Closeness vs. Otherness
Can you still see your partner as someone separate, mysterious, and not fully known? Desire requires a psychological gap to arc across.
Why Otherness Matters for Desire
Closeness and desire have a complex, non-linear relationship. Too little closeness kills desire because there is no safety. But too much closeness can also suppress desire because there is no space — no gap for longing to cross, no mystery to be curious about, no separateness to find attractive.
The construct that matters is not closeness per se, but otherness — the degree to which one’s partner is perceived as a separate, autonomous, not-fully-known person. When partners merge into a single unit, sharing everything, knowing everything, going everywhere together, the erotic charge between them dissipates. Desire needs something to reach toward.
The Research
Recent reviews have proposed that high closeness is most strongly linked to desire when paired with the maintenance of otherness (Muise & Goss, 2024). Prekatsounaki and colleagues developed measures of “celebrated otherness” — actively valuing partner distinctiveness — and found it correlated with higher sexual desire in women in long-term relationships (Prekatsounaki et al., 2019).
Sims and Meana identified over-familiarity as one of the most commonly cited desire-killers in qualitative interviews with married women (Sims & Meana, 2010). Ferreira and colleagues found that autonomy — physical distance, personal projects, the partner as a separate person — was the dominant theme when couples described what helps maintain desire (Ferreira et al., 2015).
What the Questions Measure
The domain measures eight dimensions: whether you can recall feeling a spark while watching your partner absorbed in something they love, whether they have a world of their own outside the relationship, whether you have a sense of who they are becoming, whether absence activates longing, whether they can still surprise you, whether you actively cultivate your own identity, whether you admire things about them unrelated to your relationship, and whether you have friendships and a social life of your own.
The Cross-Domain Connection
Low Otherness almost always produces low Imagination. When there is no psychological space between partners, there is nothing for the erotic imagination to work with. Improving Otherness — through independent pursuits, separate friendships, deliberate time apart — typically improves Imagination without direct intervention on the erotic side.
Identity feeds Otherness. A person with a strong sense of self naturally generates Otherness because they bring something distinct to the relationship. A person with collapsed Identity has nothing to be “other” with. When both Otherness and Identity are low, the starting point is Identity — become someone interesting to yourself first.