Want to increase your sex drive? Learning about your desire type can help Part I
I’m Erinn, your couples therapist and sex therapist in Philadelphia, and today I’m here talking about desire. I’m covering spontaneous desire here and responsive desire next.
Watch the video here.
Have Better Sex: Learn Your Desire Type
Desire is something that can be hard to define. If someone asked you to define what that means to you, it might take a minute to figure out what to say. Maybe that’s because it’s a feeling and everyone experiences it differently. I’m going to normalize here that everyone has different desire and that desire responds to different stimulation.
And even though we all have different desire, we tend to think and talk about them in one, general way: it just comes on on its own. But there are 2 types of desire. Knowing which you have can help you engage in sex in a way that fuels your desire because as we now know, everyone’s is different and responds to different things.
Today I’m going to talk more about the one that typically comes to mind, which is spontaneous desire, and we’ll lay some groundwork here. Next time I’m going to cover the lesser known, but just as important responsive desire. So if in today’s conversation you feel you can’t relate to this type of desire, come back. I suspect responsive desire may be a better fit for you if so.
Learn about your desire: Spontaneous Desire
Okay, so the most well-known desire, and what typically comes to mind for most people is spontaneous desire. This occurs when someone simply feels interest in sex. The urge seems to come on on its own and leads one to seek out sex. Desire happens, the feeling happens, and it leads to physical arousal and gets your blood flowing.
Anyone can have this type of desire, but it tends to be more common in those with male genitals. Now, without getting too sciencey today, the reason we think that is is due to how we all learn about sexually relevant cues, which simply put are cues that arouse you. When boys and those with male genitals are growing up and get erections, those erections are pretty obvious to them. So what happens is those individuals learn to pay attention to their bodily cues to inform what’s sexually relevant. I suddenly feel this way and notice this change in my body, so I should seek out XYZ.
To assess if you have this type of desire, think about how you go about engaging in sex. Do you suddenly feel an urge? Is there a feeling that comes on that leads you to want to seek out your partner? If so, you probably fall in this category. If not, don’t worry. Just because your desire doesn’t come on on its own doesn’t mean anything’s wrong. It just means you don’t have spontaneous desire, and that’s ok. Next time I’ll dive deeper into responsive desire and how this shows up. I’ll see you then.
If you’d like some direction on how to talk with your partner about this, check out Talk Dirty to Me Part 4: Why talking about sex can lead to better sex (The Desire Talk).
Free Sex Therapy call in Philadelphia, PA
If you want to learn more about how desire impacts sex drive, click here and we can set up a 15 min phone chat. I’d be happy to learn more about your individual experiences and help you figure out if sex therapy would be helpful for you. If you’re interested in individual sex therapy in Philadelphia or couples therapy in Philadelphia, you can read more about how I can help with both by clicking their links.
My specialties include low sex drive, differential desires, communication, managing sexual stress and pressure, and increasing connection.
