whatever excites you, whatever literally gets your heart beating faster.
You’ll experience general arousal, and your brain will notice your level of excitement, notice the person you’re with, and decide, “Hey, I guess this person is really exciting!”
Strategy 2: Meaningful Challenges. To reinforce commitment and 29 deepen connection, go for novelty and shared, meaningful challenge.Play out a lifelong sexual fantasy that you’ve always wanted to try but haven’t found the courage to explore. Turn on the lights—not to put on a show but to open your eyes and look at each other’s faces. Connect. Dive into trust in a big, risky way. Give yourselves, as a couple, something important to work toward. This is a research-based way to “advance the plot” in a relationship that is already at the “happily ever after” phase.
Caveat: Neither of these strategies will work if the brakes are on!
Arousal-oriented strategies are accelerator-activating strategies, but it doesn’t matter how much you push the accelerator if the brakes are on.
You’ll rev the engine and go nowhere.
So if you’re looking to increase activation of the accelerator, try these two strategies. But if you need to find a way to stop hitting the brakes, read on. maximizing desire . . . with science! part 2: turning
off the offs Take a look at your context worksheets from chapter 3 and then check out the worksheet at the end of this chapter.
You’ll notice that these worksheets require several things, all of which research has found help people to bridge the gap between where they are now and where they want to be.
1. Make a Plan. Be concrete and specific, not abstract and vague. What precisely will you do that will help turn off the brakes? What past experiences do you have that tells you your strategy could work? When exactly will you connect sexually with yourself or your partner?
Where will you be? What will you have done immediately before, and what will you do immediately after? What will you wear (or not wear)? Put simply: What sex is worth having, and what will you do to create it in your life? Concrete. Specific. Detailed.
2. Anticipate Barriers. A lot of people skip this step, and that’s a mistake. It’s easy to feel that simply having a plan should be enough. I don’t know if it should be, but I know that it almost never is, because as soon as you bump into an unanticipated barrier, your whole plan could collapse in on itself. You might think, “Well, it’s important to me, so I’ll find a way. I’ll just wing it if I hit an obstacle.” Great! I’m glad it’s important. In fact, don’t try it if it’s not important! And, at the same time, if just “finding a way” were enough, then you wouldn’t need to create change in the first place, you’d already have found your way. Anticipate barriers and 30make contingency plans.
3. Connect It to Your Identity. Don’t just run, be a runner. Don’t just have sex, be a deliciously erotic woman who is curious and playful about sex. If you run because you have to or you feel like you’re supposed to, rather than because it’s part of who you are, you won’t run very far or very often, and you probably won’t enjoy it much when you do. And if you have sex because you have to or you feel like you’re supposed to, you won’t have much sex and you probably won’t enjoy it when you do. Don’t just decide to have sex, try on the identity of a woman who loves sex.
All three are important for effectively creating change, but if I had to pick one as the most important, I’d say it’s identity. You can make a perfect plan—concrete, specific, detailed, with creative and realistic strategies for dealing with whatever barriers you may meet—but if it’s not important to you, you won’t do anything with it. And an efficient way to make the plan important is to make it central to your identity.
Many women find it empowering to try on the identity of “woman who loves sex.” It feels like finding the perfect wedding dress or house—it might need some alterations before it’s exactly right for your life, but you can feel the connection there. If that’s what it’s like for you, let the identity guide you as you think through your plan and your anticipated barriers. “If I were a woman who loved sex, how would I deal with feeling too busy for sex?” or “As a woman who loves sex, what’s my best strategy for overcoming self-criticism?”
For other women, the identity of “woman who loves sex” doesn’t feel right at all—at least, not at first. If you find it difficult to embody the identity of a woman who loves sex, that’s crucial information! Think about what makes that identity feel like such an uncomfortable fit. Are the “offs” you’re attempting to turn off tied to your identity? The more they are, the more your brain and body will hold on to them, not want to let them go.
Feeling stressed, depressed, anxious, self-critical, untrusting in your relationship, or simply exhausted and overwhelmed are all real and meaningful barriers to sex. Remember how the monitor in your emotional brain prioritizes, based on survival needs. If your answer is simply, “I’m too damn tired and lonely to be a woman who loves sex,” that’s a fantastic answer! It means that your fatigue and loneliness are hitting your brakes— which is normal and makes perfect sense in terms of context-sensitive or responsive desire—and the way to turn off your brakes is to get more rest and find more connection with loved ones you trust. Those are not easy things to do—if they were easy, you’d be doing them already—but they are important, even without the incentive of having more and better sex.
Sometimes it comes down to a struggle between different identities: the woman who’s passionate about her job and the woman who’s passionate about sex. The woman who keeps herself safe by shutting down and the woman who opens up and takes the risk. The woman who believes she’s not good enough and beats herself up for it and the woman who knows she is good enough and gently grants herself permission to try new things and make mistakes.
There are whole values systems that go with these identities, and the identity you have now didn’t just appear out of nowhere. But as I described in chapter 5, a lot of the factors that shaped your sexual self were not chosen by you. You didn’t choose your garden or what got planted in it in the early years of your life. Now is the time to evaluate what you learned and decide what you want to keep and what you want to replace. And listen: Sometimes you don’t have any control over how stressful your life is, and when that happens, it’s perfectly rational to let sex take a backseat. You don’t have to increase your desire for sex. But you can, if it matters to you.
You can, by turning off the offs.
Brakes are Merritt’s big challenge, so she tried out “connect it to your identity.” And the first thing that happened is she got really angry.
“Why should I have to love sex?” she stormed to Carol. “Why can’t I just be a woman who doesn’t want sex? I’m tired of all the pressure to want sex more than I do and be a person I’m not!”
So she did a remarkable thing. She made that her identity: “I’m a woman who doesn’t want sex.” For a while, she made her identity out of saying no. Angrily.
You’ll remember from chapter 4 that anger is a “fight” stress response, and that stress responses are cycles that want to complete.
Merritt’s life had afforded plenty of opportunities to start these cycles but not nearly enough opportunities to complete them. She would just get angry and then shut herself down, get angry and shut herself down, hitting the brakes in the middle of the cycle. So she had a big backlog of incomplete stress response cycles.
Gloria Steinem said, “The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.” What she didn’t say is how to get from being pissed off to being free. The way to do it is to complete the cycle, walk through the tunnel.
So Merritt let herself experience her anger, because for the first time she was less afraid of the anger itself than of what might happen to her if she kept the anger locked up inside her forever. She let it all out.
And she made a fantastic choice about where to put all that nonspecific anger: She channeled it into her writing, allowing her main character to brutally kill an enemy—and she shook and cried, teeth gritted, while she wrote. She could equally have channeled it into her morning walk, letting herself get aggressive with the big hills . . . or she could have channeled it inappropriately toward her family, taking her nonspecific anger and trying to make it specifically about them, using her anger as a weapon against others. But she’s smarter than that. She made writing her outlet.
And the anger did what anger does when you allow it to blow through you like a strong wind: It blew itself out. It took some time, and it was uncomfortable. She had multiple decades of accumulated stuff to finish, and even a couple weeks of “no!” was just a beginning.
But what mattered most was that she had given herself permission to feel the anger and was learning the skill of allowing it to move through her, rather than holding on to it. She didn’t do anything with it, she didn’t direct it toward anyone, she just released it into the world, she just allowed it. Merritt trusted her body to release all that pent-up rage. She visualized it settling into the hole in the ozone layer.
Then one day, her anger blew itself into quietness, and into that silence she could ask herself, “So if I don’t want sex, what do I want?”
She remembered the lube night, how good it felt to give pleasure, and the answers came fast and furious. She wanted to give pleasure, to connect, to receive pleasure and share it with the love of her life. To experience pleasure—all kinds of pleasure, but the pleasures of her own body especially—without the defenses that had kept her safe in an unsafe world.
It wasn’t that she had never before had pleasure in her life, but it was so walled up by her self-protection that it couldn’t expand beyond a small imprisoned domain within her.
When she focused on her partner’s pleasure, her brakes weren’t activated. She knew that much. How was she going to let go and experience pleasure for herself?