Authors: Emily Nagoski
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?
Orgasm.
But that’s chapter 8.
maximizing desire . . . with science! part 3: desperate measures
If you and your partner are locked into the chasing dynamic and things have escalated so far that none of the strategies I’ve just described sound helpful, therapy is probably a good option for you. In particular, if either partner is experiencing dread when wanting to experience desire, therapy may be your best strategy. Dread, after all, is what happens when
expecting
combines with
eagerness
. . . but it’s
eagerness
to move away, rather than toward. When the context is wrong, you’re like the rat hearing Iggy Pop; almost any stimulation is met with “
What the hell is this
?”, so it hardly matters what you do—everything feels like a bad idea. When you’re stuck in that mode: therapy. It is genuinely effective, when the relationship is sound!
If you’d like to try a therapy-like approach on your own, you can adapt the following ideas in whatever way suits your relationship. Here’s the basic structure.
1.
No Sex.
That means no genital contact and no orgasms for, say, a month—or two weeks, or three months. Long enough to feel like a substantial barrier. The purpose of this is to remove every trace of expectation or demand that sex will be the result of any physical contact between you. There might be other things you put off-limits, too—anything that the lower-desire Partner B resists because of feeling pushed. Without the dread of, “Ugh, what if this perfectly pleasant kiss turns into an expectation of sex that I still don’t want?” both of you can relax and enjoy the physical intimacy you do share.
2.
Alternate Initiation.
Each person initiates at least once a week. Or once every other week if that seems like too much. Or three times a week if it seems like too little. The number doesn’t matter much, just negotiate a number that both of you feel is doable. The function of this rule is to break down the chasing dynamic so that neither feels pressured and neither feels deprived.
Since you have the no-sex rule, what you’re initiating isn’t sex, but rather sensual touching (see the stages below for details). No demand, no expectations, no pressure to “perform.” Just touching and pleasure and affectionate awareness of bodies. At some point during the day or else right when you go to bed, one partner indicates that they are initiating sensual touching—verbally, nonverbally, whatever works. Find at least twenty minutes of uninterrupted time when you can focus on each other and be attentive and present, without distractions. If initiation happens at an inconvenient time, negotiate a better one and do it then.
A standard approach to sex therapy is to progress along stages. You spend a week or two at each stage, alternating who initiates the gradually escalating sensual touching. Like this:
Stage 1.
One person touches the other (excluding body parts that underwear covers)
for the toucher’s pleasure
, and then they switch.
Stage 2.
One person touches the other (excluding body parts that underwear covers) for their own
and their partner’s pleasure
, and then they switch.
Stage 3.
One person touches the other, now including genitals and breasts, for
both partners’ pleasure
, and then they switch.
Stage 4.
Simultaneous touching for
mutual pleasure.
And then penetration, if that’s a thing that happens in your relationship, first without any thrusting (“vaginal containment”) and then, in the final stage, with thrusting but without orgasm. But you don’t have to follow this series of stages. You can negotiate a variation that works for both of you.
The person doing the touching must practice “self-assertion” and the person being touched must practice “self-protection.” That is, in the first stage especially, the toucher must do what feels good, and the touchee must say when the toucher should stop doing something that feels uncomfortable. Some couples find it useful to use a scale, like –10 to +10, and the toucher stops doing anything below a –2. Some couples use a traffic light system—green light for pleasure, yellow for neutral, and red for “Stop that.” The purpose of self-protection and self-assertion is to untangle the knots in sexual communication by simplifying it down to “This feels good to me” and “I don’t like that,” without blame or judgment.
As you can imagine, Feels emerge in this process, Lots of Feels. The real challenge with this strategy is not the stages or alternating initiation,
but creating space for both people’s Feels, even when they conflict with each other. If you’re good at creating that space as a couple, this approach could be really terrific for you. If you are too stuck in your own points of view to take each other’s points of view seriously . . . therapy. Really. It helps! The research says so!
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• • •
The larger solution underpinning all three of these approaches is attitudinal rather than behavioral. Feeling like there’s something wrong with you (or with your partner) or feeling like your partner feels there’s something wrong with you—these are desire killers, every time.
So look, I’ve got a message for Partner B, the one who feels chased. I’m going to say something, and you’re going to believe me because all the scientific evidence is on my side. Actually, you’ll believe me because what I’m about to say is
true.
Because in the patient corners of your heart, you’ve always known it’s true. It’s this:
You’re not broken. You are whole. And there is hope.
You might feel stuck. You might be exhausted. You feel depressed, anxious, worn out by the demands of taking care of everyone else, and in desperate, dire need of renewal. You might be tired of feeling like you need to defend yourself and tired of wishing your body would do something different. You might wish that, for a little while, someone else would defend you so that you could lower your guard and just
be.
Just for a while.
Those are circumstances, they’re not
you. You
are okay. You are whole. There exists inside you a sexuality that protects you by withdrawing until times are propitious.
I completely get how terribly frustrating it can be that your partner’s body feels like times are propitious
right now
, while your body is still wary. And it’s even worse because the more ready your partner’s body seems, the more wary your body becomes. It sucks, for both of you.
But it’s in there, your sexuality. It’s part of you, as much as your skin and your heartbeat and your vocabulary. It’s there. It’s waiting. Just because you’ve had no call to use the words “calefacient” or “perfervid”
lately doesn’t mean they’re no longer available to you. If the opportunity arises, there they will be, ready, waiting. Like your best friend, your sexual desire is waiting for your life to allow it to come out and play. Let it, whenever it feels safe enough.
And a brief message to Partner A—the one who wants sex and keeps asking for it: I know that it can feel like Partner B is withholding and I know that that can feel
deeply awful.
Your role in untangling your relationship knots is very difficult because it requires you to put down your hurts and be loving to the person who, it sometimes seems, is the source of those hurts. Boy, is that hard.
I know, too, that sometimes you may start to worry that you want sex too often, that you’re making unreasonable demands or that you’re sick to want sex as much as you do. No, you just have a higher level of sexual interest than your partner does—your parts are organized in a different way. It’s normal. Neither of you is broken, you just need to collaborate to find a context that works for both of you.
Give Partner B space and time away from sex. Let sex drop away from your relationship—for a little while—and be there, fully present, emotionally and physically. Lavish your partner with affection, on the understanding that affection is not a preamble to sex. Be warm and generous with your love. You won’t run out.
Put simply, the best way to deal with differential desire is:
Be kind to each other.
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.