How to spark your sex life and have more desire in a relationship (according to new science)
If desire in your relationship has cooled, the usual advice is some version of "try to have more sex." A new study suggests that advice has it backwards. The thing that actually reignites desire may not be sex at all. It may be novelty, and not the kind you would expect.
What the researchers did
A team of relationship scientists led by Natalie Rosen and Amy Muise followed 263 people who were coping with low sexual interest or arousal, along with their partners. The design was unusually rigorous. Couples filled out daily surveys for 56 days, then checked back in at six months and twelve months. That daily-diary approach lets researchers compare each person against their own baseline, so instead of asking "are novelty-seeking couples just different," they could ask "what happens to this specific person on days when they try something new."
The concept at the center of the study is self-expansion, and it is worth being precise about what it means. It is a general relationship idea, not a sexual one. Self-expansion is the sense of growth and broadening that comes from doing new, interesting, or challenging things with your partner. Learning something together, going somewhere unfamiliar, having a stimulating conversation, taking on a challenge as a team. Everyday novelty that makes you see yourself, and each other, a little differently. Notably, none of it has to happen in the bedroom.
What they found
On days when either partner reported more self-expansion than usual, both people felt more responsive to each other. In the language of the research, that is perceived partner responsiveness: the feeling of being understood, valued, and cared for by your partner. And that feeling turned out to be the engine. On those same days, both partners reported higher sexual desire, more satisfaction, and less sexual distress.
The pattern held over the long run too. Across the full year, greater-than-usual self-expansion tracked with more desire and less distress for the partner experiencing low interest, and more satisfaction for both people. And in nearly every case, the benefit flowed through that same channel: feeling more attuned to each other.
This is the part worth sitting with. The novelty the researchers measured was mostly non-sexual, the ordinary newness of daily life, yet the payoff showed up in the bedroom. Novelty does not improve your sex life directly. It improves how connected and understood you feel, and that is what makes desire easier to access.
Why this reframes how to have more sex in a relationship
Low desire is one of the most common sexual concerns, and it is easy to treat it as a problem that lives inside one person's body. This research points somewhere more hopeful. Desire is relational. It responds to how safe, seen, and stimulated you feel with your partner. You do not have to manufacture arousal on command. You can build the conditions that let it show up.
It is worth being clear about what the study can and cannot say. This was an observational study, not a controlled experiment, so it shows a strong and consistent link over time rather than definitive proof of cause. But the daily and year-long structure makes the direction of the pattern hard to dismiss. When newness goes up, attunement goes up, and desire follows.
7 everyday ways to spark newness (and reconnect with your partner)
Self-expansion sounds abstract until you try to actually do it on a Tuesday night. The good news is that the research suggests it does not take a grand gesture. It takes something genuinely new that you experience together. Here are simple ways to bring more novelty into your relationship and, downstream, back into the bedroom.
- Take a class you would both be a little bad at. Pottery, salsa, a cooking workshop, climbing. The point is being beginners together, which builds the shared discovery the study rewards.
- Have a "no logistics" conversation. Trade phones for an hour and talk about something bigger than the calendar: a dream, a memory, a what-if. Stimulating conversation counts as self-expansion.
- Explore a new neighborhood as if you were tourists. Pick a part of your city you never go to and wander with no plan. Novelty does not require a plane ticket.
- Cook a cuisine neither of you has made before. Fumbling through an unfamiliar recipe together turns a weeknight into a small shared adventure.
- Do one slightly thrilling thing. A hike with a view, a spontaneous day trip, even a scary movie. Shared excitement gets misattributed to your partner, and that is a good thing.
- Trade skills. Teach each other something you each know and the other does not. Being both student and teacher shifts how you see each other.
- Bring newness into intimacy on purpose. The same principle applies in the bedroom: a new dynamic, a new toy, a new way to pay attention to each other counts as shared discovery too.
Where a little tech comes in
What this study identified is a principle: shared newness builds the attunement that fuels desire. And a principle can be applied in a lot of places, including intimacy itself.
That is how we think about partner play. It takes the same recipe the researchers describe, newness plus attention to each other, and brings it into the intimate part of your relationship. With the Lioness Smart Vibrator, remote control play lets you hand the controls to your partner, whether you are in the same bed or on opposite sides of the country. One of you leads, one of you receives, and both of you are paying close attention to what is actually happening. It is a shared point of focus rather than a performance to pull off.
And because Lioness shows you real data from your own body, the discovery keeps going. You are not guessing about what worked. You are learning together, in a way that makes the next time more attuned than the last. It is not a substitute for the broader newness the study points to, more like a small, playful extension of the same idea into a place where it can be hard to find your footing.
Trying something new together is not a distraction from intimacy. According to the science, it might be one of the most direct routes back to it.
Explore the Lioness Smart Vibrator and remote control play →
Study: Rosen, N. O., Muise, A., Huberman, J. S., Johnson, M., Impett, E. A., & Bergeron, S. (2026). Expanding together: How self-expansion and partner responsiveness shape sexual well-being in couples coping with sexual interest/arousal disorder. Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science. DOI: 10.1037/abn0001149
