They say time heals everything, can it heal intimacy?

A couple sat in front of me with a request I'd never had before. Both top executives, in an industry that runs on long hours and pride about long hours. They were living proof of it — children at home, grandparents far away, their time together not just scarce but downright rare. To make it harder, she was a morning bird and he was a night owl. They barely overlapped.

"After all these years, we're still madly in love," they told me. "We respect each other, we work through our differences. But we're not intimate anymore, and we want to be. This can't be the end of our sex life — not at our age. Can you help?"

Nothing strange so far. Then came the condition.

"We'll do anything you ask. Just don't tell us to slow down or make more time. We like our pace. It works for us."

I should have heard it for what it was. Instead, I heard a dream client. A couple willing to work hard, do the exercises, take it seriously — and I jumped. I'll admit it plainly: the prospect blinded me. We even established, early on, that slow down was the exact advice that had ended things with their last therapist. I noted it, and I sailed past it anyway.

So we began. We explored. First session, second, third — opening up what intimacy had been for them, what it had become, what got in the way.

And somewhere around the fifth, the realisation hit me like a wall.

None of this would land. Everything we were uncovering needed time to settle between sessions — time to feel it, talk about it, let it change something at home. And time was the one thing they had refused to give. The two words I'd promised never to say kept surfacing every time I thought about them. Slow down.

I had made a promise I was bound to break.

Maybe part of me had wanted to find out whether it was possible — whether you could hustle exactly as hard, add more to the calendar, try more techniques, and have intimacy somehow appear anyway. Whether desire could be engineered around the time problem instead of through it.

It can't. Every honest conversation we had led to the same place: there were not enough hours in their day, not enough days in their week, to ease into the thing intimacy actually needs. Desire doesn't run on the calendar that work runs on. It needs slack, and they had built a life with none.

In our sixth session I said it. They would need to slow down and make room. We never saw each other again.

I think about that couple often, because they taught me something I now reach for first with almost everyone who comes in. Before anything else, I want to understand the time a couple actually has. Not their feelings about each other — their ordinary Tuesday. How the hours are spent. How they move between the roles they play all day and the people they're supposed to be to each other at night.

Because here's the part the saying gets wrong. Time doesn't heal anything on its own. What heals — or doesn't — is what happens inside the time. And you can't do anything inside time you don't have.

That's the uncomfortable first question, and it's one most couples skip. Not how do we fix our intimacy, but where in this life would intimacy even fit? If you recognise yourself in that executive couple — in love, capable, and somehow never in the same room with energy to spare — the place to start isn't a new technique. It's an honest look at the day itself.

If you want to take that look, here's where I'd have you begin:

1. When intimacy was working between you, what time of day did it happen — and was morning different from evening?

2. What did the rest of your life look like then? How much unclaimed time did you have, alone and together, simply to be?

3. What does an ordinary day look like now?

4. On a scale of 1 to 10, where's your energy these days — and how does that compare to when intimacy came easily?

5. If you had to make real space in your day, what would have to go?

That last question is usually the one. It's also the one couples most want to avoid — which is exactly why it's where the work begins.