Arousal & Desire
*If quarantine has steam-rolled your sex life and you’re not sure if you can revive the flat, dry carcass of what was once a good thing - this one’s for you!
To be good at sex and keep your sex life alive, you should examine if you are following arousal or following desire.
Arousal is mostly tangible. Physically we are ready to fuck. We get erections and we get wet and pink in the face and something happens with our pupils and our body has donned the evolutionary accessories to make sex more pleasurable and likely. Our body has decided it’s turned on.
When was a time you really felt aroused? Maybe some of the stronger memories are times your body decided before your heart and mind that it was ready. You found yourself falling into the perfect sequence of mental and physical experiences that your body was ready before you even knew it. And if you were lucky, someone else was falling down the same rabbit hole as you.
Desire is less tangible than arousal and is more like a thought. I hesitate to call it a thought because thoughts can come with some emotional baggage. Desire is a pretty neutral thought. It’s so neutral that it probably feels random. You might be doing the dishes or watching The Office or at the grocery store adjusting your facemask when all of a sudden, there’s a break in your regular stream of thoughts and it occurs to you “I want to have sex”. Or, if you’re like me, there’s just a string of words like a caveman “...sex….good…”. But you brush it off because there are so many dishes, Pam still hasn’t left Roy, and your facemask is knotted to your hair so you have to wear it in the car
I’m afraid that many of our desires are discouraged so we might not be very good at spotting them. We are trained early to tune them out. Art was a desire until we googled the salary of a painter. Writing was a desire until we read a good book and decided we might as well not. That hiking trip was a desire until someone wondered if a local would stalk you and murder you in your tent.
Now I really don’t want to make this a “follow your desire” graduation speech. This is about sex after all. Art school and novel writing and hiking all take a lot of time and money - sex, is much lower stakes. But you get the idea. If it’s difficult to notice when you desire sex, that’s because you’re probably practical and good at decision making. We shrink our desires and call them “impulses” or " worse, “dreams”.
You can believe one of two things:
Arousal happens. We suddenly realize what our body is doing and we act accordingly.
Desire is a whisper that we listen to. When desire has spoken, we create the best circumstances that we can to invite arousal to come along for the ride.
If you’re sitting around waiting for arousal to come sweep you into a state of sexual ecstacy, you’re going to be waiting a long time. In fact, thank god it doesn’t work that way because we would all be caught totally off guard and wouldn’t have the chance to really create the hottest circumstances for our maximum sexual pleasure.
So your sex life has been….quiet lately. But has your desire? Is there anything you could do to fan the flame just a little bit? Get reeeally curious about your desire. Even if it’s one word, just trust it.