Sex

When he’s not in front of the camera, Mystery pays homage to his two idols — Tony Robbins and Casanova — by traveling the world offering seduction workshops, some of which run nearly $5,000 a pop. During these seminars, he roams hotel conference rooms in a headset, scribbling Venn diagrams and flowcharts meant to illuminate the female mind. Later on, students accompany him to a nightclub, where like a skilled magician, Mystery produces three platinum blonds on his lap or summons a phone number from a woman standing next to her boyfriend.

As it happens, Mystery used to work as a magician. But he says that he found he could cut the magic from his interactions with people and still captivate them — especially women. Paired with some self-taught psychology, those mind games developed into “The Mystery Method,” which, he says, teaches men to rewire a woman’s “attraction circuitry.”

How do you “rewire” a woman? According to Mystery, it involves meeting the objectives of her phases of attraction in order to establish comfort and successfully seduce her within seven hours. It’s a method that has inspired ire, to be sure — particularly his use of the “neg,” a “subtle-yet-negative statement that puts a target off-guard and makes her question her own value.” Along with “peacocking” — which, some might say, paints women as house cats easily distracted by shiny objects — Mystery has also developed “cat theory,” which he defines as “keeping ‘bait’ just out of a woman’s reach and continually enticing her in small increments. She must be baited to chase like a cat with a string.” He dubs this school of thought the “Venusian Arts” — the end goal of which is “replication.”

Salon spoke to Mystery by phone in San Diego (where he was filming an upcoming product) about sexual psychology, the “need to be hugged,” and the loneliness of life as a pickup artist.

What can viewers expect from your upcoming VH1 reality-TV show?

It’ll be heartwarming. Eight lovable lonelies are coming to me — one moment. [Yelling in background: Dude, it started!] Forgive me, I’m being pulled from several sides. I have, in this show, eight students and my job is to get them up to speed in a game their dads never taught them. In order to make it challenging we added in an elimination game to it, whereby by the end, only one of them will have earned the right to hang with me, travel with me and teach others.

Were you worried that someone wasn’t going to be qualified by the end of the show?

No, I wasn’t, simply because I’ve done boot camps for quite some time and learning the elegant art of cold approach pickup is definable, it’s quantifiable. You can do it. It’s a lot like getting on a motorcycle. The first time you get on it you’ll be afraid, just like the first time you approach a girl. The same sort of full-blown adrenaline release will take place. If you desensitize yourself to those foreign environments you’ll get yourself up to speed.

You’re already fairly well known, but what does this show mean for your future as a pickup artist?

[Laughs] I’m a 35-year-old man. I don’t need any more friends. I have all the friends that I need in my life to share challenges with. The women in my life, they’re good friends. I’ve never hidden any of this pickup stuff from them. If you had to hide pickup secrets from a woman, I think those secrets would be unethical. During my boot camps, over the years, I’ve invited girlfriends to these events. And, really, they’re great sounding boards. I get to find out what they feel is moral or immoral.

Have they helped you to tweak your method at all?

Well, what a woman says she wants and what she responds to are two different things.

That brings me to another question. You’ve said your method addresses female psychology.

Human psychology.

So what kind of psychological theories underpin your method?

Well, that’s a loaded question.

It is?

I’m fascinated by psychology and one aspect of psychology, if you’re going to zoom into it a little bit, is sexual psychology. We’re not out to try to figure out the opposite sex, we’re trying to figure out ourselves.

If we could reverse-engineer the way the emotional circuits in our brain work, how they function and why and how they systematically trigger when we’re faced with certain events, we could figure out how to do it right. How do you approach a woman without freaking her out?

A woman wants to align with a man of high value. How can a man systematically convey his value to a woman if she won’t even let him? A woman, by the time she’s 23 years old, if she’s a beautiful young lady, she’s going to have been hit on a good 7,500 times. So we have to approach differently. We can’t approach saying, “Wow, I like you, do you like me?”

There are some differences among men and women when it comes to our attraction circuits. A man’s circuits are calibrated primarily to respond to a woman’s replication value — to her hip to waist ratio, facial symmetry, breast shape and size, health characteristics, and all that, right? And a woman, her attraction mechanism is evolutionarily calibrated to respond to more of a man’s social value. In other words, when I hang out with a woman, I don’t hang out with her because I need to be protected. Men, we respond to her replication value. Women, they respond primarily to a man’s survival value or social value. The purpose of life is to survive and replicate and we’ve got 28,000 days — all of us — approximately, give or take, to make that happen.

But survival and replication have a different importance in today’s world than, say, in hunting and gathering days, right?

Well, the purpose of life is to survive and replicate, whether you know that or not. If you don’t survive long enough to replicate, well, then your genes will not replicate. It’s very simple. Our brains, when you’re looking at it from an engineering point of view, every single circuit, every emotional circuit that exists — there’s got to be a good 300 of them — every one exists for a social purpose.

You want to hang out and share challenges with people who can help you in this life. From a woman’s perspective, there is nothing more helpful than having a relationship with a man who can take care of her. Not that she needs to be taken care of. But it certainly would be nice to have someone in your corner that you can truly trust and has your best interest in mind. Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone in your corner that would remove the weight of the world from your shoulders?

Sure.

To give you direction and advice. And help you with all those other emotional things like the need for sex, the need for companionship. The need to be hugged.

But men need that too, right?

Of course. One of my students in the show is a 45-year-old virgin. [Pauses] Wow. It’s not even about sex at that point, it’s about hugging. That man had just not been hugged enough.

I’ve read that, as a teenager, you were a Dungeons and Dragons devotee and a virgin until age 21. So how did you transform into, arguably, the world’s most well-known pickup artist?

Who said “arguably”? [Laughs.] I’m teasing, I’m teasing. Well, I was a late bloomer — went through puberty at 16 and a half and lost my virginity in my 21st year. In order for me to get social, while I was a kid, I used — and was fascinated by — of all things, magic. This is how it all started: I read a book called “501 Magic Tricks.” What was amazing was it wasn’t four or five or six different ways of screwing with someone’s head and showing the holes in their perception. There were 501 ways, all in one book. It was mind-altering to me.

By my 20s, I was doing hundreds and hundreds of magic shows all around the world and when I was in my mid-20s, I went down to Florida because I wanted to perform magic on a cruise ship. And while my promo pack was out there and being looked at, I needed to make some money. So, I started working in a restaurant doing what we call intimate interactive illusion. But how the hell do you walk up to a group of strangers and say [adopts dopey voice], “Hey would you like to see some magic?” I needed to come up with a way of making it cool, adding a personality to it.

What I ultimately discovered was that I could remove the magic from my interactions and keep their attention. People would be captivated — they would gravitate toward me because of my fascination in things.

So, maybe it’s no great surprise that you’ve become skilled at interacting one-on-one with people. But how good is the average guy at summoning that kind of charisma and confidence?

I’m less concerned about confidence than I am about competence. Charisma is a very ethereal word …charisma. It’s more about what value you have for a woman and how you can systematically demonstrate it to her without appearing as if you’re one of those seedy players wanting to brag. It’s not about bragging, so you disqualify yourself by throwing out what we call a “neg.”

I was just about to go there. Explain for a minute what the “neg” is.

A “neg” is a concept. A “neg” is a statement or action one would make to briefly disqualify oneself from being considered a potential suitor. It’s not an insult, I’m not putting the girl down. For instance, if I’m in a group of people and I say, perhaps to my girl of interest, “Hey, can you pass me that napkin, please? Thank you.” I go to blow my nose and I look at her and I say, “What, are you gonna watch?” She’ll laugh, of course, and I’ll blow my nose. I’m not insulting her by doing that but I am disqualifying myself as being considered a potential suitor. Her friends know I’m not after her — I’m blowing my nose in front of her!

Then the friends are disarmed and she’s gonna think to herself, “He’s not after me.” If she’s particularly beautiful, she’s gonna wonder why. The only solution to why is either that he’s gay, in which case he’s not threatening, or he’s so accustomed to beauty that he must have beauty in his life. So he must be pretty selective and a hard-wired attraction switch gets triggered.

One “neg” that I’ve seen you do is to walk up to a woman and say, “What do you have going for you other than your looks?”

I would never just walk up to her and say that, no. But, three to five minutes in … My job is to first disqualify myself then to get into a conversation where I can demonstrate higher value. Once you’ve done that, she’ll start throwing subtle indicators of interest. Subtle cues like scratching the back of her hand. That area of the hand gets itchy when a girl is attracted to a man from ape days, you know — it means, “Groom me.” That’s a subtle indicator of interest. Once we get that, then and only then, can we qualify her. I’m being social, I’m showing that I have social values, and once she has qualified herself — I ask, “What do you have going for yourself more than your looks?” — and she starts answering. Well, that’s an indicator of interest. She’s actually trying to qualify herself. Then and only then can I give her indicators of interest.

The theory of “negging” is controversial. I’ve heard it criticized as simply veiled insults and misogynistic.

Those are the people who haven’t seen it in action. The result of any “neg” is laughter.

Doesn’t this kind of scheming ultimately harbor a more deep-seated sense of inadequacy in men? Don’t you start to worry about having the “real you” discovered?

You’ve never met me in person, have you? And you wrote that question down on a piece of paper before you met me. Here is the word that I don’t enjoy, “scheming” — I’m not a schemer.

What word would you be more comfortable with?

Let’s go through it again. What’s the question?

OK … would this kind of scheming create a sense of inadequacy in men — a fear of being found out?

Wow. Did you write that? Snap out of it, woman! Oh my god. Let’s come up with better questions than that — that just doesn’t fit into my reality. Are there people out there who scheme? Perhaps. Are there people out there who don’t like themselves? Yeah. I like myself, I’m a good person.

This is really how I see it: If you don’t learn these skills, if you don’t learn what knowledge already exists in the Venusian Arts, your chances of survival and replication in this life will be compromised.

OK, how is this question: When you start looking at women as “targets,” as a power to be overthrown, do you lose any intellectual respect for them?

That’s a very loaded question. That doesn’t fit into my reality. Forgive me, I don’t look at women that way. So you’d have to ask someone who does. That’s just not even in my reality. I have a lot of women in my life — do you know what they’d do if I talked like that, if I thought like that? They’d kick my ass!

But if you can, as you say, so effectively summon virtually any woman’s interest, wouldn’t you start to lose respect for them?

In my life, I am very fortunate to have choice. If I’m not in a relationship, there are women who are actually kind of keeping track of that. So that they can, you know, jockey for a position.

That’s just not my reality. The misogyny thing, of course I’m going to have to deal with the preconceived notions of the stereotype of a player. But that’s why we don’t even call it the pickup arts. We call it the Venusian Arts.

If your method is as effective as you say it is, do you worry about it getting into the wrong hands and being abused?

Well, I can’t worry about it. Are there bad people out there? Yeah. Aren’t there people who want to use any tool for evil?

Is it at all lonely, though, having to always follow these rules, rather than telling it like it is, saying things as you feel them?

Wow, yeah. Yeah, it is. How unfair is it that when I see a woman from a distance, I may not know her name and my god has given me attraction circuits in my head that make me want to mate with her. Even though I don’t know her name, right? Women don’t generally feel that. They have to know the man’s name and his Social Security number.

I might disagree with that. I know plenty of women who aren’t that way.

Uh, are they cute?

Well, that’s the end of my questions, is there anything else, though, that you’d like to add?

[Snickers.] You’re funny. Have you ever been to a club?

Yes.

How many boyfriends have you had? Have you had more than one?

Yes.

So you’re one of us then. You’re sequentially monogamous. You’ve had more than one man in your life.

Right. And?

These are just statements. I’m trying to understand who I’m speaking with. What city are you in?

San Francisco.

San Fran. OK, there’s a [seduction] lair there.

I’ve heard.

After the night was over, having lost in the Best Transsexual Performer category, St. Jordan took to the Web to protest her treatment. Her story inspired Kelly Pierce, a female trans performer who didn’t attend the ceremony, to write a lengthy blog post titled “AVN’s Inequality & Segregation Needs to Stop!” Soon, industry blogs and message boards picked up on the controversy.

It was an explosion of long-building resentment over their treatment within the industry. Beyond the red carpet delay this year, which AVN says was not limited to transsexual performers, the company has never allowed the Transsexual Performer of the Year award to be presented on stage. Instead, it has been announced on a JumboTron as the audience starts to filter out of the auditorium. As one star told me, “We’re the black sheep.”

That is despite the genre’s tremendous popularity: “T-girl sites are the fourth most popular category of adult Web site,” according to “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” a book that crunches the numbers behind Internet porn. (Although female-to-male transsexual stars are on the rise in queer porn, what we’re talking about here are trans women — more specifically, people assigned as male at birth who have transitioned to being female but still have a penis.) There are more frequent Web searches for this genre — often through terms like “shemale” and “chicks with dicks” — than for basic X-rated categories like “butts” or “blowjobs.” Authors Sai Gaddam and Ogi Ogas found that the genre’s average viewer is a straight-identified male (and, based on their analysis, passing curiosity doesn’t explain its popularity).

After St. Jordan’s outcry gathered virtual steam, AVN called a meeting last week with a handful of concerned trans women. On Tuesday, the company published a press release announcing that the transsexual winner would be announced on stage in the future. AVN also promised to allow more trans performers to walk the red carpet and talk to the press, and to present awards during the ceremony.

St. Jordan, who says she put her career on the line by speaking out, is thrilled. “Whether or not I ever get nominated again or get invited to anything with AVN again, the fact that the Transsexual Performer of the Year will be on stage and seen by everybody? That’s huge.” Tomcat, director of Kink.com’s TS Seduction site, agrees: “Not sharing the stage with Ts performers has allowed the majority of non-trans performers to dismiss them as outsiders and perpetuated discrimination against a group who should be equally praised for the work they do and the revenue they generate for the industry.”

While AVN’s decision marks serious progress, St. Jordan says that recent commentary on industry message boards reveals just how far there is to go. “Some of the hate and ignorance that came spewing from people was unbelievable, and this was people in, or associated with, the industry. You saw where a lot of people stood.”

Not that it wasn’t already apparent. There’s a huge stigma against mainstream straight stars working with transsexual female performers — they’re stereotyped as gay and therefore at higher risk for transmitting HIV. Tomcat, a trans man, told me in an email, “I still encounter many non-trans performers who will not work with [female] Ts performers because they consider [them] to be more of a STI risk to do a scene with — this is bullshit. In a industry where everyone is tested and everyone makes choices, the same risks are present regardless of gender identity.”

It perhaps goes without saying that the marketing of transsexual porn is often problematic. “People still search for Ts porn using ‘shemale,’” Tomcat says. “To me, this is like searching online for a cab company by typing in ‘stagecoach.’ It’s an antiquated term that is ignorant, incorrect and no longer OK to use.”

Some performers, like Wendy Williams, aren’t so concerned about the lingo. “I don’t live in a utopia, it’s what it is,” she says with her Southern lilt (she’s from Eastern Kentucky). “I’m not trying to be a transsexual activist.” Plus, “It’s a porn term that describes a genre. That way, some country, straight-ass guy in the corner is going to understand,” says Williams. “You say ‘transsexual’ and they’re confused, you say ‘shemale’ and they know what that is.”

A major struggle for the transsexual female niche is to get recognition within the straight side of the business as opposed to the gay side. “This is one of my biggest pet peeves, when I go into a store to do research to see if they’re carrying my DVDs or product lines and you have the transsexual stuff mixed in with the gay stuff,” says Williams. “Putting it next to ‘Harry Men Volume 1,’ it’s just not a good idea,” she says, since the vast majority of their fans identify as hetero. “My gay friends squeal at the idea of having sex with anything but a masculine male — the breasts and all that is just a huge turnoff.”

For most fans of transsexual porn, the genre is just one of many categories that they’re interested in. “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” argues that T-girl porn has such a significant straight male following because it combines the key sexual cue of female anatomy with that other fixture of heterosexual porn: a big, hard cock. Madison Montag, a nominee for Transsexual Performer of the Year, says, “They get tired of just the same old thing. Transsexuals are more feminine, they’re like hyper-feminine. To me, it’s kind of get the best of both worlds.”

The mis-categorization of Ts female porn has been painfully evident at the AVN awards in the past, Williams says: Buck Angel, the first recognized FTM trans performer, won the Best Transsexual Performer award in 2007. “It was a huge scandal in our community,” she says. “How do you judge his porn against our porn? His fan base is totally different. That’s just one example of how ignorant the porn community is.” (In an aside, she mentions the scene she filmed with him in 2005: “Actually, Buck was the very first, quote, vagina I had ever been in.”)

Many female transsexuals feel like they’re rejected from both the straight and gay world. “Even if you go into the [gay] clubs, transsexuals and drag queens are primarily there for entertainment,” says Williams. “It’s not really inclusive. We’re kind of in limbo, we’re in between both worlds.” In the straight world, men are often timid about revealing their interest in the genre. Most sales happen online, says Williams, who has a line of signature toys, including a $240 cyberskin mold of her ass. She says, “We’re the taboo, and where does taboo usually happen? Behind closed doors.”

Then again, Pierce, a blond with pixy features, says that when she signed autographs in a booth at the AVN Expo in 2008, she was allowed in the “female section” and had a line longer than some non-trans girls. “They were kind of upset with me,” she laughs.

In terms of fans’ willingness to announce their interest in public, it all has to do with a performer’s “passability,” according to Pierce: “Some men feel like they’re more straight if they’re attracted to more feminine looking transsexuals who bottom” — because topping is seen as masculine. Passability is also a factor in how girls are treated within the industry, she says: “If you look like a woman, they’re more accepting of you. And if you don’t look like a woman, they’re less accepting.”

Montag, a 19-year-old, doe-eyed brunette who calls me “sweetie,” says she got stellar treatment at this year’s AVN awards — she rubbed elbows with Ron Jeremy on the red carpet and scored a seat in the second row — and attributes it in part to her passability. “I’m very young. I’m only 5’1″ and 81 pounds. I’m very petite.” She adds, “I started hormone therapy earlier than other girls.”

St. Jordan agrees: “When it comes down to it,” she says matter-of-factly, “this is business, and it’s a beauty contest every day.”

Williams, who is 6-feet-tall with red, va-va-voom hair, says the pressure to pass as a porn star is even greater than in everyday life. Normally, she says, “I pull my hair up into ponytail and throw on some lip gloss and people just think I’m a tall girl with big boobs.” On camera, everything is different: “You need to seem extremely feminine, but if you want to seem feminine, then you need to be on hormones — but if you’re on hormones, you can’t stay hard and come, and if you can’t stay hard and come, you’re a bad performer.” On top of that, she says, the same viewers who expect this expensive nipped and tucked aesthetic “want to pirate my videos and not sign up for my website and have it for free.”

The irony is that many female trans performers get into the sex industry to pay for their transitions. Well, that and because it can be difficult to get a job anywhere else: “I interviewed for a job that I should have got,” says Williams about her pre-porn days, “and the guy told me, ‘I just don’t know how the cohesion in the office would be if people knew that you were a transsexual woman.’” Things have improved in the decade since then, but the same issues persist: “I couldn’t get a job, not even at Burger King,” says Montag, who lives in a small town in Texas where “people get beat up just for being punk and emo.”

She may be sexually outgoing on the Internet, but it’s not so in real life. Montag says she gets far more action on-screen and doesn’t pursue men in real life, for fear of them having a bad reaction to the discovery that she’s trans. Instead, she sticks to the Web: “[You get] a better reaction and it’s safer, too,” she explains. “It’s not like they’re gonna beat you and leave you in a cornfield to die.”

Courtney Trouble, a queer porn star and director who has worked with many trans performers, hopes that porn might actually help reduce transphobia in society at large. “Porn, while seemingly a private, frivolous luxury, has the immense power to gently create an awareness for trans issues in the audience,” she says. “If porn can create a change in the minds of people outside the industry, that’s where the real rewards are.”

Tobi Hill-Meyer, director of “Doing It Ourselves: The Trans Women Porn Project,” left the mainstream business “to create an alternative that allowed trans women to be represented the way each performer wanted to see herself represented,” she says. “I had to leave the mainstream industry in order to accomplish that, but I’ve seen a similar thing happening within it. More and more performers are speaking out about changes they’d like to see and setting up their own websites or productions.” Trouble believes that independently produced porn will do away with terms like “shemale,” “tranny” and “chick with a dick.”

Others predict transsexual porn will explode within mainstream straight porn. That’s in part because “so many transsexual stars are transitioning younger and getting more beautiful,” says Pierce. But she adds, “Sexuality in general is becoming more open-minded and the new generation is really pushing the limits on sexuality, and I think it’s going to push the transsexual market.”

St. Jordan agrees: “I think there’s gonna be some great crossover stuff real soon, within the next year or so,” she says. That means transsexuals performing not only with non-trans girls but also with straight male performers. This is partly because of growing acceptance and interest on the part of porn viewers, and partly because the up and coming generation of young performers have increasingly liberal attitudes. She says, “As new minds and ideas are coming into the industry, there are more people willing and open to work with us.”

David Jay, founder of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), tells me the show’s treatment was “disturbing but not unexpected.” Not only does the episode assert “that asexuality is problematic and pathological,” he says, but it also tells people who actually accept asexuality as a valid sexual orientation — an acceptance Jay has long fought for — that “they’re wrong.”

OK, so it’s a popular network TV show, and a medical-mystery drama at that: The bar for nuance and sensitivity is set pretty low. It’s also medically possible for a pituitary tumor to cause a lack of sexual desire — but it certainly isn’t the norm among the 1 percent of the population estimated to be asexual. (Although, asexuality as a whole is underresearched and poorly understood.)

The petition, which urges Fox execs to reconsider future portrayals of asexuals, argues, “The episode encourages viewers to meet asexuality with skepticism rather than acceptance, to probe asexual people for causes of our ‘condition’ rather than to accept us as a part of the natural spectrum of human sexual diversity.”

Asexuals hardly need to be investigated by “sexuals,” says Jay. “If someone identifies as asexual, chances are they’ve already done a lot of deep self-reflection and analysis to come to that,” and that can include the possibility of a pituitary tumor, a hormonal imbalance or past sexual trauma. “There’s such a strong message that there’s something wrong with you if you don’t like sex, it’s very hard for people to accept this about themselves,” he says. “It’s hard to be on that journey in an honest way and to be avoiding something. [Asexuality’s] not an easy out.” It’s not like “you identify as asexual and then you’re done trying to understand yourself,” Jay explains.

As for the wife on “House” who faked her asexuality to please her husband? Jay’s not buying that either. He has several asexual friends who have been in relationships with sexual people for years; and each couple finds a way to make it work, whether it’s non-monogamy or negotiating sexual interaction within the relationship — kinda like in relationships between sexuals! Believe it or not, he says, such arrangements are not uncommon in the asexual community, and he says they work “because of really good, honest communication,” not because one partner is lying to the other. But that does make for better TV.

I have asked her in recent months to recount what she told me 25 years ago about her sexual experiences. Not only will she not discuss it and gets angry about it, she now claims that she never did any of those things. Well, of course, I have some proof that she did many.

My question is why can’t I stop obsessing over her past sexual conquests (and that’s what they were — she seduced primarily married men), and why is she now denying and refusing to discuss her past?

I feel for your wife, man. You’re interrogating her about her sexual past after a quarter-century of marriage. There should be a statute of limitations on such things.

There must be a reason why this suddenly matters to you now. M. Gary Neuman, a therapist and author of “Connect to Love,” senses “some guilt or fear of the ‘what goes around comes around’ karma.” He says, “Maybe you now feel doomed to struggle since this relationship began through inappropriate behavior,” and adds: “It’s never too late to apologize to those you may have hurt in the past. Do what you need to in order to feel freer moving forward and allowing yourself to enjoy your marriage to the max.”

Listen to the man. He’s been on “Oprah,” yo.

Therapist Charles Foster, co-author of “I Love You but I Don’t Trust You,” says there are a couple of possible interpretations of what’s going on here. It could be that “after 25 years, their sex lives — so clearly in need of spicing up from the beginning — are developing rigor mortis, and his re-opening this can of worms is the best way he knows how to wake things up in bed.” Or maybe “for some reason, trust issues have reared their ugly head.”

Is your wife giving you new reason to mistrust her — based on her current behavior, as opposed to things she did when she was a young seductress? If not, this might be less about your wife’s actual trustworthiness than obsessive thinking.

Foster has little patience for this: “Come on, what is it you really want? Better sex? More closeness? More trust? Any of these could make you happy,” he says. “But satisfying your obsession will only stimulate the very itch that’s making you miserable.” Instead, he suggests that you “focus on your real needs, and work with your partner to get them met, and keep telling yourself that your obsession is just a sinkhole of misery.”

On a similar note, Diana Kirschner, author of “Sealing the Deal: The Love Mentor’s Guide to Lasting Love,” suggests that you start by simply listening to each other: Sit down and give each other 10 minutes to talk uninterrupted about whatever is on your mind. Instead of talking about past exploits, try talking about “sexual longings or fantasies you have right now and especially how you would like to act them out with each other.” She says, “Build a whole new relationship now that is so satisfying, the past just doesn’t matter.”