Desire Discrepancy is Actually Normal

Every year, I reach out to all the therapists on my mailing list and ask them what sex-related issues they struggle the most with in the therapy room. Every year, one topic comes out on top: desire discrepancy.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and teaching about all the complexities of desire discrepancy, so it makes a lot of sense to me that many therapists find it challenging!

But there’s also an interesting paradox here – there’s actually nothing wrong with desire discrepancy in and of itself. There’s really no normal amount of sexual desire; natural human variation ranges all the way from “no desire, ever” to “lots and lots of desire.” Plus, there are about a million and one different factors that can affect desire, so individual people often experience a lot of fluctuation over the course of their life as their hormones, bodies, and circumstances change.

As a result, desire discrepancy is pretty much to be expected. In fact, any given relationship is much more likely to have a desire discrepancy than not – simply as a result of the fact that you and your partner are different people. The issue is that it often causes people a lot of distress.

The next question becomes - why does desire discrepancy so often cause distress? There are a few reasons, as I see it:

We believe that there’s something wrong with us (or with our partner) if we don’t have the same level of desire. To start with, we don’t have a great way of dealing with many kinds of  differences in a relationship; oftentimes, the picture we get of romance in the media is of a seamless melding of two into one. We’re not taught to expect that differences between ourselves and our partner(s) are something to be expected and even celebrated, and we’re not taught the relational skills needed to navigate those inevitable differences.

Bringing in the sexual component complicates things still further: high desire and low desire are both pathologized (and so is asexuality, to an even greater degree), even though all are perfectly normal ways of being. Add in the emotional complexity we tend to feel around anything sex-related, and it’s no wonder desire discrepancy poses a challenge.

We make a lot of meaning out of anything not going as planned. For most of us, sex is charged with emotional intensity, and fraught with taboos and misinformation. If we struggle to communicate honestly about sex, we will end up acting on assumptions rather than facts. You can imagine how often that goes wrong – and when it does, it tends to leave us feeling unattractive, unwanted, broken, unloveable, and disconnected.

We don’t have the skillset to communicate honestly about sex. I write and talk a lot about differentiation of self, which is the core skill set needed to communicate about sex, as well as any other challenging topic. (If differentiation of self is a new term for you, here’s a breakdown to get you started.) We aren’t born knowing how to differentiate; differentiation of self is a lifelong challenge for pretty much every one of us. (Ask me how I know!)

Honesty requires risk, and risk is particularly scary when it comes to the relationships we cherish the most. But the alternative is accepting a partnership in which we are never truly known. When I work with partners who have a desire discrepancy, much of what I do, in one way or another, focuses around helping them differentiate. Building differentiation can be quite destabilizing and difficult, especially early on – but the reward is a relationship that’s richer, more alive, and often, much sexier.

The takeaway? As a therapist, I recommend starting by normalizing variation. Desire discrepancy is more common than not, and most partners have to find some kind of way of working with their natural, normal variations in desire. It’s a worthwhile project – not a sign that you or your partner is broken. That’s not an entire treatment plan, of course, but it’s a good start.

Originally published at Psychology Today.