🎙️The Myth of the Valentine’s Day Spark- Why Long-Term Desire Doesn't Work the Way You Think
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Episode Description
You love him, but Valentine’s Day makes you want to crawl out of your skin instead of into bed. If desire feels pressured, performative, or completely absent lately, you’re not broken—and your relationship isn’t doomed. In this episode, we unpack why the “spark” myth fails long-term love and what your body has been trying to tell you all along. pasted
Topics We Cover
Loss of desire in long-term relationships
Why Valentine’s Day creates pressure around sex
Why the spark fades in healthy relationships
Feeling disconnected but still in love
Desire cycles and erotic seasons
Why stress and resentment kill libido
How long-term attraction actually works
Search Tags
valentine’s day relationship pressure, loss of desire long term relationship, why the spark is gone, sexless relationship, intimacy issues couples, low libido relationship, long term desire, valentine’s day sex expectations, relationship desire problems, modern relationship intimacy
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Transcript:
If you've ever felt like your body's betrayed you like pleasure is something reserved for other people or something, you're always getting wrong. This little corner of podcast land is for you. I'm your radical rageful mama Bear here to defend your right to feel good in your body. Welcome to season two of the Nature of Pleasure.
This season, we're talking all about relationships and what it's like to love inside systems and family patterns that were never built for the kind of intimacy we're trying to have now, because here's the truth, pleasure isn't a side dish. It's not fluff. It's not a luxury. It's your body's way of saying, I'm alive, I belong, and I have power.
Welcome to the nature of pleasure. I'm Nicole Siegel, certified sexological body worker and creator of the Body Compass Method, and this is where we unravel the quiet codes of your body, the hidden intelligence beneath desire, and the organic rhythm of your erotic nature.
All right, today we are talking all about the myth of the Valentine's Day spark. Let's get into it. So let me guess. It's mid-February. Everywhere you look, someone is selling you red roses, red lingerie, red expectations, and somewhere under all of that is the quiet creeping question. You're not really saying out loud.
Why don't I feel the spark the way I used to?
Because according to Valentine's Day culture, desire should be automatic, effortless, synchronized, preferably peaking somewhere between dinner reservations and dessert. And if it's not, well, clearly something's wrong with you, with him, with the relationship. But here's what I wanna say right off the bat, and I'm going to say it plainly because you don't need more romanticized bullshit right now.
Long-term desire does not work the way you've been told It does, and the thing that's killing intimacy and otherwise loving relationships isn't lack of chemistry. It's the pressure to perform chemistry on demand. See, most of us were raised on this idea that the spark is the gold standard. That attraction should feel electric forever, that if you really loved each other, Valenti, Valentine's Day and romantic holidays would just work.
But that belief quietly ignores how bodies actually function, how nervous systems work, how desire moves in real relationships over time. Because desire isn't a spark, it's not a mood. It's not a personality trait. It's not something you either have or lose. Desire is actually rhythmic. It moves in cycles.
It has seasons. It responds to safety, stress, attunement, resentment, repair, rest, novelty, timing, so many things, and Valentine's Day. Is basically asking your relationship to be in full erotic summer, even if you are very clearly in an emotional winter. So if you've ever found yourself thinking, I love him, but I don't feel turned on lately.
Or, why does this feel like pressure instead of pleasure? Or why am I bracing instead of opening or basically like Valentine's Day is the absolute.
Best time for a relationship audit, and you can now list perfectly all the things that are wrong in your connection with your partner. I want you to know that response is super intelligent. Your body isn't failing the test. Your body is responding honestly to the conditions it's in. And today we're gonna take the pressure off the spark and talk about what actually creates long-term erotic connection.
We're going to talk about rhythm, about attunement, about why desire disappears when it's demanded and reappears when it's listened to. And most importantly, I wanna give you permission to stop diagnosing your relationship as broken when what's really missing is a framework that can actually, that actually understands how desire works over time.
So let's talk about the myth of the Valentine's Day spark and what your body has been trying to tell you all along.
So let's talk about chemistry for a second. I really, really hate this word. We'll start off there. So much quiet damage gets done with this concept. When people say the spark, what they're usually talking about is early stage attraction, novelty uncertainty, that delicious nervous system activation where you don't quite know if you're safe, but you're very alive.
That phase is real and it is intoxicating, and it's not designed to last forever. In fact, biologically speaking, it cannot last forever. Early attraction is fueled by heightened alertness. Your body is scanning, attuning, orienting there. There's risk, there's mystery. There's no shared rhythm yet, so your system stays slightly on edge, which is fun until it isn't, because over time, intimacy, real intimacy asks for something different.
Long-term desire doesn't grow from perpetual uncertainty. It grows from safety that doesn't suffocate aliveness.
And here's where the myth sneaks in. We're told that if desire changes, something must be wrong, that if the spark soften softens, the relationship is dying. That if you don't feel instantly turned on, you should panic, fix it or move on. So instead of listening to the body, we start policing it. We start asking, why don't I want sex the way I used to?
Or, what's wrong with me? Or Why does this feel like effort now? And nobody ever tells us the truth, which is that desire doesn't disappear in long-term relationships. It reorganizes.
The rhetoric, that relationship, that desire always dies in marriages in long-term relationships, is just so incredibly unhelpful and doesn't reflect reality. We just don't have the skills to move through different seasons with our eroticism. We don't have the skills to do that individually in ourselves, and we don't have the skills to do it in partnership either.
So desire reorganizes in long-term relationships. It stops responding to novelty alone and starts responding to rhythm, to timing, to emotional safety, to whether there's unresolved tension sitting quietly between you. To whether your nervous system feels met or like it's carrying too much, and Valentine's Day is basically built on the fantasy that chemistry should be immune to all of that.
And it's not as if stress doesn't matter, as if resentment doesn't matter, as if the fact you've been emotionally managing the relationship for months shouldn't affect your libido at all. It is a wild expectation when you actually slow down and look at it. So if your desire doesn't automatically switch on because the calendar says it's time, that doesn't mean the spark is gone.
It means your body is operating with more intelligence than the story you were given reflects.
Once you understand that the entire conversation about attraction starts to change because the question stops being, how do I get my spark back and becomes, what rhythm is my body actually in right now? And what would help it shift?
So let's dig into the science of all of this. You guys know I love.
The inner mechanics of how the body actually works. So early stage desire, the kind we are taught to absolutely worship is novelty driven. Like I've already said, it's nervous system based.
Your body is alert, curious, slightly on edge. There's uncertainty which creates charge. Your system is asking, who is this? Am I safe? Am I wanted, what could happen next? That kind of desire feeds on the unknown, but here's the part, no one prepares us for long-term. Love asks your nervous system to stand down, to soften, to relax into familiarity, and that means desire can't rely on novelty alone anymore.
Instead, long-term desire requires safety plus aliveness, not safety. That's boring, not aliveness, that's chaotic, but a living rhythm between the two. This is where everything shifts because desire isn't a straight line, it's not a personality trait. And it's absolutely not high libido every day forever because again, desire moves in cycles.
It has seasons. Your body's capacity changes depending on stress, connection, resentment, rest repair. Some days your system has room for erotic charge. Some days it barely has room to be touched. That doesn't mean something is wrong. It means your body is responding accurately to its environment.
And this is how spa spark culture does real harm. When desire shifts. Women tend to turn inward and think, what's wrong with me? Why don't I want sex the way I used to? Or, why does this feel like work? When in reality they're often just under-resourced, over overstimulated, emotionally caring more than they realize.
And men, they internalize it differently. They start thinking they're undesirable, rejected, failing. When what's actually missing is not attraction, it's attunement. Spark culture tells both partners the same lie that long-term attraction should feel like early attraction. So instead of listening, couples panic instead of listening to their bodies themselves or souls, couples just panic.
They start performing intimacy by scheduling sex or forcing romance, or finding tips, tricks, techniques to try.
And then there's the dreaded Valentine's Day fight about flowers or dinner reservations.
Valentine's Day can often be a time where
Valentine's Day is a beautiful. Valentine's Day is a very common instance where couples are projecting the ways that they are not feeling met or fulfilled, or the inner work that they still have left to do onto how this holiday goes, but are, they're actually talking about grief and fear and unmet needs.
Because your nervous system is constantly asking one question, am I safe enough to open stress, resentment, emotional labor, all tell the body to close, and you can't override that with lingerie or chocolates or dinner
because desire requires relational presence. It happens when the body feels safe enough, met enough, alive enough, not pressured. That's exactly why in my work, we don't start with sex. We start with resetting the nervous system rhythm between partners,
because every couple has a rhythm. The problem is most couples are fighting theirs instead of listening to it. Their rhythmic closeness, moments of wanting to emerge their rhythmic distance, moments of needing space. There are cycles of capacity, times when your body has energy and times when it doesn't, and there are erotic seasons.
Winter, spring, summer, fall resentment builds when couples don't understand what season they're in because Valentine's Day often lands right in emotional winter, and then we act shocked when fireworks don't happen. Expecting erotic key in that moment is like yelling at a rosebush in December and calling it broken,
and this is the moment I want you to feel some real relief and just really sink into this. Your season determines your spark. You're not failing, you're just out of rhythm.
And let me take this one step further because I don't actually think Valentine's Day is a villain. I think it's a mirror. Valentine's Day doesn't create problems in relationships. It reveals them. It amplifies whatever rhythm is already there. The closeness, the distance, the longing, the resentment, the unsaid things, which is why it can feel so intense
because the state. Isn't really about romance. It's about timing. And timing is everything when it comes to desire. Valentine's Day asks your relationship to synchronize on demand, but bodies don't work like that. Bodies work like ecosystems. They're warm, slowly, cool, slowly. They respond to pressure by closing, not opening.
So when Valentine's Day plans don't land, that's information. It's your body saying something here needs tending before it can bloom.
Because desire that has a deadline isn't desire. It's compliance with good lighting. So instead of saying, why don't I feel the spark tonight? A more honest question might be, what's been unsaid between us? Or where have I been overriding my body continuously? Or where have we been slightly out of sync for a while now?
Valentine's Day becomes meaningful, not when it produces fireworks, but when it shows you where relationship temperature, where your relationship's temperature actually is.
And here's the part that's gonna sound kind of counterintuitive and probably also deeply relieving if you let it land. Couples don't rekindle desire by trying harder. They don't fix it with better communication scripts or more date nights. They don't fix it by powering through discomfort of push, pushing themselves to want more sex.
Desire comes back when pressure leaves the room when bodies feel like they're allowed to arrive. Honestly, when timing is respected. When repair happens, where it's been quietly needed,
erotic reconnection happens when couples learn how to soften the nervous system and repair what's been left, hanging and reintroduce aliveness slowly in ways the body can actually receive. Not grand gestures, not performative intimacy, micro moments of truth.
Because when you understand erotic rhythm, cycles of closeness and distance, seasons of capacity, the nervous systems need for pacing intimacy stops feeling so fragile, and it becomes durable.
A few years ago, I started noticing the same pattern again and again in my work.
Couples weren't asking for better sex tips. They were actually asking for relief, relief from pressure and confusion and feeling like something was wrong when their bodies were just responding intelligently to stress, history and misattunement. They needed a way to understand why desire shuts down, why talking doesn't always help.
By trying harder usually makes things worse, and how to rebuild closeness without forcing it. So I created a relationship container that I am so excited to tell y'all about. That is specifically designed to do one thing, help couples reset their erotic rhythm, not by jumping straight into sex, not by assigning roles or scripts, but by starting with the nervous system where desire actually lives and building a foundation from the ground up and handing over.
In passing down the handbook for Modern Love that we should have all we should have always inherited
inside this work, couples learn how to read their own and others capacity, read their own in each other's capacity. Understand erotic seasons repair, disconnect early, rebuild safety without losing aliveness. It's slow on purpose because the body doesn't open under demand. It opens under attunement. And if you're here listening to this pod, I know that you know that that's true.
And there's a generational,
because asking these questions about your relationship is actually generational healing. Most couples aren't struggling because they're doing something wrong. They're struggling because they're trying to build intimacy inside a generational mess that they didn't choose to inherit. Patterns of silence, patterns of over-functioning patterns where women learn to manage emotional reality and men learn to armor against it.
No one taught us how to be in relationship. We inherited templates. Templates where women became the translator of feelings, the carriers of relational labor, the ones who noticed when something was off and tried to fix it quietly. And men inherited templates where emotional attunement wasn't taught, where vulnerability wasn't modeled, and where desire got tangled up with performance instead of presence.
So when intimacy starts to strain, guess who feels responsible? Her. She starts reading, listening to podcasts. Trying to find the words, trying to help him understand what she needs while slowly losing her erotic energy in the process. This dynamic alone will shut desire down because nothing kills eroticism faster than having to parent the relationship.
And here's the thing, most women sense, but rarely say out loud. You cannot heal a generational relational pattern from inside the role you were trained to play. You can't be the one holding the emotional field. Translating the insight and teaching your partner and also be the one who relaxes into des desire, these two roles cancel each other out.
That is why I created this program I'm so excited about called Reset Your Erotic Rhythm. It's not just another course for women to take on their own or a thing for you to explain to your partner. This is actually a shared relational container, which was really important to me because I see women over function constantly in my work.
They're trying to fix the relational dynamic on their own or trying to teach their partner how to participate in the relationship in the way that they really need to fully show up. But you can't be teacher and partner. This program does the work, does the teaching for you? It's a shared relational container with separate spaces for each of you so the work doesn't keep landing on your shoulders.
And this work I teach both of you, I teach the women I teach, the men I hand over the new relational paradigm, give you actionable steps of how to really birth it into existence for the first time in your lineage.
Your partner will learn how to feel instead of defend, to listen without collapsing or shutting down to understand their own nervous system and to meet you without being managed into it. Okay. You get to finally step out of the role of educator. You get to rest, you get to soften. You get to feel your desire again, not as something you have to produce, but something that emerges because the weight has lifted.
And this is generational healing in real time. Because when men learn emotional attunement in a way that doesn't threaten their identity, and women no longer have to carry their relational load. Something ancient and deeply human rebalances desire doesn't come back because anyone tried harder. It comes back because the structure changed.
We're living in a moment where old relationship models are collapsing, but new ones haven't been fully built yet. Women are done mothering their partners. Men are often willing to grow but don't know where to go or how to begin, and couples are stuck between resentment and hope. Reset erotic rhythm. This new program exists for this exact moment.
It's slow enough for the nervous system structured enough to create real change and relational, relational enough to heal patterns that go back generations. This isn't about fixing your relationship. It's about finally giving it the conditions. It's always needed to thrive.
This is an eight week live online program.
We begin February 23rd, there is a hym track, a her track, and then a track for both of you where there's individual learning first and then an opportunity for you to come together and put into practice all of the new relational paradigm.
The new relational skills that you've learned, and if you're feeling a poll, do not hesitate to sign up. The first 10 couples to sign up will get a significantly discounted rate, and that is a discount that I'm only going to now announce on this podcast.
For everyone else, the price will magically increase after 10 couples sign up. So check it out in the show notes. If you feel intrigued, say yes.
Okay. There are a million marketing tricks and phrases that I could use, but the reality is this is really good work. I feel so proud of this program that I've created. I've gotten tons of beautiful feedback that it's actually creating change in relationships that have been stuck for literally decades.
There's something really magical that's happened when I've opened this program. You get a chance to meet with other women that are experiencing the same thing and you, we don't get caught. We don't get stuck railing on the men and stuck in anger. There's space for rage. But the, one of the magical things about this program is that we're actually moving forward.
And I love it so much because it has really been attracting the most emotionally intelligent and nuanced couples. Even if when they first step into the container, it feels like. Their problems are insurmountable and completely solidified. I've, there's been changes every single time I'm just really, really proud of this.
I love being a part of this container as well as holding it. I.
You can find all of the details in the show notes.
Just look for reset your erotic rhythm. Do it before February 23rd. That is when we will begin and the doors will close. And again, don't wait to sign up. You get a much lower. Rate, if you are one of the first 10 people, and I do think this program's going to sell out,
so don't hesitate to sign up. All right. Until next time.
I.
