There are so many areas a husband and wife can differ sexually: in their preferences, their expectations, the way their bodies are aroused and climax, and of course, how they experience desire.

We’re going to focus on desire today. For the purposes of this article, I will use the word “desire” interchangeably with “sex drive.”

Most couples will experience challenges related to differences in desire at some point in their marriage, both in their level of desire and their type of desire. Desire is very complex, and is impacted by many factors.

You’ll often hear that there are two types of desire: spontaneous (or sometimes called “initiating”) desire, and responsive desire. I actually believe there is a third: cognitive desire.

The 3 Types of Desire

Spontaneous or Initiating Desire

You feel a physical sensation that you recognize as a desire, need, or urge for sex, prior to any physical touch with your spouse. Your body might even start responding physiologically. You think about sex and your body wakes up to the idea, but there has not been any physical touch yet.

Responsive Desire

You feel a physical sensation that you recognize as a desire for sex and your body starts responding after physical touch has begun.

Cognitive Desire:

This type of desire is not felt physically. It exists independently from a physical feeling or response. You consciously want sex, but your body is not involved yet.

I believe this third type of desire is important, because we often leave our sex life to the whim of physical types of desire. Unfortunately, spontaneous and responsive desire can be elusive and easily affected by other factors. So if you wait to feel spontaneous desire before initiating or engaging in sex, the frequency and vibrancy of your sex life will suffer. This is why I believe understanding and accessing cognitive desire is important to a long-term, healthy sex life. If you do, you will be driven to pursue and respond to your spouse sexually with or without a “high sex drive,” whether or not the physical sensations are there yet. 

There are seasons and circumstances of life and that kill desire. Hormones, diet, sleep, stress, illness, age, and many other things can inhibit your physical experience of desire, arousal, and orgasm. There is a lot you can do to address these things when you find yourself struggling long-term to access physical forms of desire, and it’s important to do so. But if you maintain healthy cognitive desire, factors like these won’t be as debilitating to your sexual connection. You don’t need to wait until that season of life has changed or circumstances have resolved to have vibrancy in this area again.  

If you make cognitive desire a priority, it can be a catalyst to cultivating the other two types, and precursor to greater desire in general.

Why does this matter?

Your level and type of desire impacts the dynamics of your sex life. Lack of awareness of this means the results are out of your control and your sex life is at the mercy of how your differences in desire interact. By taking the time to understand it, you can harness your desire to serve your marriage well. You can be the one who decides how this plays out in your sex life. 

Here are some common challenging dynamics that can result from these different types of desire: 

Spontaneous desire

• Initiating more often than your spouse wants to have sex and feeling rejected or neglected

• Avoiding initiating, because you are waiting on your spouse to let you know when they are ready and don’t want to feel rejected

• Difficulty honoring your spouse’s needs or viewing them more as a way to meet a physical need and less as a multi-faceted, integrated person 

• Feeling frustrated by infrequency of sex 

• Feeling undesirable or unattractive to your spouse

Responsive desire

• Feeling pressured to initiate more or pressure to respond to a spouse with spontaneous or higher drive 

• Feeling objectified by a spouse with higher drive

• Struggling to access desire 

• Believing you have lower drive than you do, because you tend to only “feel” desire once one of you has initiated touch 

• Feeling apathetic or disinterested in sex 

• Feeling frustrated by or suspicious of your spouse’s initiation 

Cognitive desire

• Feeling emotionally disconnected from sexual experiences

• Struggling with arousal or orgasm

• Fixation on goal-oriented sex 

• Going through the motions 

Please note that while they may often go together, spontaneous desire does not always equal a higher sex drive, and responsive desire does not always equal lower sex drive. Likewise, the person with the higher sex drive in the marriage or the one with spontaneous desire is not always the man, nor is the lower or responsive desire always the woman. 

Here’s one example: you may tend toward responsive desire and feel that you have a low sex drive, but have high cognitive desire and initiate sex more than your spouse, who tends toward spontaneous desire, but typically has lower desire than you. There are so many possible scenarios for how this could play out in any given season in your marriage depending on your combination of type and level of desire.

Where do you see yourself in these descriptions? It doesn’t matter what the majority is or the trends are. What are the dynamics, right now, in your marriage?

You may identify with one of these types of desire more than the others, or see patterns in which type you tend toward. However, I encourage you not to label yourself or put yourself in a box. You can develop all three, and they all serve your marriage in a unique way. We are integrated beings, mind, body, and spirit, and isolation or deterioration of any one of those areas is a compromise of the abundant life God has created us to live.  If one or more of these types of desire feels foreign to you, I encourage you to work on developing that type of desire. 

How to Build Desire

Here are just a few ideas for how you can build or develop each type of desire.

How to build spontaneous desire:

• Think about sex purposefully. As strange as it might sound, do whatever it takes to start training your brain to think about sex and associate it with your spouse. Set discreet reminders on your phone, write notes in your calendar or planner, choose an item, a time, or something else as a trigger to think about sexual intimacy with your spouse. And to whoever needs to hear this…it’s okay to think about sex, it’s okay to lean into your sexuality! If you struggle with losing control of your thoughts and images and find them going to anything other than your spouse, or fear that you will if you start opening this door, that’s a different (and important) conversation. But there’s a healthy and beneficial way to do this and that’s what we’re after.

• Fantasize about your spouse

• Think back to recent or favorite sexual experiences or memories with your spouse

• Imagine or plan your next sexual experience with your spouse

• Plan a way to surprise your spouse or a creative way to initiate sex

• Ask yourself questions like “what do I love about my spouse’s body?” “what are ways my spouse initiates with me, touches me, etc. that I enjoy?” “how do I enjoy initiating and touching my spouse?”

How to build responsive desire:

• Learn to focus in on physical sensations while you are engaging in physical and sexual touch

• Slow down when you’re connecting sexually and take your time. This especially tends to benefit women, as female bodies often need this time for arousal and eventually for climax.

• Enhance your foreplay. This is part of both honing in on your physical sensations, and taking your time.

• Learn what turns you on and what helps you transition into sex, and incorporate that into your sexual experiences. Maybe putting on lingerie that you feel really sexy in helps you start to respond, or something your spouse wears, or a certain scent, music, or special lighting. Maybe what you most need is a few minutes to release the thoughts, worries, and distractions occupying your mind and shift your mindset over to sexual connection.

• Build emotional connection in between sexual activity. Any moment of the day is fair game for this. Making purposeful eye contact, asking intentional questions, helping each other or doing something kind, writing notes, deep conversations, intentional greetings when returning home or sending your spouse off for the day…it can all play into how ready your body is to respond once sexual touch begins.

How to build cognitive desire:

• Learn more about sex and what it does for your marriage. How does sex connect you emotionally? What is going on with your hormones and in your brain when you connect sexually with your spouse, and how does that improve your marriage? What purposes does sex serve in your marriage? What good things come as a result of sexual connection? Finding the answers to these questions can help you gain a deeper understanding of the value sex has for your marriage and build your intellectual value of it.

• Examine your beliefs and mindsets on sex. If you have any negative narratives about sex (such as frequent sex is only for newlyweds; I’m not sexy anymore because of how my body has changed; sex is shameful, or certain sexual acts are wrong; I shouldn’t say no to my spouse; I’ll never be free from my past; sex is just physical; I’m just an object to my spouse; sex is a weapon I can withhold from my spouse; spouse is a tool I can use to manipulate or get what I want, sex is not enjoyable), that is likely inhibiting all three types of desire in you and/or your spouse. Take the time to understand where these narratives and beliefs came from and replace them with truth.

Don’t wait to initiate until you feel spontaneous desire. Don’t let an unresponsive body be your normal. Don’t let your cognitive desire stay in your head, learn to get it to travel to your emotions and your body as well. Don’t believe that arousal always has to be difficult. Not when there’s so much available to you to learn, understand, and develop.

Begin with the vision of a healthy, flexible, and playful mix of all three types of desire, knowing some situations and life seasons will require you to emphasize or develop one type of desire over the others. Most of all, enjoy the lifelong journey with your spouse of cultivating these desires together.

Think about it:

Do you tend to have a higher or lower desire than your spouse?

Which type of desire do you tend to experience? Which type do you least experience?

In what ways are you and your spouse different in terms of desire?

How do these differences play out in your marriage?

Do it:

What type of desire do you most want to cultivate right now? What is one thing you will do this week to develop that type of desire?