When Desire is Difficult (and what to do about it!) | Q&A with Dr. Jennifer

Conversations with Dr. Jennifer

Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife

Self-improvement, Education, Mental Health, Sexuality, Health & Fitness

4.4 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 27 August 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For many women, sex feels like something to get through—another duty to manage, another expectation to meet. And yet, the more we pressure ourselves to “fix” our difficulty with desire, the more elusive it becomes. This is because desire cannot be manufactured. It will never come from obligation, attempts to appease, or from sheer willpower. It only thrives in freedom—when we feel true to ourselves, at ease in our own skin, and at peace with how we are showing up in our lives. In this NEW episode, Dr. Finlayson-Fife unpacks why women so often struggle with desire and and what they can do to cultivate a sexual relationship that feels alive and worth wanting. Listen to the full episode to learn: Why you can’t force yourself into desire How duty-based meanings suffocate women’s eroticism The crucial differences between men’s and women’s sexuality Why freedom and authenticity are the lifeblood of passion Join us for the Art of Desire Retreat! Click HERE to SAVE $100 with code Desire!

Transcript

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0:00.0	This isn't about, oh, this is the sneaky way to get you to want sex like you should.
0:04.2	This is about you being truer to yourself to sort out what you really want.
0:08.7	What do you want in your marriage?
0:10.4	Do you want this marriage, right?
0:12.7	Do you want to develop your sexuality or not?
0:16.1	But to start getting clear about who you are so that you can make choices that you are at peace with,
0:23.4	that you feel good about, that are about being the person you desire to be on this planet.
0:47.5	Welcome to Conversations with Dr. Jennifer. Welcome to Conversations with Dr. Jennifer, a collection of interviews on the topics of relationships, sexuality, spirituality, and more.
1:04.7	All featuring Dr. Finlayson-Fife. Welcome, everybody. Glad to have you here and glad to talk to women, especially of the Art of Desire course. Just before we start, I just want to tell you that we are having an
1:10.1	Art of Desire retreat in September, just outside of Portland in Hillsborough, which is a beautiful suburb, just southwest of Portland, kind of looks like Tuscany in the United States.
1:23.3	That's from Monday to Thursday, and we'll be talking about a lot of the themes that I'll be talking
1:29.5	about tonight, but about self-development and sexual self-development and how deeply connected
1:37.3	the two are. This is a course I've been teaching since 2000, maybe 14, I think, or maybe 13 when I first taught it. But just my thinking continues
1:48.0	to evolve and having written the book also has really kind of continued to shape my thinking
1:55.1	on this. So this retreat will be just new materials. It's the same basic structure,
2:00.1	but there's more content around women's
2:02.9	sexuality. And I'll be talking about some of those things tonight, or at least touching on them.
2:07.4	So let me just talk for a moment about desire in general and then women's desire overall.
2:14.9	But while we can certainly choose how we engage in our lives, we can choose what kinds of
2:21.3	circumstances we put ourselves in. We can determine the kind of person we want to be or how
2:27.3	committed we want to be to our marriage or to developing our sexuality. Like we have control over all of
2:33.3	those things, but we don't have
	...

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