How easy is it for you to turn yourself on? Could you do it on demand if you needed/wanted to, or would it be a struggle?

The sexologist Emily Nagoski, as you might know, popularized a paradigm that I reference here regularly: spontaneous desire versus responsive desire. People with predominantly spontaneous desire tend to get turned on randomly, like a “lightning bolt to the genitals” (as per Nagoski), and then seek out sexual stimuli to sate that arousal. People whose desire leans responsive, on the other hand, don’t get turned on until after they’ve been sexually stimulated, whether through mental means like flirting, dirty talk, porn, or erotica, or through physical means like making out, massage, or dry-humping.

Broadly speaking, I think this is a useful framework for understanding sexual desire. Like the “love languages” system, it’s not universally applicable, but can at least be a useful starting point when trying to solve a mismatch in a relationship. A person whose desire is very spontaneous, for example, might find it baffling and hurtful that their more responsive-desire partner never jumps their bones out of the blue – and so both partners might feel comforted by the knowledge that some people’s desire just doesn’t work that way, and that it’s not necessarily reflective of a lack of attraction.

However, one common criticism of the spontaneous-versus-responsive-desire framework is that it can seem to foist all the responsibility for initiating sex onto the spontaneous-desire partner. Granted, plenty of people enjoy the process of getting their sweetheart in the mood, but it’s also understandable that they may not want to singlehandedly do so every time. And that is why it’s important for people with responsive desire to take some proactive steps of their own, at least sometimes, even if it doesn’t come as naturally to us.