SexyPrime, a blog by Susan Crain Bakos

Why Do You Keep Picking The Wrong Guys?--You Don't Understand Your Desire Curve

Why do you keep picking the “wrong” guys?

I can answer that in one crisp sentence: You’re trying to force your lust into a relationship.

Nan Wise, a non-traditional therapist/coach, professor and neuroscience researcher--and one of the women I most admire-- developed an elegant and sophisticated tool for understanding desire (or lust). The Desire Curve may be the most useful piece of applied neuroscience you ever encounter. Once you “get it,” you realize: Omigod, what I thought was love (or the reverse, falling out of love) was just my brain on drugs.

   

The Desire Curve begins at your Desire Set Point,--the amount of sex you naturally crave whether you have a regular partner or not--rises to the thrill of New Relationship Euphoria (NREU), then settles back to Desire Set Point. NREU lasts from eighteen months to three years. We typically commit while on that high.

“The misconceptions about desire are appalling,” Nan says. “We make decisions based on desire without understanding the Desire Curve where NREU is the high point, not the natural state of being. When we come down to the Desire Set Point, we’re disappointed and blame our lover, the relationship,“

It’s not unusual for a man or woman with a low desire set point to mate with a partner whose set point is higher. In the throes of new passion, they don’t realize how mismatched their sex drives are. That partner with a low desire set point suddenly wants more sex than he or she typically does—and foolishly, of course, ascribes the rise of libido to true love and the fall of libido to the loss of it.

What’s really happening in that hot relationship if it isn’t love?

Also called “limerance”, NREU, is a chemical high. The first neurotransmitter chemical firing off in your brain when you are strongly attracted to someone new is phenylethylamine, PEA. A natural form of amphetamine, it floods the regions of the brain influencing sexual arousal. (Now you know the true meaning of the terms “love addict” and “love junkie”.) Norepinephrine, a second euphoria-inducing chemical kicks in and stimulates the release of adrenaline causing your blood pressure to shoot up when you see or touch your beloved. PEA releases dopamine—the body’s “feel good” neurochemical— which helps to stimulate the production of Oxytocin, dubbed the “cuddle chemical” because it encourages bonding and attachment. This powerful cocktail of brain chemicals creates a state of euphoria in the new lovers. Intercourse and orgasm intensify the Oxytocin production. That is not love—it’s a neurochemical high.

Here’s how NREU gives you the big kick:

• Sex, especially if it includes intercourse and orgasm, adds large amounts of the attachment chemical oxytocin to the rush of neurochemicals already bathing her fevered brain.

•  Women are more affected by oxytocin then men because it works in concert with estrogen and is somewhat subdued by testosterone.

• Intercourse produces more oxytocin in women than cunnilingus or other sex acts.

What can you do when the thrill is gone?

 

Forget Hot Monogamy. It’s a lie. You cannot sustain a NREU high throughout the decades. You can, however, create peaks in your valleys--a pattern of undulating waves of desire. (Now that you understand the Desire Curve, you can relax and be grateful for the natural hormonal cycles that make you crave again.)

 

Here are some suggestions for creating the peaks:

• Break sexual habits.

• Habituation is deadly in a sexual relationship. You have to shake it up. Learn some new tricks.

• Get physical (as in exercise) with your partner.

• Do what scares you a little.

Try anal sex. Visit a nude beach. Let your secret “top” or “bottom” come out. Make sexual demands. Go to a swing club. Take some risks and get your adrenaline pumping. (Your brain needs a new chemical kick.)

• Have a secret sex life.

Masturbation. Fantasies. Sex parties or swining. A flirtation, fling or affair with someone else. The compulsion to tell your partner everything is annoyingly American and erotically

Read more about The Desire Curve in The Sex Bible for Women.





copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

TV Favors "Sex Out Of Wedlock"?" Another Sex Shocker

Photo Credit:  "Sexy" on Photobucket

 

Yesterday I was a guest on Maxim Radio's "Sex Files" where I couldn't resist tweaking Amy Spencer and Anna David, the young, lovely and very competent hostesses of the show, about their faith in fidelity.  "There's no cheating here," they said.  "Not on this show."

(In real life, vs. radio show life, I don't tell people to cheat on their partners.  I don't tell them not to cheat either.  In radio show life, I couldn't resist advising:  Cheat.) 

While Amy, a newlywed, and Anna, happy with her boyfriend, are proselytizing for monogamy, prime time TV, on the other hand, is apparently promoting extramarital affairs. 

"Is there enough married sex being shown or talked about on television?  That intrepid defender of the nation's video morals, the Parents Television Council, says no," Matthew Lasar writing on Ars Technica.  (Read his commentary on the full report--more interesting than the news stories on it.)

PTC periodically releases reports aimed at lawmakers and regulators.  This particular situation is worrisome, they say, because references to non-marital sex outnumbered references to marital sex 3 to 1.  And, worse, married sex was often depicted as boring or a chore.

Uh-huh.  And this is bad because....?

It's not good for the children. 

Babes, your children are not the intended audience for "Desperate Housewives."  You should send them to bed (and open the chilled white wine) or TiVo.  But if the young ones glimpse a scene of nudity or passion, are they harmed? 

I love John Stossel's response in today's The New York Sun:  "If exposure to media sex caused so many problems, surely we would see the negative effect in Europe.  Kids there are exposed to even more sex--explicit commercials and nude beaches.  Yet all this nudity hasn't caused European countries to experience more sex-related crimes."

We should be concerned about the increasing crudeness and coarseness of American culture, about the incivility and ignorance of public discourse--and violence.

Consensual sex?  In the words John Stossel frequently uses:  Give me a break.

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

That Desire Thing, Part Two

Nan Wise is a neuroscience researcher on orgasm--as well as a coach who does excellent work with individuals and couples in her practice, a writer and Ph.D. candidate--and a babe with the best legs in neuroscience. 

One day last summer we were sitting at her dining room table, sipping wine and discussing her theory on sexual desire, a theory that has been shaped by her work with clients.  As she explained how desire increases in a new relationship, then levels off and declines--I knew that she had to name that theory.  After a few glasses of wine, we had it:  The Desire Curve.  Think of a woman's breast.  That's how it looks.

Briefly (more later), here is The Desire Curve:

The Desire Set point:  The amount of sex we naturally crave whether we are in a relationship or not.  (You will masturbate this often if you're alone.)

New Relationship Euphoria (NREU):  The high level of desire excited by a complex chemical cocktail makes you want more sex than usual--and sex with that one partner.  (You know this phase:  Can't keep your hands off each other;  exchange of melting gazes;  thinking about the beloved when you're apart.)  NREU lasts anywhere from 18 months to 3 years for most people (though for me, it has often been 18 days to 3 months)--and then you slide back down to:

The Desire Set point:  Whether you wanted sex twice a week or once a month, you're back to that lust home base now.

Many people don't understand that the decline of NREU is normal, natural and unavoidable.  They think they're not in love with their partners anymore.  Maybe they begin looking for the next "high."  Some couples get divorced.  

The over-reported phenomenon of "Low Desire syndrome" likely includes many people who don't understand the true nature of desire.  Popular culture reinforces the myth that monogamy can and should be hot forever.

Over time on Sexy Prime Nan will answer the most common questions women have about changing desire.  You can also read more about The Desire Curve in THE SEX BIBLE FOR WOMEN.

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

That Desire Thing, Part One

Photo Credit:  "Woman Clawing Man's Back" on Photobucket

 

As a research sexologist, I can explain how desire works--and why you lose it in longterm relationships.  

As a writer and a woman, I know that female desire is more complex than the science.

An elusive element of desire is rooted in who we are, how we feel about our sexuality and how the man (or men) in our lives responds to us.  Your attitude can kill your desire.  His attitude can kill your desire.  Americans live in a society that hasn't shed its Puritan past; and, Babe, the Puritans were not sexy people.  (Remember:  They came here for the freedom to practice a more extreme form of religion than was encouraged in England.)

This is from Anthony Lane's review of the film "Sex and the City" in this week's The New Yorker magazine:

After noting that the TV version of "Sex and the City" was an entertaining mix of "dirty talk" and "romantic satisfaction," he wrote, "Behind it all, one caught a whiff of stale Puritanism:  despite the women's knowing bid for certainty, there was an old-school, anti-sophisticated wish to put desire in its proper place, or better still, to dispense it in a shared public giggle for fear of where it may lead."

We do fear female sexuality--women fearing it more men do.  Some of them need to control female sexuality or demean it.  Too many of us go along with, even initiate, that program, keeping our sisters in line by calling them "sluts" or lecturing them on their "fear of intimacy"--from which they obviously suffer if they can't be monogamous.  Right?  And don't get me started on the anti-sex underpinnings of The Rules,

The Madonna/Whore dynamic grew out of all that.  Good girls get married; bad girls get laid.  My black women friends say that the African American community has put its own spin on the myth.  "White girls will do anything," they say because they believe we are sexually freer--and "their" men want us for the blow jobs and other things we willingly perform.

Becoming a sexually empowered woman is not easy, huh?

That's why we need to celebrate and support--not judge-- one another on the road to sexual empowerment.  If we can do that, we can help lessen the erosion of desire that happens when women feel controlled or demeaned by their lovers.  Do you feel sexy? 

Tomorrow let's talk about the "feel sexy" power of vibrators--and get that quick lesson in The Desire Curve.

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime