How To Bless Arousal
Learning the difference between arousal and desire and finding the only story your sexuality can thrive in
Tyler sat across from Lauren over drinks for the first time since they broke up six months ago. And he could not keep his eyes off of her. She was stunning. He had not planned to rekindle the flame. He’d only texted to make peace since they share the same social circles. And both agreed to meet to clear the air and be well with each other.
But there she sat in gorgeous repose. He felt intoxicated by her beauty and he swears it was not the drinks. He felt every bit the arousal of his body in her presence. And yet, though the conversation was pleasant and reconciling, it only confirmed to him they did not have a future together. With such different dreams, goals, perspectives on relationships and the world, she was not the companion, the lover, the mate he could move forward with. He knew again he’d made the right decision.
He listened to her from across the table stuck in the bind of the moment, his body pulling him one way and his heart another. Oh, but the choice was clear and he knew this full well. This was not the time to make his next move. It was the time to walk away and end the evening grateful for peace between them.
He knew he had to let his arousal die.
That probably sounds a little dramatic. Arousal dying? How is that anywhere near a blessing? In reality his body was not at risk for getting injured or damaged. Our sexual arousal is very capable of stopping and fading without reaching its fulfillment. It won’t hurt us at all. More on that in a minute. Calling it a death for himself actually helped Tyler enter into his grief. He was finally and fully letting go of Lauren. He knew his sexuality could only live in one story, that’s the story of love. Arousal and desire were meant to converge together in a good story of romance. This was not that story. And by guiding his body into the reality his lover heart knew (the relationship was over), Tyler was actually blessing his arousal.
So he made his goodbye and left.
Arousal vs Desire
When it comes to sexuality, one of the most revolutionary things you can understand is the difference between arousal and desire. Though they overlap, arousal and desire are distinct processes in the body. Its called Arousal Non-Concordance.
Arousal is a body state that prepares your body (with blood flow to the genitals, lubrication, heart rate increase) for sexual experience and guides it to climax. Researchers Masters and Johnson first named this the sexual response cycle and found it involves four distinct phases: excitement, plateau, orgasm, resolution. It is essentially identical for men and women—only that men have a refractory period, or pause at the end, before they can travel the cycle again where women don’t or at least have it less. So in terms of our response cycle, men and women are equally wired for sex.
Sex researcher Emily Nagoski calls arousal our sexual radar because getting aroused is largely an autonomic process. Our arousal gets triggered when something sexually relevant to us enters our realm of awareness. That could be from touch, a book, a conversation, another person, a show, an article, a dream, a thought, a smell. The source can be almost anything. But arousal only tells us something is sexually relevant to our sexual template—our bodies and our stories. It says nothing about if we want that thing. Here’s Nagoski, “Genital response is an automatic response, unrelated to whether or not we enjoy something.” Want and enjoyment are the realm of desire.
Desire happens in the heart and that’s where we have agency and participation. As Nagoski says, “Arousal tells us if something is sexually relevant to us, but not if it’s sexually appealing.” The appeal is where we can engage with our hearts and our will. Though arousal is more automatic, desire is more malleable and engage-able. We are not slaves to desire. We can make decisions about what we want and don’t want. That makes desire sound so simple. But desire is not an on or off switch we just flip nor a straightforward game of yes or no.
What do we actually want? How much do we want it? Why do we want it? Is it sex we want or something else connected to it like touch or intimacy (desire confusion)? Maybe we want it and don’t want it all at the same time (ambivalence). Maybe we want it but want something else more. Maybe we are willing to try and want it (responsive desire). Or maybe we want it for the wrong reasons (sin). Maybe it only reminds us of something else. Maybe it’s a distraction from what we really want but can’t face. Desire itself is a very complex experience and it takes work to get in touch with our deeper desires, our truer heart. But desire is not arousal and arousal is not desire.
Another way to say this is that arousal tells us something is sexually meaningful to us. It means something to our bodies or our stories. But it makes no statement about what it means. Nor does it tell us if we want that thing. Sexual desire tells us that we feel some appeal some pull towards it. But even that needs discernment. That’s where we enter in to engage it with our hearts and awareness. Which can lead to making a choice of our will. This complex process of arousal (body) and desire (heart) awareness helps us make the complex choice of action (will). And that action can be towards, away, or tangent to the sexually relevant thing.
That may all feel so overwhelming to separate out. But I share this because, if we blur it all together in our felt experience, we can get so confused about our sexuality. The hope is that we learn how to discern what is going on in our bodies and hearts. And even deeper, to know how to bless God’s design of our sexuality and steward it to bring him glory and give ourselves the best thriving life.
And here is the not confusing part. I am convinced there is only one story in which sexuality thrives: romantic love. That’s it. There is one story and I mean only one story in which you arousal and desire can live alive and free and good and safe. Under the guidance of your mature lover heart in genuine love, you not only get physical release but emotional attachment, healthy and safe play, and love. I think here of Paul’s words, “Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Corinthians 16:14). Notice I said romance and not simply marriage outright. That was on purpose. Though I do believe that love and romance and thereby sexuality need the commitment of marriage to thrive, sadly some marriages are not built on or cultivated with love and romance, a tragedy in itself.
The only way to bless arousal is always to invite it into the right story, the story of love.
*
Though their naked bodies commingled on a hot summer evening, Andrew could not shake the feeling that Jess just seemed distant. He’d pursued her for sex earlier in the night and she’d agreed to once the kids were in bed. And that’s exactly what happened, as they had done for many years. Jess seemed present and interested and their talking and cuddling transitioned into enjoying the moment. He loved making love with her. He loved her body and he loved these moments of connection and play amidst the hard work of life.
But he started noticing her energy fade. And she was keeping her eyes shut. It felt to him like she had gone away somewhere inside. There was her body fully available to him, but he just didn’t know if he had her heart. He suddenly felt lonely for her. He wanted her, to make love to her, not simply a distant body. And so he stopped and asked, “Are you okay? You seem distant.”
“I’m fine. Just not really here…” she paused. “…But go ahead and finish.” Finish. The invitation stung. Yes, his flag was at full mast and his body well on its way in the arousal cycle. And so, sure, he could get an orgasm. But to divorce it from passion and love and affection? It was not much of a choice. “I don’t want to just finish. I want you. What is going on?” She rolled over away from him.
He clicked on the light on his nightstand. He knew it signaled the end of sex for now, for however long it took to get her heart back. He was calling timeout until he knew her heart was with him. He would let his arousal die in the name of love. He did not want a story of just finishing. That did not bless his sexuality. He wanted the lover story, the one in which sex became love making, not simply release. This was the way Andrew blessed his arousal.
Stewarding Our Arousal
Okay so far I’ve shared two stories in which men interrupted their arousal for a better story and I keep saying they let arousal die. That is misleading. As I alluded to earlier, you will never actually damage your body by stepping out of your arousal cycle. Nothing actually dies. Your body can handle the transition in and out of the play of sex at any point. God made it to be able to regulate up or down.
Oh, it may not feel good. It may feel very disappointing in fact. You will feel the build up of sexual charge in your body. Your body is made to move along an arousal cycle and feel the completion of that cycle. But it’s not a runaway train. You can stop and regulate down anytime. I still remember the client whose husband convinced her men had a physiological point of no return in sex where they could no longer stop. She had endured years of painful sex believing he could not be interrupted. Turns out he was very wrong (maybe lying?). No such thing exists.
Good lovers know how to (and want to!) bring each other along in the journey, as much as possible, to mutual climax. No, it doesn’t happen every time, but men and women’s bodies were equally made to experience the pleasure of sex, both physically and emotionally. This is indeed what it means to make love. As Dan Allender said of all love, “Love is the giving and receiving of pleasure to the glory of God.” Sex is but one unique expression of that.
And thankfully, though arousal triggers automatically, it does not exist in an untouchable realm. We can actually impact our own arousal templates too. We get to participate in writing the story of our arousal over time by the decisions we make with desire. Parts of our sexual stories were written for us. We’ve all suffered harm to our sexuality and the realm evil has worked really hard to join your arousal to shame. It’s a manipulation of our brains wiring, the neuroscience truism, that what fires together wires together.
But we can fight back. We can fight the shame and the alternate story our arousal is trapped in. Often before we can steer our arousal into the right story, we must address the story it’s caught in now. We do that with curiosity.
*
Adam tossed his phone in a chair and flopped on his bed. He had just emerged from a porn binge. So engrossing was the moment, he had lost touch with time. And his body too. He stared at the ceiling, trying to tune in again. He heard birdsong outside his window and a dog barking. He heard himself take a deep breath. His senses were returning.
Porn always put him in a trance of sorts. It was not awe, for porn did not enthrall him much these days. He would even say he hated it. He honestly had no idea how he fell down the rabbit hole of porn today. Boredom? Loneliness? Insecurity? He had not cared to pay attention much to it. He had only wanted the trance, the chance to leave his world. But that was changing now. The spell had broken.
He felt the arousal leaving his body. And he could already feel that familiar nausea. Next would be his anxiety, the sign of shame rising. He knew the temptation to hate himself was sure to follow. He joined his breathing now, as he’d learned to do, trying to calm his body and bring himself back awake. He knew if he didn’t risk being kind to himself, the self hatred would pounce and he would go do something to hurt himself—often an angry run or sometimes punching his own face.
He slowed himself. He prayed a simple, “I need you, God.” He risked on the kindness of God. And then his heart got curious. What had just happened? He thought about his day and the set backs at work. His mind flashed to scenes of the porn he’d watched. It was now the very thing he wanted out of his mind. He used to fear the flash memory of this images. But he now understood the need to be curious about those fantasies. They held the clue to the other story that held his arousal hostage. They were always reenactments of his trauma.
He rolled over, grabbed his journal and pen from the floor, and let God and his curiosity take him down the rabbit hole of his fantasies to his heart. This conversation with God and curiosity about himself was the way to bless his arousal.
Stop Making Arousal an Enemy
We tend to decimate arousal in our body when it seems in the wrong place. When we get aroused where we did not want to or when it felt out of sorts or exposing, we punish it within ourselves. Or conversely, we slavishly follow it. We push our bodies into a story that we don’t want and force it to travel the arousal cycle to give us release. But forcing it to do its job of giving us an orgasm abuses it like some one-trick-pony-circus-animal. Which only leads us back to bludgeoning it for getting us in trouble again.
But arousal should never be our enemy. Let that sink in. Arousal is never the problem.
Arousal is simply sexual radar. It’s giving us data about what is relevant to our sexual stories and bodies (our arousal template). It’s not a sign that you’re a sicko. It’s a sign that you are a human with a body and a story. You might feel aroused by something that goes totally against your morals. You can experience arousal from a story of abuse even while your heart breaks for that same story. It’s why sexual abuse victims can feel betrayed by their bodies. How could their body experience arousal for something they did not want? Because arousal is not desire. It’s your body picking up on sexually relevant material. This is why arousal is never a sign of consent.
The problem comes in how we treat our arousal and how we tune in to desire. It comes in what story we invite our arousal to live in. The way to bless arousal is always to be curious about the story it’s trapped in right now and to invite it into the right story.
*
When I first saw my wife as she walked out of our college’s chapel, I fell headlong into a crush on her. But I thought there was no way it could be from God because I was too attracted to her. My sexuality felt like an enemy inside of me, even though I had felt so much at its mercy. I lived suspicious of it.
And for two years, I walked our campus seeing Amanda but never making a move. She understandably took me to be a creep or a player. I was the uninitiated lover. I did not know how to sit with my virility, my arousal, and be curious about it or bless it to go ask her out. I was in the arousal decimation crowd and trapped in a story that saw male sexuality, especially mine, as an enemy. Finally, a friend seeing me so stuck pushed me to risk with her. And 22 years, three kids, and a dog later, you could say its worked out for me.
And wouldn’t it make a cute story to close the curtain here on our young love? I hear God laughing whenever I think about this journey to sitting here now. Yes, he playfully initiated that young man to be a risk taking lover. But there was another chapter. It took me too many years into marriage to get more curious about that old story my arousal was trapped in. I had found some freedom but it had not gone away. I needed more initiation as a lover through facing own sexual story and getting brave with the work of healing.
*
God wants to initiate the lover in you too. He will give you kindness and curiosity and bravery to face the story you are trapped in and the resolve and innocence and play to find the story of love again.
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"We are not slaves to desire. We can make decisions about what we want and don’t want. That makes desire sound so simple. But desire is not an on or off switch we just flip nor a straightforward game of yes or no."
This is so good, Sam.
So helpful Sam - you explain things so well and answer important questions that, as a man, I struggle to articulate but have been wrestling with for years. So good.