The Surprising Truth About Desire Everyone Needs To Know: Dr Karen Gurney (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of clinical psychologist Dr Karen Gurney’s talk titled “The Surprising Truth About Desire Everyone Needs To Know” at TEDxRoyalTunbridgeWells 2020 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

What if I told you that everything you’ve been led to believe about your own sex life isn’t true? That the standards you’ve been judging yourself and your sex life by, and often feeling you’re failing to meet, are unrealistic? Or if I told you that it’s possible to simultaneously have little desire towards your partner, but to still have a great sex life that lasts a distance of time? It might be hard to believe.

My professional life as a clinical psychologist in this field has been spent unlearning everything I thought I knew about people and sex to actually be able to help the people who come to see me in therapy. Take Steph and Alex. They’re a happy couple, but they, like many other couples I meet, are also dissatisfied with a sex life that, to them, isn’t quite hitting the mark.

A Turning Point

The issue, they tell me, is that the desire they feel for one another is not as present as they think it should be, particularly for Steph, and that this started to feel like a looming disaster in their relationship. A few years ago, there was a turning point in my career when I realized that I see so many Steph and Alex’s each week that perhaps the work to be done is not solely between the Steph and Alex’s, or even in my therapy room at all, but by changing how people understand aspects of sex, such as desire, outside of the therapy room so that less Steph and Alex’s need to come and see me in the first place.

Because the reality is that they, us, we, have been sold a lie.

Sex Science has made new discoveries in the last few decades since it first brought forward ideas about how human desire worked, ideas that came to dominate popular opinion and shaped how we understood our own sex lives. What came later were new understandings, understandings that have revolutionized the field of sex therapy, but haven’t yet trickled down into the mainstream, and certainly not to Steph and Alex. But why?

The Struggle of Real Facts About Sex

Surely, if these new understandings were that important, we’d all know about them. Well, sadly, the evidence is strong in history for real facts about sex and sexuality struggling to cut through a thick fog of moral and social opinion. Sex is an area where so much of our understanding comes from culture, TV, religion, art, hearsay, and magazines, that it can be hard for us to see the woods for the trees.

You only have to look at other areas of sex science to see it. Ideas about masturbation making you go blind, which were prevalent in the early 19th century, are still ideas that people bring to the therapy room to this day. It doesn’t, FYI. Although I don’t think I haven’t noticed how many of you are wearing glasses.

The Idea You Should Feel Frequent Desire

But for the purposes of this talk, the idea that you should be expected to feel sexual desire out of the blue for your long-term partner frequently, and that good sex should just happen if you love each other. This idea is the reason Steph and Alex have come to see me. Take a second to reflect on this. At this moment in time, how much do you believe that idea?

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It would surprise me if you don’t believe it strongly, even if it’s not happening for you. Everything around us speaks to this idea. Films and TV perpetuate it. Everyone who comes to see me for sex therapy believes it. It’s literally everywhere.

The Truth from Surveys

But it’s not the truth. So how do we know? Well, we can proudly say one of the biggest surveys of people’s sex lives happens right here in the UK.

It’s called NATSAL, and it’s like a sex census that happens every 10 years. In the last survey of almost 15,000 adults, 34% of women and 15% of men reported a lack of interest in sex lasting three months or more in the past year. A third of women, and more than one in 10 men.

Two Opposing Narratives

Now in some ways, this to me is not surprising, because I can promise you that everyone is worried about how much sex they or their partner are wanting, and usually that it’s not enough. And a relationship that can stand the test of time and still be passionate is certainly portrayed as the holy grail of modern relationships. In fact, Steph and Alex, and the rest of us, have two opposing but equally unhelpful narratives to choose from in our society about sex in long-term relationships.

In the first, everlasting spontaneous desire that can somehow miraculously endure fluctuations in relationship satisfaction, stressful life events, and changes to our bodies, identities, and preferences without any conscious effort from either of us at all. In the second, a hopeless inevitability that after the honeymoon period, sex is doomed forever, but that somehow, long-term companionship and a Netflix subscription should make up for it. So which is it? Passion that lasts a lifetime? Or sex only on birthdays and special occasions?

The Truth About Desire

The truth is that it’s neither. Desire and great sex are cultivated and available to all of us if we want them. But we haven’t yet been given the knowledge and skills we need to be able to do this.

So why are so many people, 34% of women especially, concerned about their interest in sex? Well, for me, there is at least one explanation. We’ve been led to believe that desire just happens out of the blue. And so if it doesn’t, we feel like there’s something wrong with us, and we’re left with no idea how to fix it.

Theories in Sex Science

But how do we arrive at this understanding? Well, as with most areas of science, there are theories, and these trickle down into the mainstream, and then these ideas form our societal understanding of how things are. In sex science, we were lucky to have pioneers like Masters and Johnson in the 60s researching how people had sex, and building the model we now know of as the human sexual response cycle.

And, with some additions by Helen Singer-Kaplan in the 70s, for the first time we had a model to describe what happens to humans from the start to the end of a sexual encounter. But their model started with desire. Desire came first.

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When Desire Doesn’t Come First

And so that’s how we all understand it, right? It’s certainly how Steph and Alex understand it. But Steph isn’t experiencing any of this desire, this supposed first stage of the process, and she’s not alone, as 34% of women and 15% of men in the UK will testify.

So if Alex kisses Steph for longer than, say, two seconds, Steph starts to think, “I know what they want. And I’m not feeling desire at this moment in time, so I better wrap this up before it gets awkward.” Research tells us that this type of desire, that we’re conditioned to expect seemingly out of the blue, it’s high at the start of a relationship, but that typically a year or 18 months in, things start to change.

The Decline in Sexual Currency

We get used to each other. We can risk falling into a routine of always having sex the same predictable way. We stop kissing for kissing’s sake. We spend more time relating to each other as housemates, co-parents, or friends.

This is certainly part of what Steph and Alex described to me. I call this the decline in sexual currency, and it’s one of the potential pitfalls of a monogamous relationship that can reduce our desire over time for the same person. Basically, no matter how much you love your favorite restaurant, your partner, eating there for every meal, and having the same starter, main course, and dessert in the same order every time you eat, well, you might start to lose your appetite.

Women’s Desire Suffers More

Every once in a while you need to eat something different, or at least in a different order, or else you might lose your motivation to go to that restaurant you love in the first place, perhaps feel like eating somewhere else. Fascinatingly, we also know that women’s desire suffers more than men’s with the same partner over time. And when sex researchers have asked women, “How often do you feel like sex out of the blue in your long-term relationship,” a large proportion say, “Well, never, or almost never.”

In fact, women report this so often that we now consider it normal for women to never feel like sex out of the blue in a long-term relationship. That’s right. Never feeling like sex does not mean there’s a problem with your desire.

Triggered Desire

So if this is the case, how do we get desire to feature more if that’s what we want? Well, to understand this, we first need to consider newer ideas that have emerged from sex research in the last few decades, which is that desire does not, in fact, always come first. Actually, arousal, meaning the body’s physical response to a sexual stimuli, such as a passionate kiss or being naked with a partner, can come first and then trigger desire.

And also that having sex is often fueled by many other motivations than feeling like it, such as wanting to feel close, wanting to show attraction, wanting to feel alive. So it can be many things other than desire which come first, and for many people, waiting for desire is going to leave them waiting a very long time. Desire basically arrives later to the party once the party’s got started.

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“I Never Feel Like Having Sex, But When We Do, It’s Great”

This is the reason that one of the first things Steph says to me in therapy is, “I never feel like having sex, but when we do, it’s great.” And I say to Alex, “We should do that more often.” If I had a pound for every time I’ve heard that.

We call this experience responsive or triggered desire, and when we measure this type of desire, we usually find it works perfectly well. So what’s the secret to future-proof our sex lives? What can Steph and Alex and the rest of us do?

Never Feeling Like Sex Is Normal

Well, first it’s important for us to understand that for many people, never feeling like sex is normal and doesn’t mean there’s a problem. But because of this, many people in long-term relationships will need to find ways to trigger desire if they want desire to feature. Steph turning towards, not away, from Alex’s kisses as just one example, although not always instinctive, is the type of thing we need to be doing more of.

But importantly, without pressure from either person for that to need to go anywhere. Because she was expecting to have to feel desire from the outset, Steph was stopping this potential trigger in its tracks, the very opposite of what her desire might need. And lastly, we need to think of our sex lives as something which, if a priority to us, we must treat as such, by finding ways to raise our sexual currency and relate to each other as partners in time’s time, not just housemates, co-parents or friends, to make this transition easier.

Small Shifts Can Make a Difference

It doesn’t have to be a big change, a series of small shifts, such as turning that peck on the cheek as you leave the house each day into a five-second passionate kiss can make all the difference. Try it, see what happens. Some of you might be thinking, “Yeah, but does it matter, I mean, sex is just a frivolous recreational activity, right?”

Well, actually, for many of us, it does matter. Sex is more than scratching an itch. It meets psychological and relational needs. And a good sex life is a known buffer against a drop in relationship satisfaction over time.

Being in the Driver’s Seat of Desire

Once we know how desire really works, we can be in the driving seat of how we want it to be in our lives moving forward. No longer a passive recipient, but totally in control of how much we want it to feature and the direction we want it to go. Thank you.