3 Surprisingly Simple Ways to Increase Novelty (That Have Nothing to Do With Sex)

Here is the trap most couples fall into: they hear that novelty matters for desire, and they immediately think about what to try sexually. New position, new location, new scenario. The mental leap from "we should try something new" to "we need to have a conversation about something we've never done" can feel daunting enough that most couples don't make it. So they do nothing.

But the research — particularly the work of sex therapist Emily Jamea and the self-expansion studies from Muise and colleagues — points somewhere more interesting. Novelty doesn't have to be about sex to affect desire. And even the novelty that is about sex doesn't have to be dramatic to work.

Here are three ideas rooted in that research.

1. Try something just 4% different

There is a concept from flow psychology called the challenge-skills ratio. The idea: we enter a state of deep engagement and focus — what Csikszentmihalyi called flow — when the challenge in front of us is slightly beyond our current skill level. Too far below: boredom. Too far outside: anxiety. Right at the edge: presence, focus, aliveness.

Jamea applied this to erotic life and found the same pattern holds. And the number that triggers it is smaller than most people expect: roughly 4% different from what you usually do.

Not radically different. Not unfamiliar. Just slightly further than the comfortable routine.

In practice, this could mean trying a different time of day. Changing the lighting. Slowing down a part of the experience that usually moves quickly. Saying something you've thought but never said aloud. The specific content matters less than the slight displacement from habit.

Small enough to feel unthreatening. Different enough to activate attention.

2. Try something new — outside the bedroom

Muise and colleagues found that couples who participated in novel and arousing activities together — activities with nothing to do with sex — were significantly more likely to report higher desire and relationship satisfaction afterward. In one study, couples who tried something new together were 36 times more likely to be sexually active that evening, with effects that held over time.

The mechanism is misattributed arousal: the physiological excitation from doing something unfamiliar gets attributed to the person you're with. Your nervous system can't fully distinguish between "exciting because new" and "exciting because of you." That confusion works in your favour.

Some practical ideas:

• A physical activity neither of you has tried before
• A class or workshop — cooking, a language, movement-based
• A route or neighbourhood neither of you knows
• Any experience that produces a small amount of uncertainty or unfamiliarity

The novelty doesn't need to be dramatic. It needs to be genuinely new to both of you.

3. Change your theory about what makes a good erotic life

This one is the most overlooked and possibly the most powerful.

Research by Maxwell and colleagues found that couples who hold what they call a sexual growth belief — the belief that a satisfying erotic life is built through attention and effort, not found through compatibility — report consistently higher desire, satisfaction, and resilience after difficulty.

Couples with the opposite belief — that chemistry either exists or doesn't — tend to interpret difficulty as evidence of incompatibility. They stop investing. The relationship erodes in a self-fulfilling way.

The growth belief reframes novelty itself: not as a sign that something is wrong, but as the natural ongoing practice of a couple that is actively tending what they have.

If novelty feels effortful, that's not a problem. That's the practice.

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These three ideas are not a checklist. They're invitations to pay a different kind of attention — to what is slightly unfamiliar, to what produces a small degree of aliveness, to the person sitting across from you who you may know very well but have not yet fully discovered.

Domain 2 of the EROS-Q — Self-Expansion & Novelty — explores exactly this dimension of your erotic culture together. Begin your EROS Quotient →