Unlocking Hidden Fantasies

Unlocking Hidden Fantasies 

In the 2024 film Babygirl, a powerful, accomplished woman—played by Nicole Kidman—finds her carefully ordered life unraveling after she becomes entangled in a risky relationship that exposes a side of her she has long kept hidden. The story is provocative, but at its core it raises a deeply human question: What happens to the parts of ourselves that never find a place in our everyday lives?

The Paradox

The theme echoes an idea explored powerfully by relationship therapist Esther Perel in her influential book Mating in Captivity. Perel argues that long-term relationships often create a paradox. The same structures that give us safety—predictability, stability, domestic partnership—can quietly suppress the elements of mystery, risk, and imagination that fuel desire. This is where couples can find themselves feeling sexually stuck.

While parts of ourselves may be hidden, they rarely disappear. They tend to resurface—often in disruptive ways. As a couples therapist, I am on the front lines of these crises. 

In Babygirl, Kidman’s character appears to have everything: professional success, a stable marriage, children, and social status. Yet beneath that composed exterior lies a set of desires she has never fully acknowledged, even to herself. When someone enters her life who seems to recognize and tap into her suppressed fantasy life, the result is destabilizing yet simultaneously deeply cathartic.

What Do Fantasies Mean?

While the film dramatizes this process in an extreme way, the underlying psychological dynamic is familiar to many of us. 

Hidden fantasies are not necessarily about specific acts, scenes, or costumes. More often, they reflect deeper emotional longings: the desire to feel powerful—or to relinquish control; the wish to be seen differently than we are in everyday roles; curiosity about aspects of identity we rarely express; and a longing for novelty, play, or intensity. 

In many marriages or long-term partnerships, daily life gradually organizes itself around responsibility: work, children, finances, routines. Over time, partners become known primarily through their functional roles—parent, provider, planner, caretaker. What quietly disappears is the imaginative space where desire lives. Many couples tell me that they experienced this imaginative space when dating or in the early stages of their relationship. Many express deep wistfulness, as they both seem to be at a loss in finding that space years down the road.  

Esther Perel describes this tension succinctly: healthy attachment seeks closeness, but desire needs distance, uncertainty, and a sense of risk. 

This is why fantasies can feel so difficult to talk about within stable relationships. They often involve aspects of ourselves that don’t align with our everyday identity. A responsible parent, respected professional, or organized partner may struggle to reveal desires that feel messy, vulnerable, or unconventional.

Creating a Safe Space

As a result, many couples never create a safe space for those conversations. Instead, fantasies remain hidden—sometimes until they surface through a crisis, attraction to someone outside the relationship, or a moment of impulsive behavior. Problems arise when they remain unexplored and unspoken for too long. 

Rather than waiting for them to emerge through rupture, I am passionate about working with couples to create a safe and exciting place to unlock those hidden fantasies.  

Some gentle starting points include: 

1. Talking about imagination rather than behavior. Conversations about fantasy do not require immediate action. Sometimes simply sharing what intrigues us—what scenarios spark curiosity, what emotional experiences we long for—can open surprising doors. 
2. Reintroducing play into adult life. Many long-term relationships become highly functional but low on playfulness. Desire often reawakens when partners experiment with novelty—new experiences, travel, creative dates, or environments where they encounter each other outside familiar roles. Partners sometimes feel very disconnected from those playful parts of themselves. Let’s face it, a Costco run doesn’t exactly inspire a playful evening in bed! 
3. Allowing multiple identities within a relationship. People are rarely just one thing. We may be competent leaders at work, nurturing parents at home, and still hold other unexplored identities within us. Relationships can become more dynamic when they allow partners to share their hidden fantasies with each other. Babygirl ends with Kidman’s marriage intact AND the beneficiary of a “second” marriage, where she and her husband, played by Antonio Banderas, can finally access hidden fantasy role play, free from the need to conform to polite strictures.  
4. Creating psychological safety for vulnerability. Partners must feel that revealing something vulnerable or surprising will be met with curiosity rather than judgment. We may hold back due to our own shame narrative and our body-numbing fear of shame and rejection from our partner. Having a conversation with your partner about wanting to deepen your physical and sexual connection may be met with surprising enthusiasm–or maybe tentative curiosity.

Desire rarely disappears—it simply waits for expression or emerges in any space it can find to see the light of day, or the dark of night.  

Opening the Door to Desire

The goal is not to eliminate fantasy or suppress it further. Instead, the challenge is learning how to integrate imagination, curiosity, and authenticity into the fabric of long-term partnership.

When I can help couples go there, fantasies no longer need to erupt through secrecy or crisis. They become part of our ongoing conversation about who we are—and who we are still becoming. 

And perhaps that is the deeper invitation: not to avoid authentic desire, but to approach it with honesty, creativity, and courage—before life forces the conversation for us, as it has a way of doing. Just ask Antonio Banderas.

Bianca Milliern, LPC, works in our Frisco and Plano offices, as well as virtually.