain slightly ridiculous forever. Not occasionally. Not on anniversaries. Forever, the way some couples have a standing Sunday brunch reservation, except nobody’s charging you for the mimosas and nobody’s judging your outfit.
What does “slightly ridiculous forever” actually look like in practice? Smaller than you’d expect. That’s exactly why it works.
It’s kitchen dancing on a random Wednesday, for no reason, to a song that came on the radio while you were doing dishes. It’s making out against the refrigerator like teenagers who might get caught, except now the person who might catch you is a sixteen-year-old rolling their eyes from the doorway, muttering “get a room” as though that suggestion isn’t the entire point. It’s goofing off—actual goofing off, the kind that involves accents and impressions and inside jokes that would get you committed if repeated in public, and have, at least once, gotten a very confused waiter involved. It’s a pillow fight that escalates unreasonably, a game of tag through the house that ends with both of you winded on the couch, one of you nursing a stubbed toe like it’s a war wound and demanding sympathy you absolutely do not deserve. It’s being interrupted by the dog mid-kiss and simply not caring. The dog does not respect your romance. The dog has never once respected your romance. The dog would like you to know dinner is late. Make peace with all of it.
None of this is impressive. None of it would look good on a highlight reel. And that is precisely the point. The couples who’ve figured this out have stopped performing seriousness for an audience that doesn’t exist. Nobody is grading you on your dignity at home. That audience lives entirely inside your own head, and it has been quietly strangling your sex life for years, and frankly it’s never even paid rent.
Here’s a line I say to clients so often I should have it embroidered on a pillow: somewhere around age forty somebody convinced us adulthood meant becoming boring as a G movie. I respectfully decline. I’ve asked around. Nobody can produce the paperwork. I suspect we all just agreed to this one, silently, at the DMV.
I want you to notice something about your own history. Think back to the very beginning of your relationship—the early months, maybe the first year. I would put real money on the fact that you were, during that period, at least a little bit ridiculous with each other. You had a private language. You made up nicknames, several of them unrepeatable in front of your mother. You did something embarrassing in public because you simply couldn’t help yourselves—danced in a parking lot, sang along too loudly in the car, laughed so hard at a private joke that strangers stared and quietly moved their children away from you.
That ridiculousness wasn’t a symptom of immaturity. It was a symptom of aliveness. Somewhere along the way, most couples decide that phase was supposed to end—that it was training wheels, meant to be outgrown once the “real” relationship began. I want to propose the opposite. That early ridiculousness wasn’t the training wheels. It was the engine. And you didn’t outgrow it. You just stopped tending it, the way you’d stop tending a garden and then act surprised when nothing grows there anymore except the resentment, which, it turns out, thrives on neglect and requires no watering whatsoever.
So this week, do one deliberately undignified thing with your partner. Dance in the kitchen with a wooden spoon as a microphone. Do a terrible impression of your in-laws to each other in the car, ideally not while your in-laws are in the car, ask me how I know that clarification was necessary. Let the dog interrupt the kiss and laugh about it instead of sighing about it.
Reclaim your right to be a little bit ridiculous. It’s not beneath you. It’s the thing keeping you together.
Rule #3: Flirt Like You Haven’t Closed the Deal Yet
Somewhere along the way, most long-term couples make an unconscious decision that flirting is for people who are still trying to win someone over. Once you’re married, once the deal is closed, once the ring is on and the lease is signed and the joint bank account is opened, flirting starts to feel unnecessary—like advertising a car you already bought. Nobody puts up a billboard for the Honda already parked in their driveway.
This is, respectfully, one of the most quietly devastating mistakes a long-term couple can make, and almost nobody notices they’ve made it until they’re sitting across a therapy office wondering why the spark disappeared, holding a mug of coffee they made for themselves because nobody made it for them anymore, and somehow that detail always comes up. Always the coffee. I could write a whole other book just about the coffee.
Stop acting married. Start acting interested.
I don’t mean stop being married in any legal sense—please keep paying the mortgage together. I mean stop performing the particular emotional flatness people call “married energy”—the eye contact that’s really just glancing to see if the coffee’s ready (there it is again), the compliments that quietly stopped somewhere around year three, the touch that’s become purely functional, a hand on the shoulder to get someone’s attention rather than a hand on the shoulder because you simply wanted to touch them. You know the difference. Your body knows the difference. Your body has been quietly keeping score, and your body does not forget, and your body is, frankly, a little offended right now.
Flirting, at its core, is a signal. It says: I still notice you. I still want you to notice me. That signal doesn’t retire once you’re committed. If anything, it becomes more necessary, because commitment removes the pressure that used to force you to send it constantly. When you’re dating, you flirt because the other person could walk away. Once you’re married, nobody’s auditioning anymore, and that’s exactly when flirting quietly disappears. Congratulations, you got the part. Nobody said you could stop performing. That’s not how theater works, and it’s certainly not how marriage works.
So we have to reintroduce it deliberately.
Eye contact is the cheapest and most underused tool in your entire erotic toolkit, and it costs nothing, which frankly should make it more popular than it is—we live in a culture that pays for spin classes and can’t be bothered to look someone in the eye for four consecutive seconds. Look at your partner across the dinner table the way you looked at them across a bar the first night you met, back when you were cataloging every detail of their face because you hadn’t yet memorized it. You have memorized it now. Pretend you haven’t. It works better than you’d think.
Teasing matters too, the gentle kind—not criticism dressed up as humor, but the kind that says I know you well enough to poke fun at you and love you enough that the poke never lands anywhere painful. Compliments matter, and not the utilitarian kind (“thanks for doing the dishes,” which is not a compliment, it’s a receipt) but the kind with nothing to do with logistics at all (“you look unfairly good in that shirt”). Touching matters—not the perfunctory touch of coexistence, but touch that lingers, that has no destination, that exists purely because you wanted to make contact with the person you love.
Here’s the part that most couples get backward, and it’s the single most important sentence in this section: build anticipation all day. The seduction begins at breakfast. Not bedtime.
Most long-term couples treat sex like a light switch—off all day, then flipped suddenly on at 10:47 p.m. when both people are exhausted, one has already fallen half-asleep during the previous episode of whatever show they’re rewatching for the fourth time, and the whole encounter has the romantic momentum of two people trying to catch a departing train while one of them is still wearing a sock with a hole in it. That’s not seduction. That’s logistics with a deadline, and it deserves a much less generous name than “date night.”
Seduction is not a switch. It’s a slow burn that starts hours—sometimes an entire day—before anything physical happens. A lingering look over coffee (I promise this is the last coffee reference). A text in the middle of the afternoon that has nothing to do with grocery lists, for once. A hand on the small of the back that says something entirely different from “excuse me.” By the time bedtime arrives, you’re not starting from zero. You’re arriving at a destination you’ve been walking toward all day.
I want you to try something this week that will feel silly at first. Flirt with your partner over breakfast as though you just met them at a party and you’re not sure they’re interested yet. Compliment something specific. Hold eye contact a beat too long. Say something a little forward and then look away like you can’t believe you said it. It will feel absurd for about ninety seconds—your partner may actually ask if you’re feeling all right, possibly check your temperature. Then it will feel like electricity.
Rule #4: Have an Affair… With Your Spouse
This is the signature exercise of the entire chapter, and I want to say upfront that it is going to sound, on paper, slightly scandalous. It isn’t. What it is, is one of the most reliably transformative exercises I have ever assigned in over twenty years of couples counseling, and I have watched it work on couples who came into my office convinced their spark was gone for good, sitting six inches apart on my couch like two people waiting for a bus that isn’t coming and honestly might not be that upset about it.
Here’s the concept, and then I’ll walk you through exactly how to do it.
You are going to meet your spouse—the actual person you married, the one already sleeping in your bed every night, the one whose side of the closet you have opinions about—as though you were about to have an affair with them. Not with someone else. With them. You are going to become, for one evening, two entirely different people who happen to be extraordinarily attracted to each other, and you are going to let that fiction bypass every ounce of familiarity that’s built up over the years and get straight to the electricity underneath it.
Here’s how it works.
You meet separately. Not “get ready in the same bathroom while narrating your day” separately—actually separately. Different locations if possible: one of you at the bar, one of you arriving twenty minutes later, ideally without texting “almost there” like you’re picking up a Costco order. Different names—pick something that belongs to somebody freer and more mysterious than the person who usually answers to “honey,” “babe,” or, in one household I know of, “the guy who never replaces the toilet paper roll, I mean never, it’s become a personality trait.” Different clothes—something neither of you would wear on a Tuesday, something that signals I am not simply your spouse tonight. Different stories—you are two strangers with entirely invented backstories, and you are going to introduce yourselves as though you’ve never met.
Then you flirt. Shamelessly. Ask questions you already know the answer to and let your invented character answer them differently—your husband of twelve years has never once claimed to be a scuba instructor from Key West, and frankly you deserve to watch him try. Compliment things you’d never normally comment on out loud. Let the conversation have real tension in it—the kind that comes from not being entirely sure how the night is going to end, even though, on some level, you both absolutely know.
And then—this is the part that surprises almost every couple who tries it—you fall in love again. Not metaphorically. Actually. The invented names and stories remove the weight of twelve years of grocery lists, childcare logistics, and old arguments about his mother, and underneath all that weight, there you both are: two people who are, it turns out, still enormously attracted to each other.
This exercise should feel almost like a romantic comedy—the awkward-but-delicious tension of not knowing quite how forward you can be, the thrill of a stranger who might say yes. The fact that you already know they’ll say yes doesn’t ruin the fiction. It makes it sweeter, like watching a movie for the second time and finally noticing the foreshadowing.
A few practical notes. Pick a bar where you’re genuinely unlikely to run into anyone you know—nothing kills the mood faster than your neighbor waving from the next booth, unless your neighbor is also doing this, in which case, wave back, godspeed, mind your own table. Commit to the bit even when it feels awkward; the first five minutes of any role-play always feel a little silly, and that awkwardness reliably gives way to genuine delight if you push through it instead of breaking character to laugh it off too soon. Give yourselves permission to end the “date” wherever it wants to end—home, an actual hotel room if you’re leaning all the way in, or simply a long drive with the windows down and the radio too loud, which, honestly, is its own kind of ending.
I have had clients tell me this single exercise did more for their marriage than a year of scheduled date nights. I believe them completely, because I’ve watched the light in their eyes the following week describing meeting their own spouse for the first time again, one of them usually still laughing about the fake name.
Don’t have an affair. Have an imagination.
Rule #5: One Lover. One Thousand People.
If Rule #4 was the appetizer, this is the main course, so loosen your belt.
This is not pornography – although it could be but that’s another chapter. This is not about performing for anyone else, and it’s not about treating your partner’s body as a prop in someone else’s fantasy. This is about imagination—specifically, the radical idea that the person you married contains an almost infinite number of characters you haven’t met yet, and meeting them, deliberately and playfully, is one of the great untapped resources of long-term intimacy. Most people leave this resource in the ground their entire marriage, like an oil deposit nobody bothered to drill, sitting directly underneath a house they’ve spent thirty years complaining is boring.
Here’s the premise. You married one person. But a person is not one fixed thing—a person is a vast, shifting landscape of moods and possible selves, most of which never get airtime in the routine of daily life because daily life doesn’t require them. Your partner has never had occasion, in the course of grocery shopping and tax season, to be a cowboy. Or a professor. Or a bartender working the late shift at a jazz club in 1974. Those characters exist somewhere in them, and this rule is an invitation to let them finally show up, ideally before they file their own restraining order against domestic monotony.
The goal is not variety for variety’s sake. The goal is rediscovery—a fresh angle on the same person, because the ordinary architecture of “husband” and “wife” doesn’t leave room for a cowboy.
Think about the decades available to you as material. The 1970s alone offer an entire wardrobe: the disco queen who owns the dance floor and doesn’t care who’s watching, the rock star with the unearned confidence of somebody who’s never once doubted himself, the French artist whose accent is so terrible it becomes its own kind of foreplay, mostly because you’ll both be laughing too hard to stop, which, frankly, is the actual goal. Go further back or further forward if you like. The professor who keeps you after class. The bartender who’s heard every hard-luck story in town and somehow still wants to hear yours. The mysterious stranger down the hall at a hotel neither of you has ever actually stayed in.
Settings matter as much as characters. A hotel room—any hotel room, even a mediocre one twenty minutes from your own house with a suspicious ice machine and art nobody asked for—instantly changes the energy, because it removes every environmental cue that says “domestic life happens here.” A vacation persona works the same magic without leaving town: decide, for one weekend, that you’re the unencumbered version of yourselves you’d be somewhere exotic, and let that version show up in the bedroom instead of the one still thinking about the recycling schedule.
This rule works precisely because it gives both partners permission to want things without the vulnerability of claiming those wants as your unfiltered, everyday self. It’s far easier to ask for something as “the disco queen” than it is to ask for it as the person who knows the Wi-Fi password by heart. The character is a permission slip. Use it.
A few notes on doing this well. Talk about it outside the bedroom first, at least the first few times, so nobody’s caught off guard by a fully-formed cowboy showing up unannounced on a Tuesday, spurs and all, while you’re still holding a spatula from Rule #2, which, incidentally, is getting a lot of use in this chapter and has earned hazard pay. Build a shorthand—a phrase that means “I want to try a character tonight”—so the invitation itself becomes part of the flirtation. Let it be funny sometimes. Some of the best personas are the ones you can barely get through without laughing, and that laughter is not a failure of the exercise. It’s the whole exercise wearing a disguise.
A running joke worth adopting: afro wigs receive bonus points. There is something so specifically, deliciously ridiculous about a truly terrible wig that it manages to be both a costume and a punchline simultaneously, and that combination—arousal plus laughter—is exactly the cocktail this chapter is trying to help you rediscover. Buy two. Someone always ends up wanting one, and the other one always ends up jealous.
You married one lover. Inside that one lover is an entire cast of characters you haven’t met yet. Go meet them. Bring a wig. Bring two.
Rule #6: Marvin Gaye Is Better Than Marriage Counseling
I’ve spent over twenty years doing marriage counseling for a living, so hear me out: I have never once watched a couple slow-dance to “Let’s Get It On” in their kitchen and stay mad at each other.
It’s not possible. I’ve looked. There is no known case. Somewhere there’s a control group of furious couples standing very still in silence, refusing to press play out of pure spite, and even they are losing, badly, visibly, one toe-tap at a time.
Here’s the experiment. Next time you’re mid-argument—not a screaming match, just one of those low, simmering, whose-turn-was-it-to-empty-the-dishwasher standoffs—one of you walks over and puts on Marvin Gaye. Doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t apologize. Just presses play.
Watch what happens to the other person’s face. It’s like watching someone try very hard to stay angry at a golden retriever who’s brought them a shoe.
Music doesn’t ask permission. It walks straight past your grudges and goes directly to your hips, which frankly don’t care whose turn it was. You can stay furious during a conversation. You cannot stay furious during a bassline. Try it. I’ll wait. I have all day. Marvin has all day too, technically, though he’s a bit harder to reach for comment these days.
So build yourselves a playlist and call it what it is: Songs Guaranteed to Increase Pelvic Optimism™. Put Marvin on it. Put whatever song was playing during your first kiss on it, even if it’s mortifying, even if it’s a song you’d deny under oath with your hand on a Bible and your lawyer visibly wincing. Put one song on it that makes you both dance like nobody taught you how, because nobody did, and that’s the whole point.
Then here’s your homework: turn it on for no reason. Not foreplay. Not a signal. Just Tuesday, six o’clock, dinner half-made, and suddenly Marvin’s asking what’s going on. See who reaches for whose hand first. Loser does the dishes. Actually, no—no losers tonight. That’s the whole rule.
I had a client—married thirty-one years, the kind of couple who finish each other’s grocery lists—tell me her husband started doing this exact thing on Sunday mornings. No warning. Coffee still brewing, and suddenly the Bee Gees are blasting through the house at a volume that alarms the dog, the neighbors, and possibly a low-flying aircraft. She said the first time it happened she nearly dropped a mug. She also said it’s the reason her Sunday mornings are, in her own words, “better than church, and I love church.” I did not have a clinical response to that. I just wrote it down and went home and put on the Bee Gees myself.
Build the playlist together. Argue about what belongs on it—that argument is half the fun. Somebody’s going to fight for a song the other one finds genuinely embarrassing, and that fight will end in laughing, not resentment, because nothing about disco is dignified enough to stay mad over. Nobody has ever ended a marriage over “Stayin’ Alive.” It’s statistically impossible. I checked. There is no data. There will never be data. You can stay furious during a conversation. You cannot stay furious during a bassline.
Rule #7: Stop Scheduling Your Romance
Every relationship book on the planet tells you to put sex on the calendar. Tuesday, 9 p.m., recurring event, right between “renew car insurance” and “dentist.” I understand the impulse. It’s better than nothing. It is roughly as romantic as jury duty, and about as easy to get out of. But I want better for you than a calendar invite. Because here’s the thing nobody says out loud: a scheduled seduction still smells like a dentist appointment, even a good one. You know it’s coming. Your body knows it’s coming. Where’s the thrill in an outcome you predicted on Sunday while doing the meal plan, right below “buy more paper towels”? So don’t schedule romance. Ambush your spouse with it.
Tuck a filthy little note into a coat pocket they won’t find until Thursday—ideally not the pocket they check for parking validation, we’ve all learned that lesson somewhere. Kiss them in the kitchen like you’re trying to get caught by someone. Text an address and a time and nothing else, and let them spend the whole car ride googling it, mildly panicking, wondering if they should’ve worn something else. Show up with flowers on a random Wednesday for no reason, and when they ask what the occasion is, just say “you.” Watch them stand there holding the flowers, looking genuinely suspicious, like you might also have hit their car.
One client left her husband a voicemail—just a voicemail, nothing scandalous—that said, “I’ve been thinking about you all day and I’m not going to tell you why.” He called her back from the parking garage at work. Nothing even happened that night. That’s not the point. The point is he thought about nothing else for six hours, and neither of them can remember the last item on their actual to-do list that did that. Certainly not “renew car insurance.” Insurance has never once made anyone’s heart race. If yours does, call me immediately.
Another couple I know has a rule: whoever gets home first hides one object of the other person’s—keys, phone charger, a single shoe—somewhere absurd, no explanation. The other person has to find it before bed. They’ve been doing this for four years. They are, by a wide margin, the most annoyingly happy couple I know, and the reason I now check my own freezer before I check the couch cushions, on principle, just in case joy is contagious.
Here’s the whole rule in one sentence: the opposite of boredom isn’t a new partner. It’s a text message that ruins their entire afternoon in the best possible way. Go ruin someone’s Tuesday.
Rule #8: Permission to Look Completely Ridiculous
Here’s a scene I’ve heard some version of a hundred times in my office. A couple tries something new—a dance move, a joke voice, an ambitious attempt at a sexy accent—and it goes hilariously, catastrophically wrong. And right there, in that split second, the whole marriage either wins or loses.
Option one: somebody laughs, the other one laughs harder, and they end up in a heap on the bed unable to breathe, which, incidentally, is one of the best places a marriage can possibly end up.
Option two: somebody feels embarrassed, the other one doesn’t reassure them fast enough, and that little flicker of shame gets filed away in the permanent record, right next to the Christmas of 2019, which nobody in this family is over. Filed away enough times, a person quietly stops trying anything at all. Not because they ran out of ideas. Because it stopped feeling safe to have them.
I want to ask you something, and I want you to actually answer it: when was the last time you looked completely ridiculous in front of your spouse and it went great?
If you can’t remember, that’s not a personality flaw. That’s a muscle gone soft from disuse, and muscles come back fast. Unlike the actual muscle you’re about to pull attempting the thing I’m about to describe.
I once had a couple describe, completely deadpan, the night the husband attempted a striptease to a song three minutes too long, and by minute two he’d pulled a hamstring reaching for the lamp switch. She said she has never laughed that hard in her life. He said it was, and I quote, “worth the ice pack.” Twenty years later, that’s still the story they tell at dinner parties. Not the vacation to Italy. The hamstring. Nobody has ever once asked to hear more about Italy. Nobody cares about Italy.
That’s the whole secret hiding in plain sight: the moments that actually bond a marriage are almost never the polished ones. Smoothly doesn’t make the highlight reel. Smoothly is forgettable. The hamstring is forever, in the way only genuine humiliation, survived together, ever is.
So here’s your assignment, zero props, zero planning, zero money: tonight, do something a little embarrassing on purpose. Attempt a terrible accent. Sing into a spatula, the one from Rule #2, we’re really getting our money’s worth out of that thing. Dance like your dad at a wedding, the one where he’s absolutely convinced he’s still got it and is, tragically, wrong. And when it goes badly—voice cracks, you trip on the rug, the accent collapses into something vaguely Scottish for no reason at all—don’t apologize. Just look at them and let them see you not caring.
If your spouse isn’t the one human being on earth in front of whom you’re allowed to be a complete idiot, you’ve built the wrong kind of marriage. Go fix that tonight, badly, on purpose, together. Ice packs optional but, statistically, advisable.
Rule #9: Three Adventures That Begin Tonight
Enough talking. Pick one. Do it before the week is out. No, your calendar doesn’t get a vote. It’s had ten years. It’s had its turn.
**Disco Night.** Playlist from Rule #6. Disco ball from Rule #1. Something in your closet with more sequins than dignity. Lights off, ball on, dance until one of you laughs so hard you have to hold onto the counter. Bonus points if a neighbor sees through the window and has questions. Extra bonus points if you wave. Full marks if they wave back.
**Meet Me at the Bar.** Pick a bar where nobody knows your last name. Arrive separately. Introduce yourself as someone else entirely. Flirt like the stakes are real, because for one night, you’re pretending they are. If the bartender asks how you two met, lie. Lie beautifully. Go home together as strangers who just got lucky.
**Become Somebody Else.** Choose a character each—cowboy, professor, disco queen, French painter with an accent that falls apart by sentence three. One costume piece is plenty: a hat, a scarf, an ill-advised wig, ideally the second wig from Rule #5, the one nobody claimed. Stay in character as long as it’s funny, and the moment one of you breaks and starts laughing, that’s not a failure—that’s the scene ending exactly on cue, curtain down, standing ovation, somebody bring flowers.
Three options. All of them cost less than dinner out. Pick one before Sunday, or I’m assigning all three, and then you’ll really have a story for the dinner party. Possibly two ice packs.
Rule #10: The Eleventh Commandment
Everything in this chapter boils down to one line, so here it is, no decoration:
Thou shalt never stop fucking like thou art still completely and utterly smitten with thy spouse.
That’s the whole sermon. Everyone can go home. Somebody unplug the disco ball before we burn the damn house down.
Smitten is the word I actually mean—not “attracted,” not “committed,” not some clinical term I could bill an insurance company for. Smitten is the involuntary, undignified thing that happens when someone you like walks into a room and your whole nervous system briefly forgets what it was doing. It’s the reason you used to text back in four seconds instead of four hours, back when a reply from them could derail an entire meeting and you did not care one bit. Most people assume that particular foolishness has an expiration date stamped on it somewhere, like yogurt. I’ve watched enough thirty-year marriages to tell you it doesn’t, provided somebody keeps feeding it a disco ball every once in a while.
Frame it, tattoo it, put it on a throw pillow if you must, right next to the one that says “Live Laugh Love,” which, frankly, this Commandment could stand to evict. Just don’t quietly retire it the way you retired the flirting and the kitchen dancing and the ridiculous accents somewhere around year seven, the same year, coincidentally, the spice rack got alphabetized.
So: stay smitten. Everything else in this chapter was just instructions for how.
Maybe We Misunderstood the 1970s
Maybe it was never really about the decade.
Maybe what we actually miss is permission—to dance badly in our own kitchens, to flirt with someone we already caught, to laugh so hard at our own spouse that we can’t finish a sentence, or the dishes, or the argument we were having eleven minutes ago about the dishes, which, if we’re honest, was never really about the dishes either. Maybe somewhere along the way we decided that kind of nonsense was for people who hadn’t figured life out yet, and we couldn’t have been more wrong. The people who’ve figured life out are the ones still doing it, badly, on purpose, in socks, on a Tuesday, at full volume.
So here’s your actual homework, starting tonight if you’re brave, this weekend if you need a running start: buy the disco ball. Put on Marvin. Wear the wig, badly. Meet at the bar as somebody else and fall for your own spouse all over again. Dance in the kitchen with the stove still on. Let the pasta boil over. Nobody has ever, in the history of marriage, remembered the pasta.
And for heaven’s sake—fuck like it’s the 1970s, with the one person you never, ever want to stop discovering.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Chapter Companion Song Recommendation:
— Marvin Gaye, Let’s Get It On 1973
This article is an excerpt from Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.’s forthcoming book Magnificent Men: How Men Are Undervalued and How Worshipping and Being Worshipped Can Bring You The Hot and Holy Love You Desire, exploring the restoration of men’s dignity and worth, the sacred and sensual dimensions of intimacy, and hot and holy love.
Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author, psychotherapist, and leading expert in counseling, communication, and human connection. Her first published study, released in 1993, explored the impact of family dysfunction on intimacy and communication in adult relationships. For more than three decades, she has developed innovative therapeutic models to help individuals and couples create deeper connection, emotional resilience, and extraordinary relationships. Her work explores the intersection of psychology, spirituality, humor, eroticism, and human magnificence, helping people live more fully, love more deeply, and embrace the extraordinary possibilities of a beautiful life.
