Love and Sexual Desire are NOT ‘Naturally’ Linked
The idea that love and desire go together—inextricably—is probably as old as, well, love and desire themselves. And with good reason. Passionate, erotic, carnal urges and longings generate a feeling of craving researchers compare to addiction. Indeed, the single-minded focus on a love-object, the exhilaration that comes from a feeling of merger with the person you love, and the withdrawal symptoms that follow a separation closely mimic those that occur with substance addiction, activating the same pain and reward pathways in the brain.
This idea of the love/desire connection is reinforced through advertising, media, stories, myths, songs, and pop psychology. You’re addicted to love. She’s wrong in so many ways, but the sex is unbelievable. The spark is gone; maybe we should separate. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with linking sex and love. But if you unquestioningly buy into this sex/love link, you could end up missing the opportunity to cultivate your sexuality with the person you’re in love with, dating, or even married to.
You Cultivate the Connection Between Love and Desire
Love and desire are not magically linked. You can love your partner without sexually desiring them, or sexually desire them without loving them. The key is to recognize that neither of these starting points has to be an absolute, unchanging state. If you want to sexually desire your partner, you can grow your sexual feelings for them and create positive shifts in your erotic connection to them over time.
Nurturing sexual desire requires courage and a willingness to step into the unknown. Rather than adopting a task-focused, fix-it attitude, trying to manipulate a situation to get a particular outcome, try being curious about your eroticism, your body, your sensuality, and your evolving sexual agency. Allow yourself to accept a state of temporary uncertainty—not knowing how things will turn out. Think of yourself as an erotic researcher engaging in erotic experiments—whether you’re alone or with your partner. Make a commitment to understanding yourself and your eroticism more deeply.
Habits For Hacking the Love Sex Mismatch
- Make the following a recurring morning event in your digital agenda: “You cultivate the connection between love and sexual desire.”
- Take a blank piece of paper, draw a line down the middle, and write “love” at the top of one section and “sexual desire” at the top of the other. Call to mind (and write in the appropriate column) different experiences you’ve had that you’ve associated with either love, sexual desire (or both, in which case write the experience down in both columns). Which love/sexual desire experiences overlap? What circumstances allowed love and sexual desire to occur together? Was there a sense of novelty? Did you feel swept off your feet, surprised, or nurtured? Was there a taboo or forbidden element at play? Consider talking to your partner about these details and how you might recreate different aspects of them in your life, now. If none of these experiences overlap, ask yourself why it might not feel safe to experience love and sexual desire together, and consider discussing what comes up around this issue with your partner.
- When you’re feeling loving toward your partner, find different ways to invite your sexuality more fully into the experience or moment. Could you kiss for a moment longer? Hug a little more tightly? Could you let yourself sense what’s happening in your body? Remind yourself that your partner is a separate sexual being? Speak in a way you typically don’t, or express desire you normally wouldn’t? Could you take your partner’s hand and place it on your face or heart or somewhere else on your body that your partner doesn’t ordinarily touch? How does it feel to take control? To surrender control?
