Experiment 001: What Is Desire? Safety, Exploration, and Why We’re All Kids With Legos

Summary

What do we actually mean when we talk about desire?

Is it a feeling? A drive? An urge? Arousal? Behaviour? And if desire is part of being human, why can it sometimes feel so inaccessible—especially in long-term relationships?

In this episode of The Desire Lab, Caroline and Andrea start at the beginning and discover very quickly that the question “What is desire?” opens approximately seventeen other questions.

They explore desire as a pull towards exploration, novelty and connection; why safety and freedom may be complementary rather than competing needs; and what happens when long-term relationships become something we “set and forget”.

Along the way: curious monkeys, secure attachment, tennis teams, capitalism, Prince Charming, mismatched desire, and the unexpected realisation that perhaps we are all just children carrying our latest Lego creation back to someone we love and saying, Look what I made.

Intro/Outro music: “Philadelphia Bounce,” Ghost Beatz

Questions to Take Home

What does desire actually mean to me?

Where do I currently experience exploration, curiosity and aliveness in my life?

Does my relationship give both of us enough safety to explore, and enough freedom to bring what we discover back to one another?

Research & Resources

Contact Comfort & Exploration

Harlow, H. F. (1958). “The Nature of Love.” American Psychologist.
Harlow’s famous rhesus monkey experiments challenged the idea that attachment could be explained by feeding alone and demonstrated the importance of contact comfort.

Butler, R. A., & Harlow, H. F. (1954). “Persistence of Visual Exploration in Monkeys.” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 47, 258–263.
The lesser-known experiment Andrea references, in which monkeys repeatedly chose to look outside their enclosure without food or another conventional reward, contributing to research on curiosity and intrinsic exploration.

Attachment & the Secure Base

John Bowlby — Attachment Theory | Mary Ainsworth — The Strange Situation
Their foundational attachment research introduced the concept of a secure base: safety in an attachment relationship can support exploration rather than inhibit it.

Self-Expansion in Relationships

Aron, A., Norman, C. C., Aron, E. N., McKenna, C., & Heyman, R. E. (2000). “Couples’ Shared Participation in Novel and Arousing Activities and Experienced Relationship Quality.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 273–284.
Research on the self-expansion model suggests that novelty, exploration and continued growth can contribute to relationship quality in long-term couples.

Sexual Desire, Motivation & Arousal

Basson, R. (2000). “The Female Sexual Response: A Different Model.” Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 26(1), 51–65.
Basson challenged strictly linear models of sexual response, showing how desire can emerge responsively rather than always preceding sexual engagement.

Toates, F. (2009). “An Integrative Theoretical Framework for Understanding Sexual Motivation, Arousal, and Behavior.” The Journal of Sex Research, 46(2–3), 168–193.
Toates presents an incentive-motivation framework in which sexual desire and arousal emerge through interactions among context, cues, learning, cognition and physiology.

Toates, F. (2014). How Sexual Desire Works: The Enigmatic Urge.
A book-length exploration of the biological, psychological and contextual processes underlying sexual desire.