Meet The Hollywood Love Doctor

She boasts Gwyneth Paltrow and Will Smith as clients and advocates hula hoops over date nights to keep the spark alive. Alice Carrington gets a crash course from A-list intimacy coach Michaela Boehm

- Alice Carrington

Would it surprise you to learn that as a 41-year-old married woman with two children, a full-time job and a gastric erosion caused by stress and eating ibuprofen for breakfast, I don’t feel 100 percent hot for it all the time? That, occasionally, I would rather eat pasta or watch Big Little Lies on a weeknight than explore the pleasures of the flesh with the man I love? And that if, on those occasions he happened to suggest it, I would burst into tears and sob, “Are you insane? I’ve finished all my jobs for today. Why would you give me more work to do?” That if he ever actually woke me up to have sex, I would punch my husband of 19 years in the face?

I suspect not.

It doesn’t surprise Michaela Boehm, a therapist and relationship guru who recently made headlines as Gwyneth Paltrow’s “intimacy coach”. That’s right, GP has an intimacy coach.

Women not wanting sex is Boehm’s area of expertise, although intimacy was never her intended specialty. She trained in forensic and trauma therapy, “but from a young age I had a very strong sense that there wasn’t much education available about how to make relationships work,” says Boehm, who is 52 and grew up in Austria. “When I started doing counseling sessions, that’s what most people wanted, because it’s where most people have the hardest time. Intimacy, relationships, sexuality, the body.”

On the side, she educated herself in tantra, meditation and yoga, and began incorporating the ideas into her practice. Since then, she’s spent a cool 42,000 hours educating couples on how to get the most bang for their buck – which is where her famous separate houses theory comes into play.