velocity satisfied—effort-to-progress ratio met or exceeded! If you’ve experienced road rage, that’s your little monitor’s how-long-this-trip- should-be-taking criterion velocity going unmet—effort-to-progress ratio much too large! If you’ve ever collapsed in a hopeless heap in the face of failure, that’s your little monitor reassessing a goal state as unattainable, uncontrollable. The little monitor and her opinions about how effortful things should be is the foundation of a wide range of frustrations and satisfactions, sexual desire not least among them. impatient little monitors Our culture absolutely teaches us to have impatient little monitors, with criterion velocities set as small as they can be, which means many of us are easily frustrated, enraged, and eventually despairing when we can’t get what we want—including sex. We can extend this, too, and notice how responsive-desire folks feel about their “lack” of desire: If you feel like you should want sex, but you don’t, you’ll begin to get frustrated . . . and will that frustration make you more likely to want sex?
Quite the opposite.
The little monitor is a gremlin of irony.
Unlike the One Ring and the brakes and accelerator, we can create intentional change in the little monitor. Actually, humans may be the only species that can do something deliberate about this kind of frustration, and I bet if you think critically about it for a minute you can work out how to do it.
There are three potential targets of change, right?
There’s the goal. For spontaneous folks, the goal is the object of desire, and for responsive folks, the goal is the desire itself. There’s the effort you’re putting in. And there’s the effort-to-progress ratio that causes you to feel satisfied or dissatisfied, the criterion velocity. So that means there are three questions to ask yourself when you’re experiencing frustrations
17around sexual desire: • Is this the right goal for me? • Am I putting in the right kind of effort, as well as the right amount? • Am I realistic in my expectation about how effortful this goal should be?
In terms of managing sexual desire in your relationship, the key is to differentiate between the desire and your feelings about the desire. The skill from chapter 4 of staying over your own emotional center of gravity (treating your Feels like a sleepy hedgehog) will come in handy, as you
make sure you take responsibility for your own feelings and ask for support from your partner.
Another useful skill in managing your little monitor is to work with the natural prioritization of different goals, as I described in chapter 4. There are all kinds of novelty and ambiguity to investigate in the world, and the monitor has only a limited amount of attention, so she has to prioritize what domains of life to pay attention to, and these domains rank themselves in 18 order of life importance.Sexual arousal draws the monitor’s focus toward sex, prioritizes sex, only when there aren’t other, more important things for her to concentrate on, such as survival. And again, stress is a survival response—escape the lion!—so it deprioritizes sex for most people.
Effectively managing the context—turning off the offs—minimizes the things that can draw the little monitor’s attention away from sex.
A third and final skill for coping with a dissatisfied monitor is to reconceptualize sexual desire from a need to the kind of system it really is: curiosity.
Curiosity (or “Exploration” or “Seeking”) is, like sex, a basic biological 19 motivational system.It fuels our innate desire to investigate novelty and resolve ambiguity. And curiosity, like sex, is deprioritized when you’re stressed. If you’re anxious or depressed, you are less curious about novelty 20and are more interested in being in a comfortable, familiar environment.
This won’t surprise you because you read chapter 3, and you remember the rat in the ordinary chamber, the spa chamber, and the Iggy Pop chamber. In a calm state of mind, pretty much anything will evoke curious, “What’s this?” exploration, while in a stressed state of mind, almost nothing will.
And like sex, curiosity has no baseline to which you need to return; instead it has a delightful satisfaction toward which it pulls you. No one ever died because of not managing to read the end of a mystery novel, find out why grass is green, or experience what it’s like to skydive.
What I like most about curiosity as an analogy for sex is that it means your partner is not an animal to be hunted for sustenance, but a secret keeper whose hidden depths are infinite. Sexual boredom can happen only
21if you’re no longer curious.
• • •
So sexual desire works like curiosity.
When it works.
Which sometimes it doesn’t.