Q&A: Desire in Unstable Relationships
I want better for you than unsatisfied cravings
Confidence and Joy is a newsletter by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Subscribe here. You can also follow Emily on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook!
This is a really interesting question. Let’s dig in.
Q: I used to have unstable and bad relationships, however I really craved and enjoyed having sex with guys that were not good for my mental health. Now I have a loving and supporting partner and my desire is nowhere to be found. I really want to know why is this happening since I want to have a normal and healthy sex with this partner that I love.
A: Let’s begin the new year with an extremely common question that has a simple answer—which I actually include in Come As You Are, but let’s put the answer here, directly, without having to comb through 100 thousand words of affective neuroscience, storytelling, and metaphor. Feel free to send it to anyone you know who is having a similar issue. (You almost certainly know someone who is having a similar issue.)
Sex, for humans, is first and foremost a social behavior. One of the social functions of sex is as an attachment behavior—that is, a behavior that helps us feel connected another person.
Super quick primer on attachment: Attachment is the biology of love. Humans, being a massively social species, require relationships in order to survive. Connection (unlike sex itself) is a biological drive; we sicken and die of loneliness! And so, as a species, we have an enormous repertoire of attachment behaviors that reinforce our sense of connection. Eye contact, smiling, feeding each other, touching hands and faces and hair, bringing gifts, talking in soft voices, holding each other in the dark. We engage in these attachment behaviors both to experience the joy and pleasure of connection, to build a new connection into a flourishing, stable, lasting connection (aka, “new relationship energy”), and to repair a connection that has been threatened for whatever reason. Did one partner go away on a long trip? That separation may well activate a bunch of attachment behaviors, to reconnect you afterward. Has there been a betrayal in the relationship, or is the trust in the connection rocky? Attachment behaviors will start oozing out of a partner, without their being aware of it even happening.
Different people experience these attachments and the behaviors that go with them in different ways (see chapter 4 of Come As You Are), but broadly speaking… sex is an attachment behavior that reinforces connection.
But it’s just one among many. In fact, most of our attachment behaviors are the kinds of things adult caregivers do with infants, since that’s the biological origin of attachment. Around adolescence, our brain co-opts the attachment mechanism from caregiver-to-infant relationships and uses it for peer-to-peer relationships. Before this, sex is more or less a self-oriented experience for a kid, just getting to know what their bodies can do and experience. But around adolescence, a lot of young people start to feel sexually attracted to others, and attachment and sex are tangled around each other in our emotional brains.
What does this mean for sex in stable versus unstable relationships?
When we are in, as you say, “unstable and bad” relationships, the attachment is constantly tenuous and begging for repair and stabilization. Sex is one of the behaviors we use in order to stabilize an attachment, so, for some people, a bad relationship often brings with it a high desire for sex, because your brain is searching for ways to stabilize the unstable relationship.
When, by contrast, we’re in a stable and loving relationship, with deep trust and admiration, that “uh-oh, fix it!” fire isn’t burning, and therefore it’s not motivating sexual desire.
AND THAT IS FINE. THAT IS BETTER. I want for you a sexual connection where the sound of them coming home makes your heart happy, even when you need an hour-long prep time to transition out of your ordinary, stressed, busy, distracted state of mind, into hey-sexytimes-yay state of mind, instead of a connection where you feel distressed, untrusting, disrespected, and horny.
Which would you rather have, spontaneous desire for sex with a partner you can’t fully trust or who doesn’t fully respect you? Or responsive desire with a partner with whom you share mutual trust, respect, and admiration?
Please, oh please, tell me your answer is responsive desire. Because responsive desire is actually the way people in long-lasting sexual connections most typically describe their experience of desire. Spontaneous desire is a mug’s game, if it happens in your body because of relationship instability. I know so many of us are raised believing that “craving” sex is some kind of reasonable measure of how “good” a sexual connection is, but that’s just not true.
To conclude, my friend: as far as you’ve described, you already have normal and healthy sex with this partner that you love. As long as everyone involved is glad to be there and free to leave without unwanted consequences, and no one is experiencing unwanted pain, your sex is healthy and normal. The other “measure,” if you will, of your sex life is whether or not you like the sex you are having. Desire is not the thing. Pleasure is the thing. “Craving” sex is not associated with long-term sexual satisfaction. Enjoying sex is.
Here’s an easy way to remember it: pleasure is the measure.
Pleasure is the measure of sexual wellbeing. It’s not about how much you “crave” the sex or how often you have it or how you do it or even how many orgasms you have. It’s whether or not you like it.
If you enjoy the sex, you are doing it right. If you don’t “crave” the sex, it might well be because your experience of “sexual desire” was actually your attachment mechanism begging for a stable sense of connection with a partner.
I know this answer alone can’t convince you that, actually, spontaneous-feeling desire that’s motivated by an unstable relationship is A BAD THING and responsive-feeling desire in a stable relationship is A GOOD THING—see chapters 3, 4, 7, and 9 in Come As You Are for that (and also a number of these newsletters), but I hope you’ll at least consider the possibility that it is pleasure, not “horniness” or “craving” or whatever we mean by “desire,” that tells us whether a sexual relationship is healthy and normal and even spectacular.
Questions or comments? Please email my very tiny team at unrulywellness@gmail.com
Feel free to say hello on 📷 Instagram, 🦤 Twitter and 🤖 Facebook – I don't always reply but I read everything.
Signed copies of Come As You Are can be obtained from my amazing local bookseller, Book Moon Books.
Stay safe and see you next time.
