The Porn Conversations #16

The question arrived in my inbox last week from a reader who’d been married thirty-one years. “Randy,” he wrote, “my wife and I haven’t had sex in four months. When I feel that itch, I just… open my laptop.” He didn’t ask me to fix it. He just wanted to say it out loud to someone who wouldn’t flinch.

Because of my first marriage, I understood him completely.

Most of us who grew up evangelical were raised in what psychologist Dr. Nicole McNichols calls “sex-avoidant homes” — households where sexuality wasn’t forbidden exactly, just absent. Never discussed. Deflected every time it surfaced. The topic that evaporated the moment you tried to touch it. We arrived at adulthood carrying a profound information vacuum, then we married, and then we discovered that two people with information vacuums in the same bed make for some genuinely confusing nights.

McNichols teaches the psychology of human sexuality to over four thousand undergraduates a year at the University of Washington. Her book You Could Be Having Better Sex does something evangelicals never did for us: it explains, without shame, how desire actually functions.

And the answer, it turns out, was not what I assumed.

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Desire is not a switch. It’s a cycle — three stages McNichols calls wanting, liking, and learning. Wanting is the craving, the seeking, the pull toward something. Liking is the experience itself, and the thing that derails it most often is getting yanked out of your body and into your head — comparing, evaluating, departing from the moment. Learning is the mindful savoring afterward: what felt good, what you want more of, what surprised you. And here’s the elegant part — learning feeds directly back into wanting. The cycle regenerates itself when you tend it.

Which means the man who opens his laptop instead of reaching for his wife isn’t broken or lost. He’s found a path of least resistance to the wanting stage, one that requires nothing of him. Bytes deliver novelty on demand. Bodies are more complicated.

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Here’s what McNichols’ research actually shows about novelty, and it surprised me. Couples who introduce one new thing once a month or more report heightened sexual satisfaction. Once a month. The effect of novelty flattens at roughly twelve times a year — meaning you don’t need to reinvent your sex life every Tuesday. You need micro-novelty: a different time of day, a different room, a blindfold, a new position, a favorite toy brought out with intention.

The evangelical church handed us two choices — purity or perversion. McNichols offers a third road entirely, and it’s almost embarrassingly achievable. You don’t have to become a different person. You just have to introduce one small variation, monthly, with presence.

I think about how many marriages quietly atrophied inside evangelical culture because no one ever said this. No one taught the wanting-liking-learning cycle. No one said that novelty doesn’t require a renovation — it requires attention. We were handed silence and told it was holiness.

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The bytes-or-bodies question my reader was really asking wasn’t about pornography. It was about risk. Bodies are risky. They require vulnerability, communication, the terrifying act of saying this is what I want to another human being who might respond with confusion or distance. Bytes ask nothing. They deliver and disappear.

But the pleasure cycle can’t complete itself on a screen. The learning stage — the savoring, the conversation, what happens next time — exists only between people who’ve decided to keep showing up for each other.

At sixty-seven, I find myself thinking that the most radical sexual act available to long-term couples isn’t anything acrobatic. It’s choosing presence over convenience. Reaching left instead of opening the laptop. Saying I want you when silence would be easier.

Micro-novelty, it turns out, is just another name for paying attention.