What causes desire to misbehave, and what do you do when it does?
In the next sections, I’ll talk about the unlikely culprits for desire issues (hormones and monogamy) and the most likely culprits: brakes-hitting cultural messages and the relationship issue that I call the chasing dynamic.
And then I’ll talk about three evidence-based strategies for creating change. good news! it’s probably not your hormones If you’re experiencing pain with sex, talk to your medical provider— there may well be hormonal issues involved, along with a variety of neurological and physiological factors. But if you’re experiencing low 22 desire, hormones are the least likely culprits.Lori Brotto and her colleagues tested six hormonal factors to determine which predicted more or less dysfunction in women with low desire, and not one of them was 23significantly predictive of low desire.
So if it’s not your hormones, what has the research found to be predictive of low desire? According to Brotto, “developmental history, psychiatric history, and psychosexual history.” In other words, all that stuff from chapters 4 and 5—stress, depression, anxiety, trauma, attachment, etc.
People sometimes feel more comfortable with the idea that their sexual desire has everything to do with their chemistry and nothing to do with their life. After all, these days it’s easy to change your chemistry! But hormones are a small—often negligible—part of the context that shapes a woman’s sexual wellbeing, so changing them can make only a small—often negligible—impact. This is another reason why the keenly sought “pink Viagra” is such an unpromising approach. Stress, self-compassion, trauma history, relationship satisfaction, and other emotional factors have far more influence on a woman’s sexual desire than any hormone.
If you sometimes experience low desire, unless there’s some medical issue interfering, chances are you don’t have to fix yourself—you’re not broken—you only have to change your context. more good news! it’s not monogamy, either Much has been made in the last several years of the “unnaturalness” of monogamy and the death of erotic connection when people commit to a long-term, sexually exclusive relationship. By now you can probably anticipate my view of the subject: It’s the context that matters, and no two people are alike. Some monogamous couples create a context that sustains and enlivens desire, and some couples . . . don’t. It’s not that monogamy is
inherently bad for desire, it’s the way people do monogamy that can kill desire. If monogamy is your preferred relationship structure, this section is for you.
There are currently two general schools of thought on strategies for sustaining desire in long-term monogamous relationships. I’m going to frame them as the Esther Perel school and the John Gottman school, though that’s just a shorthand for a much richer and more complex issue.
In Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel presents a contradiction at the core of modern relationships: the antithetical pull between the familiar versus the novel, the stable versus the mysterious. We want love, which is about security and safety and stability, but we also want passion, which is about adventure and risk and novelty. Love is having. Desire is wanting. And you can want only what you don’t already have.
If the problem is that long-term love is antithetical to long-term passion, then the solution, says Perel, is to maintain autonomy, a space of eroticism inside yourself, as a way to maintain the distance necessary to allow wanting to emerge. In terms of that little monitor in your brain, the solution is to sustain just a little bit of dissatisfaction—not enough to cross into frustration and certainly not so much that you fall off the cliff into the pit of despair, but enough to nourish your curious, “moving-toward” energy. As 24 Perel puts it in her TEDx talk, “In desire, we want a bridge to cross.”This means intentionally adding distance that creates an edgy instability or uncertainty, a slight and enjoyable dissatisfaction.
By way of contrast, John Gottman, in The Science of Trust, says that the problem is not lack of distance and mystery but lack of deepening intimacy.
From this point of view, intimate conversation, affection, and friendship are central to the erotic life of a long-term relationship. Gottman reports the findings of a study of one hundred couples, all age forty-five or older, half with good sex lives and half with poor sex lives. Those who reported that they had good sex lives, he writes, “consistently mentioned: (1) maintaining a close, connected, and trusting friendship; and (2) making sex a priority in 25 their lives.”In other words, sustaining desire isn’t about having a bridge to cross but about building a bridge together.
“Turn toward each other’s desires,” says Gottman.
“Keep a comfortable distance,” says Perel.
Are you wondering who’s right?
They both are—depending, I think, on how you conceptualize “desire.”
Remember back in chapter 3, the distinction between eagerness and enjoying? For Perel, desire is eagerness. Wanting. Seeking. Craving. The 26discrepancy-reducing pursuit of a goal, to put it in romantic terms.
And for Gottman and the couples in the research he cites, desire has more to do with enjoying. Holding. Savoring. Allowing. Exploring this moment together, noticing what it is like, and liking it.
If you’ll allow a food metaphor, Perel’s style is about hunger as the secret sauce that makes a meal delicious. Gottman’s is about arriving home from work and cooking dinner with your partner, having a glass of wine while you cook, feeding each other all the strawberries you meant to keep for dessert, then sitting down together and savoring every mouthful. In the Perel style, you come to your partner with your fire already stoked. In the Gottman style, you stoke each other’s fire.
Though both approaches have a lot to offer, our culture generally values one higher than the other. The Mating in Captivity style of desire is higher adrenaline; it’s inherently exciting. We relish this kind of perpetual itch- scratch-relief-itch cycle. We like to want, so much that we can’t always separate the experience of wanting from the experience of liking.
The Science of Trust style of desire is lower adrenaline, more a celebration of sensation in context, a celebration of togetherness. My personal inclination is more toward Gottman’s style, while my twin sister said, “Why would closeness ever make anyone want more closeness?
Space! ” I know people who swear by one or the other. I know people who are too exhausted to try either. I know people who are convinced that one is the True Way to desire, even though I think they’d benefit by trying out the other. It’s a matter of fit. And I think that in the end, both are strategies for accomplishing the same overall goal: increasing activation of the accelerator and decreasing the brakes.
The goal of both approaches is to sustain curiosity: Perel suggests we sustain curiosity about our partner as viewed from a distance; Gottman suggests we sustain curiosity about the very nature of pleasure in the context of commitment. Both are clear that passion doesn’t happen automatically in a long-term, monogamous relationship. But they’re also both clear that passion does happen—as long as the couple takes deliberate control of the context. And every couple’s needs for context are unique.
Remember from chapter 4, sex that advances the plot? Sex that moves you toward a larger goal is powered by more than just the sexual response mechanism. It’s sex in which your stress and attachment mechanisms are collaborating with your sexual brakes and accelerator to increase sexual motivation. Both of these approaches do that, but in different ways.
Following Johnny’s revelation about the dials and switches and what Laurie is sensitive to, they decided to try one of those box subscriptions. Every few months, a box would come in the mail—like a Fruit of the Month thing, only instead of fruit they got kits with a sort of prefabricated sexy fantasy. They both feared it would be kind of cheesy, but they also figured it was worth a try. They were paying attention to context, and even though Johnny’s context was, “Give me two minutes to brush my teeth,” Laurie’s was, “Get me the heck out of mommy mode or I’ll never get to hey-sexy-lady mode.”
So the box arrived and they opened it together.
Their first impression was . . . well, disappointment.
“That was a lot of money for some arts-and-crafts supplies,” was how Laurie put it.
“We already have a vibrator,” was how Johnny put it.
But they thought, What the hell. We paid for these arts-and-crafts supplies. We got your mother to babysit. We made a hotel reservation.
Let’s just go, and whatever happens (or not), happens (or not).
The box included instruction, laying out their evening and some rules, but they didn’t follow the rules. They talked about it all in the car on the way to the hotel, laughing the whole time.
They had a pizza delivered and they kept talking about it, and talking about other things, too—work, kid, family. They just talked about stuff and remembered how much they like each other. Then Laurie had a bubble bath, taking a book of erotic stories with her into the tub.
I’ll fast-forward through the rest of the evening by suggesting you hum “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” to yourself for a few minutes.
At what point in the evening did Laurie start experiencing something she would describe as actual “desire”? About halfway through the massage Johnny gave her when she got out of the tub and strolled to the bed wearing nothing but a lacy bra and perfumed body lotion.