A major complaint I hear from some moms I talk with about their sex lives is that they often start having sex before they get in the mood. Basically, they don’t get turned on until they are in the middle of lovemaking.
Many of these women just take this as a fact-of-life, they know that if they give it a go, the likelihood is that they will end up enjoying it and having just as great an orgasm as if they had been aroused from the beginning. But as I wrote about here it can cause some internal struggle to get to the point where you feel comfortable going for the gold when you are not in the mood.
These are the women I am writing about today.
Sometimes you have to be aroused before you even feel desire. At least, that’s what Michele Weiner Davis writes in her book The Sex-Starved Marriage, which despite its title is not about sexless marriages, rather it is about couples who have different sex drives.
She writes that the conventional idea that sexual desire or fantasy leads to sexual acts, which lead to arousal and then orgasm is often not applicable. Rather, many people (not only women) think of themselves as non-sexual because they no longer have sexual desire or fantasies the way they used to (or these are few and far between) but if they engage in sexual contact despite the lack of desire, they will become aroused in the process.
Redefining for oneself the concept of what has to come first: desire or arousal, can help some women deal with feelings that they are “just not sexual the way they used to be.” Not everything has to be the way it used to be, including out sex lives. And perhaps accepting this can lead to less inhibition about trying sex to see if it leads to arousal despite the initial lack of desire. And of course, there are always tools like vibrators or reading erotica together that can jump start that lagging libido in ways that traditional foreplay isn’t always able to. Because regardless of how you get there, when it works, the pay-off (orgasm!) is worth it.