A Psychotherapist Explains How To Reprioritize Pleasure In Relationships

Why is something that feels so good so hard to fit into our lives? As a mother of three small children, the demands of modern life sometimes get in the way of me choosing pleasure. I often prioritize what I have to do over what I want to do.

It's not just me—we live in a culture that rewards productivity, yet what we know about desire is that it feels stifled by routine.

As sex educator Emily Nagoski described in Come as You Are, we all have a "sexual response system" that functions like a car, with an accelerator (that picks up on "erotic stimuli," or reasons to have sex) and brakes (that picks up on reasons not have sex, like responsibilities, life transitions like losing a parent, or racism/misogyny/other socially oppressive forces). 

Mothers, in particular, are often encouraged to create space for our children's needs over our own. We brainstorm activities that make them happy but don't think of how to nurture our own peace, ease, and joy. We spend an hour playing Legos, but we don't invest time in asking ourselves "what brings me delight?"

We don't have satisfying sex lives for many reasons. Some people didn't like the sex they were having and stopped because they didn't know what to do about it. While some have body insecurities that make being present in sex hard, others feel depressed or anxious, as both nervous system states make it difficult to connect to our emotional world or the emotional worlds of our partners.

And some wilting sex lives are indicative of other disconnects in the relationship, like the buildup of feelings of resentment or hurt.

Our nervous systems need to be regulated for us to be willing to approach intimate and deep connections. It is difficult to go from a stressful bedtime routine with a toddler or an argument with a teen and then feel "in the mood."

Sex in the movies tells us that we should be "in the mood" for sex. Desire, for many of us, ignites in response to stimuli and is not out of the blue.

Couples tend to leave sex for after all the other "stuff" of life—cooking, cleaning, making phone calls, etc. If you have a window of time available, have sex first to ensure it's prioritized. 

And it's not just jumping at your chance spontaneously—it may take a bit of planning. Though this can sound really unsexy, scheduling sex is one of the most fundamental aspects of a thriving sexual relationship.

When you think about it, even when you were single, you still scheduled sex; it was just less explicit. You knew that after your dinner date at around 11 p.m., you'd do it.

It's normal to have five-minute sex. It's normal to have 12-minute sex. It's normal to have 30-minute sex. Feeling like you need a lot of time or energy to have sex might mean you never have it.

Oftentimes, when I ask women what they want in therapy or support circles, they have no idea because no one has asked them. We have to know what feels good within ourselves before we can expect our partners to know.

Great sex is about how much you like the sex you're having—which is in part your attunement to yourself and in part your partner's attunement to you.

Consider how much you allow pleasure—what makes you feel good, inside and outside of sex—to guide your choices? Do you spend time doing what you love? Do you allow yourself to feel good without needing to earn that relaxation, excitement, or ease? What fantasies does your imagination hold?

Oftentimes, people report that centering their pleasure wasn't about adding in more things but rather taking things away. In Pleasure Activism, Adrienne Maree Brown reminds us that "Your no makes the way for your yes. Boundaries create the container within which your yes is authentic."