Every year, in the first week of August, I’m struck by the silence that falls upon Paris, my beloved home.
The local boulangerie has taped a handwritten closure sign to its shutter: ‘Fermeture annuelle, retour le 25 août.’ The pharmacy is the same, while half of my street’s cars have vanished, presumably now double-parked outside some cousin’s house on the Riviera or queuing for a ferry to Corsica.
This is the ‘grande migration’ – the annual, almost devotional exodus in which a significant share of the French population heads for beaches and mountains for the entire month, with all the solemnity of a nation observing a religious holiday it invented purely for its own pleasure.
After all, ‘pleasure’ is the operative word here. As with everything in France, the sustenance of romance and sexual pleasure is embedded in the everyday rituals of life – and nowhere more so than in August.
So devoted are the French to this concept of escaping the daily grind, which can so efficiently kill libido, we even have a phrase for what we’re escaping – ‘métro-boulot-dodo’, commute, work, sleep – a three-word summary for the moment when life becomes so efficiently optimised that pleasure quietly falls off the schedule altogether.
So we take the month off, shops and offices close, before returning in September, refreshed and reinvigorated, sexual spark – and relationship – very definitely rekindled.
Long relationships accumulate friction the way engines accumulate grime – not through any single dramatic failure but through thousands of tiny, unremarkable moments.
The school run. The unloaded dishwasher. The reflexive scroll through a phone in bed instead of a glance at your partner.
Sex guru Maia Mazaurette says breaking from your usual routine for the summer, or even just a week’s holiday, works wonders for your sex life
Holidays present the perfect opportunity to switch up your bedroom routine and put some excitement back into your life
Add the sheer exhaustion of two full-time jobs, the mental bandwidth eaten up by children, ageing parents, mortgages and school WhatsApp groups, and it’s obvious why so many couples reach summer running on fumes rather than desire.
Particularly as that’s when schools shut and you’re left juggling work and childcare for six long weeks.
As a French sex expert, I very much applaud a summer exodus. Desire needs unpredictability and a bit of distance to survive – and that is why breaking from your usual routine for the summer, or even just a week’s holiday, works wonders for your sex life.
The data backs this up handsomely: one UK survey of 2,000 people found that couples on holiday have twice as much sex with each other than when they’re at home.
So while the French have made the August act of sexual reconnection an art form, it isn’t restricted to our shores.
Here, then, are my top tips for relighting your relationship’s sexual fire this summer – they might just see you enjoy the best lovemaking you’ve had all year…
Split the mental load to avoid passion-killers
This one matters more than it sounds, because resentment is one of the most reliable passion-killers around, and holidays are not automatically exempt.
A partner who has spent the week silently managing logistics – the packing lists, the rental car, the dreaded ‘does anyone else notice we’re nearly out of sun cream?’ – is not a partner in the mood.
One UK survey of 2,000 people found that couples on holiday have twice as much sex with each other than when they’re at home
So divide the invisible admin out loud and in advance: who’s booking the restaurant, who’s tracking the passports, who’s getting up with the children tomorrow so the other one can sleep in.
Say it plainly over the first evening’s drink, assign it like a small domestic contract, and revisit it if it stops working.
It sounds deeply unsexy. But it is, in fact, one of the most reliably erotic conversations a couple can have, because nothing kills desire faster than feeling like the only adult in the room.
Try a tryst at an unexpected time
At home, sex is largely confined to the ten exhausted minutes before sleep. Holidays free you from that schedule, and the French, unsurprisingly, have already noticed: a majority (57 per cent) say they prefer making love outside the ‘classic’ evening slot during summer breaks, with sex on waking in the morning topping the list of alternatives.
A siesta with the shutters half-closed, an early-morning tryst before anyone else in the house or hotel stirs, an unplanned hour back at the room mid-afternoon ‘to change’ – claim the times of day you’d never otherwise have access to.
Different light, different energy levels, different you.
Go for novelty in the bedroom
You wouldn’t go parasailing in your day-to-day life, but you’ll happily strap into a harness on holiday because it’s fun – so why not extend that same curiosity to your own body, or your partner’s?
Start by reversing your usual script: instead of the familiar order – foreplay, then penetration, then a kiss as an afterthought – run it backwards, starting with penetration and ending, much later, in a long, unhurried session of just kissing.
Try shared masturbation with ‘instructions’: one of you simply watches and talks the other through exactly how, and how fast, to touch themselves.
Turn dinner into a game, where every glass emptied earns a traded secret – something genuinely unsaid until now. Or set a timer and commit to keep making love in some form until you hit the two-hour mark.
Why does any of this work? Because passion is, biologically speaking, lazy; it responds to newness far more readily than to effort, and to a small, well-placed dose of risk more than to safety.
Feel the fuel of sexual fantasy
Fantasy needs fuel, and holidays are the rare moment we have the appetite and the hours to feed it. Instead of defaulting to true crime on the flight out, try something that puts you in the mood rather than in the mortuary.
Dark romance and romantasy fiction have become one of publishing’s biggest growth stories, with the UK’s science fiction and fantasy category – propelled overwhelmingly by romance-fantasy titles – bringing in more than £100million in 2025.
If reading poolside feels too exposed, audiobooks solve that: download a chapter each morning and let it run quietly in the background as you get ready for the day; by evening, you’ll both have the same scene in your head, which makes for a very good starting point for reinventing it yourselves.
Embrace a sense of fun together
Long-term desire dies not from too much intimacy but from too much dignity. Bearing the responsibility of childcare and a career can force us to become too serious, too well-behaved.
Holidays grant an odd but real social permission to be ridiculous: to dance badly in a kitchen that isn’t yours, to laugh at a joke that isn’t funny, to flirt across a table the way you did before either of you had a mortgage.
Eroticism, in fact, has a lot to learn from gaming: the appetite for a challenge, the urge to laugh and to win, and above all the strange power of role play, where both of you know perfectly well you look ridiculous and it works anyway.
Every sex shop now stocks a shelf of games built for exactly this – dice, cards, prompts, the lot – because couples need permission structures for silliness, not just goodwill.
You don’t need to buy anything, though: any icebreaker game repurposed for the occasion does the job just as well. Try one round where each of you has to admit one embarrassing thing from your sexual past and one embarrassing fantasy you’ve never said out loud. Nobody wins, technically, but everybody plays.
Take that permission into bed, too. Is there a position, or simply an act, you’d normally rule out at home for feeling faintly ridiculous for two supposedly serious adults – a long, unhurried kissing session with no destination, the way you did as a teenager, with all the time in the world and none of the urgency?
Play a silly game before anything else happens: pass an ice cube mouth to mouth until it melts, or play a stripped-down round of truth or dare with only the two of you as players. The goal isn’t a better performance. It’s less pressure to perform at all.
Get properly lost to heighten desire
Not metaphorically. Actually lost. Turn the phone to airplane mode for an afternoon, take a wrong turn on purpose, wander through a town with no destination.
Being properly lost heightens desire because uncertainty keeps the brain alert in a way comfort never does. Not knowing quite where you are, or what happens next, nudges the same mild-stress, mild-thrill state that underpins attraction – and the physical signs overlap: quickened breathing, sharpened attention, a flush in the cheeks.
With nowhere familiar to retreat to, you end up relying on each other to get your bearings. You cannot access that heightened, slightly off-balance state from a sun lounger with a fixed itinerary.
Treat the whole day as foreplay
At home, sex is frequently rushed into the gaps between other obligations. On holiday, you have the rarest resource in a long relationship: unstructured time. Use it to slow everything down.
Build in anticipation deliberately. A long lunch that turns into innuendo.
An afternoon of unhurried touching that goes nowhere near a bed until much later – a hand resting on a bare thigh under a cafe table, fingers trailing along a spine while queuing for ice cream, a slow massage on a hotel balcony that you both agree, out loud, is ‘just’ a massage. A promise made at breakfast and deliberately not fulfilled until night. ‘Tonight, I’m going to take my time with you,’ is specific enough to build anticipation all day without committing to any one act, which is rather the point. It’s the not-knowing exactly what’s coming that does the work.
A 2024 study on sexual anticipation found that merely expecting an arousing encounter measurably heightens arousal itself, distorting our sense of time in the process, making romantic moments feel more pleasurable.
In practice, that might mean agreeing you won’t undress each other until you’ve finished a full glass of wine on the terrace, or that the first kiss of the evening has to wait until you’re behind a closed door – small, arbitrary delays that let arousal climb rather than resolve itself immediately.
Treat the whole day as foreplay and let arousal build, rather than reaching for the fastest, most efficient route to orgasm you’d default to on a Tuesday morning at home.
Let other people ignite your desire
Summer reliably scrambles people’s fantasy lives: one survey found the character men most fantasise about in summer is the ‘girl next door’ (41 per cent would like to live out a neighbour-at-the-campsite scenario), while a quarter of women fantasise about a lifeguard, a surfer or a sports instructor.
The same study found 34 per cent of men and 16 per cent of women in relationships feel a stronger pull to change sexual partner in summer – though only 6 per cent have ever actually left a partner before the summer to enjoy it single.
‘The itch’ is real and common but almost never acted on.
Rather than pretending it doesn’t exist, borrow its energy. Meet your own partner ‘as strangers’ at the hotel bar.
Order a drink you’d never normally order. Introduce yourselves with names, real or invented, and stay in character while you ask each other questions, as though the last however-many-years hadn’t happened. Tell each other who or what you noticed today – a stranger on the beach, a look someone gave you – and let your partner respond in character rather than as themselves, a little jealous, a little intrigued.
Carried upstairs, it gives you both permission to ask for things, or do things, that would feel oddly formal coming from your usual selves. After all, it’s the character undressing you, not your spouse.
And for those with children…
None of the above requires a five-star honeymoon suite. A locked door and a genuinely early bedtime for the children (enforced, not aspirational) will do more for a marriage than any spa treatment.
If there’s a hotel kids’ club, or grandparents and friends are within reach, use even one child-free afternoon deliberately rather than guiltily.
Don’t discount the small stuff in public when a big window of privacy is impossible – a hand on a thigh under a restaurant table or a stolen kiss while the children are distracted by ice cream still counts as maintenance, even when the main event must wait until dark.
Follow the French and don’t lose sight of your aim: restoring a marriage in the way only a break from your humdrum routine truly can.
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