Healthy vs. Unhealthy Fantasies During Masturbation: An Honest Framework

I wrote recently about whether fantasies make you unfaithful — the short answer being no, and the longer answer involving the distinction between imagination and rehearsal. This post addresses a related but distinct question that I get asked more often than almost anything else in coaching:

When I'm masturbating, are the fantasies I'm using healthy or not?

It's a question that carries a lot of shame for most men who ask it. And it deserves a genuine framework rather than either blanket permissiveness or blanket condemnation.

A man relaxes comfortably in bed, partially covered by a white sheet.

The Wrong Question

Let me start by removing a framing that gets in the way.

Most men asking this question are implicitly asking about content — is it okay that I fantasize about X? Is this specific scenario a problem? Does the fact that I imagine this thing mean something is wrong with me?

Content is almost never the right variable. As Jack Morin's research established — over a thousand accounts of peak erotic experiences analyzed in The Erotic Mind — fantasy content is overwhelmingly symbolic rather than literal. A fantasy about a scenario points toward a feeling the scenario represents, not toward a literal desire to enact it. Fantasies about domination often point toward desires around surrender or intensity. Fantasies about being watched point toward desires around being seen or validated. Fantasies about taboo situations point toward the erotic charge of transgression itself rather than toward the specific taboo.

Judging fantasy by content is like judging a dream by its literal events. It misses what's actually happening.

The better question isn't what am I fantasizing about. It's how is the fantasy functioning in my life?

The Framework: Four Diagnostic Questions

Here's what I'd actually use to evaluate whether your fantasy life is serving you.

1. Is it expanding or narrowing?

Healthy fantasy has range. It moves. Different scenarios, different dynamics, responsiveness to your actual life and current desires. You might return to certain themes — most people have core erotic themes that persist — but there's variation and generativity within them.

Unhealthy fantasy narrows. It becomes increasingly specific, increasingly rigid, and increasingly required. The escalation pattern — where what produced arousal last year no longer works and progressively more extreme content is needed — is the clearest warning sign available. Narrowing is the tell, not content.

2. Is it connecting or disconnecting you from your partner?

Healthy fantasy during masturbation often includes your partner, or at least doesn't systematically exclude her. Many men fantasize about their partners, about past encounters with them, about things they'd like to do with them. This kind of fantasy feeds the partnered relationship — it keeps desire oriented toward the person you're actually with.

Unhealthy fantasy systematically excludes your partner and, over time, makes her less desirable by comparison. If your fantasy life has become a separate erotic world that your actual relationship can't compete with, that's a genuine problem — not because the fantasies are wrong, but because of what the split is doing to your capacity for desire in your real life.

3. Is it accompanied by shame that persists afterward?

This one requires nuance, because inherited shame and genuine misalignment feel similar from the inside.

Many men — myself included, growing up in the environment I did — carry shame about masturbation and fantasy generally. That shame is inherited, not diagnostic. It's the residue of a moral framework absorbed in childhood, and it says nothing accurate about whether your current fantasy life is healthy.

But there's a different kind of post-fantasy discomfort worth attending to: the specific sense of having violated your own values, of having used fantasy in a way that doesn't align with who you want to be. That signal is worth listening to. The distinction is whether the discomfort is about the category (masturbation, fantasy, sexuality generally — likely inherited shame) or about the specific use (this particular pattern, this escalation, this dependency — likely genuine information).

4. Is it a supplement or a substitute?

This is the most practically useful question.

Healthy solo fantasy exists alongside a genuine partnered erotic life. It's one dimension of your sexuality among several.

Unhealthy fantasy has become a substitute — the easier, more controllable, less vulnerable alternative to genuine partnered intimacy. When masturbation with fantasy is consistently chosen over available connection with a partner, when it's the primary outlet rather than one of several, when the vulnerability of real intimacy has become less appealing than the reliability of solo fantasy — that pattern is worth examining directly.

What Genuinely Warrants Concern

A few patterns are worth flagging without ambiguity:

Escalation. Requiring progressively more extreme content to achieve the same arousal. This is the clearest indicator of a conditioning problem, and it's the mechanism behind most pornography-related sexual dysfunction.

Compulsivity. Feeling unable to stop or reduce the behavior despite genuinely wanting to. Frequency itself isn't the issue; the loss of choice is.

Functional interference. When the pattern is affecting work, relationships, sleep, or other domains of life meaningfully.

Fantasies involving actual non-consent or minors. This is the one place where content genuinely does matter and where professional help is warranted rather than self-assessment. Fantasies involving real people who haven't consented, or involving minors, are outside the scope of normal fantasy variation and require clinical support.

Everything else — the wide, weird, symbolic range of adult human erotic imagination — is almost certainly fine.

What Healthy Looks Like

For most men, healthy solo fantasy looks like:

Varied content that shifts over time. Fantasies that sometimes include your partner. Arousal that responds to a range of stimuli rather than requiring one specific thing. A solo practice that coexists with an active partnered erotic life rather than replacing it. And an absence of the shame-spiral afterward — the ability to engage with your own eroticism without the post-session self-recrimination that so many men carry.

If you want to move toward that, the practices I've written about throughout this blog are directly relevant. The Desires exercise develops honest awareness of what you actually want. Somatic and breathwork practice reconnects arousal to your body rather than leaving it purely mental and visual. And the honest fantasy conversation with a partner — which I wrote about separately — closes the split between solo fantasy life and partnered reality that so many men are quietly managing.

Your erotic imagination isn't the problem. What it's being used for might be. That's a question worth asking honestly rather than avoiding.

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. One of the most direct ways to close the gap between solo fantasy and partnered erotic life. 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. Fantasy patterns and their relationship to partnered intimacy are regular topics in my coaching work. Learn more about coaching here.