It’s the holiday season. I find myself copying a crossstitch meme about replacing my “regular, everyday anxiety” with my “fancy holiday anxiety” and sending it to my sister and my mom friends, who I know will get it. Then I send it to my husband, just to be sure he gets it too.
I feel like I have added another part-time job’s worth of emotional labor to my already full-time jobs as a therapist and a mom to two boys. Plus there are seemingly ten thousand extra, thoughtful things to keep track of like holiday cards and gifts for teachers, employees and family. Oh, and minor details like tracking misdelivered packages and major details like trying to teach my kids to give alongside the massive influx of receiving at this time of year.
Plus, this year it’s all happening in the context of the COVID-19 global pandemic, so we have some “extra togetherness” at home and all-the-things virtual. On top of that, there is the significant underlying stress of health concerns and difficult decisions, and the loss of not seeing friends and family like we usually might at this time of year. Many people also are carrying the weight of employment loss, financial strain, and sickness and death of loved ones. Sigh…it’s been a tough year.
But there’s one thing that is decreasing more quickly than my time to get everything done — sexual desire. All this “othering” is like a wet blanket on sexual energy.
Many women know this equation: the more you take care of others, the less sexual you feel. Sexual desire and responsiveness is multidimensional and complex, so it certainly doesn’t work the same for everyone. But for many of us, nurturing and eroticism don’t play well together in the sandbox.
So what can help restore desire? One key ingredient is solitude. Even a small amount of alone time, no matter what form, can go a long way in bringing sexual energy and interest back online.
As sex therapist, author, and speaker, Esther Perel, astutely reminds us, eroticism thrives on novelty and distance. The often repetitive, familiar tasks of nurturing can drain sexual energy, especially for a woman doing so on behalf of her family. There is nothing new, and in caretaking we are all up in everyone’s business. Eroticism doesn’t like this at all.
So when we create even a little space and time to be alone and solely focus on ourselves, sexual energy gets a chance to emerge again. We get to reference ourselves and our bodies and feel some healthy separateness from the people with whom we are deeply bonded.
Solitude can come in many forms and doesn’t have to cost a lot (or even any) money: a slow walk without the family dog or a smartphone in tow, a cup of coffee before everyone wakes up, reading a novel, using a meditation app, running outside. Sometimes we just need a small but regular dose. Other times when we are really running on empty, we might need a bigger dose.
Solitude can help restore balance and bring female sexual desire back at least to a state of willingness and responsiveness. It can connect us with ourselves in a way that allows us to hold both nurturing and eroticism. Oh, and by the way, in case you are starting to hear a guilty, judgy internal voice: solitude isn’t selfish; it’s selfing, which is a huge difference. When we turn the noun “self” into a verb, to self, we actively participate in a relationship with ourselves. And the relationship with self is an important cornerstone of sexuality.
