W hen I first began having long ish -term sexual relationships during my college years I believed an old-fashioned narrative about how desire works. Well, it turns out every part of that narrative is not merely wrong, but wrongheaded. I call this mess of wrongheadedness the desire imperative. The desire imperative says:. The desire imperative puts desire at the center of our definition of sexual well-being. It says there is only one right way to experience desire, and without that, nothing else matters.
And so people worry about sexual desire. On the contrary, worry mainly puts sex further out of reach. Center pleasure, because great sex over the long term is not how many orgasms you have or even how enthusiastically you anticipate sex, but how much you like the sex you are having. A simple place to start changing how we think about desire and pleasure is understanding what sex researchers and therapists say about desire.
I really like this! I really like this person! Pleasure is the measure of sexual well-being β that is, whether or not you like the sex you are having. Pleasure is the simplest thing in the world, in the sense of declaring whether a sensation feels good or not. Notice what pleasure does to your body. Pleasure is simple β¦. A simple example of this is tickling.
But if those same partners are in the middle of an argument about, say, money, and Partner A tries to tickle Partner B, will that feel good? Any sensation may feel good, great, spectacular, just OK or terrible, depending on the context in which you experience it. Pleasure is a shy animal.
We can observe it from a safe distance, but if we approach too fast, it will run. If we try to capture it, it will panic. You have to build trust with your pleasure before it will allow you to observe it closely. Pleasure happens when we feel safe enough. Trusting enough, healthy enough, welcome enough, at low-enough risk. But when we create that safe-enough context, our brains have the capacity to interpret any sensation as pleasurable.
