Vanessa Marin, a sex therapist, separates sex drive types (spontaneous versus responsive desire) from initiation styles, the way someone likes sex to be invited. Knowing both yours and your partner's helps make initiating less confusing and more effective.
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Get ready with me while we talk about the difference between sex drive types and initiation styles. Hi, I'm Vanessa Marin. I'm a licensed sex therapist and I am the author of the book sex the five conversations that will transform your love life. It's a New York Times bestseller. Definitely go check it out. So I recently got this comment asking about the difference between initiation styles, which is a model that I present in sex talks and spontaneous and responsive sex drive type. So let's talk about the difference. So spontaneous and responsive are actually the name of the two different sex drive types. Most people don't realize that there are two types and basically what they boil down to is where you feel desire first in your head or in your body. Let me know if you want me to make a video about those two sex drive types because it's really game changing information that everybody needs to know about their sex drive. So that's all about how you experience desire. Now the initiation styles are, are how you like sex to be initiated. So regardless of how you feel desire, this is how you like to be invited to be intimate with your partner. So initiation styles is a model that I created. I share it in sex talks in full. And I've found that over decades of work talking to people about sex and how it gets initiated, we all have different ways that we like to be invited to have sex. And very similar to the love languages, if you don't know your partner's style or what they like, what's going to get them excited to be intimate with you? You might be initiating sex in the wrong way. I think for a lot of us, initiation can just feel really hard and confusing. It can feel like a way we don't even know ourselves. Like, I don't know how I want my partner to initiate. I don't know what would turn me on or get me excited in the moment. And it's definitely an area that we can really struggle with our partners. Like, I don't know how to be really vulnerable and ask my partner to be intimate with me in a way that's going to feel exciting to them. So. So the initiation styles model helps you understand yourself better, understand your partner better, and figure out the sexiest and most productive ways to initiate sex in your relationship.
