Part of me wishes Faun would realise how much this conversation hurts me. I know the old adage about the heart breaking is an overused one, but the feeling I get when he tells me the passion may be, or is, dying is as close as damn to the feeling I identify from experience as heart break. We’re supposed to be having a date, and instead we’re having the same old conversation, despite everything we’ve discussed about practices and suggestions and putting work in.
The more observant among you will have noticed that I’m drinking a lethal blend of heartache and frustration.
On the other hand, my coaching head knows that it is vital that he talk about what’s going on; that’s the first thing that makes this relationship different, and hopefully more successful, than the others he’s had. And it’s my coaching head I go with when yet again he’s asking for suggestions for the lack of desire for me, and the guilt and self-hatred that stroll arm-in-arm with it. Here’s what I offer from my nest of misery and tear streaked duvets:
Reframe sexuality.
Reflect on and record how you currently think and feel about sex, and where it comes on your list of priorities. Then come up with ways to think and feel about it as a source of joy.
He mentions as we talk that when he was young, growing up in a strict Christian household, he looked upon masturbation as something that God hated, but that he couldn’t help himself from doing. I reflect that this judgement and self-hatred around such a core part of the self probably contributed a great deal to his fundamental belief that he isn’t good enough. As I write about it now, I recall times when his post-orgasmic expression offers a direct window back to that same ashamed and confused teenage boy.
Prioritise sex in thought, word and deed
Begin with thought. Remember. Imagine. Fantasise. Plan. Focus. Your brain is your primary sexual organ.
At this point my coaching head prioritises his sexuality over the relationship, and offers my professional opinion that, if it’s difficult to focus on me, then he should focus on people he’s more easily attracted to, and allow his sexual energy to flow with them in mind. At the time this felt very brave, although in retrospect it might have just been very sensible. Or foolish. Or a smidgen of all three.
Later in the day, I get braver; I guess this is what Dossie Easton would call “going for the ick”. I ask who he’s fantasised about. He’s been talking about how he feels guilty about fantasising about other people, how he thinks that I (or rather, the fascinating woman who I’m beginning to become better acquainted with – the me in his head) will be distraught; the result of hetero parenthood and previously jealous partners. I suggest that guilt may be one of the things blocking us. I’m operating on the firm belief that desire doesn’t die – it gets buried. And I suspect this guilt might be one of the things that are burying it. So, getting him to talk about it will, I hope, allow for that guilt to be relieved – and for him to see I’m really not naive enough to have entered a poly relationship thinking I would be the sole focus of my partner’s sexual desire.
What hurts isn’t that he thinks about other people; it’s that his thoughts flow naturally to other people but not me. I know that, whatever inner turmoil may be going on, he’s still capable of turning it on when he wants to (though I’m not sure how conscious that is) and I wonder what disqualifies me now from that level of intensity. He says it’s because of the living situation. I notice the objects of his fantasies are all ex-girlfriends, I feel foolish for the fact that (when I’m not in a total sex-magic induced altered state and seeing the face of goddess – and even then sometimes) his is the face that flashes before my eyes when I cum.
Focus your energy, breath and awareness on your sex centre/pelvic region.
Try different breathing and PC muscle techniques while keeping your focus there. Notice any blockages you sense there, and be curious about what they might be. Breathe self-love into the area, and perhaps even self-pleasure with that same self-loving intent.
I also advise him to make a list of ways to show himself he loves himself and do at least one each day – no exceptions! There seems to be a total disconnect between sex and heart here, and as the aspiring Sherlock Holmes of sex I would make a connection between the fact that for him desire wanes as love grows, and the fact that sex was looked on as something so terrible in his childhood. Could it be that, since sex is something so very terrible, it is much easier to imagine “inflicting” it on women who have hurt him in the past, as opposed to the woman he professes to be deeply in love with each and every day?
I have never been with a partner who wasn’t ashamed of their sexuality (the one who takes the biscuit went through a phase of dropping my hand every time we walked past a church and not kissing me on religious holidays), and after all these years of ecstatic erotic experience and radical sexuality, I myself still have throwbacks to the teenager whose mother wrote her a letter when she lost her virginity about how she would get cancer and die – from having sex of course. My mother was a liberal and a feminist by the way.
I’m increasingly part fascinated, part horrified by how deep patriarchal heteronormative dogmatic bloody shame around our sexuality goes in this culture – even in those of us who seek to celebrate our sexual selves, and understand that our sexuality lies at the core of our identity, our life force, and our routes to pleasure and transcendence. I’ve been working on an article about the socio-political implications of more female orgasms in the world, and what society would have to be like in order for that to be possible; peace love and understanding doesn’t begin to cover it.
Shame goes so deep, layers upon layers, and I encounter it everywhere, from high street advertising, to the local pagan group which I quietly dropped out of after being verbally shamed when I started my journey into poly. I guess for someone like Faun, it’s important to recognise just how early the shaming around our bodies can start (sometimes when I’m doing deep healing bodywork on him, he’ll have flashbacks to being shamed about his genitals as an infant), and that it’s ok if that then seems take a lifetime of undoing. For him, shame itself has become a source of shame, particularly when it sets a barrier to the relationship he is working so hard to nourish. But as long as we work with it with awareness, I believe the steps to loosening shame’s grip on us lead to greater freedom of expression and peace of mind than Faun and I can currently imagine.
There will be more to come on this subject.
