Come as You Are (32 page)

• This difference between women and men doesn’t mean women are broken; it means they’re
women.

• The best way to tell if a woman is aroused is not to notice what her genitals are doing but to
listen to her words.

seven

desire

ACTUALLY, IT’S NOT A DRIVE

It’s a basic fact of their relationship that Olivia wants sex more often than Patrick does, so she ends up initiating most of the time. But Olivia’s experience of being the target of Patrick’s placebo-powered rampant lust the previous night had given her a powerful insight: It had felt good to be
open
to sex, without feeling
driven
to have sex. It had felt good to
allow
sexual desire to pull her gradually and gently toward sex, rather than feeling like it was pushing her.

So as the next step in their experiment, they tried flipping their usual dynamic on its head. They set a “date night” and then didn’t do anything to prepare; they just showed up that night in their usual states of mind—Olivia ready to go, Patrick not disinterested, but not actively interested either.

And they made Olivia follow her partner’s lead, while Patrick started to explore what kinds of things he could do to shift himself into active interest. They spent a lot of time “preheating the oven”: kissing and talking and massaging—and, surprisingly, a little adventure, moving from the bedroom to the kitchen to feed each other. When Patrick was in charge with full permission to do whatever occurred to him, they tried new things and played together. They learned a lot about what context worked for Patrick, because he had to
create
that context, had to ask for what felt right.

They learned a surprising thing about Olivia, too: When she stayed still enough to move at Patrick’s pace rather than her own naturally faster pace, the gradual buildup and the sustained arousal and the necessity of holding herself back created a context that wasn’t just as good as the context that worked for her. It was
unbelievably better.

Olivia emailed me: “One of the rules we set was I had to ask for permission before I had an orgasm. And he did not always say yes when I asked. Um, we’ll be doing that again.”

In other words: Creating a great sex-positive context for the lower-desire partner resulted in a context that was mind-blowingly, almost painfully erotic for the higher-desire partner.

This chapter is about why and how that works.

Imagine a world where everyone has desert plants in their gardens—aloe plants and dragon trees and fiddlenecks and yuccas—and everyone knows how to tend them: lots of sun, very little water.

And imagine that you happen to have a tomato plant in your garden.

Everybody “knows,” in this desert world, that plants need very little water, so you water your tomato plant sparingly . . . and it slowly dies. You wonder, “Maybe I’m watering it too often? Maybe there’s not enough sun?” And you continue to water and watch, and you wonder, “Why is it dying? I’m doing what I’m supposed to do!”

A tiny shift in knowledge—the bare fact that tomato plants are better adapted to a subtropical climate than to a desert, so they thrive on more water—can change how you tend your garden . . . which can bring your tomato plant back to life.

Now, if someone comes along and offers this bare fact, there still will be those who say, “Plants don’t need lots of water, that’s part of what it means to be a healthy plant!” Others will say, “Tomato plants are crazy—broken!—to need all that water!” Some will search for a remedy for the tomato plant, to make it more like an aloe. And there will be tomato
gardeners who simply can’t let go of the idea that they’re supposed to be able to produce abundant fruit on almost no water at all, and they will do anything to have a tomato plant that thrives in the desert.

But you try it. You give your tomato plant more water.

And you go from “Why is it dying?” to “Wow!” as you’re rewarded with abundant fruit and lush, fragrant greens. All because of a tiny shift in knowledge.

This chapter is about one such tiny shift in knowledge, which can move your relationship with your sexual wellbeing from “Why is it dying?” to “Wow!” And it’s this: responsive desire.
¹

Responsive, in contrast to spontaneous desire.

The standard narrative of sexual desire is that it just
appears
—you’re sitting at lunch or walking down the street, maybe you see a sexy person or think a sexy thought, and
pow!
you’re saying to yourself, “I would like some sex!” This is how it works for maybe 75 percent of men and 15 percent of women.
²
That’s Olivia. That’s “spontaneous” desire.

But some people find that they begin to want sex only
after
sexy things are already happening. And they’re normal. They don’t have “low” desire, they don’t suffer from any ailment, and they don’t long to initiate but feel like they’re not allowed to. Their bodies just need some more compelling reason than, “That’s an attractive person right there,” to want sex. They are sexually satisfied and in healthy relationships, which means that lack of spontaneous desire for sex is not, in itself, dysfunctional or problematic! Let me repeat: Responsive desire is
normal and healthy
.
³
And it’s how roughly 5 percent of men and 30 percent of women experience desire. That’s Camilla. Only about 6 percent of women lack both spontaneous and responsive desire.
⁴

You’ll notice this leaves about half of women and about one in five men unaccounted for. These are folks whose desire style is probably—drumroll, please—context dependent. That’s Merritt and Laurie. And they’re normal, too.

But actually? It turns out everyone’s sexual desire is responsive and context dependent. It just
feels
more spontaneous for some and more
responsive for others, because even though we’re all made of the same parts, the different organizations of those parts results in different experiences.

So in this chapter I’ll explain what responsive desire is, how it works, how to make the most of it, and what to do if you and your partner have different desire styles.

We’ll start with where desire comes from: Desire is arousal in context. And then we’ll talk about what desire is not—it’s not a drive, not a “hunger”—and why that matters so much. Which will bring us to the surprising truth about what desire is: It’s curiosity. When we understand how curiosity works, we’ll also understand why sex sometimes feels like a drive, even though it never is. We’ll spend some time talking about what’s unlikely to cause desire problems—hormones and monogamy—and what is much more likely to cause desire problems—sex-negative culture and the chasing dynamic.

And we’ll wrap up the chapter with three strategies for maximizing desire, based in the best available evidence.

desire = arousal in context

Here’s how sexual desire really works. First,
arousal
begins when you activate the accelerator and take pressure off the brake—turn on the ons and turn off the offs. (And of course, because you’ve read chapter 6, you know that arousal is what happens between your ears, not what happens between your legs.) And then
desire
comes along when arousal meets a great context.

People can experience this in a variety of ways,
⁵
depending on the context and the sensitivity of their brakes and accelerator. To illustrate, let’s think through three different scenarios, each with the same stimulation, same brakes and accelerator, but different contexts.

Scenario 1.
You’re feeling very calm and happy and trusting, not doing anything in particular, and your partner comes over and touches your arm affectionately. The touch travels from your arm, up your spine, to your
brain. In this state of mind, your central nervous system is very quiet, there’s very little other traffic, and the sensation of your partner’s touch says, “Hey, so, this is happening. What do you think?” And your brain says, “Affection feels nice.” The stimulation continues, your beloved partner touching your arm affectionately, and the sensation travels up to your brain and says, “This is happening some more. What do you think?” And your brain says, “Affection feels
really
nice,” and tunes its attention more to that sensation. Then your partner starts kissing your throat, and that sensation makes its way to your emotional brain and says, “Now this is happening, too. What do you think?” And by then the brain says, “That is fantastic! Go get more of that!” In that context, sexual desire feels
responsive.

Scenario 2.
You’re stressed, exhausted, or overwhelmed, it’s very noisy in your brain, there’s heavy traffic, lots of yelling and horns honking about all the stuff that’s stressing you out. Your partner’s affectionate touch travels from your arm, up your spine, to your brain, and it says, “This is happening. What do you think?” And your brain says, “WHAT? I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER ALL THIS NOISE!” And by then the sensation is over. (Sensations are a little bit like Snapchat.) If your partner keeps touching you, the sensation keeps asking your brain, “This is still happening. What do you think?” And eventually it might get your brain’s attention, and your brain might say, “ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I’VE GOT ALL THIS OTHER NOISE TO CONTEND WITH!” And if the sensation ever gets noticed enough to expand out of your brain’s emotional One Ring, it comes out in the form of, “Not now, honey.”

Scenario 3.
Your sexy, sexy partner has been away for two weeks, but you’ve been sending each other frequent texts, which started out flirty but have been gradually escalating in explicitness and intensity as you get more and more into teasing and tormenting each other. By the end of the two weeks, just the sound of your phone receiving a text makes you gasp and tremble. There’s noise in your brain, but all of it is chanting, “Sexy, sexy partner!” By the time your partner gets home and touches your arm affectionately, you’re set to go off like a rocket. In that context, sexual desire feels
spontaneous.
⁶

Camilla and Henry had embraced her erotic “slow heater” and were collaborating to find contexts that activated her accelerator. But Henry was left with a lingering discomfort that it felt forced to do things to turn Camilla on when she wasn’t already “in the mood.” It felt somehow unnatural.

Sometimes you can watch a fact drop into a person’s brain like ink into water. I saw it happen when I explained to Camilla and Henry that, in fact, her desire style was totally normal.

“Arousal comes first, before desire—for everyone, not just Camilla,” I said.

“Arousal comes first?” Henry said.

“Yup. Desire emerges when arousal crosses the person’s individual threshold. Camilla, you happen to have a high threshold, but it’s the same basic process for everyone.”

“You are kidding me,” Camilla said. “Seriously, has pop culture gotten
anything
right about sex?”

Henry didn’t give me a chance to answer—this was important for him, the solution to his turn-Camilla-on-when-she-doesn’t-yet-want-sex conundrum. “You’re saying we just have different thresholds, is that right?”

“Right.”

For Henry, sometimes just seeing Camilla walking around after a shower was all the arousal it took to activate desire. He said, “And I like that! I like seeing her walking around all damp and naked. I wouldn’t want her to stop doing it just because I wasn’t turned on before I saw her. So . . . if the equivalent is true for you”—he turned to Camilla—“I don’t have to feel uncomfortable creating equivalent contexts for you, right?”

“I want you to!” said Camilla. “Tease my ticking pilot light! Build up the water pressure!”

So that’s what they decided to do. Henry turned everything into low-key, no-pressure, zero-expectation foreplay, the way her walking around after a shower was a kind of low-level foreplay for him. Cuddling and touching. Slow kisses. Flowers. Affectionate attention. Like when they were first falling in love—a constant, steady stream of reminders that, “This guy is amazing!”

Henry loves Camilla’s enthusiastic desire, and all it takes to get her there is enough stimulation, built up gradually.

This is not a story we see very much in pop culture because it’s not about tension and ambivalence. But it turns out this is how it works for a lot of women.

not a drive. for real.

A lot of women, on learning that they have a responsive or context-sensitive desire style, feel instantly relieved to know that there’s nothing wrong with them, that they just need more of a reason to have sex than folks with a spontaneous style do. They get busy understanding the contexts that make them hot and talking with their partner about ways to increase access to those contexts.

But some women feel disappointed, and I can understand that. Many of us have been taught that the capacity to want sex in almost any context is not only preferable but actually the only “normal” way to experience desire. The spontaneous desire style is so privileged in our culture, so valued, that it’s easy to feel disempowered if that’s not your primary style.