Do you know what arouses you?
Knowing that could completely change the way you show up in the bedroom.
In this episode, we dive into the difference between desire and arousal, and why understanding your own arousal triggers is the missing link to greater confidence, deeper intimacy, and more passionate sex in marriage.
We cover the history of our scientific understanding of arousal and the sexual experience, including our most recent insights on how context, trust, and emotional closeness play a huge role in arousal—especially for women. We’ll also explore how positive sexual experiences build on each other, creating momentum for more intimacy and joy in your relationship.
By the end, you’ll not only understand the science of arousal better, but you’ll also walk away with ideas you can use to strengthen your connection, boost your sexual confidence, and build a marriage that feels more alive and passionate than ever!
Don’t miss . . .
- Our Virtual Getaway – The Anatomy of Arousal (Sept 26–27): a spicy, nourishing, live, at-home retreat for couples, plus so many bonuses!
- Our Private Facebook Group: Christian Couples Improving Sex & Intimacy
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors or inaccuracies. For the most accurate and complete experience, we recommend listening to the full podcast episode.
I want you to think about a time you felt highly, highly sexually aroused. For me, a memory that comes to mind is a romantic getaway. My wife and I found a brave [00:01:00] babysitter to watch our six kids so we could get away for a weekend. It was very needed. We were able to rest, reconnect, have a lot of deep conversations and just to play and I won’t go into the particulars, but I just remember being highly, highly sexually aroused my wife too, and we made love for hours and.
It feels like you’re in an altered state of consciousness. you’re like in a flow state, like nothing else in the world matters. All of my attention is on her and all of her attention is on me, and just the feelings are incredible and it’s a joyous experience. It’s a great memory I have and have many others like that.
How do you know?
What about for you?
Let me ask you this question. How do you know when you are highly aroused? do you know what arouses you? And if you knew what arouses you, how would that help you be more confident in the bedroom? That’s what I wanna talk about today in today’s podcast.
Now as I go through my [00:02:00] past podcast episodes, I have a lot of episodes on sexual desire, but I haven’t had very many that talk about arousal specifically. And I think there’s a key distinction.
Looking at a dictionary definition, desire is that mental and emotional state. That’s a state of like sexual feeling, sexual longing or like sexual appetite or libido. it’s like the motivation side. Like, yeah, I wanna do this.
I wanna engage in this. Arousal, on the other hand is the physiological. Physiological meaning like mind and body. it’s the response, it’s the increased blood flow to the genitals. It’s. The erection or the, you know, clitoral swelling. For women, it’s the touch that feels good and those are the things that are a arousal.
So they, although they’re often come together, they are distinct processes. And the better we understand what facilitates our arousal, it helps us build more sexual desire in our [00:03:00] relationships.
Now to understand the differences between desire and arousal. Let’s go back in history here and talk about how we’ve come to understand from a scientific perspective how human arousal and desire works. The pioneers in all this, were in the late fifties and early sixties with Masters and Johnson.
There are research colleagues in St. Louis, and they. Really pioneered the idea of studying human sexuality. They were willing to go where no one else before was willing to go. And they published a book in 1966 that became the, the standard at that time for understanding human sexuality. And in it, they, based on all their studies that they’ve done in their lab of observing people having sex, they’ve created what they call their, sexual response model.
And it’s a very linear model. And it starts with excitement and then a plateau phase, and then orgasm and resolution. They say all human sexual [00:04:00] experiences follow those four steps in that order. It was groundbreaking at the time because it finally gave people something to rely on or look at when assessing, sexual difficulty.
This, oh, you have a problem with, excitement, or you have a problem with. orgasm or whatever it might be, they were able to kind of pinpoint those things or so they thought, and it was groundbreaking at the time. But as time has gone on, we’ve seen that the Masters in Johnson model is really too simplistic.
It doesn’t take into account psychological or relational and cultural factors that often influence the human sexual response.
Then in the 1970s, another pioneering aspect was from Helen Singer Kaplan. She said, you know what the Masters and Johnson model is pretty good, but it’s missing a key aspect. It’s missing desire. She says, well, in the lab setting, of course you can record someone. You’re going from excitement to plateau, [00:05:00] to orgasm to resolution, but what about in the real world desire?
Comes first. So she took apart their model and put desire in the very, very beginning. And she says, desire is so important. You have to desire it first, and then you get excited and then you have orgasm and resolution after that. so. now people started to study desire, and this gave people a framework to say, you know, desire actually matters.
And this evolved to in the early two thousands, you have Rosemary Basson, who’s also a sex Researcher who built upon these ideas says, you know what? Long-term relationships are actually different than observing a person, stimulating themself in a lab setting, like in the real world, there’s a whole lot more that goes into it.
Context matters. The relationship in which the couple is engaging actually really matters. So she came up with her circular model. And in her circle model, she has this idea of responsive desire and [00:06:00] spontaneous desire, which you may have heard on my podcast before we talk about it in depth. ’cause a lot of people can relate to this, especially in long-term relationships.
She explains that responsive desire is, where sexual desire is not present yet, but it emerges as a Response to sexual stimulation. In other words. If we were to put that, uh, model out again, you know how Kaplan put desire before, excitement and orgasm? bassen is putting arousal before desire.
In other words, some sort of stimulating activity. Some sort of arousal needs to happen first before there is sexual desire. But she went a little further and said, arousal just out of the blue doesn’t happen in real life. There’s so many contextual factors like you kind of need to, like the person you’re with, you need to feel somewhat neutral first and kind of be open to the possibility of it.
And that’s when the stimulation in the right kind actually helps [00:07:00] with the arousal and then leads to more desire, which makes complete sense. Sometimes I’m a little boggled that, uh, you know, these seem obvious to me. But, anyway, a lot of money gets poured into research studies to state the obvious sometimes.
But anyway, here you go. what I really like about what she talks about is the emotional and relational state of the relationship really matters, and you have to pay attention to that. Another part of her theory that I like too is she says.
Positive sexual experiences reinforce motivation for future sexual experiences. In other words, if you’re having bad sex, it’s not gonna make you want to have sex. A lot down the road. But if you’re having good sex and good meaning, it’s a positive experience. You walk away feeling great, you love your spouse more.
You, uh, actually are happy with how it went. The more of those you have, it’s a positive reinforcement. It actually opens the door for even more sexual opportunities in the future.
[00:08:00] These theories give us a framework in how we approach sexual desire within ourselves and within our marriages. And then you have in the two thousands, Dr. Lori Brodo, she adds another element to all of this. She says, mindfulness matters. And she created techniques and interventions that, through her experiments have shown that the more mindful you are about arousal, physiological sensation, in other words, the more present you can be within yourself, settle down and like be in your body instead of in your head.
Especially for women, the better the sexual experiences become. So we have a lot of these tools that help us better understand desire and how desire happens.
There’s some additional research that I find fascinating. They try to see what it actually makes people aroused. And so they have heterosexual men and women in a lab setting and they connect their body to sensors so measure physiological. Sexual arousal, [00:09:00] and then they show images on the screen and they give a person a clicker in their hand.
And the the task is if you see something arousing, you click the button and that’s like to confirm. Yes, I think, this is sexually arousing. And what’s interesting is for men. Anytime they showed a picture of let’s say a, a naked woman or someone attractive like that, they would click the button. Yes, I find that arousing.
And they would measure at that moment how their body responded to, and there was a 90% positive correlation. In other words, when a guy said yes, that’s arousing click, their body also, was in concordance with that. Women on the other hand, had a very, nuanced response. They found that when they just measure the body alone, the woman’s body actually responded to a wider range of sexual stimulation.
For example, pictures of mountains and scenes. [00:10:00] Uh, you know, like a mom with her children. Also really good looking men. their body would also respond, uh, positively, for sexual arousal. But the clicker didn’t go off as often. In fact, the researcher said there was a 50% concordance, between what the.
Women’s mindset. It is arousing and what the body says, in other words, they agree half the time. Now, I don’t believe this is a bug. I think it’s a feature, and it just goes to show how important context is, especially for women when it comes to sexual desire. Think about it from an evolutionary biology standpoint.
Think about it this way in general, between the sexes, men are larger. they’re stronger and, in a sexual situation, women are more vulnerable. And if you think about the missionary position, he’s on top, he can pin her down. also if you’re thinking about, what the result is of a sexual [00:11:00] experience, six minutes for him.
Can equal nine months of pregnancy for her, plus 18 years of child rearing. So there’s a lot more at stake, a lot more at risk for women when it comes to engaging sexually Also. women have a higher chance of contracting a sexually transmitted infection compared to men just because of anatomy and biology.
So if you were an evolutionary scientist, you might conclude that these reasons why contextual matters matter so much more to women make perfect sense, because if she is going to have sex with a man. She needs to make sure that this is someone that she can trust and you know, a guy that’s gonna stick around for a while and actually like, be a partner in life with her.
So anything you do in your marriage that builds that stronger emotional connection is a foundation it’s good for the whole marriage when that happens, it, it makes complete sense. [00:12:00] And from a, a religious standpoint, I believe this is also a feature.
Wouldn’t God design men and women such that if sex is to be bonding between a husband and wife, there will be those contextual elements that also facilitate things that matter. Greatly to building a great marriage, and I’m talking about things like humility. Trust being, honest, being, faithful, being a good listener, being, strong.
When it’s time to be strong and meek, when it’s time to be meek, all of those factors kind of are not natural. They, they’re things that we must grow into as an individual. And a good sexual relationship invites us to always go to our next level of who we are spiritually, so that we become. more Christ-like in our relationship, and that facilitates our sexual development as well.
In our private Facebook group titled, uh, Christian [00:13:00] Couples Improving Sex and Intimacy. In marriage, you should look us up. If you’re not a member of our Facebook group, I’ll add the link to the show notes below. I asked the group, how do you know when you’re aroused? Fill in the blank.
I know I am aroused when blank. And for a lot of the men, they responded. I know I am aroused. When I feel an erection. I see my wife undress, or those sorts of things. They, they feel. Again, that arousal in response to like. The desire to be with them and for women it was, interesting. It was kind of the opposite.
In general, they’re saying it, they talk about the relationship cues, that context things. And yes, they do feel like, I feel like my genital swelling. I feel like I want to touch myself or I want to be touched, on my genitals and so on. And those are all important things. But it’s just interesting to note how much contextual cues really matter to women.
So if you want more arousal in your marriage, focus on emotional closeness. Focus on [00:14:00] pleasurable touch and focus on like, using your mind, is there a fantasy or a mental image or a theme that you can recall that you can kind of put some attention on that facilitates your, sexual attention, that sexual arousal process within yourself?
And if you don’t know what it is, I encourage you to take the time to figure out what is it exactly? That helps me feel more aroused in life.
Now that we’ve discussed the science and the research behind sexual arousal and how it’s linked to desire. Now I want to talk about building sexual confidence. Again, if you knew what it was that helped you with your arousal, in other words, assuming the context in your relationship is great, what are the things?
Is it the physical, relational, or psychological things you can incorporate into your life that will facilitate more arousal to create more desire in your relationship? What would it be? And if you knew those things, how much more confident would you [00:15:00] be in the bedroom? How much more willing would you be to engage with your partner and have those positive sexual experiences that reinforce wanting more positive sexual experiences, thus leading to a stronger and closer bond with your spouse and a tighter and more real, alive and passionate marriage?
And this is why I wanna invite you to join our virtual getaway that we’re hosting at the end of this month, September 26th and 27th. And don’t worry if you can’t attend live Register anyway. You’ll get a copy of all the recordings and all the material, and you have until the end of the year to the end of 2025 to, pick another weekend of your own, to do your own virtual getaway.
Now, virtual getaway is this. My wife and I, and a few special guests and experts will be joining you live and it starts Friday night, 7:00 PM Mountain time, and again, Saturday morning, 10:00 AM and then Saturday night, 7:00 PM So we meet in three sessions and each session builds. On the previous one, we’ll give [00:16:00] you sexy homework, and each session is about an hour, hour and a half long.
We do a deep dive into an area in your marriage to help you discover. The anatomy of arousal and how arousal is facilitated in your marriage. we’ll give you exercises that involve pleasurable touch. we’ll give you exercises that involve mental stimulation, some fantasy play. We are even bringing in a special guest, and this is, we’re so excited about this to teach a lap dance.
Now, this is great for beginners or for the more advanced couple. It’s a way for you to express desire. In a very embodied form, and you’re not on camera, don’t worry. We’re teaching this to you. And not only that, but we’re also giving you a music playlist that you can use on your own to, you know, kind of set the mood.
This is all about incorporating healthy arousal into your relationship that leads to more desire. Now this, is an amazing getaway experience [00:17:00] because you get expert instruction from myself, you get expert instruction from my team, and you’re gonna do a deep dive into an area of your marriage that could actually help facilitate more arousal in the future.
Besides, I highly encourage you to get a babysitter and go have a weekend getaway yourself. Or send the kids to grandma’s house so you have the whole house to yourself and to really dedicate this time and make it a getaway for you and your spouse to experience high levels of arousal together.
Not only do you get those three sessions of expert instruction, but we also are throwing in a ton of bonuses. So the first bonus you get is that lap dance tutorial. It’s, it’s the video, it’s choreographed for you, and we give you a music playlist and it’s gonna be fantastic. The second bonus we give you is our sex exploration list, and it is a guide that we’ve developed as a team and that we keep updated and it has over 250 prompts.
That facilitate discussions and spark, ideas on how to bring more [00:18:00] arousal into your marriage. This is like a yes no, maybe list full of over 250 sexual behaviors and ideas that you might wanna incorporate into your marriage or they might want to discuss. And this alone can be a very arousing and stimulating discussion.
Okay. The next bonus you get is a movie list. Now movies are a great way to add some romance to give you those romantic and sexual feelings. We have a list, that you’ll get as a bonus of some recommended movies that are romantic. All also feature marriage, but also. Facilitating that strong relational component that’s essential for creating the right context, for arousal to happen.
We also are gonna give you, as a bonus, a role play scenario, and we’ve partnered with our friends at Faithful Fling now role play. Isn’t that scary? It’s about taking what you usually do as a couple. But just swapping roles. It’s, it’s, I’m still Dan, my wife is still [00:19:00] Emily, but we’re experiencing each other kind of in a different light.
We’re taking a different stance to the way we play, and we’ll give you a specific script that’s, laid out for you on exactly how to do that. And it’s gonna be really fun.
The fifth bonus you get is our after dark role play instruction, and this is something you can watch in your own time. It’s about an hour long and it’s an in-depth guide on how to incorporate role play into your marriage. And the reason why role play, I believe is important, is it helps facilitate that psychological arousal.
All right, my friends, if you’re listening to this podcast episode and you’re saying, yeah, I want some time away with just my spouse, where we can really focus on our arousal and understanding and really dialing that in more. Or you might be asking yourself, I really want an experience with my spouse where we try different things that we normally do.
Or you might be saying, I would really like to be more confident with myself in the bedroom. I want to know what turns me on better. Then this is exactly what you need. So the [00:20:00] link is in the show notes below, or head over to get your marriage on.com website and click events, and then you’ll find all the details about our anatomy of arousal virtual getaway There.
In conclusion, I believe sex is such an important part of marriage and it’s definitely an area that cannot be neglected If you want a happy and joyful marriage long term, it facilitates our growth. It facilitates our spiritual development, as well as our physical and relational development. And learning how to do it well is definitely.
Uh, money well spent. It’s definitely time well spent. It’s a great investment ’cause it yields a high return on happiness. Understanding how desire and arousal works in your marriage will give you a huge boost of self-confidence, especially in the bedroom. So, I hope this information has been helpful for you and now I challenge you to go and get your marriage on.
