When I first began having long(ish)-term sexual relationships during my college years, I believed, like a lot of people, an old-fashioned narrative about how desire works.
It goes like this: Early in a relationship, it’s all passion and spark, and that lasts a couple of years, maybe. Then we have kids or buy a fixer-upper house or generally get busy with work and life, and the spark fizzles out. Especially after 50, when supposedly every hormone we ever had floats away on a sea of aging and we’re left, sexless and neutered, to hold hands at sunset.
We’re usually told that at this point, our options are either to accept the fizzling of our desire or to fight against it — to invest our time, attention, and even money in “keeping the spark alive.”
Well, I’m a sex educator with decades of experience. And it turns out that every part of this narrative is not merely wrong but wrong-headed. I call this mess of wrong-headedness “the desire imperative.”
The desire imperative goes as follows:
- At the start of a romantic relationship, we should feel a spark — a spontaneous, giddy craving for sexual intimacy with our partner that might even feel obsessive.
- This sparky desire is the correct, healthy, normal, best kind of desire, and if we don’t have it, we don’t have anything worth having.
- If we have to put any planning or preparation into our sex lives, then we don’t want it “enough.”
- Finally, if our partner doesn’t just want us spontaneously, out of the blue, without effort or preparation, on a regular basis, they don’t want us “enough.”
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. If desire changes or seems to be missing, people worry that there’s something wrong. It’s among the most common reasons couples seek therapy.
Here’s the irony of the desire imperative: Does all that worry about spark make it easier to want sex?
It does not. Worry mainly hits the brakes and puts sex further out of reach.
But there’s an alternative. What if we shelve the entire concept of desire and, in its place, prioritize pleasure? Because great sex is not about how much you want sex — it’s about how much you like the sex you’re having.
RESPONSIVE DESIRE IS NOT SPONTANEOUS DESIRE
A simple way to start changing how you think about desire and pleasure is by understanding what sex researchers and therapists say about desire. They call the spark of the desire imperative “spontaneous desire.” This is one of the normal ways to experience desire, but as it happens, it is not associated with great sex in a long-term relationship.
Researchers also describe “responsive desire,” which is not a spark feeling but an openness to exploring pleasure and seeing where it goes. It often shows up as “scheduled” sex, where you plan ahead, groom, and get a babysitter.
Whereas spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure, responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure.
Both are normal, and neither is better than the other. But it’s responsive desire that is associated with great sex over the long term.
Responsive desire — not passion, not spark, but pleasure, trust, and mutuality. That’s the fundamental empirical reason to center pleasure over spark.
So, what’s pleasure?
PLEASURE IS SENSATION IN CONTEXT
In a lot of movies and romance novels, even when the main characters may be running away from the villain or just exhausted and overwhelmed by life, as soon as Partner A touches the magic spot on Partner B’s body, it doesn’t matter what else is going on — Partner B’s knees melt.
If that’s how desire works for you, that’s great. You have spontaneous desire.
Yet for many of us, pleasure isn’t about the right spot on our body being touched in the right way. It’s the right place, the right way, by the right person, at the right time, in the right external circumstances, and with the right internal state.
In short, it’s sensation in context. That’s responsive desire.
A simple example of this is tickling. Tickling is not everyone’s favorite, but you can imagine a scenario where partners are already turned on, in a trusting, playful, erotic situation, and Partner A tickles Partner B and it feels good!
Pleasure happens when we feel safe enough.
Trusting enough, healthy enough,
welcome enough, at low-enough risk.
But imagine 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? Or would Partner B feel more like punching somebody in the nose?
Because pleasure is sensation in the right context, that means any sensation may feel good, great, spectacular, just OK, or terrible, depending on the context in which we experience it.
Pleasure is a shy animal. We can observe it from a safe distance, but if we approach it too fast, it will run. If we try to capture it, it will panic. We have to build trust with our pleasure before it will allow us to observe it closely.
Pleasure happens when we feel safe enough, trusting enough, healthy enough, welcome enough, at low-enough risk. Everyone’s threshold for “enough” is different, and it changes from situation to situation.
But when we create that safe-enough context, our brains have the capacity to interpret nearly any sensation as pleasurable. And it’s completely normal for a sensation to feel good today and not so good tomorrow, simply because the context has changed.
PLEASURE IS NOT DESIRE
According to psychologists, pleasure and desire use different systems in the brain. At the level of the emotional, mammalian brain, desire is known as “wanting” or “incentive salience,” and pleasure is discussed as “liking” or “hedonic impact.”
In the brain, wanting involves a vast network of dopamine-related circuitry that mediates how motivated we are to pursue a goal. Liking, by contrast, involves “a smaller set of hedonic hotspots” where our bodies’ own opioids and endocannabinoids mediate how good a sensation feels.
You might still be asking yourself, How are pleasure and desire all that different?
Put simply, pleasure is perception of a sensation. Desire is motivation toward a goal.
In a sense, pleasure is satisfaction and desire is dissatisfaction, because pleasure is enjoying an experience, while desire is motivation to pursue something different. You can want more of something without liking it, as with doomscrolling. You can also like something without wanting more of it, as when you’ve just finished a perfect piece of cake and you feel full.
If I wanted to spark controversy, I’d say that there’s no such thing as a sexual-desire problem, and that all the news articles, think pieces, self-help books, and medical research focused on a “cure” for low desire are irrelevant.
The cure for low desire is pleasure. When we put pleasure at the center of our definition of sexual well-being, we eliminate any need to worry about desire.
In a sense, pleasure is satisfaction
and desire is dissatisfaction,
because pleasure is enjoying an experience,
while desire is motivation to pursue
something different.
But I’m not here for controversy; I’m here to make your sex life better. So I’ll just say: Don’t sweat desire. If you’re worried about your partner’s low desire, ask them about pleasure. If you’re worried about your own desire, talk to your partner about pleasure.
I don’t expect you to believe me right away. I know you’ve been taught to worry about desire. It might even feel troubling or problematic to say that desire doesn’t matter. Maybe you’re thinking, What could you possibly mean, Emily — to not worry about wanting it and just enjoy it instead? Are you telling me to enjoy sex I don’t want?
On the contrary! I’m saying: Imagine a world where all of us only ever have sex we enjoy. And anything we don’t enjoy, we don’t do! We don’t do it and — get this — we don’t worry about not doing it!
When we put pleasure at the center of our definition of sexual well-being, sex we don’t like is never even on the table.
FINDING YOUR RIGHT CONTEXT
Assess your experience of easy pleasure: How was your relationship with that partner? What was the state of your connection? Relaxed and close? Playful and silly? Serious and intense?
Focus on setting. Where are you during this experience? Are you at home, in your shared bed with your certain special someone? Are you on vacation together? Are you in front of your screen at one end of a wireless connection while your partner is at the other end? The settings that make it easier for the brain to access pleasure vary from person to person and relationship to relationship.
When you’ve got a sense of the context that makes it easy for your brain to access pleasure, try thinking about your current context.
Ask: How’s your relationship? Are you feeling connected or distant? Can you find connection in an easy way, maybe by focusing together on a shared interest, like your favorite TV show or your love of sushi or your hometown sports team? (These are all examples of third things that help couples stay bonded.)
Ask: How’s your space? Even small adjustments to your real-life setting can make a big difference. My spouse and I realized we could remove one barrier to sex by making it easier to close the bedroom door. Most of the time, we kept the door propped open with a small linen chest so the dogs could come and go, but during sexy times we opted to keep the dogs out of the room. Closing the door required moving the chest and then pulling up a large corner of the rug to get it out of the path of the door. It was a minor hassle with a simple solution: We removed the rug and the little chest, propping the door with a small, easy-to-move wastebasket instead.
Sometimes that’s all it means to create a supportive context. Go out for sushi. Move a piece of furniture. Some problems are just that easy to solve.
Meanwhile, some problems might seem easy to solve, but you still find yourself avoiding them. If these exercises are difficult for you — or even if they’re not — it’s worth asking yourself another simple question: How do I feel about pleasure?
Many of us were taught to fear, resent, or otherwise disparage pleasure, and that can really get in the way of cultivating a context for it. If you struggle mightily with resistance to pleasure, a skilled therapist can help you address that.
Or start small, seeking out pleasures that have little or nothing to do with sex, so you can safely start to remember how feeling good feels.
YOU ARE NOT BROKEN
In any relationship that lasts long enough, it is not just normal but inevitable that partners have different levels of interest in sex, different sexual experiences they’re interested in having, and different abilities to be sexual. Normal. Not a problem. I’ve been through it myself, and I’ve used these tools and found my way back to my certain special someone.
The most efficient way to turn these normal, inevitable seasons into a problem is to worry about them. The guardians of the desire imperative want you to worry, want you to believe that something bad could happen if you jettison their rules and wholeheartedly embrace who you truly are, as you are right now. That’s why joy — loving what’s true — can feel scary sometimes, like jumping off a cliff in the dark, with no idea what comes next.
But isn’t that just like life? We step into each new day with no guarantee of what will come next, only a commitment to make of the day and our lives something worth remembering. Our only certainty is that one day we won’t get any more days. So, in my house, in the face of all the life-altering and life-threatening events that happen daily, we practice pleasure.
Life is too short and too uncertain to have sex you don’t like. So go ahead and love how you love. And don’t let anyone else tell you how that should look or feel.
This article originally appeared as “Pleasure Is the Measure” in the November/December 2025 issue of Experience Life.
This Post Has 0 Comments