The Longing Isn't a Problem to Fix
I've carried an ache about eroticism for as long as I can remember.
Not dissatisfaction with my marriage — Brittney and I have built something genuinely alive, and I write about it constantly. Something more diffuse than that. A persistent sense of reaching for something just beyond what's available. A longing that doesn't resolve when things go well.
For most of my adult life I treated that ache as evidence that something was wrong. Wrong with me, wrong with my relationship, wrong with how I was doing this. The logic seemed obvious: if I'm longing, something must be missing. Find the missing thing, and the longing stops.
I spent years trying to solve it.
What I've learned recently — and I want to write about it because I suspect a lot of people are in the same loop — is that the longing was never a problem. It's a feature of the territory. And trying to eliminate it was costing me the thing the longing was actually pointing toward.
The Enneagram Four Thing
I'm an Enneagram 4 with a 3 wing, and this is relevant rather than incidental.
The Four's core pattern is a felt sense of something missing — a persistent awareness of absence, of what isn't there, of an ideal just out of reach. Fours are oriented toward depth, meaning, and authenticity, and they experience ordinary life as somewhat insufficient compared to what they can sense is possible.
In the erotic domain, that shows up exactly as I described. I don't experience sex as an activity. I experience it as a reaching toward something and the reaching never fully arrives, because arriving isn't what reaching does.
For years I pathologized this. The Four's longing gets described, often enough, as a distortion to be corrected — the type's characteristic wound, the thing to grow out of.
What my somatic work has reframed is this: the longing is not the wound. The shame about the longing is the wound. The ache itself is part of what gives my erotic life its depth.
Why the Fix Fails
Here's the loop I was in, and I'd bet it's familiar to more than just Fours.
I feel the ache. I interpret it as a signal that something's wrong. I look for what's missing — a technique I haven't learned, a conversation we haven't had, a dimension we haven't explored. I address it. Something genuinely improves. And then the ache is still there.
So I conclude I addressed the wrong thing and start again.
That loop can run for decades. And what it produces isn't resolution — it's a persistent low-grade dissatisfaction with an intimate life that is objectively good, because the metric being used (absence of longing) is a metric that will never be met.
The error is in the premise. The longing isn't a report that something is missing. It's a report that you're oriented toward depth — which is a different thing, and a considerably better thing.
What the Longing Actually Is
A few reframes that have helped me, drawing on things I've written about elsewhere.
Longing is desire in its most honest form. Jack Morin's Erotic Equation — attraction plus obstacles equals excitement — establishes that the gap between wanting and having is where erotic charge lives. The longing is the gap. Eliminating it would mean eliminating the charge. What I was trying to fix was the engine.
Esther Perel's framework says the same thing from another angle. Desire requires distance, mystery, the not-fully-had. A person who longs for their partner has maintained the gap that desire travels across. A person who has fully collapsed that gap has comfort and has lost the charge. As I wrote in the inviting-the-third post, this is the central tension of long-term relationships — and the longing is evidence you haven't resolved it into flatness.
The reaching is the practice, not a failure of the practice. This connects to what I wrote in the no-milestones post. If intimacy has no completion criterion, then there's nothing to arrive at — which means the reaching isn't deficient, it's the activity itself. A musician doesn't finish music. The longing toward something more is what keeps someone playing for fifty years.
Depth has a cost and this is it. The capacity to experience intimacy as meaningful rather than merely pleasant comes bundled with the capacity to feel its insufficiency. Those aren't separable. You can't have the depth without the ache. As I wrote in my Sexual Self-Portrait, the Four's fusion of erotic charge with emotional meaning gives experiences real weight — and the weight includes the longing.
What Changed When I Stopped Fixing It
Three things, concretely.
The shame went quiet. The ache had been generating self-judgment — why isn't this enough for me, what's wrong with me, is something wrong with us. Removing the interpretation removed the judgment. The ache stayed. The suffering about the ache mostly left.
That distinction turns out to be most of it. The ache is bearable. The ache plus the verdict about having the ache is not.
I stopped looking for the missing piece. Which freed up an enormous amount of energy I'd been spending on a search with no terminus. That energy became available for actually being present with Brittney — which is, ironically, the only thing that ever genuinely touches the longing.
The longing started functioning as fuel. This is the part I didn't anticipate. Once I stopped treating it as a malfunction, it became usable. The ache is what gets me onto the mat every morning for the breathwork. It's what makes me write these posts. It's what makes me keep reaching toward Brittney after nine years instead of settling into comfortable routine.
A man without any longing has no reason to develop anything. The reaching is the motor.
What to Do With It Instead
If you recognize this — the persistent ache that doesn't resolve when things go well — here's what I'd offer.
Stop diagnosing it. The first and largest move. The ache is not a symptom. Treating it as information about your orientation rather than as evidence of deficiency changes the entire experience of having it.
Separate the ache from the shame about the ache. These are two different things and only one is worth addressing. The practice I wrote about for quieting the shame voice — externalizing it, naming it, telling it to shut up — applies directly here. Something's wrong with you for wanting more is the commentary. The longing is just the longing.
Let it be felt rather than solved. This is somatic work. Where is the ache in your body? What does it actually feel like physically? Longing that's been allowed to be fully felt behaves differently than longing that's being managed. As I wrote in the body-first post, the accurate information is in the body, and the head's interpretation is what distorts it.
Direct it into practice. The ache is energy. Energy can be spent on a search for the missing piece or invested in development. The second produces something. Everything I write about — the breathwork, the presence practice, the honest conversations, the ongoing project of this blog — is longing converted into practice.
Tell your partner. This one matters. Brittney understanding that my ache is a feature of how I'm built, not a verdict on our marriage, removed a significant amount of unnecessary worry for both of us. Before that conversation, my longing was something she could reasonably interpret as dissatisfaction with her. Now it's just part of the landscape.
The Reframe
Your longing is not a problem to fix. It's the shape of your reaching.
If you experience eroticism as something that carries weight — that means something, that touches something deep, that never fully arrives — then you have access to a dimension of this that a lot of people don't. The ache is the price of that access, and it's a reasonable price.
What's worth eliminating isn't the longing. It's the decades-long conviction that you shouldn't have it.
Feel the ache. Stop apologizing for it. Let it move you toward something rather than away from yourself.
It's not a wound. It's a landscape.
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. Longing converted into practice. 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.
