Is Your Sex Drive Normal? (And what does that mean, anyway?)

By Susan Mernit

Do you want to make love all the time? Every morning and night and anything in between you can fit in on the weekends? Or do you prefer making love 1-2 times a week, building your way up to it, and then knowing that by the time you and your partner make love again, it’s going to be deeply anticipated and treasured? Or, are you just over all that — someone for whom sex, most of the time, just doesn’t feel very necessary or exciting?

Welcome to the world of your sex drive.
In preparing to write this post, I spent some time cruising the web, as well as reading my favorite sexologists, like Susie Bright and Pepper Schwartz. I discovered there are two ways to think about sex, pretty much, but two ways stand out most. The first view is that sex is something a wife gives her husband and they have to negotiate a satisfactory rate of delivery of the goods, a viewpoint very common in sex self-help forums at sites like Men’s Health. The second view is that sex is a form of health and pleasure, and if you’re not enjoying yourself in a meaningful way, hey, something is the matter (translation: the world owes you some orgasms, damn it, so make sure you get what’s coming to you.)
The first view leads to normal sexual activity being whatever makes you and your partner happy. In this scenario, if both people have “low” sex drives and want to make love 1X a week or less, that’s totally normal (and if you have small kids, it might be amazing to make it that often!). In this world, at 36 my friend Lucinda made love with her new 40 yr-old boyfriend 2X a day and was dying to share news on every yummy minute; at 47, she and same boyfriend, now 51 yr-old husband, made love less that once a month and since he didn’t complain or press her (and their relationship was great in all other ways), she thought it was completely normal (and was thrilled to skip sex, which hadn’t interested her that much as she got older and the relationship became more familiar.)

The second view, however, is more of a “are you living up to your orgasmic potential?” perspective. This is the world view where even if the status quo feels okay, it’s worth checking out if you could feel a whole lot better.

This is the world where my 57-year-old friend Marsha who felt her libido had flat-lined, went to the doctor who started her on testosterone, and then fell back in love with sex. In other words, this is the view where normal is what you make it.

In my own life (sorry, son, I’m going to get personal now), I’ve lived in both camps. As a young nursing mom, exhausted and stressed, the whole idea of a normal sex life seemed like a joke because I rarely felt normal (or relaxed). Later, as the married mom of a teen, normal was whatever my husband and I agreed felt right, with interest and availability both completely tied to how much time we could carve out from everything else. (And that was telling, wasn’t it, that making time for sex was not in our top priorities?)

At each of these moments, I felt “normal” but my so-called sexual desire went up and down, and of course when there were issues, like we weren’t getting along, or I felt depressed, or my self-esteem was hurting, it went way, way down.

But then there was the period after I got divorced (the big watershed moment) when I thought about my single state, thought about sex and decided the whole truth about your sexual desire is in your head.

Or, to put it another way, I realized I had a button in my head labeled sexual desire that I could now reset.

Even though I had no clue who my future partners might be, I knew a) there were going to be some and b) I wanted sex to be both meaningful and fun, and ideally, more than once in a great while. And I also knew that I only wanted to date people where there was a strong attraction from the beginning, people whom, as my sweetie “C” might say, are “yummy.”

So while my sexual life feels normal, it’s definitely different than it was 10 years ago, when my son was still a boy, and even then it was 5 years ago, coming out of a divorce-and I have no doubt, as life and health continue to evolve, my so-called normal sex life will also shift, again and again.

And yet, it’s all about the joy we have, isn’t it? The intimacy and the pleasure and the connection that sex brings? The release of tension, the energy connection, the passion? After all, what’s normal is putting your sexual desire to work in the pursuit of these things, not the absolute number of how often you do it.

So BlogHers – How has your understanding about your sexual desire evolved over the years? What do you do to keep things juicy, both in your brain and in your, ah, bed?

This post was originally published on BlogHer and reprinted with permission by Susan Mernit.