A woman sits across from me. She wants to want her partner again. Said out loud, plainly, which has taken her a long while to be able to do.
Her plan, the entire plan, has been waiting for him. For him to look at her the way he used to. For him to do the thing that flips the switch back on.
He cannot. It was never his job.
Here is what I am seeing in couples, over and over, in this exact shape. They look OUT. What is he doing? What is he not doing? She can track every single thing he does, the tone, the timing, the hand that did or did not land, with the accuracy of someone who has been studying for years. Ask her what turns her on and there is nothing there. Not a refusal. A blank.
Eroticism Does Not Start With the Other Person
This is going to sound like it contradicts everything you were taught intimacy means.
Eroticism lives in you first. Before your partner, before the relationship, before the question of whether he still looks at you the way he used to.
It is what I call scrumptiousness. Chi. That life force running through you, the thing that has you move your shoulders a certain way, that has you turned on in every cell of your vibrational being. Enlivened. Maybe a little lust filled. Maybe a bit taboo.
A body that is turned on is alive. Full stop. Before anyone else enters the room. Before any other human comes anywhere near it.
What the Plants Did, With Nobody's Permission
I was on a vision quest, on sacred medicine, sitting on a tree trunk for hours. Meditating. Watching how all these plants were intertwining the trunk. Living in it, across it, wrapped around it.
No one asked it for permission. No one taught it to reach the sun. It grew, all of it grew, because the sun is what nurtured it and gave it what it needed. We are alive and we lean towards the light…
I always come back to plants. To flowers. They are never afraid to bloom in their scrumptiousness, in their aliveness, in exactly who they are. There is no shame there. There is no looking around to see what everyone else is doing. They take the water, they take the air, they take the sunlight, and then they bloom.
The thick rose when it opens its petals. Lush, velvety. The swelling. The growing. The engorgement. The moving. The reaching, the literal reaching out into the world, showing your allness with an aliveness that genuinely wants to meet the world, wants to meet another body.
It does not start with that other body. It starts with you. Always alone first.
"A body that is turned on is alive, full stop, before anyone else enters the room."
Your Nervous System Decides Before You Do
Stephen Porges spent his career proving something that changes the whole container. He called it neuroception. Your nervous system can decide whether it is safe to open before your mind even weighs in.
You cannot think your way into aliveness. Your body has to register safety first. Only then does it let itself swell, soften, open.
Which means the real question was never "why doesn't he turn me on anymore?"
The real question is: "when did I stop feeling safe enough in my own body to turn myself on at all?"
That is what I notice with the women and the couples who work with me. The safety piece is the anchor. We always start there.
Try This: Touch Base, Two Minutes
Thumb to forefinger. Press them gently together.
Feel the ridges. The texture. The actual skin, the real thing under your thumb, not the idea of it.
Now say it in your head: "I am safe right now." You are doing this somewhere safe. There is no tiger behind you.
You will probably notice you want to exhale a bit more. Maybe the hips move a little. That is Touch Base. It uses the Chinese meridians, the points that sit right there in your hand, and it is a practice, which means every day. Daily is what creates the safety. Once a fortnight creates nothing.
Then, when that is in place, we can start looking at turn on. What are the things that turn me on? What is my aliveness? What is my eroticism? Is it a bath? Putting on some oils?
Most people call that self care. I call them my little bundles of joy.
Three Minutes on the Inside of Your Wrist
Where can you spend three minutes stroking just the inside of your wrist, so slowly that at every single stroke you can feel it?
Because numb is also information. A lack of sensation is still a sensation, and it is telling you where you have been living.
Once you are in touch with the exact touch you like and want more of, something shifts. Your skin is the biggest organ you have and it is craving touch. Maybe not the touch you have been getting. Maybe just the touch you have never given yourself.
This is the beginning of the Touch Reset. Structured time. Structured safety. Looking at your pleasure languages, the way into pleasure for you. Then expanding on it with self touch dates, specific and small enough that you can actually build on them. That is the work.
Two Questions Before You Close This Page
Where would you want this aliveness, specifically? Which room, which part of an ordinary day, doing what. Be precise, because "more desire" means nothing to a body.
Then picture it a year from now, exactly as it is. The same waiting. The same tracking of what he did or did not do. Another twelve months of being the one who notices everything and feels almost none of it.
That is the part I would mind.
Listen to the full episode
Season 2, Episode 43, It Was Never About Him, on The Scrumptious Woman.
This teaching is part of Juliette Karaman's body-based work on touch, desire, and structured connection.
Work with Juliette: feelfullyyou.com/work-with-me