How To Deal With Low Libido Part 9
Desire tends to express itself naturally. You normally don’t have to think about it because it thinks for you. But for low libido men, desire is a decision. It’s a conscious intention to discover and learn new ways of keeping sexual energy alive.
Obviously, you can’t decide to be aroused, but you can decide to do things that lead to arousal. For example, if you’re tense you can’t “decide” to relax, but you can “decide” to take deep breaths and consciously relax your muscles, which results in relaxation.
Similarly, you can’t ‘decide’ to be sexually aroused, but you can decide to exercise, create an environment conducive to sex, follow the recommendations in this book, and set the stage for arousal to appear. Desire is like a flower. Sometimes it blooms without effort and sometimes you have to tend the earth to create the opportunity for the petals to spread.
Don’t Wait For The Mood To Strike, Strike Into The Mood
Imagine going to the gym only when you felt like it. You’d get so out of shape you’d break your nose doing a pushup. To prevent that from happening, most people have a routine—they knock back an energy drink, crank up the music, and do a few warm-ups.
Just like men figure out how to get themselves to the gym when they don’t feel like exercising, you’ve got to figure out how to get yourself to bed when you don’t feel like making love. You can’t wait for the feeling to come up. You have to come up with the feeling.
But wait. Why should you come up with the feeling if it doesn’t come up on its own? Isn’t there something wrong with a relationship that requires you to conjure up desire as if you were a medium conjuring spirits in a séance?
No, there isn’t. There’s something wrong with your understanding of the sexual response. Let me explain.
Sexual response works in different ways for different people. High libido people don’t have to wait for a thought, a feeling, or a situation to get turned on. They’re basically hormones with feet. They’re so highly attuned to their body’s responses that they act on the slightest hint of arousal. They don’t have to bring forth sexual thoughts or fantasies because they come without effort.
Low libido people are the opposite. They tend to wait until they’re flooded with feelings before they act. They interpret the absence of dramatic stirrings as proof they have little or no sexual desire.
But that is a falsehood, a grave misreading of how sexual response works. It’s true that sexual desire is often unbidden. It just appears. But it’s also true that it is bidden. It appears because you called it forth. In other words, you can wait for the feeling or you can come up with the feeling.
How “Cuing” Revs Up Low Libidos
Sometimes even basic biological drives need what psychologists call “cuing” to get them to surface to awareness. Take hunger, for example. Sometimes you’re so busy and distracted that you forget to eat. But a cue will remind you. It can come in the form of looking at your watch and realizing you should have eaten hours ago or smelling freshly baked bread. Cues don’t create desire, they remind you of them.
Situational cues act as triggers for an appropriate response. A change in lighting signals the start of a show. A sound effect is a cue for an actor to say his line. A gesture by a conductor signals a new direction in the music. Your partner’s smell may be the cue for sexual stirring.
A cue is a prompt. A stimulus, either consciously or unconsciously perceived, that elicits or signals a type of behavior. It can be artificially set or organically grown. A cue can work accidentally (somebody walking by with a fresh batch of cookies) or on purpose (setting an alarm to remind you to eat). Sex drives can be ‘cued’ in much the same way.
First, you have to understand what prompts a sexual response from you. Is it seeing romantic films? Watching erotic movies? Hearing a deep, resonant, sexually confident male voice? Sniffing an especially appealing after-shave? Picking up on a man’s natural scent?
Is it a long-lasting look into a man’s eyes (if you’re wondering why that can be so powerful it’s because a look-lock releases phenylethylamine, a chemical that accelerates attraction. Some call this the copulatory gaze).
Cues trigger a response thatbrings your desires to conscious awareness. And from there, your self-imposed chastity belt tends to unbuckle naturally. The challenge is to understand what your sexual cues are so they can trigger a response.
Next week: Types of cues and how to use them.