Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (56 page)

Women’s sexual desire is rooted in human evolution. This would be a lot of desire, if Bonobos and humans were sexually similar. But the similarity stops at a unique human quirk: We are the only primates whose females lost their heat!

Why would such a thing happen? Why did women lose their heat?

Is it possible women’s heat intimidated men? Did men breed heat out of women through sexual selection? Man’s emergent reflected sense of self may have demanded it. Perhaps he didn’t want women making him feel sexually inadequate all the time.

Women’s ability to have multiple orgasms may be a remnant of heat. Or maybe men bread multiple orgasms into women by sexual selection. Women’s multiple orgasms may have been more ego-gratifying to prehistoric men than heat-driven sexual aggressiveness. Perhaps men liked women writhing in orgasmic bliss while they thrust in their mighty phalluses. Perhaps they preferred to play out this drama with women who came easily, and multiple times. Over millions of years, could men have bred women for multiple orgasms? Is this why 30 percent of women today can orgasm during intercourse? No one knows.

Humans have another interesting sexual characteristic: Most long-term partners don’t fuck their spouse. Why is this important? Because Mother Nature didn’t spend millions of years building a capacity in your brain, and then tell you not to use it.
Fucking, doing
, and
being done
takes your primate animalness and smacks it up against your most evolved brain faculties. Your forebears evolved a prefrontal neocortex that created Tantric Buddhism. This means you are an animal who can use sex to achieve spiritual enlightenment and self-transcendence. As sexual potential goes in the animal kingdom, you are at the top.

Remember that when you’re struggling with desire problems, because this is how your species got there.

So why don’t long-term couples fuck? For that matter, how come many young couples don’t fuck either? Would you be surprised if I told you it has to do with differentiation?

People don’t fuck with their support systems. Couples who fuck at the beginning of their relationship stop later on. Other couples copulate for years and still have no idea something else exists. Many couples are virgins when it comes to fucking.

Like Nicolle and Phillip, most couples don’t fuck. Is this anything more than limited experience or sexual hang-ups? What if this involves ongoing human evolution that’s as much a part of the saga as women losing their heat? I propose it does, that it has to do with Four Points of Balance (just like everything else you’ve read in this book): You can’t
do
your spouse if you depend on each other for validation.

If there’s a good place for wantonness, you’d think it would be your marriage. Wanton sex is the kind of sex lots of people want. Woody Allen says, “Sex
is
dirty, that’s why you should save it for someone you love!” We laugh at the joke, but we don’t believe it.

It’s hard to fuck your spouse in the most wholesome, erotic sense. It’s a lot easier to fuck a stranger, or a “fuck buddy,”
²⁰⁸
or someone
else’s
wife or husband. This is the paradox of partner-swapping and affairs: You’re dying to fuck someone whose mate doesn’t want to. Letting your eroticism loose with these people doesn’t challenge your sense of self as much as fucking your spouse.

It feels easier to validate fucking in an affair because (a) you’re both there for sex, (b) your girlfriend or boyfriend is busy stroking your reflected sense of self, and (c) you’re in a collusive alliance to not see or be seen by each other. That’s why people who are a sexual dud in their marriage may be “swinging from the chandeliers” in an affair.

Nicolle wasn’t having an affair, but sometimes she wished she was. In the meantime, her sex life revolved around Phillip’s reflected sense of self. She knew he would have a hard time knowing she had fucked other men. When they first met, Nicolle felt her sexual past was none of his business. Once they started a sexual relationship and she began to care about him, Nicolle realized Phillip didn’t know about fucking. She wondered if it actually involved not letting himself fuck. Nicolle didn’t set out to plant a false picture in Phillip’s mind about her past, but she didn’t correct it when she realized he didn’t know this part of her.

Fucking is wanton and naughty. Adding it to your repertoire demands greater acceptance of your sexuality. Fucking
your
spouse brings your conflicts about love, intimacy, carnality, and spirituality right to the surface. That’s why you may be hiding the fact that you know anything about this.

Fucking involves nuances of meaning, particularly of the lusty, lascivious, desirous, carnal, and wanton variety. Fucking can’t be reduced to particular behaviors or positions, just like intimacy isn’t reducible to communication exercises. Mind-mapping plays a
big
role. Your brain is able to create these meanings, and detect and respond to them as they arise (or don’t). For people who like to fuck, that’s more important than having an orgasm. But given a choice, it’s the way they want to reach orgasm too.

According to my informal research, fewer than one in four people know about fucking.
²⁰⁹
Do you? Has anyone ever fucked you? Not just brought you to orgasm—really
fucked
you. I can usually identify people who know: They reveal themselves with an instantaneous (and somewhat self-conscious) smile. (Are you smiling now?)

Fucking
starts before physical foreplay: You send massive sexual vibes even before you get into the bedroom. The mind-mapping starts long before you hit the sheets. During sex, from foreplay to exhaustion, you follow the connection. Your physical movements remain deadly erotic whether they are slow or fast.

Fucking
involves a sexual experience distinct from “making love” in the traditional sense, in that sexual aggression is front and center. People who like to fuck argue there’s no finer form of love making.
Being fucked
involves surrender, union, and the power of receiving. Relaxing into it, opening up to it with no ticklishness and no pulling back. Just,
“Yeah! Do me!”
Why wouldn’t you want to do this with someone you love?

Fucking
and
being fucked
are positions in a relationship, just like being the high or low desire partner. They are roles in an erotic collaborative alliance that include a dose of healthy aggression and, sometimes, a sprinkling of competitiveness. It
isn’t
true, however, that high desire
partners are more into fucking and low desire partners only like to be fucked. Lots of high desire partners are
dying
to be fucked, but their partners won’t oblige. They are more likely to be fighting to have sex at all.

Lots of women are low desire partners
and
sex-starved wives. You can be both, and many women are. It messes with your mind. Most people think the low desire partner doesn’t have much desire for sex. But, as you see with Nicolle, that’s not necessarily true. How can you have no desire for sex with your husband, and be starving for sex at the same time? Unfortunately, it’s all too easy.

Healthy aggression plays an important role in fucking the one you love. Not the raw, hurtful sadism partners inflict on each other. Healthy aggression comes from digesting your “dark” side through your Four Points of Balance, turning dirty aggression and normal marital sadism into something useful. Differentiation is about self-modulation, about not inflicting yourself on others. There’s a place for using your partner
well
in the service of personal growth, intimacy, and love. That place opens up after several passes through emotional gridlock.

There’s room for your partner to dislike one thing or another. In fucking, an “I don’t care how we do this” attitude generally prevails. Fucking your partner requires being aggressive, passionate, playful, adventurous, and generous. You may be stroking her body, but you’re aiming for her mind. You focus your intentions and let her map your mind. Your goal is to create an intense mind and body connection around a particular co-constructed, multi-dimensional, phenomenological, intersubjective moment of meeting (known as fucking).
²¹⁰

There are people who can’t imagine fucking being loving, because they think aggression is never appropriate in sex. Sexual aggression in couples is a volatile issue. Under the tyranny of contemporary political correctness, all forms of aggression have been banished from the bedroom, ostensibly for women’s benefit. This doesn’t help women who would love to be ravished. They want to be the object of their partner’s carnal intent.
If you’ve ever told your partner,
“Put more into this!”
you know a little aggression can be a good thing.

Lots of women and men prefer oral sex to intercourse. They know all about sexual aggression, and power and submission, and oral sex lets them play out both sides with abandon. They like the sense of power that comes with getting someone off. But sometimes they give oral sex from a submissive psychological position. Often they like giving oral sex both ways, and receiving both ways, too.

It’s interesting that some people who love giving oral sex won’t let themselves receive it. You’d think they’d love to have their partner’s complete and undivided (sexual) attention. But these folks experience “being the center of attention” quite differently when they’re on the receiving end. They are frightened to relax, turn off their defensive radar, and let someone take care of them this way. It makes no difference if they’ve given their partner head for over an hour.

Letting your self be fucked (“taken”) is no simple matter. You have to hold on to your self with “a tight grip on a loose rein.” This lays the groundwork for sexual surrender. You don’t throw yourself away, violate your integrity, or abdicate personal responsibility (in the broad sense) when you let yourself be taken. It’s about not giving in to your fears, so you can surrender to your sensations and play out archetypical relationships.

Fucking is brain-candy to us meaning-making animals. “Fucking your brains out” suggests you’re damaging your brain, and “fucking someone’s brains in” sounds like you’re doing that to your partner. In both cases, nothing could be further from the truth. I’m going to show you how a blow job that drives you out of your mind may help reorganize your brain. At the very least, it’ll put a smile on your face, a spring in your step, and leave you in a good state of mind.

Oral sex is great for creating a rich, multi-layered experience. It can
simultaneous light up multiple circuits in your brain and curl your toes (actually and euphemistically). Oral sex hits you at many different levels. When you get them all in reinforcing harmony, you’re playing with something powerful and helpful. You’ve got an intensely pleasurable intersubjective somatosensory moment of meeting, where your genitals are being licked (or you’re licking someone’s genitals) and your right brain and left brain are working overtime, talking to each other, trying to keep up with the action.
²¹¹

My professional and personal experience indicates strategically pairing these bodily sensations with intense feelings and meanings create unique mind states that foster breakthroughs in information processing. (In other words, great blow jobs from a loving partner are good for your brain.)

When Nicolle and Phillip started focusing on oral sex, the results rippled through their relationship. The dynamics in their relationship changed. For one thing, Nicolle was less deferent without being belligerent.

Weeks of
hugging till relaxed
and
heads on pillows
dramatically reduced the physical and emotional tension between them. But years of worrying he’d orgasm too quickly made it difficult for Phillip to really relax when he was physically close to Nicolle. He was progressing a little slower than she was.

Nicolle’s desire returned, but not so much out of desire for Phillip. Our conversation about fucking had her thinking about sex all the time. Her sexual fantasies came alive, her masturbation increased, and the pictures in her mind became more daring.

Nicolle started thinking her sexuality was neat. In fact, she started thinking she was a neat woman. She liked herself more. She had desire because she respected her efforts to be her own person. She felt desirable, in and of herself. This had nothing to do with Phillip. She felt like she had more integrity.

Nicolle asked, “I know this may sound funny, but if we wanted to experiment with
fucking
, do you have any recommendations?”

I paused for a moment to consider Nicolle’s request. I could have said,
Nicolle, you know about fucking. That’s what our last session was all about. Have the guts to show Phillip what you know
.

Instead I calmly said, “You might try oral sex.”

“Why oral sex?” Nicolle was genuinely surprised.

“Yes, Doctor. Why oral sex in particular?” Phillip had expected me to recommend intercourse. “Why don’t we take care of where I disappoint Nicolle? I come too quick when we have intercourse, and we do that far more often than we have oral sex. I like to go down on Nicolle, but she usually stops me. Shouldn’t we have intercourse?”

“As for taking care of where you disappoint Nicolle, that’s what I had in mind. And as for having intercourse more often than oral sex, you might want to change that. Oral sex lets you approach sex as equals. It reduces the pressure on you because you don’t need an erection. You don’t have to worry about coming quickly, because even if you do, you can still make sure Nicolle isn’t disappointed. You can probably do a better job of pleasing her if you use your tongue instead of your penis. You’ll probably be able to feel what you’re doing better, too. You can afford to tune into Nicolle whether you’re giving oral sex or receiving it, and stop distracting yourself to delay your orgasm.”