ORIGINAL ARTICLE “I Just Go with It”: Negotiating Sexual Desire Discrepancies for Women in Partnered Relationships Breanne Fahs 1 & Eric Swank 2 & Ayanna Shambe 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract Although some researchers have addressed differences in sexual desire between sexual partners, little attention has been paid to the subjective narratives of how women understand and reflect on discrepancies in sexual desire between themselves and their partners. In the present study we used a critical sexualities (Fahs and McClelland 2016) perspective to analyze semi-structured interviews with 20 women from a diverse community sample collected in a large Southwestern U.S. city in order to examine women’ s feelings about and reactions to instances where they and their partners have different levels of sexual desire. Results revealed five themes in how women negotiate sexual desire discrepancies: (a) Declining sex, (b) Having unwanted sex, (c) Experiencing pressure for sex (giving or receiving), (d) Feeling disappointed and staying silent, and (e) Discussion of sexual discrepancies. We highlight tensions about essentializing and naturalizing sexual desire, as well as how women imagine their right to ask for, or decline, sex. Implications for power, coercion, and sexual entitlement are also included along with practice implications for clinicians working with individuals and couples. Keywords Sexual desire . Women’ s sexuality . Sexual negotiations . Sexual scripting . Desire . Sexual entitlement . Sexual health . Partners The subject of wanting sex—that is, who gets to want sex, who feels entitled to sex, who experiences (or even feels allowed to experience) sexual desire —is a relatively understudied subject in critical feminist psychology (Fahs and McClelland 2016; Lamb and Peterson 2012; Morgan and Zurbriggen 2007). Although some researchers have stud- ied the relationship between sexual entitlement and sexual satisfaction (McClelland 2010; Zimmer-Gembeck et al. 2015) and others have looked at the links between sexual desire discrepancy (that is, when one partner wants more sex than the other partner) and satisfaction in quantitative studies (Bridges and Horne 2007; Mark 2012) little attention has been paid to the subjective narratives of how women negotiate discrepancies in sexual desire between themselves and their partners. The research literature on sexual satisfaction has generally focused on who feels more (or less) satisfied (Byers 2005), methodological complexities of studying sexual satisfaction (Fahs and Swank 2011; McClelland 2011), and the demo- graphic and personality characteristics that predict higher sex- ual satisfaction (Haavio-Mannila and Kontula 1997). These focuses have generally ignored the nuanced decision-making in which women engage when deciding whether to engage in sex when they feel tired, disinterested, or even repulsed by sex. Some research has looked into the gendered aspects of sexual compliance, with studies showing that women feel more obligated to comply with men’ s sexual demands than the reverse (Sanchez et al. 2012) and that sexual desire dis- crepancies are normative for women in long-term relation- ships (Herbenick et al. 2014). However, women’ s reports of having more desire than their partners, as well as how they negotiate these feelings, have been largely understudied, with only a few studies examining “hypersexuality” in women or the stigma of “excess” sexual desire for women (Fine and McClelland 2012; Leiblum and Nathan 2002). * Breanne Fahs breanne.fahs@asu.edu 1 Women and Gender Studies Program, Arizona State University, 4701 W. Thunderbird Road, Glendale, AZ 85306, USA 2 Social and Cultural Analysis Program, Arizona State University, Glendale, AZ, USA https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-019-01098-w Published online: 12 December 2019 Sex Roles (2020) 83:226–239