Spontaneous vs. Scheduled Sex: How Do We Find The (Right) Time?

It can be hard for couples to find good times to connect sexually. Busy lives or different sleep schedules are just some contributing factors that make finding time for sex especially challenging. Add to that an expectation that sex is "supposed to be spontaneous" and we have a recipe for frustration. 

Join me for an exploration of where the whole "thing" around spontaneity comes from, why you might like to de-bunk the myth that spontaneous = passionate, and how you can find more time and better times to get it on. 

Get my free email newsletter with helpful tips, plus a free guide to Finding Your Deepest Turn-Ons, and learn how to work with me at https://laurajurgens.com.

Transcript

0:00  
Welcome to Sex help for smart people. I'm Dr Laura Jurgens. I'm here to help you have better sex, intimacy and relationships. So let's get at it. All right. Hey everyone, welcome to episode 77

0:14  
so today we are talking about spontaneous versus scheduled sex. And boy, people have really strong opinions about sex needing to be spontaneous. And so I want to really invite you, if you are one of those people, to try to keep an open mind in your own best interest, because if you'd like to be having more and more delicious sex, then I want to challenge the assumption that sex needs to be spontaneous in order to be passionate or wonderful, because I really think we've been kind of brainwashed into thinking that. And I want to help you un brainwash yourself and see if you actually might wind up with a different opinion, and you might want to try out scheduling more, because it could really just be wonderful for you. So one of the problems with the idea of sex needing to be spontaneous is just the facts of adult life, right? Like we have things to do, we often have jobs, maybe kids, maybe elderly parents to take care of, maybe dogs, or whatever it is that fills your time, right? We need to go to the gym. We need to go do our favorite hobby. We need to make food to feed ourselves, right? We have to take ourselves to the doctor. All those things get in the way sometimes of just having nothing to do

1:51  
and being like, oh, maybe this would be a great time to have sex. And in fact, I was just hearing from someone the other day who said, you know, remember when we used to be bored?

2:02  
I think I miss that. And it's very uncommon in many people's lives to really even have time to sit down and relax, let alone to just sort of be like, Oh, maybe might be feeling like some sex right now, especially when we're not teenagers anymore and we don't have all of our you know, if you were lucky enough as a teenager to have your needs taken care of by your parents and they put a roof over your head and paid your bills and things like that, maybe you had a little extra time to be thinking about having sex at that time. And maybe as an adult, it's just really hard to find time to be spontaneous. So that can be one challenge, and that's one of the reasons why scheduling is a really good idea. But I'm going to give you a particular approach to scheduling that I think is much more helpful than the one that a lot of times people do, where they say, you know, okay, five o'clock on Sunday afternoon, we're meeting for sex. Everybody sort of feels like, Okay, I'm not really turned on right now. What do we do? How do we get there, right? So that is a bummer, and just feels bad. So we don't want to do it that way. But I do want to challenge the idea that spontaneity is somehow better, because I do think it's mostly socialized subconsciously, through a lot of media and to some extent porn also, but really, even just regular old movies and TV, sex happens really fast. People fall into desire in an instant, rip each other's clothes off, and just two seconds later, everybody's already done,

3:45  
everything's happened. It's over.

3:48  
And you know, that's really handy in movies, but it is not actually how real human beings work, and especially not how most female bodied human beings work. So men often tend to have a bit of a much sharper arousal curve, which means it just gets it goes from zero to 10 really fast. And women will go from zero, they'll get to 10. They'll actually sometimes get way past 10, but it will take a while, and that is a really common thing. And in fact, a lot of my trans clients who've transitioned from male to female identities and bodies have reported, as they've started taking estrogen, that they felt like their arousal just takes a lot longer, but they do still really get there. It just is a longer process, and I've so maybe estrogen based bodies often seem to take a little bit longer. But what's the problem? It's wonderful. It's delicious. And often female bodies have a more tendency for responsive desire, and a lot of times men do too, especially when they're not teenagers anymore. I mean, when you're a teenager and you're a male, oftentimes you get an erection when the wind blows. So you know.

5:00  
Which can even be problematic and embarrassing at that time. But as we get older, responsive desire is much more common than the idea of spontaneous desire, where we're just sort of sitting around, you know, eating a peanut butter sandwich, and we just get horny. Responsive desire means maybe there's a look our partner gives us a touch, maybe they grabbed our butt. Maybe we are skin to skin. Maybe there is something that's happening that feels yummy and it leads us to sort of we want to follow those breadcrumbs. We want to follow the next step in arousal. But it doesn't mean we're magically ready for penis and vagina sex right away, or to have anything inserted in us right away, right? Or any or even oral right away, right? It just means we want to start following the mmm that feels good. Let's continue. And so responsive desire often does take time, and it also means in order for us to access that arousal, a lot of times, we need to slow down from the busy pace of day to day life. We need to slow down in order to get into our bodies, in order to feel relaxed enough to be available for arousal, because eroticism and sexuality is really easily shut down by any sort of anxiety. And that's an evolutionary trait that seems to make a lot of sense, right? If things are scary and there's problems that's not really the time to be making sexy time, making babies, right? So slowing down from the busy life pace, recognizing there's no need to rush, following the little bread crumbs of yummy until you see, if you want to do more, we sometimes need more room in our life. We need more time for that. That's not something that can just happen spontaneously. We need to take aside, set aside time to have the play time to even do that. And that's what I suggest. Scheduling is letting it be play time, not making it an agenda. We have to, you know, 5:03pm,

7:00  
everybody needs to get naked and be horny. Like, that's just ridiculous, but scheduling it like, All right, hey, Sunday afternoon, let's check in and just start to see if maybe, you know, we might want to make out a little bit or do some of the stuff that we both know is yummy for us, for each other. Maybe you'd like a little back rub. Maybe, you know, I would like you to pull my hair and smack my ass, whatever it is.

7:27  
We might really like to have a little bit of play time and just see if that goes somewhere that seems nice. If everybody feels on board, we can just kind of stoke the fires, right? We can just play and be connected. And the worst thing that's going to happen is we're going to relax and we're going to giggle and we're going to have a good time. Okay, that is a much nicer thing to schedule, much better way to go about it,

7:53  
and tends to lead to more frequent sexy times for couples, especially if you're in long term relationships, because here's the thing that happens when you're just dating someone, you're automatically scheduling. We don't realize this, but dating is all about scheduling, and when you live together, you are not scheduling so much anymore that time, necessarily, unless you were smart enough to take that time and set it aside to do things like sexy playtime or relationship talks, checking in, emotionally staying connected, those kind of things. But when we're dating, kind of automatically scheduling, because we have to figure out, when am I going to get together with this person? How much time are we going to spend? What time do we have to be home? You know, what is the sort of familial arrangement, right? If you're dating and you have kids, you might be okay, well, I don't have kids this weekend, so maybe I want to stay over. So now you're actually scheduling play time. So news flash to all, y'all in long term relationships where you live together,

8:59  
it's not that you didn't schedule when you were dating. It's that you did, but you didn't realize it. And that when I realized that, it sort of shifted my mindset a lot. It was a game changer for me. I was like, Oh, that's right, that's a lot of scheduling going on when we didn't live together. And you'll notice if you're polyamorous or if you're non monogamous, there's a lot of scheduling going on, and there's a lot of scheduling sex. Because you if you don't live with all your partners, and gosh, if you do live with all your partners, you're going to have to figure out that schedule too. So when you have multiple partners, there's a lot of scheduling as well, for sure.

9:38  
So this sort of myth of spontaneity. You know, maybe it would be great if we were all sort of independently wealthy, and we were all constantly on vacation and we had zero responsibilities, and we could just get up in the morning and, like, toodle around and decide at some point during the day that maybe we wanted to invite our partner to sex. But maybe that wouldn't even work either, because now all of a sudden.

10:00  
The other person has to be on the same sort of rhythm. And a lot of what happens with couples who don't schedule either is that they're working, they oftentimes will wind up not having very much sexual connection, simply because they might be on different bio rhythms. And somebody is kind of a morning sexy time, and somebody's kind of an evening sexy time. And because they're not actually finding something that works for both of them intentionally through scheduling, they are missing each other, and they're both kind of upset about it. You know that the person doesn't want to have sex when they want to have sex, that gets really, really common problem. And you know, in those cases, a good scheduling of like an afternoon delight session can really help out. So this is my pitch for embracing scheduling. I hope you have enjoyed it.

10:53  
If you are a hardcore, spontaneous person, that it has at least opened a door to maybe thinking about how you might have more sexy time and more delicious sexy time if you were willing to schedule with your partner

11:09  
and do it in a way that doesn't have a super hard agenda, right? Like, it doesn't mean that anybody has to do anything in particular. There doesn't have to be penis and vagina sex, or doesn't have to be toy and vagina sex, or doesn't have to be, you know, penis and butthole sex, or doesn't have to be oral sex. It doesn't, it doesn't have to have an agenda. It just needs to have play time and following the things that feel good to both of you, and that will also give you an opportunity to really start having dialogs about, Hey, what should we think about trying? What would feel good to you that I haven't necessarily known to do? Is there something you could show me that you would like, you know? Is there a way of flirting that would feel really good to you? Is there type of touch that we could practice a little bit beforehand so that I'm sure I get it, you know? Or do we want to make sure our toys are charged, or all of those things. Do we want to make sure that we have the lighting right? Do we want to have the music? Do we want to how do we want to set it up? How do we want to set our scene, you know, and that really creates some intentionality there. Do we want to try a different room in the house? Do we want to go somewhere? Do we want to, like, you know, find a secluded spot outside so you can really open up some more creativity, too. If you have planned it, it's a little bit easier to do that. Okay? I hope. I'm really interested to hear if you are a hardcore, spontaneous person,

12:34  
how this landed for you, and if you want to stay in your hardcore, spontaneous camp, more power to you. You know. I hope it works out for you, but it's just that it's hard to fit into a lot of adult life. So I'd be curious if it feels more open. And for those of you who really want to schedule, but your partners may be feeling a little resistant to that, or they're not sure about how that might work, and if it would feel less sexy, I want to really invite you to share this episode with them, talk about it, and hopefully you can use some of these points to see if maybe they'd be willing to give it a try for a little while. All right, my friends, have fun. I'll see you here next week.

13:12  
Wanna come to Hawaii with me? If you are a woman or you know any, send them right to my homepage. Laura jurgens.com, the Maui retreat info is there and it is open for Early Bird registration. Don't miss it, and I get to see you in Hawaii.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai