Come Together Quotes

“You don’t need to want your partner passionately so much as you need to like them, admire them, and believe they are worth some effort on your part.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“Responsive desire. Not “passion,” not “spark,” but pleasure, trust, and mutuality. That’s the fundamental empirical reason to center pleasure over spark.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“Your sexuality is not a problem you have to solve or a disorder that needs to be treated. Your sexuality is a garden you can cultivate.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“Sufi poet Rumi—“The wound is the place where the Light enters you”—to Groucho Marx—“Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light.” Heck, isn’t the moral of every comic-book movie that our greatest strength often derives from our greatest wound?”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“Difficult feelings are not dangerous because they, like all feelings, are tunnels. When you go all the way through them, you get to the light at the end. They may be uncomfortable, for sure; that’s kind of their point. When you experience them, that’s your embodied mind alerting you that it perceives a potential problem or a threat. But the feelings themselves are not dangerous, just as a lifeguard’s whistle alerting everyone to get out of the ocean is not dangerous.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“And if pleasure always is pleasurable but desire is only sometimes pleasurable, doesn’t it make sense to center pleasure, and allow desire to emerge in contexts that maximize the chances that the desire will feel good?”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“Pleasure happens when we feel safe enough. Trusting enough, healthy enough, welcome enough, at low-enough risk.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“Your task, as a partnership, is to explore ways to co-create a shared context—a shared life, a connection, a state of mind, a way of being together—that makes pleasure easy to access.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“If you enjoy the sex you’re having, you’re doing great, regardless of how much you crave sex (or don’t) and regardless of how often you have it (or don’t).”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“If there’s a “sexual behavior” that predicts sex and relationship satisfaction, it’s cuddling after sex.[2]”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“When you do the work of cultivating your individual garden and your shared garden, you’re not just doing good for yourself and your erotic relationship, you’re doing good for the world. Every time you pull the invasive weeds of body self-criticism or sexual shame, you weaken the social vine, making it that much easier for your sister to pull it from her garden, or your daughter or your niece, your clients and patients, your romantic and sexual partners. When you cultivate a garden that is uniquely your own, filled with whatever brings you delight, you make it a little easier for everyone else to do the same.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“What no one ever told me, and what I want to make sure we all know, is that urgency is the enemy of pleasure.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“5. Finally, when in doubt, go back to the beginning: What is it that I want when I want sex? What is it that I like? What activates my accelerator and what hits my brakes? Your answers are probably changing as your household, relationship, bodies, and internal experiences change. Keep talking to each other. If you can talk about another human’s bodily fluids, you can talk to each other about your sex life.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“But here, I want to offer a specific tip for survivors, which is that sometimes our “escapist” behaviors are actually part of our healing: Be curious about the metaphors and stories that soothe you. Nothing in our real lives can explain or describe what happens inside us as we heal from trauma. We may need the metaphors of a fantasy world to describe our experience.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“One time I met a militant vegan who told me that actually? vegans have more food choices? because they can eat all these plants. To which I replied, “But omnivores can eat all those things, and also meat and eggs and cheese…” To which he replied something rude that I forget, but basically he got mad.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“For me, the term “sex positive” doesn’t mean that all sex is positive (which it certainly isn’t) or that everyone should like, want, and have sex. It means that everyone gets to choose how and when they touch and are touched, and everyone gets to decide how they feel about their body.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“The dark places may be among the most difficult things to know about ourselves and to love. And don’t worry about “finishing” the process of shining a light on all your dark places; you may never get there. You don’t have to. Turn toward your dark places with warm curiosity; it will grow easier each time.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“Abandon the idea of “normal” as the gateway to “perfect.” Normal, by its usual definitions, is a dead end. Replace it with the cycle. Here in the real world of woundedness to healing, “perfect” is the cycle itself. Anywhere you are in the process, you’re in perfection.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“That’s the thing about the weeds in the garden: They can grow back if you don’t keep on pulling them. And sometimes we get so busy with other things, we forget to keep weeding.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“When there’s an argument in an established relationship and the conflict creates a threat to the attachment bond, humans use sex as an attachment behavior, to reinforce and heal damage to attachment.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“Sometimes, breakups and major arguments can also catapult us from panic/grief to lust. When our connection with the other person is destabilized, our brains will harness every tool they have to stabilize the connection.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

“Just as a long-neglected garden can be tended and brought to new life and glory, an erotic garden can bloom again.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections