Come as You Are: Difference between revisions

🧭 After years of trying tricks, toys, and “fantasy boxes” to fix her low desire, Laurie’s turning point comes when she chooses pleasure for herself and spends a weekend at a mindfulness retreat—doing yoga, eating and breathing with awareness, sleeping nine hours a night, and rediscovering that she wants to be a source of joy for the people she loves by first being a source of joy for herself. That shift is the gateway into meta-emotions, the feelings she has about her own sexual feelings, which are governed by a “little monitor” in her brain who constantly compares her real experience with an internal standard and reacts with satisfaction, frustration, or despair depending on the gap. An elderly patient in Oliver Sacks’s clinic, Gertie C., illustrates how powerful that monitor can be: she has anxious, erotic hallucinations until he tells her that a friendly nightly visitor actually sounds like a good idea, at which point the same hallucinations become affectionate, scheduled rendezvous that give her love and comfort in late life. In stark contrast stands Ms. B, a woman in her mid-40s who rarely initiates sex, never climaxes during intercourse, and has learned to describe herself as “sexually dead” because she absorbed the script that real sex should be thunderbolts of spontaneous desire and orgasms from penetration, even though her responsive desire and clitoral orgasms are statistically normal. Their stories show how wishing to be different can shove the monitor into the pit of despair, turning perfectly healthy patterns into sources of shame and slamming on the sexual brakes, while a simple reframing—like the student whose only spontaneous desire had appeared in chaotic relationships and who lights up when invited to embrace responsive desire in a good one—opens curiosity instead of contempt. To explain why this happens, the text introduces the “map and terrain” metaphor: families, media, and moral messages draw a map in which men’s simple, spontaneous sex scripts are treated as the default, and women try either to force their real bodies and relationships to follow those routes or to conclude that the terrain is broken when it does not. Changing sexual wellbeing, then, means changing meta-emotions: trusting the terrain by noticing that current desire, arousal, and orgasm patterns are normal; letting go of the map even when that means grieving old ideals; and practicing nonjudging “emotion coaching” toward oneself and one’s partner. Laurie’s renewed gentleness with herself, couples who interrupt arguments to ask whether they are both choosing compassion and patience, and partners who treat each other’s tears like stunned birds or sleepy hedgehogs to be held rather than problems to fix, all show how new goals, kinder effort, and more realistic expectations can shrink the gap the monitor obsesses over. In this sex-positive context, negative meta-feelings such as “I shouldn’t be like this” or “my body is wrong” stop piling stress on the brakes, and the same responsive desire style, nonconcordant arousal, or non-intercourse orgasms that once felt like failures become welcomed parts of a unique erotic self. When people move their inner standard from “be normal” to “belong in my own skin,” their sexuality stops being a test and becomes a terrain they can explore with curiosity, flexibility, and shared responsibility for creating good contexts. ''Feeling okay about how you feel—even when it’s not what you expected—is the key to extraordinary sex.''

 

''Chapter titles and part structure per catalog/preview records.''<ref name="Marmot2021">{{cite web |title=Come as you are: the surprising new science that will transform your sex life — revised & updated |url=https://cmc.marmot.org/Record/.b64025202 |website=Colorado Mountain College Library Catalog |publisher=Colorado Mountain College |access-date=19 October 2025}}</ref><ref name="GBTOC" />

''First U.S. edition: {{Tooltip|Simon & Schuster Paperbacks}} (2015), xi+400 pp.; ISBNs 9781476762104 (pbk.) and 9781476762098 (hc).''<ref name="OCLC879642467">{{cite web |title=Come as you are : the surprising new science that will transform your sex life |url=https://search.worldcat.org/title/come-as-you-are-the-surprising-new-science-that-will-transform-your-sex-life/oclc/879642467 |website=WorldCat |publisher=OCLC |access-date=19 October 2025}}</ref><ref name="CCCL2015">{{cite web |title=Come as you are : the surprising new science that will transform your sex life |url=https://catalog.ccclib.org/?currentIndex=3&resourceid=791842151&section=resource&view=fullDetailsDetailsTab |website=Contra Costa County Library Catalog |publisher=Contra Costa County Library |access-date=19 October 2025}}</ref>