Where does boredom live on the emotional floorplan?
A great question about Come Together
Hey there friends, back in June I did a presentation about the Emotional Floorplan and someone asked this amazing question:
Where does boredom live on the floorplan?
It’s such a good question, not least because there’s a huge cultural narrative around sexual “boredom,” being bored with having the same old sex every time. As the authors write in Magnificent Sex, “Nothing kills desire faster than doing what works – relentlessly.”
It’s such a good question, in fact, that I’m going to write two newsletters about it—one for most people’s experience of sexual boredom and one for the minority of people who experience boredom as intense, painful, and/or frequent. Really this is a distinction between people whose boredom arises mostly from external circumstances (e.g., the sex available to them is “boring”) and those whose boredom arises mostly from internal traits (e.g., their brain adapts to novelty after fewer similar experiences)
(It’s a false binary, of course; all boredom is a combination of both internal and external circumstances, but this is a handy heuristic that helps me write a newsletter shorter than 20,000 words.)
My answer during the presentation was that I wouldn’t put it in a primary process emotion, I’d put it in the “bonus space” of the thinking mind (“the office”), since boredom is ultimately your thinking mind scanning and scanning and not being able to find to attend to. A good question to ask, to explore sexual boredom, is, “What kind of sex is worth paying attention to?”
After I got home, I went to the research, which said generally yes, attention is about cognition, but I would like to add detail to my answer, please.
If, for you, boredom is merely unpleasant rather than agonizing, I invite you to refine the question “What kind of sex is worth paying attention to?” by exploring the characteristics of Very Boring Tasks, according to the research:
Purposeless: without meaning
Monotonous: anything repetitive and inadequately engaging
Constrained: being required to keep at something past the point that it holds your attention
Poor Use of Resources: Too difficult or too easy, a “bad fit” for a person’s abilities
“What kind of sex is worth paying attention to?” is a great question because it will evoke conversations like those I encourage readers to have in chapter 1 of Come Together, about meaning—why have sex? What kind of sex is worth the time and energy and attention it takes to have sex, rather than do any of the million other things you could be doing? I can’t overstate how often meaning and purpose comes up in the research on boredom. ASK WHY. Why this sex? If not this sex, what sex? And why? Seriously, why even sex tho?
I think if you explore the purpose and meaning aspect of sex, the other characteristics of a boring task – monotony, constraint, and difficulty or ease—will often take care of themselves.
For example, do you get bored while you’re giving a partner oral sex because it’s monotonous? Consider why you’re giving them oral sex. For the pleasure of it? Theirs and yours? Well, my friend, if pleasure is the purpose and you’re not having fun, you’re missing the purpose!
Solution: “I’m really enjoying your pleasure and I’d like to slow down or mix things up and try some other ways of stimulating you without aiming directly for orgasm. Would that be okay with you?”
(I know, nobody really talks that way except me. Feel free to find a way to say it that sounds like an actual human.)
Or, to complicate this example, let’s say you’re “constrained” in the oral sex because your partner is orgasm-focused and requires this very specific, repetitive stimulation to get to orgasm. (This scenario is not unusual.) If the purpose of the oral sex truly is their orgasm, reinvigorate your shared connection to the meaning of their orgasm. Why orgasm? What does it mean? Why does each of you enjoy it? Why does each of you value it? Your partner’s pleasure need never be boring, no matter how long orgasm takes, if you remember to pay attention to their pleasure rather than tune out because your own stimulation isn’t changing.
And if, in the process of exploring the meaning of orgasm, you realize together that actually it’s not the orgasm so much as the shared pleasure that matters… that’s a result, too! But it might be that your generosity of time and attention, your patient and loving focus on their pleasure for as long as it takes to get to orgasm, is really, really, really important—especially if they’ve had partners who were impatient, got bored, and stopped before they could orgasm.
A different example: You’re not bored during one specific sexual behavior, you’re more generally bored by sex altogether, the way you’re bored when you scroll through Netflix, with a million things to watch and nothing that holds your attention.
Again, go to meaning. Why have any kind of sex? What is the actual point? Is there any sexual behavior you’re interested in engaging in, maybe if it could be separated from other behaviors that don’t snag your interest? What is it about that one behavior that grabs you? What it is about the others that feels slippery to your attention?
Once you’ve got a sense of the meaning, take a step back (into “observational distance”) and remember that the stakes are low and you’re allowed to play. Please don’t beat yourself up for getting bored sometimes; it is a normal part of having a mammalian brain.
(A parallel example a friend brought up: consider how meaningful it is to play with your children… yet it can be stultifyingly boring.)
ONE MORE COMPLICATION: Sometimes people experience boredom not because of any characteristic of the sex itself, nor any characteristic of their attention per se, but because there is a part of them that is unaware of the emotions around sex and/or rejecting opportunities to attend to emotions, for any number of reasons. Sexual shame can cause boredom this way: your attention won’t go to sex because there’s a psychological wall between your attention and the whole concept of sex. Trauma, ditto. Or, you’ve got sex-related relationship issues that you’re avoiding addressing because some part of you feels like if you start looking at the problem, the whole relationship will unravel? Sex may be “boring” because it is, in a sense, too complicated and difficult to address the problems that stand between you and good sex.
(Oof, I feel like that last complication is gonna feel tough for some folks.)
To conclude: Boredom is the uncomfortable experience of your brain searching for something worth paying attention to. Help it, by examining the question of what makes an experience worth your attention.
Next time, I’ll write about sexual boredom for people who are boredom-prone because of their internal state. These are the folks who would rather suffer actual physical pain than be bored.
In the meantime, for those of us whose boredom is uncomfortable but not actual torture, start with meaning. Use what you learn about meaning to adapt how repetitive, constrained, or difficult the sex is.
Want to learn more about the Emotional Floorplan? Check out this podcast I did with my friends at Pleasure Mechanics.
Questions or comments? Please email my very tiny team at unrulywellness@gmail.com
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Stay safe and see you next time.
