Guidelines for Revitalizing and Maintaining Sexual Desire
By Barry and Emily McCarthy
The keys to sexual desire are positive anticipation and feeling you deserve sexual pleasure.
Each person is responsible for his/her desire with the couple functioning as an intimate team to nurture and enhance desire. Revitalizing sexual desire is a couple function, guilt and blame subvert the change process.
Inhibited desire is the most common sexual dysfunction, effecting one in three couples. Desire problems drain intimacy and good feelings from the relationship.
One in five married couples has a non-sexual marriage (being sexual less than ten times a year). Three in ten non-married-couples who have been together longer than two years have a non-sexual relationship.
The initial romantic love/passionate sex pattern of desire lasts less than two years and often less than six months. Desire is facilitated by an intimate, interactive sexual relationship.
The essence of sexuality is giving and receiving pleasure-oriented touching. The prescription to revitalize and maintain sexual desire is intimacy, pleasuring, and eroticism.
Touching occurs both inside and outside the bedroom. Touching is valued for itself, touching does not always lead to intercourse.
Couples who maintain a vital sexual relationship can use the metaphor of touching as having five gears. Gear one is clothes on, affectionate touch (holding hands, kissing, hugging). Gear two is non-genital, sensual touch, which can be clothed, semi-clothed, or nude (body massage, cuddling on the couch, showering together, touching going to sleep or on awakening). Gear three is playful touching, which intermixes genital and non-genital touching, this can be in bed, dancing, or on the couch clothed or unclothed. Gear four is erotic touching (manual, oral, or rubbing) to high arousal and orgasm for one or both partners. Gear five integrates pleasurable and erotic touch, which flows into intercourse.
Both the man and woman value affectionate, sensual, playful, erotic, and intercourse experiences.
Both the man and woman are comfortable initiating touching and intercourse. Both feel free to say no and suggest an alternative way to connect and share pleasure.
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