Untangling the knots of sexual dynamics in a relationship takes time, patience, and practice, but consistently using these strategies, which are based in the best available science, can put you on the right track. sharing your garden Just as women are often taught to trust cultural messages about their body more than their own internal sense of what’s healthy, we often trust our partner’s opinions and ideas about our sexuality more than we trust our own. Especially if our partner’s sexuality is a better match with the standard narrative about how sex is “supposed” to work, we’re ready to believe that we’re broken.
But you know better now, and you know how to make the most of any desire style. Embrace responsive desire. Adore it. It asks that your partner help you in creating good reasons for you to be turned on.
When you welcome someone new into your garden, remember, that person is used to working in their own garden, and that garden is different from yours. That person’s body, brakes and accelerator, the seeds that their family and culture planted, the way that person was taught to tend the garden, all may be similar to yours . . . or they may be totally different. If you and your partner are different from each other, remember that neither of you is better or worse—even if one of you conforms more to the cultural standard. A potato farmer would be plain old wrong to suggest that your roses should be growing underground. What works for aloe won’t work for tomatoes.
I hope that anyone you like and respect enough to invite into your garden likes and respects you, too. Just as you want to help the other person’s garden thrive, so the other person wants to help your garden thrive.
They just might not know how to do it.
So you have to teach your partner about responsive desire. You’re not broken, you’re a tomato plant in a world that expects you to be an aloe. If you thrive on more water, tell your partner, and celebrate it together. Say what contexts activate your accelerator, turn you on, and say what contexts hit your brakes, shut you off. Talk about the sexiest sex you’ve had together and what your partner can do to make it happen again.
Good things happen when you create space in your relationship for responsive desire. When Olivia and Patrick flipped their desire styles on their heads by making Patrick, with his context-sensitive desire style, the initiator, he had to figure out what exciting things
would propel him from idling to interested. Olivia patiently allowed Patrick space and time to explore his desire, and she was rewarded with an intensity of erotic experience that her own spontaneous style rarely allowed for.
This level of mutual acceptance and self-acceptance is itself a specific and vital characteristic of the most exuberantly sex-positive context. It requires not simply being aware of how each person’s sexuality works, but also accepting and welcoming those sexualities, just as they are. It’s not how your sexuality works that matters; it’s how you feel about your sexuality. How your partner feels about theirs. And how you both feel about each other’s.
That right there is the ultimate sex-positive context. And it’s what chapter 9 is about.
But before we get there, how about we talk about orgasm? tl;dr
• About 15 percent of women have a spontaneous desire style—they want sex out of the blue. Thirty percent experience responsive desire—they want sex only when something pretty erotic is already happening. The rest, about half of women, experience some combination of the two, depending on context. • Sex is not a drive, like hunger. It’s an “incentive motivation system,” like curiosity. So . . . stay curious. • When sex feels like a drive, it’s because of the little monitor in your emotional brain, whose job is to reduce discrepancies. The monitor motivates you to pursue novelty, pleasure, ambiguity, etc. • To increase sexual desire in a relationship, increase novelty, pleasure, ambiguity, and intensity (increase your heart rate!). See the worksheet on this page to find out how. turning off the offs This worksheet is designed to help you create a practical plan for turning off the offs. The research suggests it’s most effective when you repeat the four steps each day, but you can try doing it weekly, and even going through the exercise once would be great.
Step 1: Review your Sexy and Not-So-Sexy Contexts worksheets from chapter 3, where you identified the contexts that hit your brakes and activate your accelerator. Write a summary here: Brakes Accelerator
Step 2: All these brakes-hitting and accelerating-hitting contexts are your potential targets for change. Choose one that you could change if you
decided to try turning off the offs. List five things you and/or your partner could take to implement this strategy. Hint: The more concrete and specific
you are, the more useful this will be.
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Step 3: Anticipate barriers. What obstacles might you encounter?
Where and when—specifically—will this obstacle occur?
What could you do to prevent these obstacles?
What—specifically—will you do to get back to the goal if you face these obstacles?
Step 4: Think about what it would feel like to be a warm and erotic woman who is curious and playful about sex. What is it like? What else is true?
Some questions to consider: • What strategies would you use to create more time for sex? • What would give you more energy for sex? • What aspects of your relationship would enhance sex?
• What challenges in your relationship would you like to overcome? • What would your relationship with your body be like? • How would you initiate sex? • How would you respond when your partner initiated? • What sexual cues would you notice? • What kinds of thoughts would you have about sex? • How do you feel about your partner’s sexual arousal, desire, and orgasm? • How would you feel about your own desire, arousal, and orgasm? • How would you feel about giving pleasure? • How would you feel about receiving pleasure? • How would you manage the cultural shaming that some people would try to impose on you for being empowered and in control of your own body? • What would be your favorite thing about your sexuality?
Examples: • I can lose myself in my partner’s touch and experience pleasure in the moment, without worrying about orgasm. • I would think about the sexy and romantic interludes I’ve shared with my partner and let
that build up my desire. • I want sex even if we’re arguing. • All the doors and windows are open on my sexuality—I’m a big exuberant YES. • I won’t let anything get in the way of pleasure. • I would allow myself to want what I want and not judge it. • Exploring my sexuality is more exciting than scary. • I would turn to sex and pleasure in times of distress. • Sex isn’t separate from the rest of my life—it’s a part of my life, and my life is a part of it. • There’s no pressure to be or do anything that isn’t 100 percent of what feels right to me.