Sexual desire, we talk about it frequently, especially when it is absent. It is, moreover, according to Sébastien Landry, sexologist and author of “Sexual Desire” (ed. In Press), the number one reason for consultations, regardless of gender. Suffice to say that this famous sexual desire gives us a hard time, and that in case of inhibition, it worries us. Why ? Because today, we must succeed at all costs in our couple and that this success requires good and big sexual activity. In other words and from a different angle, we say to ourselves that if the desire plummets, and well the couple too.
However, we are wrong, at least in part. Because desire and the couple, if they get along well and like to work together, are not essential to each other. We can be in a relationship and no longer desire (that, we understood) and desire without being related. And this sentence, precisely, teaches us a lot about the expression of desire within the love schema. So let’s take stock of all these notions, of the relationship between couple and desire, in order to better understand what is at stake in our beds, in our bodies and above all in our heads.
Desire prefers novelty to security
Mathilde, 36, has been in a relationship for twelve years. She and her partner don’t make love “so much” anymore: “If we had to put a number, I would say that we share one sexual relationship per month, and again”, confides the young woman, who claims that the longevity of the relationship has something to do with it. She’s not entirely wrong: “At the beginning of a relationship, discovery and novelty feed the excitement, and since time passes, as discovery and novelty move away (we know each other now), the excitement has nothing to put under the tooth”, develops the sexologist. But is it a fatality? Must we necessarily, one day, get used to the idea that time destroys desire and that the couple configuration completes the excitement? It would be a real shame to have to deprive yourself of one or the other. However, this is how Sophia, 37, sees things: “I know that my couple is acquired, and that this acquisition goes against my desire, as if the sex allowed the relationship to be born, but that once the relationship was in place, the sex no longer had any role to play”, she tells us.
This distinction between couple and desire, between acquired and active sexuality, is at the origin of our many questions. It is also approached by psychotherapist Esther Perel. In a TED* video, she asks a simple question: how to desire what one already has? “I think that at the heart of what makes desire last in a stable relationship is the reconciliation of two fundamental needs: our need for security, for predictability, and our need for adventure, risk, surprise”, she says on stage. We are therefore tempted to think that the couple is incompatible with desire, that we cannot on the one hand take advantage of a loving cocoon (the couple) and on the other make room for the unexpected (including desire sexual feeds). This is why we find ourselves, after several years, thinking that we have to choose between “desire and couple”. So let’s be clear: nobody asks us to choose, first because the love bond (also) forms the couple, and the couple can live without desire and without sexuality. But if we are not obliged to choose, it is also because we can link these two notions and nothing is lost.
Admiration and imagination: the two keys to a desire capable of living together with the couple
Faced with declining sexual desire, sexologist Sébastien Landry wants to be reassuring: “Sexual desire does not necessarily fade over time, but it does change.” Seen like that, it’s already better. But how does it change? Where does he change to go? The expert points out that “admiration can replace novelty”. It is when we admire our partner that desire finds hold, because admiration continues to arouse in us a semblance of novelty, precisely, but above all of inaccessibility, which is in line with the words of Esthel Perel.
But this novelty that is dear to us is not only played out in the feeling of admiration. Suffice to say that the one who does not admire her partner, or not enough, could quickly find herself stuck in the face of a desire that is impossible to unlock. Novelty also resides in the imagination. Is it imagining that our relationship is brand new, unearned, full of surprises at the next corner of the couch? We can, but it is not necessarily easy. Always being that there is this: “If, for example, we feel desire for a stranger, a person we meet in the street, it is because we are imagining something new”, underlines the sexologist. At the same time, it is very true, one can only imagine. Anaïs, 33, remarks: “I feel desire for a colleague but more for my husband. It comforts me because it means that I still want to make love, but hey, it looks like i don’t feel like having sex with the right person“she says.
What if, to want to make love with “the right person”, you had to stimulate your imagination and see your partner as a stranger? For that, the track would be to no longer “freeze” him in a state, to no longer repeat to ourselves that “this evening, he will come back at six o’clock and turn on the TV”. He may come home at six o’clock and turn on the TV, but as long as we are certain, we will act according to this certainty, we will block our partner in this projection. He, thus, will not dare move a millimeter (not even change the channel). To grant the other the right to be “differently” is to encourage him – non-verbally – to be different. And so new.
Revise your notion of desire
And if it were enough for us to redefine the desire so that the desire and the couple get along well? What if taking a different look at desire allowed us, frankly, to no longer see the absence of desire as a drama? If, first, we stopped believing that desire is essential to the health of the couple, we would release the pressure since we would abandon a heavy belief to bear.
But we can also, to go further, link amorous desire and sexual desire, understand that love, when it sets in, does not prevent desire, and that desire, when it is there or is not there, does not direct our feelings. To do this, let’s recreate a “wider” desire, a desire that not only reflects a desire to make love but rather a desire to be with the other, to share tenderness. This is what Danae, 40, tries hard to think: “I tell myself that love is a form of desire, that if I love my partner, I still desire him, despite my sexual desire in small form”, she reveals. Should we play on words? Not necessarily. We should, say, get out of sexuality as we perceive it : “We think there is a good time to make love, but also perfect places, ideal practices. pleasure to be together”, advises the sex therapist.
So, see desire as a desire to connect with each other, and “let’s rely” on our feelings, because if feelings are not necessarily the engine of desire (and vice versa) they are quick to help us. They are only the enemy of desire when they have been around for a long time. On the contrary, they are a part of our desire. So yes to declarations of love and to communication, because if I no longer desire you but I love you, and I say so, worries can bounce back and fly away, and then desire can take its place again.. .in the couple.
Read also:
- Can sexting revive desire?
- What if writing erotic short stories could boost desire?
- How to talk about his fantasies?
- 9 useful tips for having sex in the present moment
- Mirror sexuality: the way we caress the other reflects our expectations (in the matter)
