What Sexual Fantasy Actually Is (It's Not What You Think)
Esther Perel offers a quietly radical redefinition of sexual fantasy — one that has nothing to do with costumes, elaborate scenarios, or anything that has to actually happen.
Most people, when they hear the word fantasy, imagine something elaborate. Costumes. Role-play. Carefully constructed scenarios. Something borrowed from a film or a novel or a screen. And when their inner life doesn't match that picture, they conclude they don't have fantasies at all.
Esther Perel, in a recent piece for her Substack Entre Nous, offers a correction that is quietly radical: sexual fantasy is simply anything that enhances excitement or pleasure.
That's it. Not a scenario. Not a performance. Not something that needs to be acted out, confessed, or even shared. It could be the time of day, the angle of light, the way someone's voice drops, a story you tell yourself about a glance across a room. Fantasy, in this frame, is the mind doing what it does naturally — reaching toward pleasure, creating meaning, keeping desire alive.
"Fantasy connects us to hope, playfulness, and mystery," Perel writes, "and it keeps us alive."
The narrow lens
The problem isn't that people lack imagination. It's that the cultural definition of fantasy has become so narrow — so saturated with performance and spectacle — that most people's actual inner lives don't register as erotic imagination at all. They're comparing their quiet, ambient, deeply personal experience of desire to a genre. Naturally, it falls short.
But desire was never meant to be a genre. It's something more like weather — shaped by memory, mood, sensation, context, and the particular way two people occupy a space together. Fantasy is the mind's way of working with all of that. Perel's definition gives it room to be what it actually is.
This matters for couples in a specific way. When we assume fantasy means something elaborate — something "other" — we miss the erotic imagination that's already present in the relationship. The glance. The anticipation. The specific way one person touches another. The memory of a moment that keeps returning. These are all fantasy. They don't need to escalate to mean something.
The companion exercise: Morin's Peak Erotic Experience
Psychologist Jack Morin spent years asking people a deceptively simple question: What is your most memorable erotic experience? The results became the foundation of his landmark book The Erotic Mind — an analysis of over 1,000 peak erotic experiences that revealed consistent themes underlying human desire.
Morin's Peak Erotic Experience exercise is worth pairing with Perel's essay. It goes like this: sit quietly and let your memory scan for erotic moments that stand out — not the most explicit, but the most alive. The ones that return to you. Morin's key instruction: peak experiences don't have to be dramatic. Some are remarkably simple. Some involve no physical contact at all. Some happen fully clothed.
The goal isn't to compile a list of things you want to do. It's to understand what your erotic imagination has been telling you all along — what conditions, qualities, and dynamics reliably generate excitement for you. This is the raw material of your erotic identity. It was never absent. You may just not have had language for it.
Together, Perel and Morin point in the same direction: your erotic imagination is more active, more personal, and more available than you've been told. It doesn't require elaboration. It requires attention.
What this means for couples
One of the more useful things couples can do with these ideas is to talk not about what they want to try but about what already works — and why. What moments, even quiet ones, have felt most alive? What conditions reliably bring them back? These conversations rarely require bravery. They require curiosity.
The EROS-Q explores this territory across Domain 2 (Self-Expansion & Novelty) and Domain 1 (Erotic Meaning & Identity) — not because fantasy is explicitly assessed, but because erotic imagination is a current that runs through both. How curious is each partner about their own desire? How much room does the relationship give to the unexpected, the playful, the not-yet-named?
Fantasy, in the end, isn't a destination. It's a capacity. And according to Perel, everyone has it.
For a structured exploration of your own peak erotic experiences, Morin's The Erotic Mind remains one of the most useful self-guided resources available. His Sexual Excitement Survey, included in the book, walks readers through the process.
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The EROS-Q is a research-grounded assessment for couples who believe there is more to their erotic lives together.
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