There’s a belief that only queer people need to come out. It’s as if heterosexual is the default, so there’s no need for heterosexuals to examine their sexuality.
 
Even if you are LGBTQI+, coming out is often more about your sexual orientation, which is who you are attracted to, or your gender identity, which is what your internal sense of your gender is, and less about who you really are as a sexual being.
 
When it comes to who you are as a sexual being, well, that’s a totally individual thing. There are eight billion sexual identities on this planet, as we all have a unique sexual identity.
 
And that sexual identity is not a static thing, it changes and evolves over your lifetime. Who are you as a sexual being at 18 is going to be different at 80. Who you are as a sexual being when you have babies and toddlers is going to be different to when you’re an empty nester. Who you are as a sexual being at the start of a relationship is going to be different to who you are fifteen years into a relationship. Importantly, no stage is better or ‘more sexual’ than another, it’s just different.
 
At least, it is if you are actively engaged with the concept of who you are as a sexual being, rather just being in default mode. Default mode is when you are simply responsive to what comes to you, either in terms of what happens to be going on in your body, or in terms of what your partner is or isn’t presenting to you. And much of this will be based on a lack of quality sexual understanding but rather a whole lot of myths around what it is to be ‘sexual’ or not.
 
To be actively engaged in your sexuality is to really pay attention to what is right for you, both in general and in the moment. And you need to be equally aware of your partner’s sexuality, both in general and in the moment.
 
And while much of that is to do with behaviours, what you like to do or don’t like to do, it’s actually way more subtle and layered than that. What style of sexuality do you prefer – more playful, more sensual, more raunchy? What about the pacing – faster, slower? How do you like it at different stages of a sexual encounter, particularly in the lead-up? What even is a lead-up for you? How about time of day? What you’ve eaten? What kind of atmosphere? What do you need to not be distracted, to not be tired, to feel connected? How do you need your relationship to be? How do you know when you’re done? What do you like to do or not do afterwards? How is your sexuality different during the week versus on weekends, when you’re on holidays versus work weeks? How frequently do you tend to want to engage sexually and how do you like to relate in between? What even is ‘sex’ to you and why do you do it?
 
All these questions and more are so important to clarifying who you are as a sexual being. You might like to go through the questions above alone or with your partner. Consider how you might have answered differently in the past and how you might answer in the future. You’ll probably find that your discussion ranges wider than these questions alone. You might find yourself identifying beliefs that may or may not be helpful, events from your past that have affected how you see yourself as a sexual being either positively or negatively. You might find you’ve made assumptions about yourself and very likely you’ve made assumptions about your partner if you have one.
 
This process will highlight and clear negative energies around shame, guilt, fear, compulsion, entitlement, sadness, trauma, and through that will enhance positive energies of pleasure, connection, joy, bliss, zest, contentedness. And you will also examine your lifestyle to make changes to enhance the good and remove the bad. It’s a fascinating and wonderful process.
 
Try it on your own, and if you find you’d like some support, see me or my colleagues at the LoveLife Clinic, do one of my online courses, or attend one of my wonderful Couples Retreats!

It’s amazing how when you focus on improving your love life, the whole of life improves. Health, wealth, career, friendships, family – it all starts shifting when you start looking at yourself, your primary relationship (if you’re in one), your sexuality and everything that goes along with connection, love and intimacy.

Sometimes it is just about sex and engaging in it from a more authentic, more meaningful place. But that’s rare. More commonly I find that life shifts far more broadly and deeply.

You see, in the process of examining connection, meaning, relating, understanding, pleasure, purpose, there comes a clarity and a freedom to be your authentic self. It allows for clearer communication and deeper understanding, you find more mutuality and support. This brings joy and openness, so there’s a greater pleasure in the existence of life. While life and love doesn’t necessarily become easier, there is a greater ease. There’s less stress and more flow, less worry about what’s ‘not’ and more appreciation of what ‘is’. More mindfulness. More love.

And along the way there’s a lot of letting go of things that are no longer aligned. A client just this morning used the analogy that it’s like in nature where there’s a burning off of the undergrowth to allow new growth to come through. He has been finding that strange things are happening around jobs, projects, friendships. Stuff is clearing. What’s emerging for him personally and within his relationship is clearer, simpler and richer.

Another young woman I’m working with is finding the same thing. She was stuck in anxiety caused by belief systems that just weren’t aligned with who she is really is. As she becomes clearer about herself and her truth, old friends and old ways of being are going and she feels lighter and free to welcome in new people and new possibilities and to create an authentic life for herself.

I recall a client who once said “I came to you for premature ejaculation but it’s been an entire existential shift!” or an attendee at a couples retreat who said “I was expecting you to improve our sex life, but you’ve turned it upside-down and inside-out and I’m looking at the whole of life in a slightly bewildered but exciting new way!”

It’s why I call my brand LoveLife, because by transforming your love life you really do transform your love of life.

Sometimes relationships are so bad it’s clear you need to run a mile – there’s violence, coercion, repetitive cheating, they’ve gambled your life savings away… But actually, even in the worst of relationships it can still be hard to end them. There’s often the remembrance of when it was good, the magical thinking that if only, not to mention the fear of what’s on the other side of separation.

So, when a relationship isn’t right, but isn’t horrendous, it can be even harder to end it. You like each other, you get on well most of the time, but you’re not a great match. Maybe your values are different, maybe your wants in life are different, and you get in negative patterns that aren’t anyone’s ‘fault’, but they repeat over and over and over.

In those situations, you are even more likely to get stuck in an endless weighing up of the good and bad. As the title of an excellent book by Mira Kirchenbaum puts it, it’s too good to leave too bad to stay.

Some people get stuck, others do something interesting, generally unconsciously: they force a crisis. A client came to this realisation in session the other day. She was stuck in a relationship where they are both good people, but they want different things in life. She had been working with me to clarify what she does want in life and in a partner, and it had become clear that this relationship wasn’t it. But even with this realisation, she was still compelled to engage in the relationship even more, to move in with the partner, even though she knew it would be a disaster. It didn’t make logical sense.

Then the light bulb moment hit – she realised she was trying to force the relationship to explode. If the relationship became so toxic, so unbearable, it would be easy for her to end it. But while it would be easier, it would also end with bitterness and hurt and probably a good deal of trauma to deal with after! She realised it would be far better to end it now, maturely, with love and respect.

When you read it here, you’d think that it’s obvious that we should end relationships before they get so bad, before you’ve become bitter and twisted. But humans being the fallible creatures that we are, it’s hard to break strong bonds with another, and it’s scary to have to face the unknown on the other side.

It takes courage to end a relationship well. You have to let go of the future you’d planned, athe hopes you’d had. You have to let your heart break. It’s hard and it’s scary. But it’s not traumatic. And in being brave you are also giving yourself freedom to live the life you want with someone who is a good match – and you’re giving your partner the same freedom. So, if you're in this situation, and therapy hasn't worked, be brave.

Feeling awkward in sex is perfectly normal, natural and ok. Even if you've been with the same person for a long time, things can get awkward. Maybe you haven't been sexual for a while, and it feels awkward. Or maybe you're trying something new, and it feels awkward. Or maybe you've been coming to see me and I'm asking you to do homework that feels a little bit awkward. Maybe one of you is feeling awkward or you're both feeling awkward. It's all ok.

The best thing to do when you're feeling awkward is just to acknowledge it. So one of you might say: "I'm feeling a little awkward about this," and the other will reply reassuringly: "That's ok sweetheart, you're safe, it's ok, anything I can do to help?" Or maybe you're both feeling awkward, and one says "I'm feeling a little awkward about this," and the other replies with "Yeah, I am too!" and then you can have a nice chat and a cuddle, feel more secure and then give it a go. Admitting you're feeling awkward gets it out in the open, clears it.

Whereas if you keep it on the inside and push on through, the awkwardness tends to come through anyway, in ways that aren't very sexy. That's if you even push on through, very commonly the awkward feeling stops people from doing anything at all.

Sometimes people cover awkwardness with humour, but it's not funny humour, often it can be a juvenile, often blunt, attempt at sexual humour that feels cringy, coarse or sleazy: "He he, let's go play hide the sausage in the bun". It's not at all ressuring and soothing - and not at all sexy. So try not to make jokes to cover your awkwardness.

Another thing people do, again, it's juvenile, but this time in a coy, babylike way. Often they put on saccharine baby voices: "Ooh, let's go do naughty things in the bedroom". I see couples do this in the clinic, and it is very cringy. It's not mature and it's not sexy.

Just be honest. Be adult. Be clean. Put any negative feelings on the table. Let each other know where you're at and what you're feeling. And then you can genuinely give it a go in a mutual, supportive way - and that is sexy.

I had a client come to see me this morning. She opened up with: “I don’t want to be here as I know you are going to judge me.” She then confessed that she finds a work colleague attractive. And then went into a long, confused, fraught spiel about what it did or didn’t mean. 

I didn’t judge her. I did help her figure out what was going on for her.

To summarise: 

• No, you’re not a bad person if you find people other than your partner sexually attractive.
• No, you’re not being unfaithful if you find people other than your partner sexually attractive.
• No, it doesn’t mean there’s a problem with your relationship if you find people other than your partner sexually attractive.

It is totally normal and fine to have those feelings. The issue is what you do about them.

If you act on those feelings and are unfaithful to your partner then that is not good. That’s a problem. (Unless you have negotiated and agreed to a consensually non-monogamous relationship with your partner and this is within the parameters of what’s agreed to).

But what’s also not good is if you judge yourself. That’s feeding more negativity into what you are feeling and making the situation worse.

So, what to do? 

1. Accept the feeling. It’s actually a nice feeling. It’s not that dissimilar to seeing a nice slice of cake and thinking about how delicious it would be to eat it. It’s a good feeling to feel attraction and also to feel attractive if you sense the feeling is mutual, it’s a buzz, it’s tapping into a life force energy. 
2. But know if for what it is, simply an attraction, a fantasy, a nice feeling. It’s not a reality. The reality of acting on the feeling might be momentarily nice, like eating the slice of cake, but unlike a fantasy, the reality has consequences.
3. Choose not to act on it.

Now, it is possible that finding someone else attractive could highlight dissatisfaction in your own relationship. In which case, talk about it and improve your own relationship.

It’s also true that the feelings could be hard to deal with, especially if the object of desire is someone you see frequently. That’s where willpower and self-control come in. Just like with not eating a slice of cake even if it looks particularly delicious.

I would also suggest that it’s preferable not to be fantasizing about that person while making love with your partner. If the thought comes into your mind at that time, don’t panic, just open your eyes and smile at them and come into the present moment.

As humans, there really are many things in life that are attractive and appealing, including other people. And also as humans, we have the power of choice to decide on how we engage with those attractive and appealing things, whether it’s cake, pokie machines, online shopping, alcohol, drugs or the cute new colleague.

I’m always hearing clients say that one initiates, or one doesn’t, or used to, or whatever. It’s always framed as though initiation is something one partner does, with a question, a suggestion or an action, to which the other agrees or rejects.

It’s a pretty limited, unidirectional way of thinking about initiation. It puts a lot of pressure on each partner. Both can feel pretty powerless. The one initiating has to be brave, hope the other is receptive, and risk rejection. The one responding to the initiation doesn’t have much scope to reply other than yes or no, with the yes assuming a lot and the no risking the other feeling rejected with all the consequential grumpiness or resentment that might follow.

No wonder people are reluctant to initiate, it’s fraught with anxiety, pressure, expectation, fear, guilt – none of which are in any way erotic feelings!

So, let’s ditch that approach to initiating and move towards one that is much more creative and explorative and allows for infinite possibilities.

Think of initiation as a dance between the two of you. It’s a lot more subtle and creative. It can start in many ways, usually less direct than a question or request. There is suggestion, flirtation, hints, without any definite outcome in mind. The other responds in kind. This dance both avoids the unsexy yes/no binary that unilateral initiating leads to, and allows for playfulness, sensuality, sexiness which can actually create interest, desire and arousal.

If you take on board the non-linear approach to lovemaking that I advocate, then there is no pressure for the dance to lead anywhere other than to connection and pleasure, so the dance is already ‘sex’ because it is already pleasure and connection. Then the dance continues until you’ve had enough, with or without genital involvement, orgasms, and the usual KPIs of linear sex.

This dance of initiation is a lovely way to connect, share, co-create, and live a life that in many ways is always the dance!

Some clients confessed to me recently that their bedroom activity has become sitting in bed on their phones “like two passengers in business class”. Each in their own little world and no connection between them at all. It’s pretty dire.

Sadly though, it’s so common. If there’s one issue that comes up over and over again in sessions, it’s phone use. They are so enticing, so readily accessible, and so utterly absorbing.

When you’re on your phone, you’re not with your partner. Your consciousness has been sucked into that alternate reality, you are not here and now, you are there.

Now of course phones are amazing technology and incredibly beneficial when you engage with them in an active manner. The problem is when you passively lose yourself in them. There’s none of you left here. Active engagement with phones is good, part of you is aware of what you are doing and is making conscious choices about how to engage and how long to engage. Passive engagement is a zombie-like absorption into another dimension where there’s little conscious control of what you’re doing and how long you’re there for.

 There are three impacts on your relationship when you don't manage your phone use well:

1. As an individual you’re not getting proper relaxation time. Instead, you’re engaging in mindless time-wasting which leaves you feeling jangled and not rejuvinated.
2. You’re wasting precious ‘us’ time, time where you can connect and enjoy each other’s company, relaxing together.
3. You miss out on the ‘chilled build’ which couples need to connect and create desire for lovemaking. So, sex becomes less frequent and poorer quality.

What to do? Have a phone policy! And support each other to keep it.

I recommend you put your phones to the side at times when you can maximise connection, such as when you’re having dinner or going for a walk. And I insist that you put your phones aside in the bedroom. Some couples successfully ban phones altogether in the bedroom, which I admire. However, they are useful, and with discipline you can have them in the bedroom. The important thing is to make sure you put them down when you are both in the bedroom to make sure you have quality time together before you pick up your phone (at which point you might not want to as other more delectable activities are occurring!)

We need to accept that it is difficult to manage our phones, they are very very enticing. It takes mental will and discipline to manage their use. So, support each other kindly in creating and implementing an approach that works for you as individuals and as a couple. That way you can have all the benefits of phones and all the benefits of a connected, sexual relationship!

Consent has become an important topic, one that is absolutely necessary, important and overdue. 

However, as an accredited Psychosexual Therapist who has spent over ten thousand face-to-face hours talking in intimate detail with people about their sex lives, I know that as well-intentioned as the consent conversation is, until we start addressing what comes before consent, we won’t solve the problem of people being able to give consent. 

We tend to assume we know what sex is and what it is we are consenting to or not. But do we? We can’t consent if we don’t know the parameters, our own internal assumptions, of the thing we are consenting or not to. 

The first question I ask people when they come to me with their myriad issues, the essence of which comes down to being able to navigate sexual relating, is ‘what is sex’? The immediate response to which is generally a puzzled-look followed by, ‘oh, I’ve never really thought about that before.’ 

This is the problem – what do we mean when we refer to sex? What are we consenting to? So many people have a very limited view of sex, one that is generally framed in a patriarchal manner – that sex is something that men do to women and the woman has to agree to or say no. Even in same sex attracted couples I often see this approach: I have to agree to what you want, or what I think you want, or I say no. 

Our language is riddled with words that promote this. Take the term ‘penetration’ – who on earth thought that such an aggressive word was appropriate for the act of sex. And who does the ‘penetrating’? The penis owner! Why not call it ‘envelopment sex’ and move the focus to the vagina inviting, welcoming in and embracing the penis? (I can assure you that I’ve solved a lot of ‘women’s sexual dysfunctions’ simply by changing the language.) 

This tends to be accompanied by another unhelpful belief that sex is a linear process. It has a ‘green light’ early on followed by a series of KPIs that have to be met, leading to the ultimate and final one of the male ejaculation. Then the act is complete – and hopefully she’s had an orgasm along the way.

So many people say they have sex because ‘that’s what you do – don’t you?’. So many young people I see view sex as what they see on porn, they feel they are consenting to those behaviours. So many people in long term relationship view sex as something they have to do to keep their partner happy. Interestingly, aside from a small proportion of entitled folk (and that’s just as often a woman as a man) most people are more concerned about their partner than about themselves.

Let’s take this a step further – not only are people not conceptualising what sex is for themselves, they’re not discussing it with their partner. Even couples who have been together for decades don’t talk about sex much beyond the ‘sex tonight dear?’ – unless it’s a problem, in which case they can talk about it endlessly in a most unsexy way. Even though most people would say that they want a positive sex life, very few go anywhere near the depth of discussion that is required to be able to co-create something meaningful.

Note the language I’m using here. Firstly, “co-create”, yes, sexual intimacy needs to be co-created. It needs to be ‘where are you at’ and ‘where am I at’ and from that we co-create. Not just at the start of an interaction, but all the way through. And secondly, “meaningful” – what is the meaning of sex? The model of sex as ‘getting each other off in the way that we think we should be without talking about it or even wondering why’ doesn’t work. We need to understand the why. 

And to do that we need to step outside the model of sex that we inherited from the millennia of patriarchy, which, while it’s been around for a very long time, does not represent what really drives humans sexually. Let me be brief: most other mammals only have sex to reproduce, when the female is fertile, and there is no ‘fatherhood’, their infants are self-sufficient enough for a mother to manage them on her own. But humans have big brains and big skulls, so we have to give birth to our young when they are very helpless or they wouldn’t fit out the birth canal. A prehistoric mother couldn’t raise an infant to a viable age on her own. There was evolutionary pressure for the fathers to stay around. Men who embraced fatherhood were more likely to have offspring who reached reproductive age and continued their gene line.

Parents who bonded and loved and supported each other and their vulnerable young were the ones whose genes survived. How, in part, did this bonding happen? Through activities that released the bonding and pleasure hormones – sexual intimacy, from touches, hugs, kisses to all kinds of genital engagement.

Sex in humans is primarily a bonding activity, the emotional component is an essential part of quality sex in humans. We need to embrace it as such and teach our young people that. It is something that two people do to create connection through pleasure. There are no other KPIs. It is a moment-by-moment co-creation where each brings to the moment their true selves

I know clinically that this shift in attitude changes everything. It moves it from performance to self-expression, from a physical behaviour to an emotional, dare I say spiritual, connection. Let’s move the consent conversation in society at large in the same direction. Let’s talk about the beauty and the goodness and the mutuality of sex and inspire our young people to engage in a way that is pleasurable and life-enhancing. And as their parents and elders, let’s sort out our own sexuality so that we can model and discuss sexuality as the important and wonderful part of life that it can be.

The days when sex was seen as bad have passed. We’re pretty sex-positive these days. I rarely come across anyone who thinks that sex is a bad thing or that it’s a wrong thing. Which is great. But it seems to me that the main challenge these days, now that we’re positive about sex in general, is to feel comfortable with sex in the personal.

We don’t live in a sex-comfortable society. We might be sex-positive but we’re not necessarily sex-comfortable. We don’t talk about it, we’re not raised with much information. We only have either the bio-medical information or porn, both of which portray sex in a very physical, limited way. It’s not at all surprising that we’re not comfortable about sex, because what makes us comfortable about our sexuality is being able to understand what it’s all about in an holistic body-mind-heart-and-spirit way, to be able to talk about it and to be able to sink into our body and really know what we want and be able to express it. So, I think this term sex-comfortable is more what we should be aiming for now.

It should be like food. You know me, I like my food analogies, and I say we should be as comfortable about our sexuality as we are with our food. Of course, some people have food issues, we often eat too much or too little and not necessarily the best food, but nonetheless, most people are pretty in touch with what they are feeling in terms of how hungry they are, what they want to eat, how much, when, how and why. If I said to you: “What do you want for dinner tonight?” you could probably answer quite readily, “well, I feel like this or that, or I’m not so hungry or I’m very hungry…” We can readily tap into our food desires, know what we feel like. And so importantly, we’re very comfortable with sharing our food desires with our partner. “What do you feel like for dinner sweetheart?” “Would you like a piece of this cake?” Really not an issues at all. And if you want to eat different food -  say, one wants curry and the other wants a salad – well, that’s not a disaster. If one knows they’ll want dessert and the other doesn’t know if they’ll want dessert yet -  it’s not the end of the relationship! We don’t have mismatched food libidos!  You’re not going off to a food therapist to sort out your food incompatabilities. Even heavy carnivores and vegetarians can eat together.

Now I know sex is a little different to food and you need to be engaged with the same thing at the same time, so the analogy is not perfect. But there are three important things we’re good at in regard to food that we need to be just as comfortable with sexually: 

1. Being able to know what’s going on with you and what you are wanting;
2. Being able to express that with your partner;
3. From that awareness, to co-create something that suits both of you. And as I keep stressing, that is a moment-by-moment thing, not an assumed fixed process. 

That takes time and focus;

• approaching the concept of sex and sexuality openly, confronting our inevitable negative emotions of fear, shame, guilt, as well as any sense of entitlement;
• identifying our expectations and assumptions;
• learning to be comfortable asking for what we want and giving feedback;
• being open to exploring and learning and creating; and
• always maintaining an intention of pleasure and connection.

We need this level of comfort for our own personal wellbeing, to be able to co-create a healthy supportive relationship, and to model comfortable sexuality to support our children and young people. Then we will have not just a sex-positive society, but also a sex-comfortable one.

So many people consume sex like other goods. Like good little capitalists they crave and crave, wanting more and more: bigger, harder, faster, more diversity, more people, more orgasms, more toys, more excitement, more, more, more…

Popular culture encourages this with porn’s approach to creating craving for more and more.

Even in alternative, spiritual sexuality there’s often still this craving – for the cosmic orgasm, the kundalini rush, the bliss beyond.

Give us the tip, what’s the technique, show us the method… All wanting the bigger and better, the more.

It’s exhausting!

And it doesn’t lead anywhere. Other than an endless desperate yearning for some level of satisfaction that can never be reached.

It’s a hedonistic treadmill. As one male client who’d been on the treadmill for years, thinking he was cool and sexually open, said: “where was it all going to end – with a cock in each orifice and a zucchini up my nose?!” What an absurd situation!

As that client came to realise, sexual satisfaction doesn’t come from constantly chasing sensation on the outside. It comes from savouring sensation from within, exploring the subtle, the slow, the simple. And while that can of course include any activity or prop that takes your fancy, those elements are there to enhance an experience, not to chase a result.

Slow the fuck down! Literally.

Get off the hedonistic treadmill. Savour what you are experiencing in the moment.

And paradoxically, that will lead to better  sexual response, orgasm, kundalini flow and bliss…