Books and Influences

The largest study of sexual fantasy ever conducted found that 97% of people fantasize, and that three themes dominate: multipartner sex, power and control, and novelty. Here's what each one actually delivers psychologically — and why a fantasy is almost never a plan.

Two people notice each other across a crowded room. Their energies radiate outward and meet — not at him, not at her, but in the middle, forming a third thing. Walsch calls it TOMARY: the body between them. Here's why that image reframes what intimacy actually is.

Esther Perel argues that "the third" — the outside, the other people, the roads not taken — is always present in a relationship whether or not it's acknowledged. Here's why denial is exhausting and costly, and what acknowledging it actually adds.

Esther Perel draws on Michael Bader's concept of sexual ruthlessness: the quality of desire that lets you surrender completely to your own pleasure, free of guilt and shame. Here's why selflessness in bed deprives your partner of the only thing they actually want from you.

Esther Perel observes that in the erotic realm, the qualities that make you good at life often work against you. The attuned, considerate, other-focused social self is genuinely valuable — and almost useless in bed. Here's why eroticism requires a healthy self-focus, and how to grant it.

Esther Perel: sex is not something you do, it's a place you go. That distinction reorganizes everything — why technically good sex can feel empty, why a simple encounter can be profound, and why interruption costs so much more than the seconds it takes.

Esther Perel said something in an interview that stopped me: desire is owning the wanting. Not having it — owning it. Most people have plenty of wanting and very little ownership. Here's why disowned desire doesn't transmit, and what changes when you finally claim it.

There's a lot of noise in the online sexuality space and most of it isn't worth your time. These five have shaped my own thinking substantially — here's what each uniquely contributes, where to start, and who each one is best for.

Esther Perel's claim: the erotic is not about sex, it's about aliveness. Couples don't lose their sexual function in long-term relationships — they lose their erotic imagination. Here's why it atrophies, and the practices that genuinely rebuild it.

I read Sex at Dawn expecting it to complicate beliefs I was comfortable with. It did. Here's an honest reckoning with the pros and cons of monogamy from someone nine years into a happy monogamous marriage who found the counterarguments genuinely compelling.

John Wineland's concept of evocation changed how I understand what happens between two people. You are always evoking something in your partner — warmth or defensiveness, aliveness or withdrawal. You don't get to opt out. You only get to choose what you evoke.

John Wineland names a specific failure mode in how men express desire: wanting from need rather than from fullness, and letting that neediness leak into the asking. Here's the distinction between "do you maybe want to?" and "meet me in the bedroom" — and why the second one changes everything.

"Kung fu" doesn't mean martial arts — it means skill achieved through disciplined practice. Sexual Kung Fu is exactly that: sexual mastery developed through consistent training in ejaculatory control, energy circulation, and whole-body arousal. Here's what it actually involves.

Mantak Chia's Exercise 16 from The Multi-Orgasmic Man is one of the most detailed practices in the Taoist sexual health tradition. Here's an honest assessment of what the practice genuinely produces improved circulation, pelvic floor awareness, somatic development and where the enlargement claims go beyond what the clinical evidence supports.

I read Daniel Rose's The Sex God Method this past week and have an honest take: the core DEVI framework is genuinely useful for men who've been operating as passive lovers. Some of the framing is dated and occasionally misogynistic. Here's what it gets right, where I push back, and how it maps to the other intimacy work on this blog.

I first read Deida in 2018 and it changed how I understood the specific quality of presence that creates erotic charge in a long-term relationship. Here are five concrete ways men can ignite their masculine essence — not as performance, but as genuine cultivation of what polarity actually requires.

I prepare for almost everything that matters — Ironman races, presentations, coaching sessions. And then I'd walk into the bedroom and wing it. John Wineland's observation that we prepare for everything except intimacy is both obvious and genuinely revelatory. Here's what intentional preparation actually looks like.

In the middle of a disagreement, most of us are asking the wrong question. John Wineland's devotion framework offers a better one: what liberates love right now? Here's the three-stage conflict framework behind it, and what changes when you make this the animating question of your relationship.

My somatic coach guided me through an eye gazing exercise — not with Brittney, but with her. What I brought home afterward changed what was possible in our intimate life. Here's what ethically outsourcing parts of your intimacy actually means and why the professional container produces capacities that the primary relationship alone often can't.

There was a period where Brittney was my entire relational world — and I told myself it was intimacy. What I've learned since is that it was also a burden. Esther Perel's framework for what we've done to modern marriage explains why your spouse cannot be everything — and what changes when you stop expecting them to be.