Love, Sex

How To Know If Your Sex Drive (Or Lack Of One!) Is Totally Normal

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Most people believe that if your sex drive is healthy, you are buzzing with sexual desire all day long. But this isn't true for everyone.

The truth is that some people don't even think about sex until someone else initiates it. But just because it's true — does that make it normal? Or are we normalizing low sexual desire?

In a new video by The Science of Us called Your Sex Drive is Normal, they explain that there are two forms of desire: spontaneous and responsive.

Spontaneous desire is when you are experiencing that buzzing sexual desire or lust that makes you initiate sex, while responsive desire is the desire that comes about when someone purposefully initiates desire in you, through seduction, foreplay or some other means of arousing you.

But while this video jumps at the opportunity to say how "normal" everyone is, what they don't say is that someone with a healthy relationship to their sexuality should experience both forms of desire.

If it was normal not to think about sex until someone else initiated it, no one would be having any sex (after all, who would be initiating it?)

Women are conditioned that good girls don't want sex and that sex is bad. Many women (and men) also have sexual or birth trauma that shuts down their arousal pathways.


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While science is wanting to tell us that it is normal not to think about sex, I believe that it is. The reason you don't desire sex spontaneously is because your culture and your subconscious is telling you not to.

So how do you know if your sex drive is normal? You have BOTH spontaneous and responsive desire.

That's right. You get aroused when you see someone attractive, think about something hot that you and your partner did last night, and you are able to easily get aroused when your partner initiates sexual activity.

People have different levels of desire, and desire changes as we journey through time, or go through stressful or less stressful periods of our lives, but if both expressions of sexual desire are not present in our lives, then it is time to sit down and have a conversation with our sexual self.

Where are you, desire? We need to talk.

Lauren Brim is a sexual wellness coach and the author of "The New Rules of Sex"  a roadmap to rediscovering your sexuality in a dynamic and healthy way. Book a coaching session to discover where your spontaneous and responsive desire have disappeared to on her site www.TheNewRulesofSex.com.