When we talk about our sex lives we tend to focus on the first word and ignore the second. Sex is what’s interesting. Our lives are not.
This is both untrue and a trap that leaves us sexually impoverished. Many people complain about losing desire, about sex going stale, they want their old sex lives back, they want to put the life back into their sex life.
This is possible, for all of us. But people get stuck because they usually forget that it’s their lives in the first place.
To explain I need to back up and start with our bodies.
There is something strange about the way we think and talk about our bodies.
On the one hand, we know our bodies change over time. From infancy to old age we grow and change shape in ways that are hard to ignore. Our bodies and ourselves are constantly changing. Literally. Cells die, other cells grow. Our ability to process things, both inside our bodies and perceptively outside our bodies, change and develop with each new experience and with every day that passes.
Yet we talk about life as being a series of discrete “stages” we move through, from youth through mid-life to old age. These stages are depicted in ways that suggest we’ll know clearly when we move from one step to another. Only when you talk to someone who is moving through these stages (which is all of us really) usually you’ll hear them say that they got older before they noticed it.
The problem is a perceptual one. We seem unable to see our bodies and our lives for what they are.
In this way life can be thought of as change that we don’t attend to. That is, until “something” happens.
In the context of our bodies that “something” is usually an illness or disability. It might happen to us or to someone we love, but when it does, we start to notice how everything does change. And hopefully we discover that we can live with and change with those changes. Having our mobility restricted, living with pain, isn’t fun. But it also doesn’t mean the end of life.
We have a similar perceptual problem in our sex lives.
Like life, our sexuality is also in a constant state of change. Yet as adults, we often talk about wanting our sex lives to change. They are too routine, too much the same. How is it possible that our sexuality could be constantly changing and yet our experience of sex seems so boring?
Here the perceptual problem is that we only pay attention to certain aspects of our sexuality. We notice how many times we’ve had sex with someone else in the past month, and what sorts of activities we did that we called sex. We notice how often we watched porn, or masturbated. We notice how often we feel dissatisfied, unmoved, unloved, while with a sexual partner.
But it’s not just what we attend to when it comes to sex, it’s what experiences we allow ourselves to have, and consider to be part of sex. The circle we draw around certain activities and feelings which we call sex, is so small, and the space around it, our sexual potential, is so great, that it’s hardly surprising that when we take the time to look at what’s in front of us, we come away feeling unsatisfied and wanting more.
Our whole lives are sexual, and as we gather life experience, our sexuality is always going to be influenced in ways small and large by these experiences. But just as we artificially impose “stages” on the aging process, which results in us being surprised by the process of growing old, we impose a boundary around what is part of our sex life and what is part of our whole life. When we feel like our sex lives are letting us down, it’s often about the size of the circle, not our capacity for pleasure or desire for connection.
Sex Life Sex Tip
At some point during the week, take some time to think about your sex life. Get a piece of paper and draw a circle on it (or visualize a circle, no drawing needed). Now fill the circle with all the life experiences that you would consider sexual. It might be activities, or feelings, it can be specific memories or chunks of your life. Whatever it is that you think is part of your sex life put in the circle.
Once you’ve done that, you can start writing, or imagining, other life experiences and note them outside the circle. Try to list as many life experiences as you can. This might be things you do (grocery shopping), major life events (graduation, helping a family member at the end of their life), or whole areas of your life (money, family, travel).
When you’re done, look at what’s outside the circle and just pick a few to focus on. Choose the first one and even though you’ve put it outside the circle of your sex life, think again about whether there is a connection to sex and sexuality.
Whatever it is (grocery shopping, watching a family member die, going to school, etc…) really consider whether or not there isn’t some connection between the experience and sexuality.
As you do this you may find that the line around what is sex and what isn’t won’t be as solid as you imagined it to be. And you may begin to notice how the life part of having a sex life is just as important as the sex part.
