Attraction or Love or What?

Synopsis: Attraction/love confusion problems; understanding attraction systems; nature’s way; sexuality attracts but love bonds; insecurity issues; sharing attraction system pleasures.

Attraction/Love Confusion Problems

“Where can I go to live, where I’d like to live and where there are no redheads?  I know it sounds crazy but, you see, I fall in love with just about every redhead I meet.  I’ll never be able to settle down and stay faithful because the next redhead will come along and I won’t be able to resist this ‘falling in love thing’ I do with redheads.”

Does this person really have a ‘fall in love’ with redheads problem?  No, not really.  This person appears to have a ‘fall in’ multiple, perhaps serial, attraction issue which they are confusing with real love.  I suspect this person hasn’t gotten even close to having anything like a true ‘love’ problem.  It would seem they, like many, may not have learned to clearly perceive, understand, and think about the big differences between love (the healthy, real kind) and mere attraction.

There are lots of other ways that the love/attraction confusion causes problems.  To really see that, read a few more quotes.  “I’m getting wrinkles, getting gray hair and looking older.  I’m really afraid my husband will quit loving me when I look old, and then he will fall in love with someone who looks like I did when I was 20, and he will leave me for her.”  The woman who said that did not understand that it is not looks, but love, that best holds couples together over time.

“My wife has recently developed this thing for young men with swimmer’s bodies, you know, the long, lean, smooth-stretched muscle types.  I don’t look anything like that, so does this mean she doesn’t love me anymore and she’s really looking for somebody else?  The answer to this man’s question is “probably not”.  It just likely means that her attraction dynamics direct her toward having some enjoyment and maybe mild, fantasy fun thinking about ‘swimmer’ types, but probably she loves her husband dearly.  Her love of her husband is far more important than any simple, physical attraction dynamics, and maybe some reassurance of that fact is in order.

“My guy can’t stop staring at other women, and looking at pictures of naked females and stuff like that.  Does this mean he doesn’t really love me?  He swears he would never cheat on me, and it’s just the way he’s wired.  I want to believe him but my girlfriends tell me not to trust him”.  Usually this sort of statement suggests that the woman saying it is insecure about her own attraction power, and she is confusing her man’s ‘natural attraction dynamics system’ with his couple-type love for her.  She also may have been conditioned by society, and/or her family, to incorrectly think love always alters a person’s attraction habits.  Who we are naturally attracted to, and who we love can be two very different things.

Attraction can lead to a relationship getting started but then, in the long run, love has to take over to keep it going.  Once love is strong enough it keeps couples together into old age.  But often a couple’s attraction habits, which were established before the couple met, remain the same and operate independently.  A couple who can share what they are in the habit of being attracted to usually are a much stronger couple than those who can’t share because they fear triggering insecurity and jealousy in their mate.  One more thing.  Listening to friends advising mistrust really just may be listening to fear-based, mistaken perceptions.

“My wife keeps wanting me to watch romantic porn with her, and then role-play being the guy we just watched while she plays the female.  She tells me it’s all just sexy, fantasy fun, but I can’t help wondering if this means she is on her way to searching for love with somebody else”.  This quote suggests a man who would do well to study what love really is as opposed to attraction.  It also may point to a man who could use a little more healthy, self love and/or a little more reassurance from his wife that he is the one she really wants to love and play with, and the rest is just a way to do that.

Understanding Attraction Systems

The above examples just are a small sample of the many ways that confusion between ‘love’ and ‘attraction’ helps mess up relationships.  Here’s what research suggests explains our attractions systems and the way they operate.

A large percentage of males, and a smaller but still significant percentage of females are genetically ‘hard wired’ to be attracted primarily by sexy, visual stimuli.  A large percentage of females, and a smaller but still significant percentage of males are genetically ‘hard wired’ to be attracted primarily by sexy, verbal/auditory stimuli.  That is why men’s porn is largely pictorial and women’s verbal or written.  Other people’s attraction systems may be primarily tactile, kinetic, olfactory or a variety of balanced combinations of the above.  Of course, there are those whose attraction systems are primarily oriented to anyone, and everyone, who are in some way quite powerful, intensely feminine or masculine, highly sociable, high in status or popularity, or attracted to personal characteristics like intelligence, kindness, being humorous, artistically talented, individualistic, stable, protective, sexy, etc.

The existence of love in a relationship doesn’t necessarily change a person’s attraction system, especially if it is quite strong.  If you are strongly attracted visually or auditorily only, or in any other way, you likely will stay that way, whether or not you deeply, romantically love someone or not.  Therefore, when you encounter someone who activates your natural, inbuilt attraction system you will observe and enjoy observing what you are attracted by.  The enjoyment comes from your brain making neurochemical compounds that cause pleasure sensations when your attraction system is activated.  This is not love.  It is your attraction system at work, doing what it’s supposed to do.

Nature’s Way

Humans are built by nature to have many attraction experiences.  This seems especially true for humans with various ‘strengths’.  By strengths we mean those who have strong attributes or desirable qualities like leadership, assertiveness, the tendency to ascend and succeed, all sorts of different talents, sociability and of course ‘baby making and bearing’ potential.  We are built by nature to enjoy both being attracted to others and being attractive to others.  The enjoyment reinforces the attraction system and its operations.

Long ago when there were far fewer of us this system helped especially strong males plant their ‘seed’ in a lots of different females, and helped especially desirable females get ‘seed’ planted in them from men with lots of varying, strong qualities.  That helped mix the gene pool and create more and more humans with various strengths.  That, in turn, assisted humans in becoming the dominant species on the planet, so the system worked quite well.

Our love systems also were incredibly important for helping us to survive, cooperate, protect and nurture one another, plus a lot more.

Healthy, real love can develop after attraction brings people into contact but there are lots of times when it does not.  This is one of the ways we know that ‘attraction’ and ‘love’ are different.  Love can influence attraction to a loved one to grow, broaden, deepen and keep happening.

Sexuality Attracts, Love Bonds

Attraction can be partially defined as that which draws people or things together, or pulls toward it that which is ready and free to be attracted.  Attraction brings things together so they have a chance to form a connection but attraction is not the connection itself.  It takes healthy, real love to hold a couple together once they have made a love connection.  Mutual attraction helps people go ‘psychologically toward’ each other and want to keep going toward each other.  If healthy, real love develops a couple may become love-bonded and stay together but if healthy, real love does not develop they will, in time, likely split up.

Those who worry about losing their mates because they have ‘lost their good looks’ would do better to worry about how well they are doing love.  Those who jointly love well tend to stay together and those who don’t – mostly don’t stay together.  There is nothing wrong in doing what can be done to stay physically , sexually, or in any other way attractive, unless it detracts from the more important issue of giving and receiving of healthy, real love.  Of course, there are unions in which things, other than love, are of paramount importance.  Sex object wives, success object husbands, trophy wives, sugar daddy lovers and husbands, and status entry spouses are classical examples of other reasons people join together.

Insecurity issues

Do you have self-security and love relationship security?  These two things go together quite nicely.  Are you insecure about your desirability or your ability to give and get healthy, real love?  Let me suggest security in couple’s love is best attained by love not by looks or anything else.  Therefore, the self-secure, healthfully self loving individual has a great advantage over the insecure and the less love-able.  The self-secure tend to avoid damaging their love-mate relationships with fear-based actions, like trying to keep a spouse from looking at attractive others, enjoy flirting with others, having fun with wide ranging sexiness, being around other attractive people, having jealous fits and practicing restrictive control via religiosity, shaming or guilt tripping.  Most of those attempted restrictions usually backfire and make your chances of losing somebody larger, not smaller.

Sharing Attraction System Pleasures

In a solid, healthy, love-based relationship people can share the joys of their own and their love mate’s attraction systems.  Here’s an example.  Harriet said, “I so enjoy pointing out sexy women to my husband and teasing him about what excites him.  He is so cute when he’s both embarrassed and turned on.  I’m not threatened by other females because I know our love is strong, and sharing what excites us makes for intimate, special fun that draws us even closer together.  I really like my man being a real man.  Real men are turned on by lots of women, just like us real women can let ourselves be turned on by different guys.  It’s all just harmless, naughty fun.  Both of us get off on sharing each other’s lusting and just appreciating how others are attractive.  It makes us closer and never afraid because we create our security by sharing everything.”

Well, dear reader have you given much thought to understanding the differences between love and attraction?  Have you been getting the two of them mixed up with each other?  Have people been attracted to you and thought it was love?  Have you been flattered by someone finding you attractive or have you had your ego boosted and then thought they were in love with you, or began to wonder if you could love the person being attracted to you?  There’s lots here that you might want to consider.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question What are you going to do the next time you are rather strongly, sexually attracted to a new somebody.  Are you going to do guilt and confess it, enjoy it, fantasize it, deny it, hide it, ignore it, share it, or go after it?

Related posts:

1. False Forms of Love: Unresolved Conflict Attraction Syndrome 

Multiple Sex Partners and Love

With dismay in his voice Vince blurted out, “Doesn’t everyone feel awful if their main squeeze has sex with someone else?

“Isn’t it natural to feel jealous or bad or something terrible if you really love someone?  So what’s wrong with me and my wife?  When I found out she had sex with a guy on a cruise she went on with her girlfriends it just turned me on.  That night, after she told me, we had the greatest sex ever!  Now she says she wants me to have sex with her friend, Sheila — so we’re even.  Are we both crazy?”

Vince’s bewilderment and similar variations of his confusing situation are not all that uncommon in my couples counseling practice.  The truth is no small number of couples who really do love each other get quite sexually aroused about their spouse having sex with someone else before, during or after it happens, or in fantasy.  Others keep circulating around a confusing mix of strongly opposing feelings and thoughts, while still others begin in agony only to later embraced and enjoy the very sexual behaviors they were first shocked and horrified by.

Another group seems to like it at first but not later.  For most people raised in a culture that condemns this sort of thing and promotes sexual monogamy as ‘the only way to go’ dealing with this issue usually is excruciating.  A great many breakdowns and breakups, along with all sorts of life chaos are the more usual experiences.  Even suicide and/or murder sometimes are known to happen when a spouse or love mate has had sex outside their primary relationship.

What some people find strange is the fact that an increasing majority of couples in the developed world don’t break up or breakdown when one or both of them has sex outside their relationship.  That doesn’t mean it is easy for all these couples to sort out.  Some find it a relatively important but still a lesser significant event in their lives, while no small number of others actually enjoy what is so devastating to others.  A surprising minority report that sex with others is actually good for their primary union, which is so totally opposite to what the majority of Western world couples experience.

What makes the difference between couples who are destroyed, couples who struggle through it and stay together, couples who take it in stride and are not much affected, and couples who enjoy and look forward to having multiple sex partners in their lives?  Before we go after answers let’s get a little perspective and some background.

Down through the ages men and women have lived rather successfully with all sorts of different standards regarding sex.  In all civilizations there have existed sexual standards which have at times included sanctioned and socially honored paramours, inamoratos, concubines, temporary travel spouses, concurrent secondary and tertiary husbands and wives, polygamist mates, and especially for the rich and the Royals various high status official positions for extramarital lovers of all sexual persuasions.  There also have existed official holidays from monogamy, religious ceremonies involving sex with priests and nuns, sanctioned orgies, broadly approved of incestuous assignments and a whole lot more you didn’t get to hear about in World History 101.  All major religions and major cultures have had extramarital, multi-person sex accepted and approved of in their history at times and in certain circumstances.

It is to be noted that traditionally matrilineal societies have had a whole lot less trouble with sex outside marriage than have patrilineal societies.  Also in quite a few male dominant, agrarian societies having multi-person sex partners has been much more OK for males and often not at all OK for females.  However, in certain hunter/gatherer tribes where male/female equality is greater, having multi-person sex outside a pair bond relationship, for both males and females, has been and in some areas still is highly approved of and is the norm.

Today around the world people in different cultures and societies react very differently concerning having multiple sex partners outside of pair bonded relationships.  In some tribal cultures to refuse to have sex with a visitor or an important personage could be grounds for divorce and it might even get a person thrown out of the village.  In other cultural groups multi-person sex can condemn a female to so called “honor murder” possibly by beheading or stoning.  In contrast there are, and have been, sub-societies where the more people a woman has sex with the higher her social standing and desirability.  And there have been the rare religious groups where even monogamous, marital sex has been deemed evil and equal to the sin of sex outside of marriage for both men and women.

You might say, “But all that’s ancient history”.  Not so.  In reviewing our current so-called civilized world I have seen a poll which showed that 67% of young, modern adult Peruvian women think sex with someone other than a spouse is quite justifiable.  This number falls to 59% for young adult Brazilian women, and 50% among female Argentinians under 35 years of age.  In a somewhat similar poll the UK number was 28% and the USA number was 38%, with various countries in the EU registering numbers similar to the South Americans.  Urban dwellers in China score similar to the Peruvian women but measurements in rural China result in scores more similar to the English.

Modern world customs vary greatly in regard to multiple sex partners.  The French have their custom of ‘separate vacations’ allowing for sex with another, and the Germans have Oktoberfest during which extra marital sex is not grounds for divorce.  There is research that shows every year more married people have sex with someone other than their spouse, but the percentage of people divorcing because of infidelity continues to decline.  Other research suggests that an increasing number of couples are jointly agreeing to engage in sex with other couples or a third-party.  An increasing number of prostitutes offer their services to couples.  Swingers’ clubs exclusively for couples are on the increase, and polyamore relationships where couples work to both grow and share real love along with sex with others are receiving increased attention.

No one is sure how many couples engage in Internet sex with others, or phone sex, or Second Life avatar sex, and the debate rages about whether or not any of that is adulterous.  Sexual robots and three-dimensional cyber sex with electrodes to provide the physical sensations are in the works, and meanwhile couples rent and buy more explicit, erotic videos than do single individuals, and married women are the primary purchasers of sexual fantasy and erotic romance books according to some researchers.  There’s a lot going on out there, and knowledge usually serves us better than ignorance.

So, with all that in mind let’s get back to what Vince asked.  “Doesn’t everyone feel awful if their main squeeze has sex with someone else?”  The answer obviously is “no” and reactions actually are quite varied.  I want to acknowledge that many are deeply hurt in these situations, I see them in my practice and help them through very painful emotions.  However, in this entry I want to relate that there are other responses that couples have.  There is a minority in our culture who are erotically aroused and generally quite positive, others are only moderately disturbed, while some actually are fairly indifferent about the whole thing.  This probably means your reaction to your mate having sex with someone else is probably not genetic or biologically ‘natural’ and ‘universal’, as some have argued.  That’s good news because it also means that with work (psychological, ethical, relational, etc. work) you have emotional and behavioral choice.

Let’s look at the love factor for those who do get hurt because their spouse, or committed lover, had sex with someone else.  There are those who argue that the more healthy, real, broad love you have the less you will see a spouse having sex with someone else as ‘vitally’ important.  Therefore, the more you both have real love for each other the more you will be able to successfully stay together, even when great hurt and disturbance occurs.  A supporting thesis goes like this.  Only those who are markedly insecure and inadequate at both love and sex have to break up over a mate having sex with someone else.  This might be because they can’t tolerate the idea that someone else might be better than they are at both love and/or sex.  Secretly they suspect they themselves are inadequate and other people will outperform them.  About that they are profoundly but secretly ashamed.  The truly loving and self secure do not breakup or break down, they work it through with and for love.  At least that’s some of the theory posited for this complicated issue.

We also must look at the healthy self-love factor.  With enough healthy self-love and healing love for a spouse forgiveness, healing and relational improvement becomes more possible.  Splitting up over anything sexual acts to make sex more important than love, and indicates it is likely self-love is deficient.  Some religious leaders have taught that successfully staying together after infidelity is a special application of the great admonition “love others as you love yourself”.  It seems like more and more couples are coming to new psychosexual understandings and with those understandings are working toward staying together.  They do that with growing love for themselves and for each other.  Also they jointly work against the common, cultural training to divorce over ‘going sexually astray’.  This cultural training makes sex so incredibly important that it can, and by these societal standards, should outweigh healthy, real love.  Fortunately for many couples, children and families real love often does prevail, and the problems our culture gives us concerning multiple sex partners are overcome and defeated.

It must be fully recognized that millions have been heavily programmed to give sex great importance, and some argue far more importance than it logically deserves.  This is especially true for those living in the modern world where the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy can be responsibly guarded against.  It also must be fully recognized that how much one hurts in a multi-person sexual situation may be heavily influenced by how one has been subconsciously programmed to feel and think about sex with someone other than a primary mate.  How one has been programmed to behave about all this also is of great import.  Acts against one’s self or against others almost always are counterproductive and they often negate the healing power of love.

Healthy, real love is protective (see the entry “A Functional Definition of Love") so those acting from healthy, real love take appropriate precautions for both sexual and emotional health.  All persons in a multi-person sexual involvement are best treated with love, in fact the more love the better because that will produce the most health and healing when needed.  Love between all participants also will assist in the healthiest resolution of difficulties.  Making an enemy of one person usually just makes everything take longer and be much more difficult.

For the hurting couple grappling with their many difficult emotions here are a number of things to look at so that healing can occur.  Everyone’s sexual background programming and beliefs, along with each person’s own sexual experience history, along with everyone’s religious training are well worth examining – but examining with love and with a loving attitude.  The trick is to be very love-oriented and to combine that with being extremely truthful.  It is love-centeredness mixed with truth that wins the day for most couples and for anyone else involved.  Healing self-love, mate love and love for all concerned is the medicine that makes the difference.

Truth with love can defeat the problems while deception, lies, half lies and attempts at manipulation just make everything worse in the long run.  Being not love-centered but fear-centered, or centered in authoritarian/judgmental controlling, or in victimhood, revenge, self-pity, judgmentalism or anything else can prevent love and truth from doing their healing work.  Blame, accusation, condemnation, rage and other negativity aimed at yourself or others just helps you get a negative outcome.  Be as loving as you can be to yourself and all concerned, be as truthful as you can to yourself and all concerned and you are much more likely to come out better than before.

Again and again that is the result I see in counseling with people dealing with these difficulties.  I have worked with hundreds of couples hurting, struggling and battling their way through these issues.  Those who do love mixed with truth are the ones who come out OK and often even better than they were.  Seek the help of a loving, nonjudgmental counselor or therapist who only ‘takes the side of healthy resolution for all concerned’ and your journey to well-being will be both better and quicker.  At least that is my experience and the experience of those therapists and counselors I have supervised.

Now, let’s look at the love factor for those who don’t get markedly hurt, upset, etc. about their love mate having sex with someone else.  Swingers, polyamores, sex sharers, sex surrogates, erotic communalists, cyber sex aficionados and everyone else engaging in some form of sexuality with multiple people who really do a good job of showing their love-mate lots of healthy, real love usually are the ones who do best.

The general guideline is ‘do lots of love toward everybody involved’ or trouble will probably start and grow.  Lots of truthfulness mixed with lots of love actions keep sex with each other more emotionally safe and nonthreatening.  The couples who are less loving, less truthful and generally less successful at life tend to fail at having multiple sex partners in their lives.  At least, in my counseling and consulting practice that’s what I have seen.  Healthy self-love, mate love, reliance on truth, plus self-disclosure love and protective love (both physical and emotional) help toward a good prognosis.  Anything less loving is likely to be much more problematic.

As in so many things those who do best at multi-person sexuality are those who are highly loving of self and others.

Again, the aim of this entry is to inform about diversity in the human condition.  What we may have been taught is usual, normal, regular, etc. may be different for others, may be changing, and may have much more variation.  What I promote is not a particular relational style but rather health and love in all things.

As always, Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥  Love Success Question
How do you know the ways you think about love and sex are not just the result of your family’s and your society’s programming and not necessarily about what is natural or best for you?

Related posts:

1. Can You Talk about Sex – with Love?
2. Making Love OR Having Sex?
3. Do You Want To Say ‘Love’ When You Mean ‘Sex’?
4. Monogamy for Love & Monogamy for Sex
5. Sex Drive Differences and Love 

Lasting Sex and Lasting Love

Did you know that to keep having good sex in an ongoing, couple’s relationship it almost always takes having ongoing, healthy, real love actively and frequently demonstrated?  It seems people can have good sex, on a short-term basis, without healthy, real love but not in a long-lasting, ongoing, romantic or spousal love relationship.

Did you know that healthy self-love probably needs to be a part of this mix also?  Without healthy self-love couple love may not flourish.  Without sufficient self and couple healthy, real love flourishing a couple’s sex life is likely to fade over time.  So, to have a great, ongoing, couple’s sex life it likely will take having a good, healthy, ongoing love of self and a good, healthy, ongoing couple’s love frequently and actively demonstrated.  That is what I have found and other counselors and therapists like me have concluded after many years of practice working with the sex and love lives of a great many couples.

Naturally it is important not to confuse ‘sex’ and ‘love’ as, unfortunately, so many people do (See entry “Making Love or Having Sex” and explore “The Love Definition Series” in the left column).  Confusing love and sex leads many people to relational disasters.  To really weave sex and love together healthfully it is important to know how extremely different they are from one another.  Learning the different characteristics of healthy sexuality and healthy love can greatly assist individuals and couples to do both well, and to do a good job of weaving them together.  If you confuse love and sex or suspect your beloved does I suggest you both had better work on that.  If you think that your maturing children may confuse love and sex you might want to attend a bit more to their love and sex education.  It also can help to talk with close friends about de-confusing love and sex.

A good, healthy sex life usually means one in which a couple has sex fairly frequently and every so often differs the style, place, time, etc. of their sexual experience.  Differences in sexual behavior are not the only important kind of difference to consider.  Many couples find that differences in mood or attitude can be the most important differences to consider when aiming to have lasting sex with lasting love.

To have lasting loving sex it helps if you consider all the many mood options available.  Sex in which the shared moods include being romantic, naughty, daring, sweet, silly, primitive, crazy, wondrous, adventurous, passionate, nasty, lazy, wild, sacred, mysterious, kinky, base, abandoned, playful, tender and a host of other mood possibilities is highly desirable.  Working to enact these various mood options is frequently far more important than simple, sexual intercourse position options or different methods by which orgasm is achieved.

Frequency of sexuality issues also is important and can vary greatly from one person to the other and from one couple to another.  In addition it is important to consider the frequency of all sexual interactions, not just sexual intercourse.  Erotic kissing, sexy talk, sexually flirtatious behavior and a host of other sexual interactions that do not lead to intercourse and orgasm but rather stand on their own as desirable events help spice up life and have independent value for a couple’s lasting love life.  Quality is more important than quantity but there are too many couples who do not have frequent enough sexual interactions, including intercourse.

There also are a very small number of couples who have sex too often, but from a health professional’s point of view too much sex is a rarer problem than too little sex.  If you have sex so often that you become very raw, bleed a lot, miss work or otherwise malfunction at regular life activities you might be having too much sex.  Since sex is highly healthy in all sorts of different ways, and it gets even far more healthy when it’s mixed with love, having loving sex frequently is a very healthy thing to do biologically and psychologically.  It also may help socially because there is evidence suggesting well sexed and well loved people are easier to get along with and possibly are more interested and active in constructive, social concerns.

In regard to the frequency of orgasms, having between one and three a week, depending on the individual and physical ability or disability, is often regarded as a good regimen for accessing accompanying health benefits.  Perhaps you have heard “a climax a day keeps the physician away”.  Oh, you thought it was an “apple” a day?  Was it the Victorians or the apple industry that changed it? 

In any case, the ‘climax a day’ works for quite a few people while there are others who seem do well with only once a month.  Less than that is highly questionable.  If each orgasm is accompanied with a dose of healthy self-love, with other love and/or love of life and the universe it is likely to be extra healthy.  If orgasms are accompanied with guilt, shame, embarrassment, thoughts or actions that self-denigrate or demean another, with anger, depression, anxiety, or other negative emotions the experience is likely to result in poorer mental and emotional health and be damaging to a couple’s relational health, which also goes against having a good, lengthy love and sex relationship.

Lasting love is greatly assisted by knowing the different ways love can be conveyed and then mixing those ways into your sexuality.  Research has discovered that there are eight distinct groups of behavior which convey love directly, and four others which transmit love indirectly.  I egotistically will say the best thing you can read about the eight direct ways of conveying or giving love is to be found in Part Two of my book, Recovering Love, chapters 5, 6 and 7.  Chapter 8 is about integrating those ways into your sex life and is titled “How Do We Get the Sex Life We Both Want”.

If you want to be a lasting, loving couple with a lasting, full sex life then it is important to study and practice the major ways love is done as you also experiment and explore sexuality together and it’s never ending variety.  There are so many ways to be sexual you can never get around to them all.  You will have your favorites which you can keep going back to but I suggest every once in awhile experiment with something new.

Now, let’s look at healthy self-love and some of its particulars.  Healthy self-love is extremely helpful to lots of couples in lots of ways, and this is especially true when it comes to sexuality.  The same ways you show love to another can provide you with the ways to show love to yourself.  Healthy self-love actions of affirming, protecting, nurturing, gifting and working to lovingly interconnect and harmonize the parts of your psychological self provide examples.  To know more about this you can explore this website looking at the various entries that have to do with communicating love and other entries concerning sex with love issues.

Healthy, real couple’s love usually is greatly complemented and made lasting when couples continue throughout their life together to study love and explore sexuality further.  Generally speaking, the more a couple maintains a fairly high level of varying sexuality and at the same time the more a couple works at being purposefully love-active the more lasting, healthy and happy that couple will be.  However, it takes some good, couple’s teamwork to accomplish that.  If you have trouble with any of these ideas and suggestions you might want to seek an accomplished, love-oriented, couple’s therapists who is trained, experienced and credentialed in both couple’s and sex therapy.

For a lasting, love-filled, erotic, couple’s life together here are a dozen simple questions you and your beloved might want to consider working with.

1.  Do we lovingly talk about sex together?
Lovingly means to talk with kindness, care, understanding, acceptance, and staying open to each other’s feelings and ideas, while not letting egotism, fear, inhibitions, judgmentalism or defensiveness have influence, and never talking in ways that could be interpreted as disrespectful, demeaning, degrading, making fun of, or angrily argumentative.

2.  Do we lovingly ask for what we want sexually, and lovingly hear what our beloved wants?

3.  Do we lovingly handle a hesitancy, reluctance, or our beloved not wanting what we want?

4.  Do we lovingly handle our beloved wanting something very different from what we want sexually?

5.  Do we want to lovingly share our erotic selves with one another, and lovingly participate with our beloved sharing their erotic ways with us?

6.  Are we lovingly open to experimenting and exploring new and different ways to be sexual with one another?

7.  If one or both of us gets erotically carried away and into intense, extreme or wild abandon sex is there still a sense of love pervading our experience?

8.  Are our beloved’s sexual emotional wants, well-being and satisfaction consistently treated as lovingly important as our own?

9.  When we experience sexual difficulty do we handle those difficulties with lots of self disclosure, truth and love?

10.  Do we lovingly work to help each other get past restrictive sexual inhibitions, bad previous sexual experiences, anti-sexual training and subconscious programming, sexual ignorance and sexual inexperience?

11.  Do we lovingly help each other share the fun, excitement, silliness, joy, playfulness, pride and ecstasy of sexuality together?

12.  Do we, at least sometimes, lovingly together strive to grow and experience sexualities that are of spiritual, oceanic, metaphysical and cosmic dimensions?

Couples who can affirmatively respond to most the above questions I see as highly likely to have a lasting, growing and frequently enriched sex and love-filled life together.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Is your all over attitude about sexuality more of a loving, happy, affirmative, thankful it exists attitude, or a conflicted, contradictory and confused attitude, or an aggressive, competitive, loveless attitude, or a mostly emotionally bad feeling, negative attitude?  Then, how do you think your all over attitude about sexuality affects your love relationships, including the one you have with yourself?

Related posts:

1. Can You Talk about Sex – with Love?
2. Do You Want To Say ‘Love’ When You Mean ‘Sex’?
3. Multiple Sex Partners and Love
4. Sex Drive Differences and Love
5. Making Love OR Having Sex? 

Sex Drive Differences and Love

Synopsis: What is usual; going from differences to disastrous dysfunction; love making the difference in differences; small step sex with love; examples; sex drive differences as a good thing; and handling sexual mis-steps are all discussed in this mini-love-lesson.

What Is Usual

Everybody has a natural, inborn drive for sex.  That is part of being a healthy human.  Like everything else human, the strength of that drive varies from person to person.  Sex drives also tend to naturally and healthfully vary in a number of other ways. Sex drive differences are normal and natural as well.

It is quite common for couples to have rather different drives for sex, urges for sex at different times, desires for different kinds of sexuality and differing     turn-on’s.  Not only that but the strength and frequency of sex drives tends to vary up and down over time.  Sex drives also can vary according to a multitude of sundry circumstances.  Furthermore, what may heighten one person’s sex desires at one time may dampen them at another time.  These sex drive variations may or may not at times have no relationship to what is happening with a person’s partner.

The number of couples who are well matched and, therefore, sexually highly compatible on all these factors turns out to be minuscule.  Most couples, sooner or later, have some sort of sexual compatibility problem often related to differences in their changing sex drives.  No wonder so many lovers complain that their beloved wants sex more or less often, or very differently than they do.

From Sexual Drive Difference to Disastrous Dysfunction

For no small number of couples the sex drive, related differences cause serious difficulties, numerous disappointments and sometimes emotionally excruciating dysfunction.  One partner who has a much stronger sex drive than the other can be a contributing factor to secret sex outside a primary love relationship, full-fledged affairs, breakups, divorce, violence, fits of depression, anxiety attacks and worse.  For larger numbers of people these differences in sex drive only cause minor to medium, relational dysfunctions along with a hampering of shared happiness.  But none of this need be true for couples who have a good, love-centered system for handling such difference difficulties.

How Love Can Make the Difference in Differences

Suppose your beloved wants to have sex a whole lot more often than you do.  What can you do?  Give in and go along?  Make excuses and dodge as often as possible?  Have lots of big, horrible fights?  Force your beloved away with cold rejection?  Run away?  Get resentful and passive/aggressive?  As you probably know, none of those work very well and may cause more trouble than they prevent.

Now suppose your beloved wants to have sex a whole lot less often than you do.  Do you try to cajole, guilt trip, shame, beg, harass, force, seduce, argue, cause fights, tolerate, accept and sacrifice your wants, become embittered, be passive/aggressive, look for other secret sex partners, or what?  Those ways also have a lot of drawbacks and ways of making things worse.

So, what to do?  Let me suggest this.  It is ‘love’ well expressed, probably quite frequently that is going to make progress possible when dealing with difficult, sex drive differences.  It is love in words and actions that will motivate taking steps toward overcoming whatever is in the way.  It is love shown compassionately that will heal wounds, relieve emotional pain and keep or retrieve emotional closeness.  It is the giving and receiving of love actions, when continuously mixed with certain small sexual actions, that will fix the problem of sexual drive differences.

Now, you don’t have to believe any of this, you just have to do it – ‘experimentally’ – to find out whether or not it will work.  You see, it is not a ‘true believer system’ but rather a ‘heart-centered, action system’ that has been known to work time and time again.

Small Step Sex with Love

Here is what may work best.  First, meditatively center  yourself in love (see the Love Centering mini-love-lesson) and ask your beloved to do the same thing.  Decide that you are going to ‘come from love’ and also with truth, in how you talk and act to your beloved about these differences.  Then, have a kind, loving but very truthful talk in which you listen as much as you talk.  Remember, Paul who told us love is kind, not rude, love is patient, etc. (First Corinthians 13).

Next, as lovingly as possible, talk about experimenting with very, small steps in moving toward more of what each of you wants sexually.  For example: If one of you wants tender kisses in intimate places, why not start to add at least a few more tender kisses near intimate places.  Then do more and closer over time.  If the other one wants raunchy, dirty talk why not begin to add some naughty words and statements so as to move in that direction.  Then do more and more over time.  Ask your beloved to be patient, and kind and anything else you want as you keep making small, experimental steps forward.  Mentally open yourself to the idea this may help you increase your own enjoyment and desire, as well as helping your beloved with their desires and enjoyment.  Compliment all steps toward improvement and criticize nothing.

Work to enjoy the journey.  If anything seems extra difficult in any way, you probably need to divide it into smaller steps.  Give and ask for praise, and thank you’s for each step attempted.  When things wrong, keep going, don’t stop.  Remember not to play the evil, ego game called “strike one, you’re out, and the game is over”.  Add fun whenever you can but do not make derogatory fun of your beloved or of yourself.

Examples To Consider

Listen to these five sentences which were made by people solving their issues concerning sex drive differences.  See if they give you ideas of what you might want to shoot for in your own sexual relationship.

“Dearest, let me try having sex with you more often, like you want, and you try doing some things I ask for that might help me get more turned-on.  And let’s be sure we both do it all in good spirits and with love whether it works or not.”

“Honey, I don’t really feel like having intercourse right now but I’d be glad to snuggle next to you as you masturbate, and I’d really enjoy helping you along as you do that.”

“Sweetheart, how about we do sex the way you like and want it this time, and the way I especially like it a little later?”

“Darling, I will be glad to try role-playing having sex the way you want but actually doing it hurts too much, so the best I can do is pretend – okay?”

“I want us to have a very sweet, tender, loving, caressing, cuddling, holding couple of hours together without having sex.  I want us both to ‘get into’ really enjoying all that ‘on its own’ without it having to lead to intercourse or a climax.  It’s okay if we get horny but this time let’s not do anything about it.  Every so often that’s what I want.  Will you help me have that?  Will you also try hard to enjoy it like I will?  If you could do that, I’ll feel really loved by you and I’ll very much want to do it all your way soon”.

With healthy, real love there is a desire, motivating actions toward helping those you love experience what they want to experience.  With healthy self-love there is a desire for healthy self-care.  Sometimes these two seem to clash.  However, with loving cooperation and the small steps approach, couples can help each other do at least some of both.  That often leads to a synthesis type solution, or at least a sort of taking turns compromise.

Unless something is distinctly harmful or destructive, or seems likely to be so, it usually is best to attempt some of whatever your beloved sexually wants.  At the same time, be sure and be asking for whatever you want.  Some of that can seem scary, weird or even repugnant at first, but then with small step experiments, done with love, it can turn into new ways to have excitement and much more mutual pleasure.  The rule is to avoid harm and to get into things lovingly and by way of small, sometimes very small, slow steps.

Sex Drive Differences As A Good Thing

Having sex drive differences can be a good thing when handled with enough love and with a small step, ‘experimental’ approach.  Two people can softly, but clearly, put forth what they want sexually and be as open as possible to hearing what their beloved wants.  Then both can experiment slowly, carefully and with small steps toward each other’s desires all of which can be done while being very loving.  This is what works for a great many couples.  This approach can lead to all sorts of sexual enrichment, new sexually and emotionally enjoyable experiences, new discoveries and a wider shared life experience.  It is especially great when a couple works to add to each other’s experience rather than to be limiting or subtractive.

Some people mistakenly think that starting out with high, sexual compatibility and staying that way is required to have a good, couples relationship.  That really is not true.  Remember, you do not need a copy of yourself.  It is better when you work at learning to enjoy what your beloved enjoys in every area, including sex.  In that way you add to each other, grow as a couple and grow as individuals.  This loving, small steps approach also helps get over sexual ignorance, sexual hang-ups, sexual fears, sexual narrowness, anti-sexual training and sexual blocks in subconscious programming.

Handling Sexual Miss- Steps

Know that some of your experimental step taking will lead to some stumbling, awkwardness, fumbling, etc..  Mis-coordination is certain to occur.  Especially, each first effort at something new is not likely to work.  The trick is to put some more love into it, and keep going.  Try, try, try again and don’t take any of it too seriously.  Doing it all with love and being love-centered is the more important thing.  Making love more important, and more commonly enacted than sex, makes the sexuality improved.  Making the sex more important than the love tends to make it much harder to sexually succeed.

Remember, there are two kinds of love involved.  Love of your beloved and healthy self-love.  Keep doing both as you keep taking small steps toward a greater, love-filled, sex life.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Have you been learning as much about love you as you have about sex, and are you endeavoring to learn more about both?

Related posts:

1. Age Differences and Romantic Love
2. Making Love OR Having Sex?
3. Do You Want To Say ‘Love’ When You Mean ‘Sex’?
4. Can You Talk about Sex – with Love?
5. Sex Fears Mastered with Love 

Intimate Love, What Everyone Needs to Know!

       

Mini-Love-Lesson  # 259

Synopsis:  We start with the experience of intimate love; move on to what is intimacy and intimate love; the main two pathways to intimate love; its widespread healthfulness; the question “Is risking realness required” and then end with the wonders of intimate love via emotional intercourse.

The Experience of Intimate Love!

Close and personal, special and private, connecting and bonding, free and trusting, revealing and exposed yet safe and secure, known and accepted, miniscule and precious, cherished and soaring, erotic and sacred, tender and powerful, idyllic and serene, delicate and cosmic, warm and ebullient, core sharing and soul touching -- these are but some of the words people used to describe their experience of intimate love in a couples workshop on advanced intimacy and love.

Do some of these words resonate with you?  Would you use others and, if so, what?  What is your experience so far with intimate love?  Do you seek, wish for, long for, or work to create more intimate love in your life?  Are you good  at intimacy cooperation and intimate love teamwork?  Do you tend to eagerly welcome or more often dodge experiences of intimacy?  Do you tend to linger with intimate love or cut it a bit short like so many do?  In your future, what part will intimate love play?

What Is Intimacy?

Those who research intimacy tend to see it as a process of interaction in which, most commonly, two or sometimes a small group of people reveal and share their real, deeper , more personal and private thoughts, emotional and physical feelings, behaviors and sometimes their sexuality, thereby, letting themselves be more mutually and idiosyncratically known and experienced.  In doing so, intense forms of mutual feelings of closeness, bonding, joy, being preciously connected and valued can result.

Sometimes smaller, intimate experiences produce feelings of simple closeness and strong, shared appreciation along with cherished memories of the experience.  There is often a sense of conjoined caring, mutual understanding and dual affirmation resulting from shared intimacy experiences.

What Is Intimate Love?

Intimate love combines everything you have just read about intimacy with, for, and in the expression of authentic love.  Love simply is defined as a powerful, vital, and natural process of highly valuing, desiring for, often acting for, and taking pleasure in the well-being of the loved (see The Definition of Love Series “The Definitions of Love”). Intimate love therefore, is a major, close, personal way of doing just those things.

At the same time, intimate love is a marvelous process for accomplishing the five major functions of love.  In brief, they are (1) to connect us, (2) to nurture us, (3) to protect us, (4) to heal us and (5) to reward us for enacting the behaviors of love.  Intimate love often provides profound connectedness, nurturing, healing and rewarding experiences frequently in a wonderful sense of happy safety and, thus, facilitating all five major functions of love.

The Main Path to Intimate Love

The primary path to intimate love is self-disclosure and, with it, self-disclosure love (see “Self-Disclosure Love”, a chapter in my book Recovering Love). It is an act of love to disclose yourself to someone you love.  It lets them know who you are in intimate detail.  Ongoing self-disclosure shares your personal self with another so that they can understand who you are in many differing ways, enjoy you and much more fully experience the unique you.

Self-disclosure can be done by revealing your body, your way of being sexual, your physical feelings, your positive, negative and mixed emotions, your history (both bad and good) your ordinary past, your hopes and aspirations, fears, weaknesses, strengths, excesses, deficiencies, victories and failures, personal thoughts, areas of knowledge and ignorance, your troubles and triumphs, mediocrity, ugliness and beautiful parts, along with where you need healing and growth, your deficiencies and attributes, guilty aspects, shame, pride, enjoyments, proclivities, idiosyncrasies, and ways of just being yourself.

Do not forget to reveal your ways of being fair, decent, kind and ways of having pleasure.  Very important are your perceptions, understandings, conceptions and misconceptions, preferences, moods, attitudes, judgments and quandaries.  Even more important are your fears, anxieties, secret hopes and hidden desires.  In other words, share as much as you can and, while you are at it, enjoy your beloved sharing themselves with you (see “Growing Closeness -- A Love Skill”).

The Second but Equal Path to Intimate Love

The second great path to intimate love is touch or tactile love, both sexual and affectionate (mostly nonsexual).   Everything from one finger, tender, superlight touch to full body bear hugs and full body massage-type touching is included here.  When you fully, really love someone touching them in every loving way and on every loved part is a great way to create an intimate love, experience.  Likewise, letting yourself be touched every way and everywhere is a grand way to share yourself with someone and let yourself be intimately loved.

Passionate embraces and tender eyelid kisses, being vigorously lifted then swung around or super gently caressed, having your feet rubbed with scented oils or your back scratched -- they all can convey, enhance and embody intimate love.  So too does all types of wanted sexuality.  Experimenting with new types of sexuality, always done with shared love and without judgment or anything critical, can produce a wonderful sense of an intimate love experience.  That is true even if the sex part does not work out so well (see“50 Varieties of Love Touch”).

Intimate Love Is So Healthy -- Physically and Psychologically

There is quite a bit of research showing that high levels and frequency of intimacy resulted in higher levels of happiness, good mental health, better immune system functioning, less stress hormones in the blood, as much as eight years of greater longevity, greater general enjoyment of life, better body systems functioning, far better relational functioning and a host of other goodies.

Is Risking Realness Required?

Many people fear self-disclosure, intimacy and intimate love itself though still desiring it.  There are lots of different reasons for those fears.  For some, it is a fear of being judged and rejected, others have been trained to be ashamed, embarrassed or have a sense of being sinful when they reveal certain parts of themselves, while still others have very painful memories of betrayal stemming from the last time they risked being real.  Then there are those who rely on their social act and persona mask so much that they just can't bring themselves to do honest self-disclosure without embellishment and social deception.

If you self-disclose some intimate truth about yourself and it goes badly,  in one way that is a good thing.  It helps you know that the person you did the self-disclosure with probably is not a good person to do self-disclosure with, and consequently, is more likely to be a poor candidate for carrying out most kinds of love relationship with.  Thus, whatever went wrong is likely to be a message to consider ruling them out and to go looking for someone more tolerant, accepting, empathetic, less critical or whatever.

If you choose not to be self-disclosing, that can be quite a barrier to intimacy and intimate love occurring.  Some people do not do well at self-disclosure just because they were brought up that way.  Frequently they have been subconsciously programmed to mold themselves into strong silent types.  This especially is true for a lot of men in several cultures where showing your emotions is not considered manly.

Then there are those, women mostly, who have been subconsciously programmed to be attracted to the strong, silent types.  Strong can be okay but silent, not so much.  Silence is a prescription for emotional distance and loneliness.  It is done mostly for safety but, in reality, for love relationships it is not safe at all.  Whenever there is too much emotional distance in a romantic relationship love hunger tends to grow, as does, the likelihood of secret affairs.

Can you risk being seen psychologically naked?  If you are rejected, or have fled from or retreated from being criticized and condemned, can you be strong enough to be okay with the probability that you and that person may not be a good match -- which is a good thing to know sooner than later.  Risking revealing yourself is the only way to really find out if the real you and the whole you is loved.  Hopefully you have enough healthy self-love to both risk and survive going for intimate love.  Likewise, will you do well with self-disclosure coming your way?  Toleration love often is required for a love relationship to be good and lasting (see “Tolerational Love”, a chapter in Recovering Love).

Emotional Intercourse

Having emotional intercourse fairly frequently is absolutely great for making intimate love experiences happen and for keeping heart-mate love relationships interesting and enriching.  How do you have emotional intercourse?  Well, you do it by taking your positive and negative emotions about anything and everything and showing them, not just telling them to a loved one who can take them in with good listening and love reception skills.  It is sort of like living them with you as you share and self-disclose them (see “Listening with Love”).

Then, with good listening and love reception skills, you do the same as they share and self-disclose their emotions about anything and everything to you (“Tolerational Love”, a chapter in Recovering Love).   Emotional intercourse usually is fairly active though sometimes subtle.  Intimately looking into each other's eyes, while holding each other, while both have very loving facial expressions can be great emotional intercourse.  Emotional intercourse can occur at the same time as sexual intercourse if very free-form, active expression of what is being felt emotionally and sexually is occurring and is being observed with enjoyment and maybe with awe (see “Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill” and “Emotional Intercourse”).

One More Thing: With another, talking over what you have just read and sharing your feelings about it, as well as your thoughts, might lead to a bit of an intimate experience.  If you do that, please mention this site and our many mini-love-lessons.  Thank you.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: If you go emotionally naked and have emotional intercourse with someone and they, likewise with you, will you not, in one way or another, come to love each other?

Intercourse Absent Lovemaking - a Love Skill

Synopsis: This mini-love skill lesson explorers the puzzle of sex without sex?; the great world of sexual variety for the loving; intercourse dependency; why have sex without intercourse; how do we start moving beyond intercourse dependency with a sample scenario; and a bit about fixing sexual intercourse problems:more.

Sex Without Sex?

Sex without sexual intercourse is almost unthinkable to some people.  When you say the word sex a whole bunch of people think sexual intercourse is what you mean.  Having sex, doing sex, making love and a hundred other phrases mean, to them, having sexual intercourse.

The truth is there are a lot of people having a lot of great sex and no sexual intercourse is going on.  Quite often there also is a great deal of healthy, real love happening, the intensity of the erotic experience is fantastic and yet there is no ‘penis in vagina’ sex happening.

The Great World of Sexual Variety for The Loving

For some people sex without intercourse is seen as a necessity.  For others it is seen as being preferable at least some of the time.  For a lot of people who really love each other sexual intercourse is kind of incidental so long as there is good, love-filled, emotional intercourse.  There is another group who somewhat crudely say “who cares how you get to come, just so you do”.  Then again, some proclaim there is so much more to sexuality than intercourse or climaxing they can do without both so long as they get to do all the rest with someone they really love and who loves them.

People who love each other ‘through and with’ their sexuality often tend toward engaging in a wide variety of different, erotic experiences with each other.  The more different things they do together the less they become what some call ‘intercourse dependent’.

Intercourse Dependency

Quite a lot of males protest things like “I just have to be in her.  In fact I’m driven to get in her again and again, that’s just the way I’m built.  I’ve got to feel that ‘inside her’ feeling and nothing else will do”.  No small number of females declare things like “having a man inside me is what makes me feel feminine and like a real woman.  I have to have that more than anything, even more than an orgasm”.
Others deeply and strongly want to have the “in” experience coupled with feeling their lover climax while “in”.  This is all likely to be quite natural and maybe genetic.  However, some people let this drive toward intercourse and/or climax in intercourse narrow their sexuality.  They’re sort of like the people who have to have meat at every meal or the don’t feel like they’ve eaten well.

There are those who are religiously trained that it is wrong to do anything but intercourse and so their sexuality has been unnaturally narrowed by outside forces.  From a health perspective behavioral variety is a good thing in almost everything humans do, sexuality included.  When humans have too much sameness in just about anything they tend1 to give up on it because humans are the creature that seeks variety more than any other.  Therefore, exploring for the wide variety of ways sexuality can be practiced outside of intercourse can be a healthy, enriching experience.

There are the millions who prefer oral-genital sexuality which some think of as a form of oral intercourse. There are men and women who are more desirous of anal intercourse than they are vaginal. A fair number of women enjoy and even prefer dildos and other intercourse toys.   There are quite a few people who don’t care which kind of intercourse is occurring, or whether or not there’s any intercourse, just as long as what’s happening  is very loving.  Along with oral, anal or vaginal intercourse some people also need to hear sexy words and see sexy looks, or they combine their intercourse with various “kinky” actions.  Plain  intercourse usually is not high on their priority list, though they can be quite intercourse involved.

Why Have Sex Without Intercourse?

Do you wonder why some people have and even strongly desire to have sex without intercourse?  One reason is to develop all one’s other loving sex skills.  Lots of couples who resist or abstain from having intercourse discover that they develop many other ways to excite and pleasure each other.  Some say intercourse-dependency deprives people of all the better things there are to do sexually with each another.  They say too much focus on intercourse makes for a rather limited sex life.  By not doing intercourse for a while other things often are explored, discovered and developed.  Thus, a much broader range of experience can be shared which often is a major joy in a loving couple’s life together.

There are a larger number than you might think of people who don’t participate in sexual intercourse for religious reasons, but ‘do everything else’.  These fall into three groups.  One is the group who has been religiously taught not to have intercourse unless it is to procreate – have a baby.  Another group it’s because they have been taught that they are still virgins if they don’t have male-female, vaginal intercourse, even though they might do everything else imaginable.  Then there is the group who has been taught that only  male-female sexual intercourse is sanctified (especially in marriage), and they are in religious rebellion attempting to break out of and away from their faith’s restrictive dogma, so they might do everything except sanctioned sexual intercourse.

Very large numbers of people do not engage in sexual intercourse because of medical reasons.  Sadly, some of those have just given up on sex when they don’t have to.  Sometimes they have given up because they are indeed intercourse dependent in the way they go about taking care of their natural, sexuality, and they are unaware or inexperienced in the many ways sexuality can be expressed.  They can learn that, in spite of injuries, illnesses and various other hampering or debilitating medical conditions that limit or prohibit sexual intercourse, they can have a great life of love-filled sexuality.  Even paraplegic and quadriplegic people can have a sex life, and treatment programs exist for accomplishing exactly that.

How Do People Have Great Sex Without Intercourse?

There are lots of ways people can have a great sex life without sexual intercourse or with only occasional sexual intercourse?  Some couples simultaneously masturbate each other, and some do side-by-side parallel masturbation while talking sexy to each other, or watching each other, or watching films.  Some take turns as giver and as receiver teasing, tempting and pleasuring each other sometimes applying oils, powders, feathers, toys, vibrators and other  stimulating actions and devices all over each other’s bodies.

Those people who have to spend time away from each other can do ‘Skype sex’ where they can watch each other do sexually stimulating things (according to company policies this is not supposed to be done, but often is).  Some couples watch the same sex video at the same time, though they are thousands of miles apart, while they talk to each other on the phone.  Of course, millions do ‘phone sex’ with their beloved on a regular basis while apart.

An amazingly large number of people, especially females, are sending naked and otherwise sexy pictures of themselves to their lovers as stimulating love gifts, and then delighting in hearing about what their lover did while looking at the pictures.  Oral sex, anal sex, spanking, B&D, S&M, D&H, Tantric sacred sex meditation exercises, mud pit sex, second life avatar with love partner avatar sex on the Internet, all sorts of role-playing, sharing porn sex, etc. – why the list goes on and on.

Not all these ways are pleasing to all people but choosing the ones that are can help loving couples share fantastic sex lives together without sexual intercourse.  For couples for whom intercourse is painful, somehow physically dangerous, ill-advised or impossible many of these ways are used and make available sexual alternatives which can show each other intimate, personal love and can make available loving, sexual adventures together.

What Does It Take for Couples to Have a Sex Life
Not Overly Based on Intercourse?

Usually it takes a very love-centered relationship where tolerance, acceptance and a “whatever works” attitude prevails.  It also takes being able to be lovingly open to experiments and explorations of lots of varying sexual behaviors.  Happy, shared, excited, anticipation, curiosity and a sense of joyful sharing in each other’s erotic, adventuring feelings also are great additions.

An important consideration backing up all these actions and adventures often has to be a sense of being able to (if needed) to take small steps, pause, back up or totally escape any sexual exploration with full, loving support from one’s lover.  Frequently a sense of strong support and protection of one another in each and every sexual experiment or adventure must be readily available for people to be able to move forward together.

When lovers fear their beloved may be critical, disappointed, disparaging , judgmental, angry, prudish or any other relationally negative process, it becomes quite difficult if not impossible for couples to sexually progress.  Also there has to be a sort of “we can try that again later” understanding.  No one wins by playing the destructive, psychological game known as ‘strike one, we are out and our game is over’.

How Do We Start Moving Beyond Intercourse Dependency

One way is to do a homework exercises that I sometimes assign which seems to work for a lot of couples.  It starts with a trip to a good bookstore and going to the sexuality section.  There a couple often can read and look at beautiful, erotic pictures portraying many of the different ways people can and do go about sex, with and without sexual intercourse.

It’s important to talk together about whatever grabs your attention, gets you interested or piques your curiosity.  You might want to take a book or two home, then share going deeper into the books with one another.  After that I suggest giving each other a full, very light touch, naked, all parts of the body massage with intercourse absolutely prohibited.

Following that you can begin to take little, mental, sexual adventurers like sharing some sex fantasy and maybe do a little role-playing.  There are more advanced ways to progress to sexual intercourse-absent sexuality, and then even much more advanced ways.  If you’re up for it you might attend a Tantric, Shakti or Taoist spiritual sex practices weekend workshop which many couples proclaim as the most amazing and productive way to maximize a couple’s sexual love together.

Sample Scenario

One couple followed this scenario.  Shy Sarah whispered, “I will go skinny dipping if you will, but it has to be dark and no intercourse.”  Timid Tim agreed, and it turned out to be incredibly exciting.  Then timid Tim said, “Let’s make out in the back seat of our old station wagon, and so they laughed and giggled while they kissed and fondled for hours.  Sarah, no longer quite so shy, had read about couples doing nude meditation together which they did and quite a few wide-ranging, new and intriguing feelings enveloped both of them.

Later Tim, less and less timid, brought home a sexy movie and side-by-side they played with each others genitals as they watched it, driving them into passions they never knew existed before. Even later their ecstasy soared when Sarah said to Tim, “Tease, tempt and lightly ‘torture’ me for the rest of the night.”  Tim quite enthusiastically obliged, although because of blissful exhaustion they didn’t make it all through the night.

Of course, some days later Tim came with chocolate syrup and did all manner of erotic oral things to and with Sarah.  Together they visited a sex shop and came home with a variety of toys plus a great eagerness to learn how to play with them.  Those were the beginning practices that went into shy Sarah and timid Tim building a love filled, not intercourse dependent, sex life.

Fixing Intercourse Problems

Couples who have sexual intercourse problems can do all the above, while working on whatever difficulties they might have concerning sexual intercourse itself.  If you have problems with intercourse, or getting started in the above described areas, come to talk to one of us who have received the additional training it takes to develop expertise in sex therapy.  We’ll be glad to help you.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question If you’re going to get into a sexy, new practices or actions with your beloved what would you really like them to be?  Do they include a healthy dose of love?

Related posts:

1. Emotional Intercourse
2. Dining with Heart – A Love Skill
3. Talking to Feelings First, Then Topics – A Love Skill
4. Checking It Out – As a Love Skill
5. Gratitude As a Love Skill 

Pro-Love and Anti-Love Talking

Is your way of talking to your loved ones (mate, children, siblings, etc.) more pro-love or more anti-love?

Have you ever examined your habits of speech and speech style for their effect on your loved ones?  Do you know the three big factors determining pro-love and anti-love talking effects?


Factor I    Love Destroyer Words versus Love Builder Words
Below you will find 25 examples of words and phrases which tend to have an anti-love effect.  Following each of these is an example of a pro-love effective way to state a similar thing.  Check your speech habits against these to determine if perhaps you are using love destroyer words and phrases and might need to practice a more pro-love style to have a love building effect through words and phrases.

1.    You should …
You could …
2.    You shouldn’t …
I would like you not to …
3.    You always  …
I’d like that to happen less …
4.    You never …
Really soon I really would like you to …
5.    Why don’t you ever …
I want you to ………………, maybe by tomorrow if that’s OK?
6.    You’re wrong.
I see that differently.
7.    You’re lying.  That’s absolutely not the way it happened.
We remember that differently.
8.    How could you have been so stupid!
In the future I really want you to do that better.
9.    Don’t ever let me catch you doing that again!
How can I help you not to do that again?
10.  You’re terrible!
You can improve!
11.  I hate you!
Right now I’m really mad at you.
12.  You’re an idiot!
Part of me would really like to call you a lot of names right now.
13.  I can’t stand you!
I’m having trouble dealing with you right now, so let’s take a break.
14.  Why did you do such an awful thing?
Let’s look at what we can do to improve that.
15.  I can’t love you when you act that way.
I always love you, and what you’re doing really upsets me.
16.  But … 
And …
17.  Never say that again!
I don’t want to censor you so can we talk about that later and nicer?
18.  I’ve asked you time and again, so when are you going do what I say!
Honey, so that you’re clear, this is not a request, it’s something I have to insist on.
19.  You crazy freak!  Don’t you know any better than that!
In some ways we are really different.
20.  Can’t you ever get it right!
Sweetheart, we don’t seem to be making progress in this area.
21.  That’s all your fault!
Honey, how can we learn to go about that differently?
22.  I blame you for that, and you know you deserve it!
The critical part of me really wants to lay a guilt trip on you for that.
23.  No, not ever, and that’s final!
Sweetheart, right now I am firmly against that so please bear with me and be tolerant.
24.  We are never going to …
So far we haven’t and I really want us to, so this time how can we get to it?
25.  If you really loved me you’d know what I need and you would have done it already!
I probably have not made a clear enough request so let me see if I can be specific
and tell you more exactly what I want.

Factor II    Destroyer Voice Tones versus Love Builder Voice Tones
Did you know that 35 to 37% of what you are communicating in a personal interaction is delivered by your voice tones?  Have you given much thought to what your voice sounds are telling your loved ones when you talk to them?  Below are 10 words describing voice tones which frequently tend to have an anti-love effect and 10 words describing voice sounds that might have a more love positive effect.

Check and see which you think are most common to your own voice tone expressions:
1.  Indifferent    2.  Businesslike    3.  Bored    4.  Harsh    5.  Unfriendly
     Interested         Personal              Intrigued    Gentle        Friendly
6.  Hard    7.  Mean    8.  Condescending    9.Condemning     10. Angry
     Soft          Kind           Respectful               Forgiving          Understanding 

Factor III    Pro Love and Anti-Love Face and Body Communication
Did you know that in person-to-person talk it is not unusual for as much as 55% of the value of what is being communicated to be carried by face and body language factors?  Did you know that in a person-to-person talk your subconscious mind may be interpreting as much as 300 bits of information per minute having to do with face and body language communication?  Have you given much thought to what you’re face and body language messages are to your loved ones?  Here are 10 words that can be used to describe face and body language expressions which can have an anti-love effect.  Under each of these words is another word for a face and body language expression which might have a more pro-love effect.

1.  Uncaring       2.  Judgmental    3.  Rejecting       4.  Bland        5.  Egotistical
     Caring               Forgiving             Accepting            Involved        Sharing
6.  Tough    7.  Superior    8.  Irritated    9.  Impatient     10.  Prudish              Tender            Democratic      Tranquil         Patient                Flirtatious      

Now we suggest you examine what your own, more frequent face and body communications are when you are talking with your loved ones.  Then examine your voice tone communications and see how you might improve them.  After that take a look at the words you are commonly using and see if you want to make some changes so that you can have a greater love-positive effect.  You also might want to lovingly ask a loved one to follow your example and do the same.

As always, Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Will you ask one, two or three people who know you pretty well what is the best and the worst or how you come across in regard to the above 3 Factors?

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Image credits: “[last remnants of autumn]” image by Flickr user lempel_ziv (Tanya Zagumenov) .
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Related posts:

1. Love Positive Talking
2. Are You Talking About Love Enough?
3. Talking to Feelings First, Then Topics – A Love Skill
4. Say It With Love
5. Additive Talking – A Love Skill