You may recognize the following dynamic, which is common among many couples. I hear about this pattern so often that I’ll give it to you in a basic, stripped-down version.
Once again, Max unintentionally leans on Trina’s hair, or squeezes her nipple too hard, bangs her pubic bone, pushes his tongue too far into her mouth, or rubs her clitoris too roughly.
Frustrated (and perhaps temporarily in pain), Trina criticizes Max for being a selfish oaf.
Max tries harder (this time or next time) to do what Trina wants, which makes him feel anxious, which makes it even harder to make fine motor adjustments in his touch. As a result, Max’s behavior doesn’t change enough for Trina to notice.
Getting more frustrated, Trina feels emotionally distant and more critical.
Max feels more anxious and inept; he feels ashamed about being unable to please his partner.
Trina gets more frustrated and doesn’t give as many helpful cues.
Feeling overwhelmed by her distancing, Max pulls back.
Trina feels abandoned and uncared for.
Hurt and confused, Trina eventually decides that Max’s inability to be physically attuned with her is his “fault” and that it reflects his lack of commitment to her. He attempts to “try harder,” which rarely works. But he knows he cares for her, that he wants to please her, and that he’s trying hard. Her interpretation—that he’s uncaring—hurts him very much. He ultimately decides that she’s overly sensitive and impossible to satisfy.
They don’t discuss their mutual sadness much, eventually deciding that they “have a sex problem.”
Now they’re really in trouble.
Sexuality involves bodies, each belonging to a separate person. In the last chapter, we talked about how sexual partners typically enjoy having their bodies attuned to each other, and feel disappointed when they aren’t. Sexual Intelligence informs us that, for most people, this attunement is essential in order for sex to feel “intimate.”
In this chapter, we look at the nuts and bolts of this attunement, both how to maximize it and what can interfere with it.
Three-Dimensional Radar and Our Sixth Sense
For bodies to be attuned to each other, two things must be involved:
a. You know how to control your body’s movements ( proprioception).
b. You sense how your body relates to its environment—which includes another body (kinesthetic awareness).*
These skills involve the internal ability to sense your own body. Even blindfolded, you know if your arm is above your head or hanging by your side; with your eyes closed, you can probably touch your finger to your nose. Try it; it’s actually pretty amazing. Sexual Intelligence requires both of these skills, so you can relate your body to your partner’s body without much thought or effort. It’s not about sexual “function” or “dysfunction”; it’s about the ability of two bodies to find and relate to each other.
Proprioception is the sensory input and feedback mechanism that tells the brain about body position and movement without requiring conscious thought. Its receptors are located within muscles, joints, and connective tissues, as well as in sense organs and the inner ear. Your brain receives feedback about your body every second. It processes this information routinely so it can command your body parts to move smoothly, keep you balanced, and modulate your voice. You know the five senses? Proprioception is a sixth sense, your “position sense.”
Kinesthetic awareness is the ongoing, always-changing sense of where your body is in time and space. It isn’t enough to control your body’s movements—you have to make the right movements to accomplish what you want. Do you want to get close to someone’s face, or accidentally lean on their hair? Do you want to smell someone’s chest, or accidentally bang your nose into it? Kinesthetic awareness is your body’s three-dimensional radar—again, without constant conscious awareness.
An activity like skiing requires both skills working together: proprioception gives you the reflexive sense of what your limbs must do to keep you upright. Kinesthetic awareness lets you know where your body is in relation to the skis and the slope so you can adjust your angle, speed, and direction.
Another example is everyday speech. It’s one (physical) skill to know how to create a certain volume; it’s a separate (physical) skill to know how your voice at a given volume sounds; a third skill—cognitive, not physical—decides if your voice is the correct volume for the situation; then we’re back to the first skill of adjusting the volume so it’s the level you’re aiming for. When you’re in a romantic little cafe and the idiot at the next table is yelling into his cell phone, you don’t know if he realizes how loudly he’s talking, or just doesn’t care, or perhaps even thinks it’s appropriate. Each of those involves a different skill (for the idiot).
How does this relate to sex? Here’s an example: Proprioception gives you the sense of how to move your arms to hug someone. Kinesthetic awareness lets you know how far you need to reach, and what the strength of your hug needs to be so that the recipient gets the hug you intend. Then of course there’s the social skill of judging whether or not this person wants a hug from you—yet a third part of the situation.
When Instincts Don’t Quite Work
Athletic trainers, ballerinas, and child development experts find this topic endlessly fascinating. But most of us just take these two unconscious skills for granted—until there’s a problem. In fact, deficits in these two skills create a lot of disruption in sexual relationships. But most people don’t think about these instincts, so they don’t realize that difficulties with one or both could be the source of a problem.
For example, when people have proprioceptive difficulty, they have trouble with:
• Instinctively knowing what various parts of the body need to do in order to move a certain way
• Instinctively knowing how much pressure is needed to, say, stroke an arm or squeeze a breast
Similarly, when people have difficulty with kinesthetic awareness, they have trouble:
• Accurately estimating what their body’s movements feel like to someone else
• Accurately estimating how close they are to another person, the speed at which they’re actually moving toward or away from that person, and the extent to which two movements are similar or different
We might describe problems like these as neuro-sexual learning disabilities. Note that this is completely different from someone saying, “Please don’t touch me that way,” and the other person saying, “Aw, c’mon, there’s nothing wrong with me touching you that way. Get over it.” And of course people frustrated with these problems don’t typically imagine that they have such a disability.
To their partner, people with these disabilities appear clumsy or self-absorbed or uncaring. Their partners may get impatient or resentful, assuming that if the other person would just pay more attention and be more caring, they wouldn’t keep leaning on them the wrong way, accidentally pulling their hair, or “whispering” too loudly in their ear.
But just as some people’s eyesight or hearing isn’t great no matter how much they “pay attention,” so it is with proprioception and kinesthetic awareness.
Here’s a simple way to check yourself or a partner. We know that someone who is always asking others to speak louder often has a hearing problem; that’s also true if a person is always complaining that their partner speaks too loudly. If your partner says “ouch” a lot in bed, or sex keeps getting interrupted by complaints of being kicked, elbowed, or bitten too hard, one of these neuro-sexual difficulties may be responsible. If so, both you and your partner need to think about the situation as a physical problem rather than a character flaw—and approach it as a learning disability.
Of course, some people really are self-centered or uncaring. But those who genuinely struggle with a lack of instinct about their own body—whether they realize they’re struggling or not—should be able to explore it in a cooperative environment. People have to talk about how to handle this deficit, just as they would with a partner who has a poor memory or suffers from ADD.
On the one hand, a sexual partner with a high degree of proprioception generally will seem technically proficient. And a sexual partner with a high degree of kinesthetic awareness will seem empathic and sensitive. The ideal lover, of course, has plenty of both skills (and great hair and plenty of money, but that’s another story).
When making love with someone who has poor proprioception, however, you might think, He’s very clumsy, or, She doesn’t know what to do in bed. When making love with someone who has reasonable proprioception but lacks kinesthetic awareness, you Sexual Intelligence 119 might get the impression that he’s a great athlete, but he doesn’t connect with me, or she’s great in bed, but there’s just something missing, or he’s gorgeous, but he’s too involved with himself. In general, we criticize sexual partners who lack one or the other of these instinctive abilities, thinking their behavior reflects unacceptable emotional or character traits—uncaring, selfish, bossy, aggressive, bitchy, crude.
The worst combination, of course, is when an undersensitive person (“A”) gets together with an oversensitive person (“B”). That’s when it seems like A has two settings for touch—too hard and too soft—while B needs for A to have two hundred settings in between those extremes, and wants to be touched at exactly one (and only one) of those two hundred settings. Similarly, one person may be able to distinguish only the color red, while his or her partner can see dozens of shades of red, orange, pink, and gold. Now imagine this couple being clothes designers or offset printers, occupations in which color distinctions are critical.
Unfortunately, the way the brain processes and responds to the body’s internal feedback can be disrupted by trauma or bad experiences, past or present. In fact, anxiety itself (including anxiety about being “clumsy”) can disrupt your internal feedback process—including the common self-pressure in sex of trying desperately to do certain things.*
This sounds like a ballplayer pressuring himself so much that he has trouble catching a ball, doesn’t it? In contrast, when we say that an athlete performs well under pressure, we mean that he can handle that external pressure without disrupting his processing, feedback, and motor functioning. In other words, he doesn’t respond to external pressure by creating damaging internal pressure. Some people consciously use tricks to do this (such as visualization or memory cues). Others are more natural at it.
Touching Can Be Complicated
There’s another physical aspect of sexuality: the affinity for touching. Some people just don’t like to be touched that much, while others love it. We shouldn’t be surprised about this—after all, it’s unusual when two people have the same level of interest in anything, whether it’s sunsets or mac-and-cheese or Gwyneth Paltrow films.
As with everything else, each of us starts life with our own unique level of interest in touching. But how we respond to touching is more than just a matter of personal taste; some babies are apparently more sensitive to stimulation than others. They hear, smell, feel, taste, and see things more intensely, which can be terribly disconcerting. Such babies quickly get a reputation for being picky about the way they’re fed or held, and they don’t handle changes in the environment (a light turned on, a noise outside, dad’s post-workout smell) that well.
Understandably, they don’t gratify their caretakers with lots of smiles and cooing, which is the worst baby sin of all.
These extra-sensitive babies attempt to communicate at least as much as other babies, through vocalizations and gestures, like motioning to be picked up or pointing at a desired toy. But they’re typically less successful than other babies because they’re in more distress, have more specific demands, and do fewer attractive things. Their ultimate desire—“less intense stimulation, please!”—is of course impossible for them to convey, difficult for parents to conceptualize, and hard for anyone to accommodate.
Now fast-forward thirty years.
Some adults who are overly sensitive to stimulation may express it by a distaste for touch, body smells, the moisture of sex, and so on. They can appear to be anti-sex, just as they may also appear to be anti-music, anti-food, anti-clothes, anti-shopping, and anti–other people’s laughter. But that may not be true; it may simply be that the normal intensity of sex, like these other things, is too overwhelming for them to handle comfortably.
Such discomfort can be baffling if you’re someone who craves touch, enjoys sexual intimacy and pleasure, and feels deprived by your partner’s physically reserved nature. And if you’re convinced that your partner’s quirkiness is about you—if you’re taking his or her distaste for touch or sex personally—that can make productive conversation about this almost impossible. Sexual Intelligence reminds us not to take our partner’s preferences, limitations, or “function” personally. It’s one of the most important ways to keep sex free of performance anxiety.*
The Emotional Side of Body Issues
Having looked at our physical equipment and its vagaries, let’s look at some of the ways you need to be emotionally comfortable with your body regarding sex. Because even with the most finely developed physical instincts, you need to cope with a wide range of issues just to enjoy a simple sexual encounter.
Sexual Intelligence recognizes this reality, and it provides tools for getting comfortable with the messiness of sex—both literally and figuratively.
Sex Is Messy—Literally
Sex is inevitably moist, smelly, and sweaty, and often involves bodies that aren’t perfectly clean. It uses various openings in each body, including the mouth. And it involves, or is near, the excretory organs that process our daily waste products. Every ten-year-old knows how extremely gross the whole idea seems. To enjoy sex, you have to look at it entirely differently.
While most people don’t go out of their way to make sex messier than necessary, a couple can choose to agree that sex is a place where the normal rules of decorum don’t apply. You and your partner can decide that wetting the bed, drooling, grunting, and crying are acceptable, needing neither apology nor explanation. Making sex a “no-vigilance zone” can make it a lot easier to relax and let your body do what it wants, which is a pretty dependable way to increase pleasure, maintain self-esteem, and facilitate intimacy. Now that’s Sexual Intelligence.
People who can’t stand a mess find sex challenging, something to protect themselves from. Few people who need their partner to be squeaky clean (and to be clean themselves, of course) before consenting to sex can relax and enjoy it fully. And people who expect to remain clean and dry all the way through sex find it very difficult to enjoy. That’s because they see bodies as a source of contamination, messiness, dirt, and unruliness, rather than a source of pleasure. They see the body as a problem rather than as a toy.
So when patients who complain about sex use words like messy, sloppy, gushing, drooling, unclean, dirty, or disorganized, I assess their tolerance for messes and bodies in general. I tell too-neat people that I’m sympathetic about how they’re probably making sex more difficult than necessary. If their partner is in therapy with them, I remind them both not to take the other’s preferences and needs as personal criticism or selfishness. And I encourage them to take a minute before they start sex to relax together and focus on the parts of each other’s body that they like. Visualizing pleasure, calmness, and connection during sex is often helpful for the person concerned with the messiness of sex. I suggest that people learn to interpret the moisture and mess of sex as an expression of intimacy and safety rather than chaos and danger.
Trusting Your Own Body
Your body feels how it feels. Sometimes it gets excited. Sometimes it doesn’t. Do you trust its judgment?
Our bodies have no morality other than immediate sensation. Your finger doesn’t know if you’re putting it in a socially “clean” part of your partner’s body or a “dirty” part; your tongue doesn’t know if you’re licking a “normal” part of someone’s body or a “kinky” part.
If we judge our physical experiences through a cultural filter—this is sex, this isn’t, this is clean, this is dirty, this is normal, this is sick, this is gay—we deny the body its unmediated, uncivilized, raw intelligence and perception. We also keep sex a controlled, left-brain activity, whereas Sexual Intelligence suggests we can more easily enjoy it via the right brain. Unfortunately, some people have to think, during sex, about each caress, each kiss, each moment, before “deciding” whether to enjoy it and allow it to continue, or to reject it—as too kinky, too ambiguous, too dirty or nasty.
Note that this decision is different from “Yes, I want to have sex, and I don’t like how that particular activity feels.” Instead, this is “I can’t allow myself to like this because of what I’ve decided it means.” Over the years I’ve seen men who wouldn’t let their wives kiss their nipples because “that’s what gay guys are into”; I’ve seen women refuse to give their boyfriend a hand job because “I should use my vagina for that”; I’ve seen both men and women reject a friendly, moist finger near their anal opening because “that’s way too kinky.” Not “it hurts,” or even “it will hurt,” but “it’s too kinky.”
It’s a little like facing a new food while traveling. Some people try the new food and judge it based on how it tastes. Others ask what it is and decide whether or not to try it based on how it sounds. “Dandelion buds? Flowers are made to look at, not eat.” “Alligator? That can’t be good.” “A squash six feet tall? That’s just too creepy.” You miss a lot of life’s richness that way.
If you’re trying to keep everything in life from flying out of control, it’s very hard to enjoy your body’s anarchy (unless you’ve decided that sex is the one place where it’s safe to let things go). Of course, the fear of losing control isn’t always about sex—for many people it’s part of a bigger unconscious neurotic project. Sex therapists see a lot of, um, control freaks. These patients often tell us how to do the therapy, how to rearrange the furniture, and why we should change the music in the waiting room. They often want to argue about the answer—and then complain that we’re wasting their time.
Boundaries
Enjoyable sex requires that we invite the violation of our personal boundaries and accept that we’re going to breach someone else’s boundaries. Of course, that’s part of what demands and facilitates intimacy in sex.
Much of sex involves putting a part of your body inside of someone else’s body—a tongue, a finger, a penis; a mouth, a vagina, an anus. For some people, this voluntary, temporary violation of personal space is what sex is all about. But if you’re not comfortable with this, the firmest erection or most luxuriant lubrication won’t be worth much.
Are you emotionally present enough and comfortable enough to provide useful feedback to your partner while this is happening? If not, how can he or she possibly know what your experience is like? Some people like words, while others like gestures. Still others imagine that the psycho-erotic fusion is so complete that each partner just intuits the other’s experience. (Sounds like being stoned back in the sixties.) For a grown-up in the twenty-first century, actual communication is your best bet.
But some people are extremely inhibited about expressing themselves. They imagine that their experience should not be acknowledged, or that the very expression of it is unattractive or inappropriate (which is like saying, “I want to make complete sentences, but I try to do so without ‘k’ and ‘g’ because they’re so unlady-like”).
Some people hesitate to communicate during sex because genuine expression renders them vulnerable, which is scary. They’re right—someone’s more likely to know how you feel when you express yourself. As a therapist, I investigate what exactly makes this troublesome: Does experiencing pleasure contradict someone’s self-image of being demure or wholesome? Does feeling anything sexual conflict with someone’s self-image? There’s something missing from sex without actual communication. What could explain such inhibition?
One thing that makes the boundary violation in (consensual) sex more comfortable is being confident that it will end when sex ends—the way serious competition in weekend tennis is okay if we’re certain that it will end after the match. We lob the ball up high if our opponent is facing into the sun, but after the match we don’t toss their car keys into the bushes, out of reach.
If personal boundaries are not respected outside sex, however, it’s hard to choose to lower boundaries within sex. In fact, if there isn’t a healthy division of power in a relationship, sex might be the one place where someone gives him- or herself permission to say no. Of course, sometimes people do this indirectly, via having a headache, picking a fight, being too tired, or taking on extra projects.
Salvadore’s trauma had very little to do with sex. In order to divorce him and marry someone else decades ago, his ex-wife falsely accused him of assault, got a court order banishing him from their kids’ lives, and then took all their money. He was so grief-stricken by this, and exhausted from endless rounds of lawyers, social workers, and psychiatrists, that he eventually lost his job, too. He withdrew from people in general, and from women in particular.
Three years ago he got involved with Elizabeth, an obese, lonely woman tired of living alone. One thing she wanted was sex. Another was touching. Salvadore, sixty-two years old at the time, couldn’t deliver much of either. So Elizabeth brought them in for “sex therapy,” essentially to fix him. In our initial sessions, Salvadore could barely look at me. Elizabeth complained about a lot of things: his clothes were old and didn’t fit, he needed a haircut, he mumbled, he was sloppy around the house, and so on.
These observations were all true, but Elizabeth’s continual criticism reminded Salvadore of his ex-wife, who had complained for years about how inept he was. On top of that, just being in a relationship reminded Salvadore of being married, which itself made him terribly anxious.
Never a person overly interested in touching or sexuality, Salvadore was just too traumatized to trust and relate to a partner, and his physical expressions of affection and even his physical presence simply collapsed under the emotional stress. As we soon uncovered, he had eventually coped with his ex-wife’s threats and the endless aggressive interviews by police and social workers back then by dissociating. His mind just shut down his conscious psychological function, disrupting the normal processing of outside stimuli, distancing his mind from experiences that were too much for his psyche to handle.
Indeed, one of the reasons he did so poorly with judges and social workers was his inability to advocate on his own behalf, and his defeated, depressive body language and poor personal grooming supported his ex-wife’s claim that he was unsuited for parenting.
Salvadore was literally traumatized. In fact, I diagnosed with him PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder. Even though sex wasn’t involved in the origin of his PTSD, his condition was creating sexual problems.
Because of his past marital nightmare, he frequently dissociated with Elizabeth, often without warning. When he did feel anything, it was typically rage. That would trigger her rage—she had her own problems with anger, and working on a high-pressure assembly line in a dysfunctional factory didn’t help things. They’d fight a lot. Passive Salvadore would become Mean Salvadore. Neither Salvadore could function in a relationship or enjoy sex.
When dissociated, of course, Salvadore could barely touch Elizabeth and couldn’t possibly make love—which drove her crazy. Sometimes he’d respond to her begging or bullying and caress her in a perfunctory way, or even acquiesce to passive sex. But of course she wanted much, much more.
his PTSD + her desire = relationship trouble
Before Salvadore could feel more desire for sex or even touch, therapy was going to be about welcoming Salvadore’s body back into his life and into their relationship. So there were a few things we would need to do first. Our work had to include:
• Identifying Salvadore as struggling with PTSD
• Understanding the meaning of “dissociation” and its impact
• Elizabeth’s recognition that Salvadore wasn’t rejecting her personally
• Salvadore’s recognition of what it was like for Elizabeth to be with someone whose body was missing from the relationship
• Helping them both see that neither of them was to “blame”
• Getting him to accept physical pleasure from non-physical activities
• Understanding that no matter how Elizabeth seemed at a given moment, she was not Salvadore’s ex-wife
• Elizabeth’s need to back way off—and not because her appetite for him was bad
• Structured touching exercises
• Both Salvadore and Elizabeth learning to recognize the symptoms of him disappearing emotionally—and learning how to stop sex if that happened, and to talk about it
After about a dozen very painful sessions, Salvadore sort of woke up from his trance. “Elizabeth’s not perfect, but she’s not my ex-wife, is she?” We all agreed that she wasn’t. “So I don’t have to protect myself from her?” he speculated cautiously.
For the first time in their entire relationship, he talked about experiences of “just turning off, shutting down, and going into suspended animation inside.” He said the pain—the betrayal by his wife, the loss of his children, the humiliating and frightening interrogations by “cops and shrinks”—was so intense that it was just easier to “feel nothing, want nothing, be nothing.”
This was the man whom Elizabeth wished would feel desire, feel pleasure, feel intimacy, and feel connected with his body. This was, sadly, completely unrealistic for Salvadore as he was. But he was motivated to change. So we started small. We’re still working on it.
Experience and Comfort with Masturbation
A century ago, Oscar Wilde famously said, “To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.”
Masturbation is the ultimate example of this. In Western countries, over 90 percent of men and two-thirds of women masturbate at some point. In 2009, various European countries even started encouraging it as a healthy habit.
Of course not everyone feels the same about it. When my patients discuss it with me, I ask if they enjoy it. Many look at me like I’m crazy—“Of course I enjoy it, Doc, why else do it? Sheesh.” But a sizable minority don’t—they masturbate, but they feel guilty, selfish, or unfaithful (to spouse or even God), they rush so they won’t get caught, they lie to their mates about it, or they feel frustrated when they don’t climax.
The experience of masturbation is a vital part of Sexual Intelligence. While it isn’t necessary for people to masturbate in the present in order to enjoy partner sex, it does help if they’ve done it at some point. Or if they never have, it’s important that guilt, fear, or shame isn’t the reason why.
Years (or decades) before partner sex, masturbation provides familiarity with your own body and with the feelings of desire, arousal, excitement, and satisfaction. Perhaps most importantly, it develops your sexual agency, the knowledge that:
• Your sexuality belongs to you.
• You can experiment with it without knowing exactly what will happen.
• You can create experiences that please you.
• Focusing on yourself sexually doesn’t make you selfish or greedy, lewd or oversexed, or less than or different than you “really” are.
Contrast sexual agency with the idea that many children learn and often carry forward into adulthood: that the desire to masturbate is shameful or pathological, a sick impulse that must be resisted—one that will hurt them if they give in to it.
There’s one more thing about sexual agency to remember—you can masturbate even when you’re in a sexual relationship with someone. In fact, you can even masturbate if your partner complains about not getting enough sex with you. Of course, such a complaint should not be ignored, but in my clinical experience, masturbating less doesn’t usually increase desire for one’s partner. That’s like saying, “Eat less ice cream, so you’ll eat more broccoli.” It rarely works; depriving your partner of a favorite sexual outlet typically doesn’t increase her or his hunger for you.*
The next logical step of sexual agency is openly touching yourself during sex with a partner. How’s that for challenging a taboo?
I’m not aware of any statistics about how many men and women do this, but I know it’s not common. That’s too bad, because there are so many good reasons to do it. Of course, pleasure is the first one. There’s nothing like getting touched perfectly—the right speed, pressure, angle, location. And if you’re really excited—say, from sexual activity with your partner—that might be just the time to take over and give yourself what you want. I don’t call this masturbation, because masturbation is what you do when you’re alone. I call this touching-yourself-during-partner-sex. That’s more accurate, it sounds sexier, and it helps people overcome their inhibitions about it.
Of course, there are other reasons to touch yourself during partner sex. For example, it’s the best way to show your partner what you like. If you’re a woman, your male partner can’t know just how sensitive your clitoris gets when you’re really excited, or just what angle you want a finger to enter your vagina. If you’re a man, you’ve known for years that women need instruction in how tightly (and when and where) to squeeze your balls.
The option of touching yourself during partner sex multiplies your possibilities. Four hands, not two. Angles and pressure not otherwise available. And it means you’re not dependent on your partner’s stamina—or interest. Your partner may swear that he or she will stay engaged after climaxing, but, well, sometimes that old post-orgasm-disengagement hormone kicks in, and then it’s really good to lend yourself a hand. And if you’re someone who enjoys (or needs) steady stimulation for a long time in order to climax, it’s great to give your partner a break now and then (or, to think about it differently, for him or her to give you a break).
Finally, touching yourself during partner sex encourages your partner to do the same. If your partner has never done it, or feels too shy to even think about it, this will change his or her life. If you’re already doing it, I’m guessing it changed yours, right?
The Gift of Staying Present
Some people don’t realize that to enjoy sex, you have to pay attention. It isn’t like TV, where you can just go on automatic pilot and let it happen. Well, I suppose you can just go on automatic during sex if you don’t mind having sex that’s like watching TV.
Many people don’t actually know how to pay attention during sex.
It’s a skill, like focusing on how something tastes (instead of reading or talking on the phone while you eat and missing the actual experience of the food), or on how enjoyable a movie is (instead of focusing on your uncomfortable seat), or on how beautiful the Golden Gate Bridge is (instead of getting irate about the miserable traffic).
There are many choices of what to attend to during sex. Listening for the people next door? Wondering if your stomach is getting bigger? Thinking maybe you should have showered first? Noticing that the drapes need dusting? Noticing that your husband needs dusting?
Of course, there’s always the past to attend to: what it was like last time, what it was like the first time, what it was like two years ago, what about that time you farted during sex and your boyfriend teased you so much you thought you’d never get over it, what about that time you thought he was cheating on you and you had sex with him anyway for weeks afterwards even though you hated it….
As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
And as we’ve seen elsewhere, their own sexual response is something that too many people attend to during sex: Am I getting excited enough? Excited enough fast enough? Erection okay? Lubrication okay? Have an orgasm? Time it takes to orgasm okay? That’s a lot to think about. And it makes it harder to pay attention to how things look, taste, smell, sound, and feel. Which is where sex actually is experienced.
For some people, consciously inhabiting their body is scary.
Having a quiet mind is scary. Paying attention to the input from fingertips, nose, and eyes feels too … too … personal. Too private. Sex with the body, sex with the quiet mind, paying attention during sex, for some people it just feels too intimate. All you have is you and the other person, with nothing to mediate or dilute the experience. And then worries about “maybe my balls are too hairy” or “I hope the shoe repair place is open on Sunday” are a welcome distraction.
If that sounds like you, I encourage you to stop the sex when you realize you’re having trouble being present—yes, right in the middle—look at your partner, and gently say either:
• “Honey, can we slow down and start again?” or
• “Um, I’m not really in the mood like I thought I was. Maybe let’s try again another time.”
Add these phrases to your sexual vocabulary, and use when appropriate.
Focus your attention on how your body feels during sex. In fact, you could paint that on your bedroom ceiling.
The question is, when it comes to sex, is the body a problem to be tolerated, outwitted, and thwarted, or is it a resource, a toy, a locus of pleasure, a place of integrity? If it’s the former, it will be hard to stay present, hard to connect with your partner (and his or her body), and hard to use your body to express positive sentiments or explore the self.
If it’s the latter, all things are possible. Part of the job of therapy is helping people discover which experience of the body they’re closer to, decide where they want to be, and figure out how to get there.