Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life

by Emily Nagoski

Their relationships were strong and their health was good—both things had to be true for women to qualify to participate in the drug trial—yet they believed their responsive desire was a disease. And so they felt broken.

Of course they felt broken. They were taught the same thing that the rest of us were taught, the same thing even their doctors were taught, about sexual desire: that it “should” be spontaneous. That a person who doesn’t spontaneously just crave sex is diseased.

Are we starting to get the picture, that telling women they’re broken is a gr...

No wonder the drugs are ineffective. They’re trying to fix something that isn’t broken. The only thing that’s broken is the culture that tells women they have an illness.

If you have responsive desire, you are already normal. No one needs to “crave” sex out of the blue to be a fully healthy person.

If you want to experience more spontaneous desire, just for the fun of it, you don’t need to change you, you can just change your context, which you learned how to do way back in chapter 3. But you don’t need to experience spontaneous desire in order to be healthy and normal.

Problematic dynamics emerge when partners have different levels of desire and they believe that one person’s level of desire is “better” than the other person’s.

Partner A may feel rejected and undesirable because they almost always do the initiating, and then Partner B may start to feel pushed and judged and so will resist more. Partner A asks and asks and asks and feels rejected and hurt and resentful because Partner B keeps saying no, no, no; and Partner B feels defensive but also guilty and hurt because just being asked makes Partner B feel like there must be something wrong with them.

The purpose is to remove every trace of expectation or demand that sex will result from any physical contact between you. There might be other things you put off-limits, too—anything the lower-desire Partner B resists because of feeling pushed. Without the dread of “Ugh, what if this perfectly pleasant kiss turns into an expectation of sex that I still don’t want?” both of you can relax and enjoy the physical intimacy you do share.

When you take sex off the table in order to break down the chasing dynamic, both partners must agree fully and equally that they are creating the dynamic together. Neither partner is the problem; the dynamic they’re stuck in is the problem.

After your phase of no sex, you can gently increase the intimacy of your physical contact, but ultimately the solution is attitudinal rather than behavioral. Feeling like there’s something wrong with you (or with your partner) or feeling like your partner feels there’s something wrong with you—these are desire-killing contexts, every time.

you’ll believe me because what I’m about to say is true. Because in the patient corners of your heart, you’ve always known it’s true. It’s this: You’re not broken. You are whole. And there is hope.

You might feel stuck. You might be exhausted. You feel depressed, anxious, worn out by the demands of taking care of everyone else, and in desperate, dire need of renewal. You might be tired of feeling like you need to defend yourself and tired of wishing your body would do something different. You might wish that for a little while, someone else would defend you so you could lower your guard and just be. Just for a while.

I know that it can feel like Partner B is withholding and I know that that can feel deeply awful. Your role in untangling your relationship knots is very difficult because it requires you to put down your hurts and be loving to the person who, it sometimes seems, is the source of those hurts.

sometimes you might worry that you want sex too often, that you’re making unreasonable demands, or that you’re sick to want sex as much as you do. No, you just have a higher level of sexual interest than your partner does—your parts are organized in a different way. It’s normal. Neither of you is broken, you just need to collaborate to find a context that works for both of you.

Give Partner B space and time away from sex. Let sex drop away from your relationship—for a little while—and be there, fully present, emotionally and physically. Lavish your partner with affection, on the understanding that affection is not a preamb...

the best way to deal with differential desire is: Be k...

Untangling the knots of sexual dynamics in a relationship takes time, p...

“Don’t just run, be a runner,” she told me. “If you run because you have to or you feel like you’re supposed to, rather than because it’s part of who you are, you won’t run very far or very often, and you probably won’t enjoy it much when you do. Ditto if I have sex because I feel like I’m supposed to. So how about I try on the identity of a woman who loves sex?”

Gloria Steinem said, “The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.” What she didn’t say is how to get from being pissed off to being free. They way to do it is to complete the cycle, walk through the tunnel.

anger did what anger does when you allow it to blow through you like a strong wind: It blew itself out.

It took some time, and it was uncomfortable. She had multiple decades of accumulated stuff to finish, and even a couple of weeks of No! was just a beginning. But what mattered most was that she had given herself permission to feel the anger and was learning the skill of allowing it to move through her, rather than holding on to

She wanted to give pleasure, to connect, to receive pleasure and share it with the love of her life. To experience pleasure—all kinds of pleasure, but the pleasures of her own body especially—without the defenses that had kept her safe in an unsafe world.

It wasn’t that she had never before had pleasure in her life, but it was so walled up by her self-protection that it couldn’t expand beyond a small imprisoned domain within her.

When she focused on her partner’s pleasure, her brakes ...

In my all years of reading the research on sexual desire and talking with couples, therapists, scientists, and medical providers, I have seen no more powerful key to treating “problems” with desire than to understand that it is normal not to want sex you don’t like. As Peggy Kleinplatz and her team write, “[P]erhaps much of what is currently diagnosed as sexual desire disorders can be best understood as a healthy response to dismal and disappointing sex.”

sex that moves you toward a larger goal, powered by more than just the sexual response cycle. That’s the kind of sex Kleinplatz’s clients describe as “worth wanting.” People don’t just want orgasm, they want more.

Being present, focused, and embodied. This is the experience of slowing down, letting go of distractions and inhibitions, and paying attention to what’s happening right now, to the exclusion of everything else.

Connection, alignment, merger, being in sync. Feeling aligned with your partner was described by many participants as essential to extraordinary sex.

Deep sexual and erotic intimacy. Not just during sex, but in the whole relationship, these folks felt deep mutual respect, genuine acceptance and caring, and a de...

Extraordinary communication, heightened empathy. Extraordinary lovers are also, necessarily, extraordinary communicators, which means they are extraordinarily empath...

Authenticity, being genuine, uninhibited, transparency. Extraordinary sex involves emotional nakedness and a shame-free expression of sexual pleasures and desires, which usually requires going through a process of rej...

Transcendence, bliss, peace, transformation, healing. Yes, extraordinary sex can include feeling like you’re melting into the universe and connecting with the divine in a way that changes you, heals you, and truly makes your life and relationship better. When our daily lives require a lot of boundary setting, our sex lives are tran...

Exploration, interpersonal risk-taking, fun. This is much like the “ludic factors” from chapter 3—the context of play, curious investigation, discovery, ...

Vulnerability and surrender. Extraordinary sex is also characterized by profound trust, with nothing held back from partners, where your authentic self is re...

great sex is not about what you do with your partner, nor about which body parts go where or how often, or for how long, but about how you share sensation in t...

“Lust, desire, chemistry, attraction” was, at most, a minor component of optimal sex. Even among people who have extraordinary sex, responsive desire is normal.

More common in these women’s narratives of good, happy sex were comfort and naturalness, basic pleasure, and, above all, emotional connection.

Disappointing sex lives can change. The goal here is not merely to discard sex guilt, shame, and inhibition. Rather it is to jettison the entire aspirational package of paint-by-numbers sex.”25 People who have magnificent sex don’t just show up and put their bodies in the bed—e.g., good sex. They deliberately cultivate a context that’s “just safe enough” to dare the leaps of faith they take into the wild places in their souls.

When people who have magnificent sex want sex, they don’t just want the sex we see performed in the mainstream media or porn. They want to know themselves and their partners more fully, and they want to be seen and known more fully, felt more deeply, held more closely. This is what I call “magnificent desire.”

sometimes there truly isn’t time or energy to pause and turn toward each other with erotic intention. You can allow that to be true, knowing that it’s a phase of life you’ll pass through together, and you’ll find your way back to each other on the other side.

And it’s worth considering what you will each find there, on the other side of your shared dry spell. Is it play or connection or exploration or peace? Or is it more like a chore or an obligation or drudgery? If you dread the idea of showing up and putting your body in the bed, lack of desire is not the problem. Lack of pleasure is the problem.

To want sex may be to want the routine pleasures of the body and of play. Sometimes, though, i...

people who have magnificent sex describe sex that gives them far more than pleasure. It tunes them in to their partner at a deep, physiological level. It reveals their own desires to themselves, and it dares them to reveal those desires to a partner. It takes them deeper into their own personhood, even into their own divinity, and it takes them deeper into their partner’s internal world.

Ask yourself: What kind of sex is worth wanting? And how far would you go to create that in your life?

Just as women are often taught to trust cultural messages about their body more than their own internal sense of what’s healthy, we often trust our partner’s opinions and ideas about our sexuality more than we trust our own. Especially if our partner’s sexuality is a better match with the standard narrative about how sex is “supposed” to work, we’re ready to believe that we’re broken.

Embrace responsive desire. Adore it. It asks that your partner help you in creating good reasons for you to be turned on.

Couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over multiple decades have two things in common: They are friends who prioritize sex.

when the context is right, you long to welcome someone into your garden. When you do, remember that they are used to working in their own garden, and their garden is different from yours. Their body, their brakes and accelerator, the seeds that their family and culture planted, the way they were taught to tend the garden, may be similar to yours, or they may be totally different. If you and your partner are different from each other, remember that neither of you is better or worse—even if one of you conforms more to the cultural standard.

I hope that anyone you like and respect enough to invite into your garden likes and respects you, too. Just as you’d want to help their garden thrive, so they should want to help your garden thrive.