Sex On The Couch Gets To The Bottom Of Millennials' Love Lives

Now, now. Don’t get ahead of yourselves. BBC Three’s new series isn’t literally 30 minutes of couples having at it on a nice settee. Sex On The Couch is indeed about sex, but the 'couch' bit refers to the sofa you're invited to sit on – and share from – at the therapist's office.

The show sees young couples visit a purpose-built clinic to get a bit of help and guidance in the bedroom. And we're not talking about the cliché "dress up", "talk dirty" and "block out some time" responses to sex problems. We've seen enough of that. Here we get deep, down and fairly dirty, unpicking the issues that are getting in the way of a really good, erm, sesh.

Between the pair in their 20s exploring their sexual fantasies for the first time, and the married couple in their early 30s who have stopped having sex altogether, Sex On The Couch offers a surprisingly revealing opportunity to eavesdrop on the inner workings of other people's sex lives (and the advice they're given to fix it, too).

Truth be told, I was most surprised by the ages of the couples who had opted for some external help. So used to the pressure of being romantically 'young', and being fed the idea that our 20s and 30s were for wild, fun and adventurous sex at all hours (lol, as if) and the action dies out as we get older, part of me expected to meet different people. Despite my better knowledge, whenever we talk about relationship counselling my mind shoots to scenes of Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones in Hope Springs (a charming film for a hungover Sunday afternoon, by the way). Seeking help for that sort of thing beyond the realm of Netflix's Sex Education has often been reserved in my mind for an older generation who have touched there, banged that and come out the other end without anything more to explore sexually. But it's not. Sexual hiccups and hurdles know no bounds, and they far from have an age limit.

First we're introduced to 22-year-old Tanika and her 27-year-old girlfriend, Riana. They've been together for a year, Tanika has only recently come out and their expectations of what a relationship should look like – sexually and emotionally – seem to differ. Tanika has a higher sex drive, Riana has a habit of actively avoiding sex and so they've fallen into a rut. They're given three sessions with one of the four sexual therapists on the show to try and work out where things are going wrong, with homework assignments to complete between meetings. The good news is that they manage to have a conversation about their sexual fantasies for the first time (which align better than either of them expected); the bad news is that the whole therapy process doesn't sit quite so well with one of them.

Next up we meet Louisa (30) and Nick (34), who have been together for five years. Things changed dramatically when they moved in together and enjoyable sex has gone out of the window. Over the course of their therapy session we learn that deep-rooted friction in their relationship overrides the reasons Louisa and Nick assumed they weren't having sex. Their homework assignment is to try massage as a gentle way to create intimacy and a whole new revelation comes to light when their attempt to move forward is halted.

Eavesdropping on other people's conversations/relationships/sex lives is interesting all on its own of course, but this six-part series zooms in just a little bit further. Whether you like it or not, it will likely make you take stock of how your thought processes or behaviours might be preventing the sex of your dreams. Format-wise, it's not far from Celebs Go Dating – the couples enter the sleek and modern clinic, are greeted by a glamorous receptionist and ushered in for their private sessions with a therapist. But here we get to watch people reveal their most intimate secrets and understand their desires, all while on the brink of a relationship breakdown. Intense, right? You'll be surprised – it might just tell us a bit more about how fragile our generation's attitudes to sex really are.