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A review by katefrost
Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections by Emily Nagoski
challenging
hopeful
reflective
4.5
I began reading this alone, but after I had the repeated impulse to send entire sections to my husband of approximately one trillion years, we decided to read the book aloud together.
Its structure follows the same pattern in each chapter: an idea, data, sometimes a story about a couple the author knows, a TLDR, and some suggested questions for yourself and your partner. We worked through the book slowly, to avoid burnout. While neither of us particularly had complaints in the area of our sex life, reading this together and working through the questions at the end of each chapter, gave us a shared “third thing” to turn towards.
In particular, I am still thinking about how Nagoski recontextualized trust and trustworthiness for me. It genuinely blew my mind and I immediately sent the ideas to my therapist for discussion. The chapter on the gender mirage has been similarly useful as a lens through which to view so many other ways we engage.
The one place where Nagoski lost me/us from time to time was the examination of specific couples. The scenes she described where she was participating in the conversation felt a little self congratulatory of the ideas presented and almost like missed social cues, if the conversations proceeded as written. It just created a bit of cringiness where the anecdata could have been communicated with fewer stage directions.
I’d recommend this first and foremost directly to my therapist; then to people in long term relationships. With the exception of one chapter (which focuses on a very specific dynamic in cis/het relationships), the book is incredibly inclusive in its language and its consideration of many different relationship structures.
A big thanks to Netgalley for an advance copy of this book!
Its structure follows the same pattern in each chapter: an idea, data, sometimes a story about a couple the author knows, a TLDR, and some suggested questions for yourself and your partner. We worked through the book slowly, to avoid burnout. While neither of us particularly had complaints in the area of our sex life, reading this together and working through the questions at the end of each chapter, gave us a shared “third thing” to turn towards.
In particular, I am still thinking about how Nagoski recontextualized trust and trustworthiness for me. It genuinely blew my mind and I immediately sent the ideas to my therapist for discussion. The chapter on the gender mirage has been similarly useful as a lens through which to view so many other ways we engage.
The one place where Nagoski lost me/us from time to time was the examination of specific couples. The scenes she described where she was participating in the conversation felt a little self congratulatory of the ideas presented and almost like missed social cues, if the conversations proceeded as written. It just created a bit of cringiness where the anecdata could have been communicated with fewer stage directions.
I’d recommend this first and foremost directly to my therapist; then to people in long term relationships. With the exception of one chapter (which focuses on a very specific dynamic in cis/het relationships), the book is incredibly inclusive in its language and its consideration of many different relationship structures.
A big thanks to Netgalley for an advance copy of this book!