Fantasies Don't Take Away — They Give
My somatic coach reframed something for me recently that I've been turning over ever since.
I had been describing fantasy the way most people implicitly understand it: as something that draws energy away. Attention that could have gone toward my partner going somewhere else instead. A kind of leakage — desire spent on the imagined rather than invested in the real.
She stopped me and offered a different frame entirely.
Fantasies don't take away. They give. They add eroticism rather than diverting it.
That single reframe has changed how I relate to my own imagination, and it's worth unpacking because the scarcity model of desire is one of the most common and most limiting assumptions people carry.
Prefer to listen to this content instead? We covered this topic on Episode 47 of our Do You Feel That? podcast.
The Scarcity Model
Here's the assumption underneath most anxiety about fantasy: desire is a finite resource.
In that model, you have a certain amount of erotic energy. Every unit spent on a fantasy is a unit not available for your partner. Fantasizing is therefore a kind of infidelity of attention — not because the content is wrong, but because the resource is limited and you've allocated it elsewhere.
This is why people feel guilty about fantasy even when they're clear it isn't cheating. The guilt isn't really about the content. It's about the perceived diversion. That energy should have gone to us.
The scarcity model is intuitive. It's also wrong.
Desire Is Generative, Not Finite
Here's what the reframe reveals: erotic energy behaves much more like a fire than like a bank account.
Fire doesn't have a fixed quantity that gets divided among the things it touches. It builds. Add fuel and you get more fire, not a thinner distribution of the same fire. The heat generated in one place raises the temperature of the whole system.
Desire works the same way. A man whose erotic imagination is active and generative has more desire available for his partner, not less. The fantasy doesn't compete with her. It feeds the same fire she benefits from.
This matches my actual experience once I started paying attention rather than assuming. During the period I described in the authorship post — when I removed all external erotic content and required my own imagination to generate — my desire for Brittney increased substantially. Not because I was redirecting energy toward her by denying it elsewhere. Because the imagination, being exercised, produced more of everything.
The generative capacity got stronger. And a stronger generative capacity means more charge in every direction, including hers.
What Fantasy Actually Contributes
Beyond the general point about generativity, fantasy makes several specific contributions that the scarcity frame renders invisible.
It develops the erotic imagination itself. As I've written, most adults have underdeveloped erotic imaginations — decades of consuming rather than generating leaves the capacity weak. Fantasy is the exercise that builds it. And since eroticism issexuality plus imagination, per Perel's distinction, a stronger imagination means a richer erotic life across the board.
It carries information. Jack Morin's research on core erotic themes established that fantasy content is symbolic rather than literal — it points toward emotional states and dynamics rather than toward acts you're planning. A recurring fantasy is telling you something about what you most need to feel. That information is useful, and it's only available if you let the fantasy arrive.
It generates material for partnered life. Fantasies shared become shared erotic territory. As I wrote in the fantasy conversation post, disclosing what your imagination produces is one of the most intimate acts available — and it gives your partner something real to work with rather than guesses.
It sustains desire through the flat periods. Long-term relationships have seasons. Illness, stress, exhaustion, the compressed years of parenting young children. A person with an active erotic imagination keeps the fire lit through those periods. A person who has suppressed it has nothing to return to when conditions improve.
It produces anticipation. Fantasy about your partner specifically — imagining what you want with her, replaying what you've had — is anticipation, which as I've written is one of the most underused generators of erotic charge available. That's not energy diverted from her. That's energy aimed directly at her.
Where the Scarcity Model Does Apply
Honest caveat, because the reframe can be overextended.
There is a version of fantasy that genuinely diverts — but the diversion isn't about the fantasizing. It's about substitution.
If solo fantasy consistently replaces available partnered intimacy — if it's the easier, more controllable, less vulnerable option chosen over genuine encounter — then something real is being taken away. Not the erotic energy. The engagement. As I wrote in the healthy-versus-unhealthy fantasies post, the diagnostic question is supplement versus substitute.
Similarly, fantasy used to cultivate genuine emotional attachment to a specific accessible person is a different activity than imagination. That's rehearsal, and rehearsal has a direction that matters.
But these are narrow exceptions. The ordinary, wide, symbolic range of adult erotic imagination — the vast majority of what people feel guilty about — is additive rather than subtractive.
The Permission This Grants
What the reframe ultimately does is remove a specific and unnecessary guilt.
You can let your imagination run without accounting for it. You can have a rich inner erotic life and bring more, not less, to your partner. The fantasy you had this morning is not a debt owed to your relationship. It's part of what keeps you alive enough to want her.
This connects directly to what my coach told me about not policing fantasies. The censor that evaluates each arising desire is operating on the scarcity assumption — it's protecting a resource it believes is limited. Remove the assumption and the censor loses its rationale.
And as I wrote in that post, the censored imagination is a weak imagination. Letting it run is what makes it generative.
Bringing It Into the Relationship
The most useful application of this is to extend it to your partner as fully as you claim it for yourself.
Her fantasies also give rather than take. Her inner erotic life, whatever it contains, is producing the same generative capacity that makes her available to you. A partner who fantasizes is not spending something she owed you. She's building a fire you both benefit from.
That understanding makes the fantasy conversation possible. If you believe fantasy is diversion, hearing your partner's fantasies is threatening — evidence of resources spent elsewhere. If you understand it as generation, hearing them is simply learning something interesting about someone you love.
Brittney and I can have that conversation. It took work — mostly on my part, undoing the scarcity assumption I'd carried for decades. But what's on the other side is a relationship where neither of us has to hide a dimension of ourselves to protect the other.
The Short Version
Desire is not a finite resource being allocated. It's a generative capacity being exercised.
Fantasy exercises it. Suppression weakens it. And a weakened erotic imagination doesn't produce a man more devoted to his partner — it produces a man with less to bring her.
Let the imagination run. It gives more than it takes.
Ready to go deeper?
If this resonates, there are two ways to take the next step with Coelle.
Download the Coelle app — Guided audio intimacy sessions designed for couples who are ready to stop performing and start arriving. Download Coelle here.
Work with me directly — I offer one-on-one sex and intimacy coaching for individuals and couples, drawing on my background in sport psychology and years of personal somatic work. Book a free discovery call here.
