The New Self-Help

What You Don’t Know About Your Partner Might Turn You On

Romantic desire thrives on uncertainty

This story is part of The New Self-Help: 21 Books for a Better You in the 21st Century.

You meet someone through a potent alchemy of attraction. You’re filled with a sense of possibility, of hope, of being lifted out of the mundane and into a world of emotion and enthrallment. You cherish the rush, and you want to hold on to the feeling.

You’re also scared. The more you become attached, the more you have to lose. So you set out to make love more secure. You create comfort through devices — habit, ritual, pet names — that bring reassurance.

But the initial excitement was bound to a certain measure of insecurity. By seeking to harness it, you wind up draining the vitality out of the relationship. In your attempt to control the risks of passion, you have tamed it out of existence. Marital boredom is born.

There’s a powerful tendency in long-term relationships to favor the predictable over the unpredictable. Yet eroticism thrives on the unpredictable. The motivational expert Anthony Robbins put it succinctly when he once explained that passion in a relationship is commensurate with the amount of uncertainty you can tolerate.