DESIRE DIFFERENCES: COUPLES WITH DESIRE DIFFERENCES
When we talk about sex drive, we are referring to your natural capacity to respond to sexual stimuli, including how often and the specific ways you react to sexual cues or situations. And just as all of us have different natural capacities in other areas, we also have different sex drives. Your level of sexual desire, like Tim's or Dan's or Maggie's, may be relatively low. You may be perfectly happy making love two or three times a month or even less often, and there may only be a few types of sexual cues or settings that really turn you on. Or, like Barbara, your sex drive may be quite high. If you could, you would have sex every day, or you normally think about sex many times a day and can; turn everything from a suggestive television commercial to boredom with a tedious task into a sexual cue. Whether very low, very high, or somewhere in between, this innate capacity is rarely viewed as a problem when both partners have nearly equal sexual appetites.
When a couple that comes to us for sex therapy consists of one partner who says, "He (or she) never wants to make love," and another who complains, "He (or she) is constantly pressuring me to make love," it is relatively easy for us to identify them as a couple with desire differences. And like many other sex therapists, we find that the lower-desire partner overestimates the frequency of lovemaking while the higher-desire partner underestimates it.
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