Should You Aim for Arousal, Not Sex?

by | Apr 26, 2019 | Sex | 25 comments

For sex to feel good for women, aim for arousal first

What if the reason sex doesn’t feel good for some women is that they haven’t had a chance to learn what arousal feels like?

It’s Rebecca on the blog today. We get a ton of emails and comments from women with low libido, and a lot of them are quite similar to this woman’s question:

Reader Question

So what do you say to the wife who has never had an orgasm, and for whom the physical aspect of sex is just unpleasant and uncomfortable? I really don’t understand how people enjoy this at all, but obviously my husband does. We have sex fairly often, sometimes I have a good attitude and sometimes I’m quiet but just hoping it will be over quickly because I’m so tired and being touched so much makes me want to cry. We married as virgins, there have been no affairs and no porn, I just don’t like sex.

It’s easy to blame low libido on external factors. If your husband uses porn and you don’t want to have sex, that’s very understandable and the porn needs to be dealt with. There may have been past abuse that is impacting you. Sometimes there are health factors that make sex uncomfortable or painful. Sometimes it’s just that the marriage isn’t great. But when the usual suspects are ruled out and we’re left with an awesome marriage and a woman with zero interest in sex, where is the problem coming from?

I believe that a lot of women enter marriages never knowing what being aroused actually feels like.

I don’t think by any means this is the case for all women who struggle with low libido or just a general distaste for sex. But we get comments and emails like the one above all the time–they did everything right, they got married, but she just never felt fireworks. And it makes sense.

Arousal for Women Often Takes Time: Maybe the reason sex doesn't feel great is because she's never learned how to be aroused.

We tend to think of sex like a switch, when really it’s a learning process.

Couples are told “don’t have sex” before marriage and then they get married and we say, “now have sex.” We don’t start with the basics; it’s like teaching someone to read by giving them Dante’s Inferno instead of The Cat in the Hat. Of course they’re going to hate reading–it doesn’t make sense and makes them feel stupid. Having sex before you’ve learned how to get aroused can feel the same way–it doesn’t feel natural, it doesn’t feel like you are built for it because it just doesn’t make sense.

For many women, sexual arousal happens in stages. First, there’s no sexual desire at all–it’s all just snuggling and hand-holding. Then you graduate to wanting to kiss. After kissing for a while, you start to want to make out. Once you’ve been making out for a while, it’s natural to want to touch him and have him touch you. Next the clothes start coming off. And it just escalates from there.

But here’s the thing: that process of arousal and wanting to go further, for women, often takes a long time. And too often we speed up the steps, so that we go from hand holding to sex in around 15 minutes on someone’s wedding night.

Many women get married having never done anything more than kiss or make out and then they go immediately to sex.

This means they end up skipping so many steps!

Now, many of these women may have been aroused before the wedding night and desperately wanted to go further but they’ve managed to practice self-control and so that they’ve been ready for wedding night sex for a long time and it’s finally here!

But for others? They got married and they weren’t ready for the final step yet. Their bodies haven’t actually craved it yet. Their bodies haven’t been taught, “this is how it feels to want your spouse; this is what it feels like to be sexually aroused.”

And then they get married, they have sex, and they feel nothing. And I’m not really sure why we’re so surprised.

I want to be clear: the answer is not to start having sex before marriage. 

It is clear in scripture that God’s best for us is to save sex for our spouses. I am not arguing against that whatsoever. But what I am arguing is that if you are part of a couple where the woman just hasn’t ever felt fireworks, can we re-think what sex looks like?

Sometimes the answer isn’t just to have more sex–it may be to go through those skipped steps to learn about arousal.

Perhaps the problem in your marriage is not that sex can’t be great–it’s that you’ve skipped too many steps along the way. So as a couple, maybe it’s time to work through those steps together. But here’s the thing: if you want to learn how to get aroused, the goal can’t be to have sex–the goal is only to get aroused. That means there’s no pressure to have sex. And if sex doesn’t happen, you haven’t failed–you’ve done work to go through those steps to train your body to respond to arousal. It’s not likely going to go from 0 to 100 in one day.

I cover a lot of great tips for building intimacy and arousal to improve your sex life in the Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex:

God made sex to be AWESOME!

It’s supposed to be great physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Feel like something’s missing?

For those of you who are engaged or dating now, can I ask you to re-think the wedding night and honeymoon?

What would happen if we started telling newlyweds that they don’t have to have sex on the honeymoon? To instead have baths together, to cuddle naked, to give each other massages while they kiss each other? To explore ways to please the other? And then to only do sexual things if they just can’t stop themselves? And that if one is ready and the other is not, there are other ways to be close sexually without penetration until both are ready.

Most women reach orgasm for the first time not through intercourse but through manual or oral stimulation anyway. If we determined to help her figure out how her body works before we went to penetration, we’d likely have fewer people like the letter writer wondering what all the fuss is about.

Obviously there will be many couples who are ready and rarin’ to go from the minute they say “I do,” but if you aren’t ready yet, there’s no shame in that. Be honest, and tell your fiance,

“I want to have an awesome sex life with you. And so I’d like to use our honeymoon to explore every inch of each other’s bodies and see how they tick and what makes us feel good so that when we have sex it’s great for both of us and I feel ready for it. I want to start this important part of our marriage off right.”

And if you aren’t sure yet if you are ready, be honest about that, too.

The great part, too, is that if you feel unsure but then there is a moment where you think, “I want this so much!” You can just have sex. You’re married! So as soon as your body says YES, then you don’t have to hold back!

What I wish people could understand is that you will have a whole marriage ahead of you to have sex. And I believe that if more couples spent the early weeks of their marriages figuring out just what makes the wife “tick,” we’d see a lot of women with much higher libidos. Because when you go from 0 to 100 with no warming up, it can be hard to understand what is supposed to be happening. But it’s something that comes naturally when it’s new, exciting, and your goal isn’t sex, but to learn how to turn your partner on.

My Sexy Dares have a lot of emphasis on the man learning how to get his wife aroused and draw out foreplay, so if you’re looking for some help, that’s a great place to start!

If you are looking for some more tips to improve your sex life, check out these posts:

What do you think? Do you think couples who are virgins feel too much pressure to go straight to sex on their honeymoon? Do you think a week focused on exploring rather than just “doing it” would help couples start off their sex lives right? Let’s chat in the comments below!

Written by

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Tags

Recent Posts

Want to support our work? You can donate to support our work here:

Good Fruit Faith is an initiative of the Bosko nonprofit. Bosko will provide tax receipts for U.S. donations as the law allows.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Author at Bare Marriage

Sheila is determined to help Christians find biblical, healthy, evidence-based help for their marriages. And in doing so, she's turning the evangelical world on its head, challenging many of the toxic teachings, especially in her newest book The Great Sex Rescue. She’s an award-winning author of 8 books and a sought-after speaker. With her humorous, no-nonsense approach, Sheila works with her husband Keith and daughter Rebecca to create podcasts and courses to help couples find true intimacy. Plus she knits. All the time. ENTJ, straight 8

Related Posts

Comments

We welcome your comments and want this to be a place for healthy discussion. Comments that are rude, profane, or abusive will not be allowed. Comments that are unrelated to the current post may be deleted. Comments above 300 words in length are let through at the moderator’s discretion and may be shortened to the first 300 words or deleted. By commenting you are agreeing to the terms outlined in our comment and privacy policy, which you can read in full here!

25 Comments

  1. EM

    Oh my goodness I love this! One of the reasons I feel like our sex life got off to a great start is that we baaaaarely managed to wait til our wedding night so I was definitely ready to go! It felt like the very natural next step of the tension & desire that had been building for our entire engagement. I can’t even imagine going straight to sex if I hadn’t already been very comfortable with him physically. That being said, we really struggled with guilt over going “too far” during our engagement. I’m not sure what that would look like practically to shift everything past “making out” to after the wedding, but I think it’s a really intriguing idea and worth exploring!

    Reply
    • Rebecca Lindenbach

      I’m so glad you enjoyed it, EM! Yes that’s where I’m at, too–I’m not sure what exactly to tell people, but I think that it doesn’t need to be a prescribed thing–it can just be more of a “explore and see where things take you!” and that may look different for different couples. But some guidelines would likely be helpful… I’ve just heard this far too often to think that it’s NOT an issue and it makes me sad because I really feel like people are only given half the story as long as arousal continues to be left out of the discussion.

      Reply
    • Natalie

      That’s huge, EM, that you went into marriage ready to go! I can only imagine how that helped you. For us, we’d been dating for almost 5 years and had gotten really good at subduing and ignoring our sexual sides, me especially. I was a pro at that. Now 5 years in to our marriage, and we’re finally starting to undo all we did during our dating years & all we ignored for the first 3-4 years of our marriage. Looking back, I’m a fan on dating for “the perfect about of time” which will vary per couple – long enough to know the person well and be certain they’re the ones you want to marry, but not long enough that you have to literally repress your sexuality with them cause that’s for sure gonna follow you into your marriage in some way.

      Reply
      • EM

        Totally agree. Five years is a really long time! That must have been so tough. We dated 18 mknths and then thankfully had a quick engagement, only 4 months.

        Reply
  2. Becky

    YES to this. I was another woman who went from a lifetime of being told to avoid getting anywhere near crossing that line to suddenly being told to just “have good sex” on my wedding night. There were additional factors besides lack of arousal in my case, as I learned that night that I have vaginismus and it took 4 excruciating tries over multiple days to just manage to have it at all. But I wish someone had given me this sort of permission before I got married, or that I’d known to have this conversation with my husband beforehand. Because he didn’t like knowing that it was hurting me, but I felt a lot of pressure to just push through the pain or risk being a failure, because I’d been waiting for 32 years and I was supposed to want this, dangit. When I look back at my honeymoon, I can honestly say that sex was the worst part, honestly the one bad part, and that makes me sad. Nearly 6 years later, though PT helped a lot with the pain factor, it still takes a ridiculously long time for me to get aroused at all, I’ve never actually had an orgasm, and the mental game of even convincing myself that this is a good thing in our marriage is a constant struggle. It shouldn’t be this hard. But what you said sounds like a good approach for a reboot (in a few months, since I’m currently in a place where pregnancy is kicking my butt again and the physical symptoms mean not much is really happening anyway. 4 months to go…)

    Reply
  3. Anon

    Well said. One of my favorite memories from our honeymoon was a stop on the drive up. We drove several hours to our honeymoon location (I don’t recommend that after the wedding, lol) so we pulled over to switch drivers. We started kissing, then touching each other over clothes which was new and exciting. This got us ready to go by the time we got to our honeymoon location. 😉

    Reply
  4. Andrea

    One big problem is that we are all (mis)taught that arousal for the two genders is “men get hard and women get wet,” when the truth is that both experience both — men get so-called pre-cum sperm (which is why the old pull-out method is not the best form of birth control) and women experience the rush of blood to the genitals (the inner labia, to be precise) and swelling of the same.  Only THEN is she ready.  This is why women need to look down there with a mirror and touch themselves, because your erection isn’t as obvious to you as a man’s is to him and it is also likely that you don’t instinctively know what to do with it.  When you’re not aroused (but might be wet nonetheless) your inner labia are small and wrinkly, like turkey necks, to quote my hilarious sister.  When you are aroused they become like two little pillows that cover the clitoris and rubbing them feels amazing.  Touch yourself there occasionally to feel the difference.  Most young women also wake up with erections just like young men do, but don’t know it because there is no embarrassing protrusion.  If you touch yourself first thing in the morning, you might notice it.  Hopefully you can also feel comfortable enough to show your husband the difference and hopefully he is eager to learn.  

    For the single ladies, I am convinced that how he treats you outside of the bedroom has enough predictive value as to how he will treat you inside the bedroom that there is no need to “test-drive the car before you buy it.”  Is he considerate of your needs, comfort, and pleasure in general?  Does he get grumpy if you pull away from a hug?  Does he actually believe what he’s been taught about male sexuality being uncontrollable and women being less sexual than men?  Does he think there is anything he can learn from a woman?  I mean, it’s one thing if he thinks women have no business instructing men in theological matters, but if you’re not allowed to show him how your clitoris works, if he thinks he knows about your body better than you do (and especially if it offends him that you are familiar with your body and recognize your own arousal pattern), then run.  These are all conversations to be had before committing to a lifetime of penetration.  I use this term “penetration” purposefully to indicate that the woman is the more physically vulnerable partner in sex. So make sure he hasn’t accepted the (false, not to mention rape-y) belief that “men just can’t stop once they get going” and holds to the etiquette that “the partner who is getting penetrated sets the pace.” Dare and ask him before you tie the knot!  Ask him if he knows that most women do not come vaginally and that 30 percent experience pain for long after virginity is over (I am not talking about vaginismus here, which is in the single digits, but general discomfort, mentioned in the article Shelia linked to some posts ago about the female cost of male pleasure).  Better be picky and have fewer years of amazing sex than many years of misery.  And as we also know from that article on female pain, “bad sex” is very different for women than it is for men.  

    Reply
    • Natalie

      The word you’re looking for, Andrea, is engorgement. For women, arousal/wetness and engorgement/ready for penetration are two totally different things like you said. (Sadly, this isn’t something I learned till my husband and I started going to a Christian sex/marriage therapist recently lol). Like you mentioned, most women don’t know what their own arousal looks like. I’ve still never seen what I look like down there when aroused, but I’m starting to be able to feel differences I think. When we first started our sex life together, my husband (more “experienced”, so I trusted his knowledge) told me that when I was wet that meant I was ready for sex. So that’s when we did it, and it was okay but honestly kinda boring. But he also learned most of his sex ed from porn, so, yeah know… not super accurate. 😉

      Also, how he treats you outside the bedroom may actually be different than how your initial experiences together are in the bedroom. At least that was my experience. My husband’s view and expectations of sex had been shaped by porn. I think that’s probably true for most new husbands, even those who have not grown up watching porn per se but have just been exposed to all the graphic sexual content our “pornified” society portrays, which is nearly impossible to stay away from totally these days. I think it all depends on the husband and his personality, character, and the state of his heart. Even if he was raised with misconceptions of sex, as long as he’s willing to correct the falsehoods about sex he has in his mind, I think that’s what really matters. And the same could be said for the wife, too.

      Reply
      • Andrea

        Ah yes, engorgement is the right word. Don’t you think it’s hilarious that men think they know more about our bodies than we do? Good people fear searching for sex information online because of porn, but the internet has also brought science online, which means you can read medical journal articles that describe the mechanics of arousal and orgasm in technical language. For example, I got my information from the British National Health Service (NHS). If only men would read those instead of watch porn! Also, if they did, then they would notice that none of the women in porn are actually aroused.

        Also, I hope this isn’t too forward, but why not take a hand mirror and look at yourself down there? Do it in a bubble bath if it helps. Look at the Georgia O’Keeffe flower paintings for inspiration 🙂

        Reply
        • Natalie

          Hahaha, Georgia O’Keeffe lol. As a former art history major, she’s still one of the only modern to contemporary artists whose work I really enjoy.

          Honestly, until only the past month or two since talking with our sex and marriage therapist, I had a really hard time touching or even looking at myself down there. As I’ve mentioned on other posted, I have a really weird relationship with my vagina lol. When I was a teen and trying to insert tampons, my mom gave me a mirror and told me to figure it out. Turns out, I had an abnormally shaped hymen (which obviously couldn’t be seen with a handheld mirror) that basically covered my whole vaginal opening with only some small holes to let out the blood. I only found that out at my first gynecologist appointment, which I went to at age 19 due to my tampon issues and just for a general check-up even though I wasn’t sexually active. That tampon-inserting experience was the only time I’d ever used a mirror to look at myself, and that was associated with a lot of pain, awkwardness and frustrating, ending with me throwing my hands in the air and concluding that tampons just weren’t for me and that my vagina must be abnormal. Plus, I just generally thought vaginas were gross and dirty since they always seemed to be discharging blood or fluid, and they seemed so strange and flappy to me. Also, due to being told growing up that masturbation is always wrong, I never touched myself except to put tampons in (once I’d had my hymen surgically removed), so I never learned what sensations felt good down there or even what arousal was or felt like (I didn’t learn that until several months ago). So, as you can imagine, when I met my husband who’d have previous girlfriends who he’d fingered and even done oral on one a couple times, I trusted his experience far more than my own because he’d actually had “up close and personal” experiences with vaginas, whereas I’d avoided mine at all cost. Heck, even our first child was born via c-section due to being breech, so it’s not like I even experienced my vagina in that sense. Thankfully, with the birth of baby #2 coming any day/week now and him being head-down and in the optimal position for a VBAC, the Lord has allowed me to do A LOT of healing, growing and understanding my own body both mentally and physically and I feel like I’m at probably the healthiest place I’ve ever been concerning how I view my own anatomy and sexuality. I’m sure getting rid of this huge, hard belly will also aid in my continued learning and experimenting down there, cuz right now, it’s very hard for me to see lol. :p

          Reply
          • Andrea

            Ha-ha, here I am recommending Georgia O’Keeffe to a former art history major! I read an interesting essay about how art influences life and not just the other way around (meaning that art changes the way we see things in real life) and I think about that every time I’m at the gynecologist’s office and the diagram of the uterus, ovaries, etc. hanging on the wall reminds me of one of O’Keeffe’s desert skulls 🙂 Sorry, I know we’re veering off-topic now, but I’ve always wanted to share that with someone and since you know about the artist…

    • Mary

      Hello. Care to share where can I find more info about the general discomfort for women? ( you mentioned that there is an article Shelia linked to some posts ago about the female cost of male pleasure). I do have to research this, it seems that after 4 years I still feel it. It is not a big pain, but he needs to enter slowly and it takes like 1 min. So this kind of gets in the middle of my arousal if not yet reached orgasm firts. We want to try to have orgasm with him inside (even though is manually) and this kind of gets in the way. I am not sure it is normal. I don’t think it is vaginisnus, I just think that it is all to narrow and it gets some time for the place to get used to his penis 🙂

      Reply
      • Sheila Wray Gregoire

        Mary, you could very well have a mild form of vaginismus, and a pelvic floor physiotherapist may be able to help with this! I hope that helps.

        Reply
      • Andrea

        Here it is, Mary: https://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasure
        It’s a depressing article about secular sex, but super-important for acknowledging that sex is painful for 30% of women and that the pain can persist long after virginity is over, as it did for the author and her friends, as it did for me, and as it does for you. But you describe more discomfort than pain, which was also the case with me. I don’t think that’s vaginismus and, unless you’re flush with cash, I wouldn’t spend money on a physiotherapist. People talk about the awkwardness of the first few years, but those can be wonderful bonding experiences, where you learn to work as a team instead of fighting gender wars in the bedroom. It sounds like you also have a nice husband who works with you, so I would just say enjoy all the sensations and clitoral orgasms instead of trying to conform to unrealistic expectations. You mentioned that it helps to orgasm first (and I think that should be a prerequisite for penetration), that he starts slowly, and that the discomfort lasts only a minute. That all sounds great and I still love starting in super-slow motion even though I don’t need to because it just drives me crazy and he loves getting me to the point where I’m begging for it. We also still practice what we dubbed “faux doggy style” (rubbing instead of penetration) because it’s enjoyable and we feel quite proud of the creativity we developed in the early years. Conventional wisdom says a woman should be on top to be able to control the pain, but I found lying on my back the most comfortable because it allowed me to relax completely (no muscles needed to be used to keep me upright) and I could open up more by bringing my knees all the way up to my ears, which he also loved. Also, tell him to bear down – it’s the only direction in which it stretches and accidentally coming across this information years ago helped me a lot. Sorry for the details, but women sharing like this is the only way to make things better.
        One more thing. If you’re the type of person who reads the New York Times, switch to the Guardian (English paper of record). You will get all the U.S. news you need and the kind of information on female sexuality that the New York Times won’t print; nothing raunchy, just more concerned with women than the other side of the Atlantic is. I switched when I read a Guardian article that discussed the “orgasm gap” with the same seriousness that other articles discuss the “wage gap,” and their “Vagina Dispatches” section discusses painful sex and condescending gynecologists who say “just relax and drink a glass of wine beforehand” (this also happened to me and with a female gyno). No paywall either, though you might be tempted to start donating to them for all the helpful information, like I did.

        Reply
  5. Lisa

    Very well written. I think there is a belief that the new husband is entitled to intercourse/penetration/orgasm on his wedding day and the new wife better provide it. It’s just not true. You do have your whole lives ahead of you and men, believe me, you don’t want your wife looking back on those early years with tears in her eyes. I know MANY, many women who rolled over and silently cried themselves to sleep on their wedding night. Much better to start off slowly and get to the point where she’s begging for it than to take what you want and then try to repair the damage.

    Reply
    • Natalie

      AMEN, Lisa!!!!

      Reply
  6. Kari

    How does one get through adolescence without ever being aroused? How do you marry someone in this day and age who you love but doesn’t turn you on? This was just so far from my experience that I don’t understand how this is possible. And I grew up in a purity culture household. We had some issues with sex but it sure wasn’t due to lack of arousal on my part.

    Reply
    • Rebecca Lindenbach

      People have different reactions to arousal–many people learn to push down any romantic feelings to the point that they make it almost impossible to get aroused. And that can cause some issues once you are married and arousal isn’t just permitted–it’s important for sexual satisfaction!

      People who grow up in more conservative circles still have a wide range of experiences, and we have definitely heard from a lot of women who have honestly never really experienced that longing to have sex. And then as a result, they don’t want or desire sex even after married even though they know it’s OK now. It’s very sad, but something that I really do believe can be re-learned! 🙂 And something that I hope with more healthy talk about how arousal isn’t sinful we can help avoid in the future.

      Reply
    • Ashley

      I know there are some lines that aren’t heathy to cross, but how about just getting comfortable with our bodies? Grab some coconut oil and see what feels good! This is especially helpful before the wedding, so a bride can be a little knowledgeable and guide a new husband to what feels good.

      Reply
      • Ashley

        I meant to leave mine as a stand-alone comment. Oh well! 😜

        Reply
  7. Natalie

    So well written!! If there was one post on all of TLHV that spoke about my marriage and sexual experience, it’s this one!

    “Because when you go from 0 to 100 with no warming up, it can be hard understanding what is supposed to be happening.” I’d also add that, when you start off your sex life going from 0 to 100 with no warm up and that becomes the norm for the early formative years of your marriage/sex life, it becomes very hard to think of sex as anything else than what you’ve experienced and very difficult to start a new trend in your sex life and sexual habits. Even now, after we’ve been spending several months trying to get our sex life on a different track, I find it difficult and actually unnatural now to not be focusing on him and his pleasure and making that sexual encounter all about him (i.e. jumping right to the sex acts he likes best). It’s actually hard for me to slow myself down and give myself more time to warm up, simply because I’ve never done that in sex before. It’s a learning experience for us both that will take time.

    Reply
  8. Lyndall Cave

    I was thoroughly immersed in Purity Culture as a teen, to the point of choosing to save my first kiss for the wedding. Purity Culture plus a couple random historical romances gave me the idea that it’s normal to go from 0-100 on the wedding night. I was FREAKED OUT about marriage, and that was the one thing I wasn’t looking forward to.

    I remember what a relief it was to learn that I won’t have to have sex on the wedding night if I don’t want to. In fact, it’s relatively normal for people to wait a few days or weeks (because she’s on her period, because they were tired, whatever). I think I learned that from this blog actually.

    I’m the kind of person who when someone says “You have to” I’m gonna instantly react with, “Well, I’m not gonna do it now”. So knowing that I have the freedom to have sex any time after I’m married makes me a heck of a lot more excited for it. Feeling the pressure to do it the night of the wedding is STRESS.

    Reply
  9. Ruth

    It’s so interesting to read all the comments here. I feel like I can relate to a lot of these. I was a virgin when I got married at 34 but I actually think I was experiencing depression and burnout. On my wedding night (and actually even during the wedding itself to be honest), I was a bit like ‘Ok, let’s just get this over with.’ I think that all the years of build-up and pressure from society and church and family etc etc., plus having different boyfriends and having lots of break-ups and emotional ups and downs, left me with very little energy and very few feelings to actually enjoy my wedding and honeymoon. My husband hadn’t had any other girlfriends and was so sweet to me – and I feel really sad and remorseful that he organised such a lovely honeymoon and really tried to hard to be good to me – but I was just too depressed to really appreciate it.

    Reply
  10. Yubi

    What if I don’t enjoyed touching, kissing or any prelude to sex? I rather get to the point and hope for a quick one.
    He really tries and ask what I like but I like nothing. 🙈
    Sad situation!

    Reply
  11. Swty

    Hi Rebecca!
    May I know what are those skipped steps?
    Can you give details.

    Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *