Davide’s work doesn’t begin with theory but with rupture, the kind that slowly builds when avoidance stops being enough. After years shaped by trauma, addiction, pornography use, and attempts to navigate intimacy through escape and experimentation, something shifted. Not all at once, but in the quiet realisation that he could no longer outrun himself.

What follows in his story is not a reinvention, but a return. A return to the body, to presence, and to a more conscious way of relating, where desire is no longer driven by urgency, novelty, or fantasy but by attention and lived awareness. He speaks openly about what it means to rebuild connection from that place and how intimacy changes when performance is no longer the goal.

There is a clear thread in the way he understands sexuality, not as something to be managed or endlessly intensified, but as something shaped by repetition, curiosity, and emotional presence. In his view, desire does not fade in familiarity. It deepens when attention replaces distraction and when two people are willing to stay engaged with what is actually there, rather than what is imagined.

In both his practice at JustCoaching.be, and his personal life, Davide works from lived experience rather than distance. From stepping out of a 25-year relationship to entering a new one slowly and consciously, he describes intimacy as something that requires time, honesty, and nervous system awareness, not urgency or performance.

In this conversation with Davide D’Urbano, we move through the tension between escape and presence, exploring how healing, discipline, and relational awareness can reshape the way we understand desire, attachment, and what it really means to stay with another person.

The Day I Chose Healing Over Hiding

Your journey into relationship and intimacy coaching began with your own experiences of trauma, abuse, pornography addiction, and questioning monogamy. Looking back, what was the moment that forced you to stop running from your pain and start facing it?

Davide: There’s a moment in life, hopefully, when you feel you’ve drifted too far from yourself. It tends to arrive like a plane without fuel.

I’d known for years I was unhappy. I wanted to leave my previous relationship but stayed anyway, out of a misplaced sense of loyalty. The substances, the porn, and the “debauchery” all did their job for a while. They numbed it. Then they stopped working, and what was left was the burnout underneath, the thing I’d been spending all that effort not to feel. I had tried everything except the one thing that would have helped. So I left.

The moment wasn’t dramatic. It was just the pain finally getting bigger than my talent for ignoring it. Life offers you a choice. You either face it or it will entirely consume you.

Can Monotony and Desire Coexist?

A lot of people associate desire with novelty, intensity, or fantasy. You argue for something more grounded and repetitive with the same partner. How do you rewire someone’s understanding of desire without suppressing it?

Davide: Desire for a person is wanting that person for who they are. Not for what matches a fantasy you wouldn’t have had if you hadn’t seen it somewhere first. Start there, because everything else follows from it.

Monotony is the act of repeating the same thing with no change. It’s the word we use to file away a life we’ve decided is boring. But it’s an illusion. No two days are identical, and neither are the two people living them. Experience, exchange, circumstance – all of it shifts something. The danger isn’t repetition. It’s when we stop seeing each day as new and lock ourselves into the should’s, must’s, and have-to’s. That’s where desire quietly dies.

I used to think love and fresh water were enough to be happy. Romantic. Unrealistic.

One of monotony’s great adversaries is simply learning something new every day. For a lot of people, curiosity is easier to cultivate than desire, because despite all the porn and the more libertine lifestyles on offer, cultural and familial taboos are still very much a thing.

I don’t believe sleeping with multiple partners as a habit restores desire or escapes monotony. Experimenting with a partner, though, healthy and agreed on by both, is necessary to keep desire alive. The one real danger is saying yes from a place of pleasing, born from a fear of loss.

That isn’t desire. That’s you drifting away from yourself again, with better company.

Rewiring desire takes practice and discipline, repetition, and a good dose of mutual understanding. This is something that either both partners commit to together, or one is already there and brings the other one along.

If a body and a nervous system can be trained to want more ceaselessly, the opposite is true as well.

Cutting the noise also helps a great deal. Remove social media and TV altogether, and watch your level of undirected and unfocused desire collapse. Mind the withdrawal, though. Your brain will need to get used to getting bored before it can become creative and alive again.

What Screens Get Wrong About Love

Cinema and porn both shape cultural expectations of love and sex. Where do you see the biggest gap between how intimacy is portrayed and how it actually feels when it is healthy and grounded?

Davide: The gap is immense, and it starts with two things: a camera and a word.

Cinema took romantic love and sold it to the West as the default model, replacing the old arranged marriage, where you simply hoped love would show up later. Then there’s the word itself. Love. Nobody can tell you exactly what it is. It’s given us some of our best stories. It’s also given us our most unrealistic ones, because those stories mostly show the beginning, plus some conflict resolution whose quality depends entirely on the writer, and frankly, in 2026, the writing is hitting rock bottom.

Movie tickets sell because of drama, not love. It’s our appetite for drama that gives those stories their charge, not any love for love itself, which is a far quieter thing. Nobody’s buying a ticket to watch secure attachment. So the screen is programming us toward turbulence and calling it romance. We’re told constant novelty is the goal. Worth asking who that actually serves. Us, or the merchants.

Porn does its own version. It takes sex, one of the richest ways two people can exchange energy and presence, and turns it into a game of Twister built to distort the view. Strictly visual. Strictly mechanical. No longer something felt from the inside. It’s dopamine, endless novelty at your fingertips, and instant gratification. It teaches you nothing about respecting your body, your feelings, or being present with one partner, let alone several.

The screen sells you the rollercoaster to the point where you’ll believe that steady and secure relationships are boring and wrong.

When Desire Isn’t in a Hurry

After ending a 25-year relationship and entering something new with a slower, more conscious pace, what has surprised you most about how desire behaves when you remove urgency from it?

Davide: What surprised me most is that when you remove the urgency, the pleasure doesn’t shrink. It deepens past anything I’d known before.

Intimacy is about presence, not performance. Vulnerability, not domination. Co-regulation, not excitement. That’s what I found with my new partner. We took our time before sleeping together the first time. We took time to learn who we actually were. I come from a path most would call debauchery. She comes from a much quieter place. So we let the tension build. We stayed present with each other. I felt genuinely welcome inside her, which was something I’d struggled with for years.

And the part I can’t stress enough: we stopped chasing orgasms, mine or hers. Doing so builds a capacity to receive and give pleasure that extends through the entire body first and literally in your entire nervous system later, and push it far enough, I believe you reach a state of soul pleasure, and it can go on for hours or entire days. Waves of pleasure course through your body gently throughout the day. It’s a far more lasting effect than the usual thing

I’m someone who went from masturbating to porn and coming fourteen times a day, still wanting more, to coming once or twice a week while making love nearly every day. I wish someone had guided me there sooner. My partner gave me a word she’s proud of when I demonstrate it: Mastery. Some people call it edging. Mastery is cooler, and it hits differently.

There’s a lot of kissing, stroking, playing, and exciting each other. The point isn’t the finish. It’s a state of being rather than meat entering meat and waiting to pop. It makes the act mean more, and because the release isn’t automatic, the energy accumulates. It becomes fuel for everything else, such as sport, creativity, building a business, and of course, wanting each other more.

I stopped treating what I carry as waste to be discarded in a tissue and started treating it as a drive to direct. Call it what you want. When I stopped throwing it away, I stopped throwing pieces of myself away with it.

Respect desire. Cultivate it. Want what you have instead of chasing what you don’t.

If Fantasy Disappears, Does Desire Follow?

If fantasy is removed completely from sex, does desire survive? Or is a certain level of fantasy always necessary for erotic life to stay alive?

Davide: This is a good question, and I think it will stay unanswered for years to come, which is the best thing about it.

What even is a fantasy? When is it healthy, and when is it your subconscious shoving something into view, or your survival mechanism doing its work? Would we fantasise at all if we’d never been shown anything? What drove the first drawings in the Kamasutra? No amount of expertise cracks this one, and I’m glad. Some things should stay a mystery.

I think some level of fantasy is healthy. When I ask my partner about hers, she says she isn’t really thinking about them. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have them. Or maybe it does. I think a little fantasy is necessary, but curiosity is easier to hold. It carries less weight.

And believe it or not, plenty of people still think fantasy equals dirty, when it can just be a place, a circumstance, or a setting. I think it’s necessary and, at the same time, unnecessary to voice or to act on.

A fantasy is like a secret. It loses its potency the second it’s out in the open.

Are You Really Seeking Kink? 

Kink can be healing for some and destabilising for others. From your perspective, what makes the difference between kink as conscious exploration versus kink as a form of escape?

Davide: Conscious exploration starts with the total agreement of two people. Not “I guess so.” Not “fine.” A real yes, the kind that lives in the body and can be taken back at any second without punishment.

Take a man who was molested as a child. Back then, something was done to him. No choice, no voice, no way out. The nervous system files that away as ‘I am not in control of what happens to my body.’

Years later, that same man might walk into a scene and ask to be restrained. To someone watching from the outside, it looks like the wound is repeating itself. It isn’t. This time, he chose it. He set the terms. He named the safe word. He can stop it with one word, and that word will be honoured.

That’s the difference between a thing happening to you and a thing you author. Same nervous system, opposite job. Done with consent, presence, and support, that’s not the old story playing again. That’s him taking control back.

But, and this is the line everything turns on, that only holds if he’s moving toward the feeling. If he’s there to meet the old terror with new safety, to feel it and reclaim it, that’s recovery in motion. Eventually, it has to stop; you move past it because you have done your healing.

The moment it flips to getting away from the feeling instead of through it, the same act becomes a numbing agent.

And that’s the clean rule underneath all of it:

Anything done to avoid inner pain is a dissociative behaviour.

Doesn’t matter what the act is: Kink, sex, work, scrolling, control, or helping everyone but yourself. If the function is “don’t make me feel this”, the body is leaving the room. The activity is just the exit.

One caveat I won’t skip, because this is real work and not a hot take: trauma reenactment without skill, pacing, and support doesn’t heal anything. It rewinds. The reclaiming I’m describing happens with consent, with co-regulation, often with someone holding the frame so the survivor doesn’t get flooded and dragged back under. Do it alone in the dark to outrun the pain, and you’re not reclaiming control. You’re just rehearsing the wound with better lighting. You’re performing again.

So the question is never “is kink okay.’ It’s, “Am I in here to meet myself or to disappear?” ‘

Fixing Your Behaviour. Change This First

If someone reading this feels stuck between compulsive desire patterns and a desire for deeper connection, what is the first internal shift you would invite them to make before changing any external behaviour?

Davide: Go through the pain. Reach out to someone. It doesn’t matter how much shame you think you’re carrying; there are people out there you can safely speak to who can actually help. Maybe you feel undeserving of love. You aren’t. It’s your birthright. So treat yourself with love, and walk through the pain with someone who can hold that space with you.

Then the outside shifts on its own.

Editor Note

The most striking insight is not about sexuality itself, but about attention and what it means to finally stay present with one’s own experience without escaping it. Desire does not collapse in familiarity; it collapses in the absence of awareness. When attention is fragmented by avoidance, fantasy, or repetition without presence, even intimacy begins to feel distant.

Desire is not something you chase or control; it is something that reveals itself when you are no longer leaving the room. And in that realisation lies a quiet but transformative perspective, one that redefines intimacy not as intensity, but as sustained attention, honesty, and presence.