How to Think More About Sex

When was the last time you felt completely normal about sex? Alain de Botton begins How to Think More About Sex by suggesting that almost no one does. You, me, everyone—we all harbor secret anxieties, odd fantasies, moments of self-doubt, or disappointments about our sexual lives. The cultural insistence that we should feel cheerful and well-adjusted about sex, he argues, is precisely what makes us so distressed by it. This book is not a guide to having better or more frequent sex; it is a philosophical invitation to understand our desires, embarrassments, and contradictions more compassionately.

De Botton proposes that sex is strange not because society once repressed it, but because it is inherently destabilizing. It disrupts reason, challenges civility, and exposes us to our deepest vulnerabilities. We imagine ourselves to be liberated moderns, yet we continually find sex difficult—not from ignorance or prudery, but because it collides with the very mechanisms that make civilization work. In other words, sex is meant to be confusing. Instead of dreaming of total liberation, he suggests we aspire to a respectful, realistic coexistence with this unruly force.

The Modern Myth of Liberation

You might have grown up believing that modern society solved sexual guilt. Earlier generations were supposedly shackled by taboos, religious fears, and ignorance, until liberation arrived sometime between Freud and the birth of the bikini. De Botton dismantles this neat narrative. He reminds us that repression emerged from something deeper than dogma: humans were disturbed by sex because of what it does to them. It awakens impulses—cruelty, obsession, humiliation—that polite society cannot easily contain. Sexual freedom, therefore, never dissolves these darker elements; it simply strips away the old protective layers and leaves us facing the raw chaos beneath.

The tension is eternal. We crave erotic release but live in a world built on restraint. We must go to work, raise children, and be decent—yet our bodies scheme against these tasks with inconvenient, anarchic lusts. For de Botton, modern people suffer precisely because they imagine that being liberated should make sex easy. The wiser approach is humility: to accept that confusion and contradiction are permanent companions to desire. Sex will always feel irrational because humans are irrational animals trying desperately to be moral ones.

Redefining ‘Normal’

If you’ve ever worried that your desires are unusual, de Botton offers immediate relief. He insists that almost no one is sexually normal. The idea of normality itself is a fiction created by social comparison and the façade of cheerful couples who seem perfectly adjusted. In truth, behind these façades lurk conflicting cravings, avoidance, shame, and indifference. We live surrounded by secret eccentricities that rarely reach daylight because love and lust depend on keeping certain truths hidden. Human connection would collapse if we revealed too much of the chaos under our surface.

We would rather die, de Botton writes, than have certain sexual conversations with those whose approval we need most. His goal is to build a language for these private miseries—a shared vocabulary in which we can confess strangeness without fear.

The Problem with Technique

Most popular sex manuals approach sex as a skill deficit: learn the right positions or find the right rhythm, and happiness will follow. De Botton finds this mechanical view tragic. Our real struggles, he argues, are emotional and philosophical, not anatomical. We wrestle with desire fading in long-term relationships, with resentment, jealousy, impotence, guilt, or the split between love and lust. The Kama Sutra is irrelevant when the true challenge is surviving rejection, learning forgiveness, or reconciling affection with cruelty.

What we need isn’t a manual for better orgasms—it’s a way to understand disappointment. Sex, like happiness, is rare and fragile. De Botton likens a good lover to a hospice nurse rather than a surgeon: someone who helps us manage suffering with grace, not eliminate it entirely. A philosophical approach won’t fix your sex life, but it can make you less lonely about how messy it is.

Why This Matters

Thinking more about sex, as de Botton sees it, means reclaiming it as a subject worthy of deep reflection, not snickering or technique. By acknowledging the madness at its core, we can become more forgiving of ourselves and others. We can stop assuming that great sex is the goal or that it proves our worth. We can stop pathologizing what may simply be natural imperfection. Above all, we can understand that sexuality is not a self-contained physical act—it touches everything we care about: intimacy, identity, mortality, and the search for meaning.

Through vivid stories—like Jim and Daisy’s faltering marriage, Freud’s dilemmas about desire, or the bourgeois myth of romantic perfection—de Botton invites you to look at sex as part of the drama of being human. It isn’t about cure but consolation. The lesson is tender but sobering: we should not expect sex to make us happy, only to remind us, painfully and beautifully, that we are alive.

Why does great sex feel transcendent? Alain de Botton begins his exploration of sexual pleasure by arguing that sex’s deepest reward isn’t merely physical—it’s psychological. At its core, eroticism offers an antidote to loneliness. Every kiss, touch, and caress signals that someone accepts us as we are, without judgment or demand. This, he suggests, mirrors the unconditional love we experienced as infants before shame and self-consciousness took hold.

The Longing to Be Known

De Botton traces our erotic impulses back to early childhood when we were adored simply for existing. A caregiver’s gaze assured us that our being was enough. As we grew, that simple affection became conditional on performance and decorum—we learned to hide bodily, emotional, and sexual truths. Sex in adulthood revives that lost paradise of being loved without having to earn it. Through physical union, we briefly dissolve the boundaries of isolation. A kiss, he writes, is thrilling not because of nerve endings but because it symbolizes mutual acceptance at the most private level.

Shame, Nakedness, and Redemption

The naked body is the site of both embarrassment and liberation. De Botton imagines a couple like Adam and Eve rediscovering innocence after exile from paradise—sex becomes a way to reclaim what divine punishment took away. For lovers, undressing each other is a moral act: they forgive one another’s flaws and affirm that the other’s strangeness is acceptable. Physical love redeems what shame destroyed.

Desire and Truthfulness

Our sexual arousal is honest. You can fake almost anything—enthusiasm, kindness, laughter—but not an erection or an orgasm. The body tells the truth; it becomes the measure of sincerity. Lovers celebrate those involuntary signals as proofs that attraction is not social performance but genuine care. De Botton’s lovers, he notes wryly, later reminisce about being aroused even during serious conversations at cafés—their bodies had already conspired toward intimacy long before their words did.

Rudeness and Love

During sex, kindness can coexist with cruelty. When lovers slap, bite, or insult each other affectionately, they are testing the most radical form of trust: the freedom to reveal darkness without losing love. De Botton interprets such erotic violence as psychological healing—it allows people to express parts of themselves that daily civility forbids. Roughness becomes proof that one’s flaws are known and forgiven. In this way, sex substitutes for confession and becomes a secular ritual of absolution.

Fetishism and the Ladder of Love

De Botton sees fetishes—whether shoes, rubber bands, or watches—as symbols of moral longing. They are not absurd quirks but emblems of what is good and desired in others. Borrowing from Plato’s Ladder of Love, he suggests that sexual attraction begins with objects and appearances but ultimately points upward to virtues like kindness or intelligence. When someone’s loafers seem irresistibly sexy, perhaps what excites us is the modesty or calm they represent. Fetishes remind us that eroticism and moral aspiration are intertwined.

Sex and Utopia

Orgasm marks a momentary utopia: two isolated beings cease to be separate. It grants, for an instant, the unity we have longed for since childhood. But, says de Botton, the feeling cannot last; postcoital sadness follows naturally from comparison between that bliss and the fragmented normal world. The beauty of sex lies not in its duration but in its fleeting victory over loneliness. Every encounter recalls the possibility of connection—however brief—that makes human life bearable.

Have you ever wanted love when your partner wanted sex—or vice versa? De Botton opens the section on “The Problems of Sex” with the story of Tomas and Jen, whose desires are perfectly misaligned. He longs for tenderness and devotion; she longs for the physical thrill. They cannot be honest: she fears sounding vulgar, he fears sounding needy. Their confusion mirrors society’s inability to allow both desires equal dignity. We praise love as noble and dismiss lust as shameful, forcing people to lie to get what they want.

Equal Dignity for Love and Lust

De Botton argues that human fulfillment requires separating love and sex without moral hierarchy. Lust is not lesser—it satisfies a fundamental emotional appetite. When culture privileges romantic idealism and condemns casual desire, people resort to deceit. Lovers pretend commitment for sex; romantics fake promiscuity to appear liberated. Both become victims of an unnecessary taboo.

The Ethics of Honesty

The solution, says de Botton, is candor. Imagine Tomas could freely admit: “I want affection and lifelong trust.” Imagine Jen could say: “I want one night of passion.” Neither need is immoral. Transparent communication would prevent the heartbreak that currently defines courtship. Yet such an ideal demands cultural change: we must create space to talk about sex without attaching moral superiority to restraint or commitment. It is, paradoxically, a call for less romance and more compassion.

The Spiritual Lesson

In the end, de Botton’s point is not anti-love or pro-casual sex—it’s philosophical realism. Desire operates on multiple planes, and our happiness depends on treating each with nuance. Love nourishes our longing for safety and meaning; sex defies that safety to awaken the body. To insist that one should always serve the other is to guarantee frustration. Real maturity begins when you can say, without shame, what kind of connection you truly want—and accept that neither form can fully satisfy the human soul.

When someone tells you they’d rather be friends, it can feel catastrophic. De Botton treats sexual rejection not as moral failure but as meteorological bad luck. Just as storms aren’t punishments from angry gods, another’s disinterest isn’t condemnation of your soul—it’s the random outcome of psychological and biological weather systems. We don’t choose what excites us; desire, like rain, obeys hidden forces beyond reason.

The Pain of Moralization

Most heartbreak comes from interpreting rejection as moral verdict. “They didn’t want me,” we think, “because I’m unworthy.” But de Botton insists it’s simpler: their sexual compass points elsewhere. You cannot will attraction any more than you can command a storm to stop raining. Your failed romance isn’t a flaw—it’s atmospheric coincidence.

Compassion in Perspective

He encourages treating rejection like weather forecasts—accept and move on. When we recall our own inability to desire someone kind and available, we glimpse mercy. We didn’t hate them; we just couldn’t fake arousal. Understanding this helps us release bitterness toward those who reject us and stop demanding that love align perfectly with fairness. In matters of desire, justice rarely applies.

Luck, Not Sin

De Botton’s weather metaphor rescues dignity from despair. Instead of concluding we are hideous or cursed, we can recognize the randomness of attraction. Sometimes a “no” is just a “no”—and it may have nothing to do with you. Accepting that truth makes love more bearable and frees us from taking storms personally.

Few modern couples fail as dramatically—or as tenderly—as Jim and Daisy. Married seven years, they haven’t made love for a month, though she lies half-naked beside him plucking her eyebrows. He reaches for her hand; she turns away. Their situation captures de Botton’s most empathetic theme: why long-term love so often kills desire. He doesn’t moralize; he anatomizes boredom with realism, psychoanalysis, and art.

Routine vs. Eroticism

Domestic life requires order—bills, childcare, laundry—while sex thrives on chaos and imagination. The same person who can efficiently oversee school runs must later become a playful conspirator in fantasy, and switching registers is hard. Bureaucracy erodes sensuality. We avoid sex not because we dislike it, but because the vulnerability and disorder it demands clash with our managerial selves.

Freud’s Paradox of Love

De Botton invokes Freud’s eerie maxim: “Where they love, they do not desire; where they desire, they cannot love.” We learn affection from parents whom we must never approach sexually, then seek partners who remind us of them—producing an unconscious incest taboo within marriage. Once kids arrive, spouses literally call each other “mom” or “dad,” completing the Freudian trap. Erotic energy collapses under the weight of parental familiarity.

Seeing Anew

The cure, says de Botton, lies in perception. We must learn to see our lovers as if for the first time. Some radical couples use third-party voyeurs or photography to rediscover desire; less scandalously, hotel rooms can accomplish the same. Changing scenery resets the gaze. Familiar furniture kills imagination—the Park Hyatt carpet becomes an unlikely ally of erotic revival.

Artistic Vision

Painters like Manet teach lovers how to re-see the ordinary. His portrait of a bunch of asparagus turns banality into beauty. Likewise, you can learn to perceive your spouse’s daily gestures—their irritations, fatigue, laughter—with artistic wonder. Desire can be an aesthetic act: the discipline of finding depth beneath routine.

Depathologizing Decline

Modern sexology, from Masters and Johnson onward, labeled fading libido a dysfunction. De Botton calls it normal. Frequency is not proof of love; rarity is proof of reality. Fantasies of constant ecstasy belong to bourgeois romantic myths, not biology. Instead of seeking miracle cures, we should accept sexual decline like aging—with stoicism and tenderness. Turning over in bed without resentment, he concludes, may be the truest act of long-term love.

Why do intelligent people risk everything for affairs? De Botton answers with empathy: because monogamy promises too much. Through Jim’s affair with Rachel, the book exposes the tension between the bourgeois ideal of marriage and human limitation. Adultery, he insists, is seductive precisely because it challenges death and boredom—but also stupid because it cannot solve what drives it. Fidelity and desire are not moral opposites; they are tragically intertwined facts of life.

The Thrill and Its Morality

Jim’s moment with Rachel, brief and electric, reawakens a sense of vitality lost to domestic repetition. De Botton doesn’t deny its beauty; he asks why we condemn it so absolutely. Perhaps, he suggests, refusing all temptation is itself unnatural—a failure of imagination in the face of mortality. To desire infidelity is human; to indulge it without awareness is dangerous.

The Bourgeois Dream

Modern marriage, born in eighteenth-century Europe, fused three ancient human needs: romance (the troubadours), sex (the libertines), and family. Never before had one person been expected to fulfill them all. The result is disappointment on a massive scale. Austen’s heroines chase the ideal; Bovary and Karenina die trying. De Botton’s marriage critique reveals that our expectation of one partner as lover, co-parent, and soulmate is historically unprecedented—and statistically doomed.

The Kindness of Realism

He proposes a gentler morality. If we must choose, let it be with full awareness of loss. Every path—faithfulness, adultery, desire, renunciation—hurts someone; no option is pure. True morality lies not in avoiding pain but in acknowledging its inevitability with grace. Fidelity, then, is heroic: staying inside one cage out of love for shared disappointment. It deserves medals, not smugness.

Rewriting the Marriage Vows

De Botton jokingly suggests better vows: “I promise to be disappointed in you and you alone.” Marriage should be a conscious choice of mutual imperfection. Adultery isn’t evil; it’s just naive about what marriage is for. Happiness doesn’t mean constant satisfaction—it means learning to love within limits. The rare marriages that fuse eroticism, affection, and family exist, but they are miracles, not norms. Understanding that tragedy makes fidelity possible.

What does a laptop at midnight have to do with theology? For De Botton, quite a lot. He sees internet pornography as modern humanity’s private religion—a ritual of distraction that exposes erotic power while hollowing meaning. Unlike moralists who condemn porn for impurity, he fears its spiritual emptiness. Porn doesn’t corrupt virtue; it annihilates attention, trapping us in endless stimulation and cutting us off from contemplation, boredom, and imagination.

Freedom and Its Costs

Liberals defend sexual liberty by invoking John Stuart Mill’s principle that freedom should be limited only when it harms others. But de Botton argues that porn harms by distraction—it reshapes priorities, steals hours meant for creativity, parenting, or reflection. His satire on Jim’s nocturnal browsing reveals how technological freedom collides with psychological fragility: our brains weren’t designed for infinite temptation.

Religion’s Hidden Wisdom

Unlike secularism, religions took sex seriously. They feared its power because they recognized its magnificence. When Islam enforces modesty through the hijab, or Catholicism preaches chastity, their mistake isn’t exaggeration—it’s misplaced focus. De Botton admires their underlying insight: beauty and desire can derail life entirely. He provocatively suggests that a measure of censorship might protect our minds, just as ethics protect our bodies.

Toward a New Kind of Porn

De Botton imagines pornography reborn as moral art. Inspired by Botticelli’s Virgin Mary, who manages to be both virtuous and alluring, he proposes an erotic aesthetic based on kindness, intelligence, and dignity. Instead of lust divorced from meaning, this “integrated pornography” would unite sexuality with higher values—people reading books, laughing, or being tender while making love. Sex, then, could return to its rightful place: not beneath morality, but within it.

Repression as Compassion

In the secular world’s rush to dismantle taboo, we forgot repression’s psychological purpose: it protects us from ourselves. De Botton’s final paradox is humane—some desires must remain underground so we can live fully elsewhere. To repress wisely is to love intelligently. Sex may be sacred, but so is the ability to stop clicking.

What if impotence were virtuous? De Botton turns an apparent catastrophe—the failure to perform—into a sign of ethical evolution. He suggests that the history of impotence parallels the history of empathy. Early humans, free of compassion, had vigorous sex because they didn’t imagine others’ discomfort. Civilization, with its moral sophistication, taught men to hesitate, to worry about displeasing, to be gentle—and hence to falter. Erectile anxiety, he proposes, may be civilization’s tender side effect.

From Animal to Moral Being

Cavemen weren’t nervous lovers. They lacked empathy, so sex was easy. The more self-aware we become, the harder desire gets. Genuine moral scruples interfere with lust. De Botton sees impotence as the product of kindness, not weakness: the fear of being disgusting, of imposing oneself, of failing to offer pleasure. In this light, culture itself sabotages biology—but honorably so.

Viagra vs. Virtue

Pharmaceuticals promise to restore lost power. Yet what these pills really do is suppress conscience. De Botton humorously imagines billboards celebrating impotence as evidence of sensitivity—a man’s flaccidity would prove ethical imagination. Instead of masking nerves, society should value hesitation as empathy turned physical. Civilization, he concludes, doesn’t kill sex; it complicates it in the name of goodness.

The Gentle Man

Impotence thus becomes reinterpreted as part of moral beauty. Behind every failed erection might lie a fear of hurting someone else. In the end, de Botton models compassion: sexuality is not performance but participation. Your body may sometimes falter, but perhaps that’s the cost of decency—proof that civilization, however clumsy, still beats barbarism.

De Botton ends where he began—with the strange, aching fact that humanity would be gentler but duller without sex. It wounds us, humiliates us, drives us insane with jealousy and longing, yet it rescues us from abstraction. Sex makes us remember we are bodily creatures. Without it, we might believe we were pure intellects, untouched by death or vanity. In its chaos we rediscover humility.

The Civilizing Power of Chaos

For de Botton, the erotic is philosophy’s most embodied field experiment. It shows that beauty and morality are not separate domains but competing instincts. Sex dethrones status—it sends professors begging interns for mercy, CEOs weeping in parked cars. It keeps arrogance in check by reminding us that passion levels all hierarchies. In that vulnerability lies moral progress.

Embracing Tragedy

None of this makes sex easy. But understanding its difficulty allows gratitude. Great sex is rare—perhaps a few luminous nights in a lifetime—and that scarcity should humble rather than depress us. The goal isn’t constant satisfaction; it’s comprehension. Sex, like life, is tragic but bearable when contemplated honestly.

Philosophy as Hospice

De Botton describes his book as a literary hospice rather than a hospital: not a cure but a place of comfort for those suffering from the human condition. To think more about sex is not indulgence—it is mercy. In accepting strangeness, temporal joy, and inevitable disappointment, we learn the art of consolation. Sex may not make us happy, but it keeps us real—and that, he says, might be the best kind of love we can hope for.