In Radical Intimacy by Sophie K Rosa, she talks about how intimacy should include connection, care, and community. This individual versus communal approach makes me think of the old trope, you have to love yourself before you can love someone else. I beg to differ. I’ve learned to love myself more deeply and fully by being in meaningful relationships with other people. People I trust and love reflect my strengths and my blindspots in a way that catalyzes growth and self-actualization. Relationships highlight the damaging patterns that surface from old wounds as well as areas of growth, security, and integrity.
When I forget how to love myself, my community steps in to love me so fiercely and honestly, that I remember again. This trope, when taken seriously, has the potential to reinforce individualism in a way that keeps intimacy contained. It says that to learn how to love is an isolated path. Go forth and find the answer and don’t come back until you do. It implies that love is finite, that somehow we can figure out love, and once we do, we can only then experience that with someone else. This message makes a mockery out of the expansiveness and complexities of love. Love is nuanced and powerful enough to be in perpetual process. It is one of our greatest teachers, and therefore, often leaves us with more questions than answers. I’ve learned more about myself in community than being alone.
I’m not suggesting we discard self-reflection and internal, personal work. It’s important. I’m not suggesting we expect others to solve our challenges. I just think we could do with a little more emphasis on community when it comes to love and care. I’m all about the self-care and self-love but not when it’s associated with individualism in a way that leads to self-loathing, overspending, and even loneliness.
I see this neglect of communal care when it comes to desire discrepancy. The onus is often put on the person with the lower desire, implying that they are the problem and have to fix something. I see it quite differently. Desire discrepancy, as I’ve come to conclude, is less a problem than it is a means to engage in relational growth and healing. A standard approach to desire mismatch in relationships is to see the person with lower desire as having the “problem.” Our desire standards have become so rooted in compulsive sexuality that we forget how widely desire reaches, the space it takes up outside of sex.
We equate desire with physical contact yet we can desire emotional intimacy, mental stimulation, and more. Having low desire can be a beautiful opportunity to see what else you might be craving, both personally and relationally, and how feeling unfulfilled in certain areas could be interfering with sex and intimacy. It can be a way to invite ourselves — and our partner(s) — into relationship more vulnerably and wholeheartedly. It gives us the opportunity to open up what sex and pleasure mean for us.
In a study¹ about using the practice of Sensate Focus to resolve desire discrepancy, they write, “also seeing the problem as shared rather than one person’s issue helped make improvements.” I don’t love that they use the word problem but I appreciate that they emphasize the importance of shared commitment.
For me, a season of lower desire is often a cry for more holistic connection, a way to honor and bring light to another longing, one that craves an expanded, co-created intimacy. What if we recognized the lower desire as an important and appreciated indicator of what may be neglected in the relationship and how both people can aspire to learn and grow together? For me, communal care around sexual healing means changing the narrative from you are wrong to you have been wronged. In Sex Ed Book Club, we often talk about the ways dominant culture has corralled us into believing things about sex and pleasure that just aren’t true, and definitely aren’t uplifting or encouraging.
How would we feel about our desire level if we remembered that society pushes an unrealistic script about sex and intimacy on us, and operates in a way that tries to keep us confined within that narrow script? If we feel bad about ourselves or hyper-fixate on self-care as the only answer, we buy more things! We work harder! We try and change or force our desire to be something it doesn’t want to be. We must, because we have to be better and aspire towards something that we are not currently. Ahhhh, and there’s the rub — capitalism at its finest. It functions to keep the duty solely on the individual because if we paid attention to communal care and relational growth, we might just call out its dirty little game; we might just remember that we are whole and lovable as we are and already have a million free, inbred resources to call upon; we might spend more time awakening and nurturing soul-affirming relationships; we might become less rigid in our I can do it alone determination and soften into support.
I’m tired of people telling women that it’s their responsibility to heal sexual and relational wounds. I say this because I recently dove into benevolent sexism (here’s a great video describing it) and how it implicitly demeans women and urges them to show up differently. I just watched a TikTok video where a female relationship coach says “a man is not going to be inspired to provide for you if you’re reaching from a half full cup.” This really set me off. This reinforces the binary that a man should provide for a woman (therefore taking away the woman’s autonomy) and that the woman’s half full cup is somehow burdening the man. You have a half full cup which is causing your man to not feel inspired. I see this all over the internet and it fucking infuriates me. This might seem like a ranting tangent but stay with me.
According to Emily Nagoski, 30% of people assigned female at birth and 5% of people assigned male at birth experience responsive desire. If responsive desire isn’t being given the care if needs and deserves — foreplay isn’t centered, other forms of connection aren’t attended to — it can lead that person to not want physical closeness at all. Their desire may wane, and then perhaps they feel blame or shame or the pressure to match their partner’s desire. If AFAB folks are more likely to experience responsive desire, and society does not historically support or endorse this type of desire with its hypersexual ways, then who might the blame typically fall on? AFAB folks! Okay, so now we see how other forces besides capitalism might be at play here (duh) — hi cisheteropatriarchy 👋🏼 We’re tricked into thinking it’s our fault but the truth is, our ways of being aren’t supported by larger society.
Okay, I want to close this out by saying that you are not broken or wrong or unlovable. If your desire doesn’t look like your partner’s desire, or it has fluctuated, that is completely normal. There are a lot of forces at play impacting how we feel about intimacy and your changing desire might be the wisdom of your body and heart responding to certain pressures or ass-backwards societal scripts. I sometimes imagine my desire as a sweet little creature retreating because it’s intimidated by all the ways it’s supposed to operate. If you’re looking for communal care and a space that will invite you in as you are, join our next sex ed book club meeting. I have some exciting news about that »
We’re meeting twice next month — online and IN-PERSON!!! 🎉 We’ll continue talking about Come Together by Emily Nagoski and we’ll probably veer off into other topics, as we usually do. You do not have to engage with the material in order to join book club. Seriously. It just serves as a guide but book club is really about coming together around pleasure and relationships and having a safer, nonjudgmental space to talk about it.
🐚 We’ll meet online on Wednesday March 20th at 6pm est. Here’s our link.
🐚 We’ll meet in-person on Thursday March 21st at 6pm est. We’ll get cozy. There will be music, snacks, n/a beverages, and a collaging station 🤩 Suggested donation of $5-$10 can be sent to my Venmo: @sarahdiedrick // please reply to this email to get location info!
OTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS:
I’m teaching an in-person Restorative Immersion at the end of March. This 10+ hour immersion will deepen and expand your Restorative practice so you can enjoy it at home, share it with loved ones, or integrate it into your yoga classes. You do not have to be a teacher to attend this immersion. During the weekend, we will cover:
How the stress cycle works
The difference between beneficial + harmful stress
Preventing chronic stress + burnout
The foundational postures of Restorative yoga + their variations
How to tailor your practice if you don’t have all of the props at home
The reason why I’m calling it an immersion is because you’ll have ample time to be in the poses. This is where the magic happens. By being in the pose for some time, you’ll get to experience the stress-relieving benefits firsthand and feel even more inspired to keep practicing and/or sharing the practice. This is one of my favorite community offerings and I’m excited to lean into long-lasting, meaningful care with you. Click here to find out more and sign up.
¹ Case report: An online sensate focus application to treat sexual desire discrepancy in intimate relationships