Come as You Are (34 page)

Bill Murray’s little monitor goes berserk. Boy howdy, is the world not following the rules, and nothing—not even dying!—is effective in reaching the goal.
What the hell?!

When you’re continually failing to reach a sexual incentive, your little monitor grows frustrated and then angered and eventually despairing. And that’s why it sometimes feels like an unpleasant internal experience. It’s not the desire itself that feels unpleasant, it’s your criterion velocity being unsatisfied. In other words, it’s not how you feel . . . it’s how you feel
about
how you feel.

•  •  •

When I teach about the little monitor, my students’ eyes widen and their jaws drop. The little monitor is a crucial part of your sexual wellbeing, but she shows up in nearly every domain of life. If you’ve felt the thrill of
winning a race or a game, that’s your little monitor having her criterion 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 around sexual desire:
¹⁷

• 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 order of life importance.
¹⁸
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 motivational system.
¹⁹
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 and are more interested in being in a comfortable, familiar environment.
²⁰
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 if you’re no longer curious.
²¹

•  •  •

So sexual desire works like curiosity.

When it works.

Which sometimes it doesn’t.

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 desire, hormones are the least likely culprits.
²²
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 significantly predictive of low desire.
²³

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 Perel puts it in her TEDx talk, “In desire, we want a bridge to cross.”
²⁴
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 their lives.”
²⁵
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 discrepancy-reducing pursuit of a goal, to put it in romantic terms.
²⁶

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.”