Ebullient Love: Love’s Joyous River

Mini-Love-Lesson  #231

Synopsis: The dynamics of this all too often under-explored form or “River” of Love are presented, clearly explained with quick examples along with an outline for achieving ebullient love and its many upbeat, healthful, positive emotions.

The Champagne Kind of Love

Has your spirit ever seemed to bubble up with happy love?  Has your heart been effervescent with joyous love feelings?  Have you experienced the heady excitement of irrepressible, buoyant love?  If so, you have known ebullient love.

Ebullience is the quality of lively, zestful, high-spirited, effusive positive feelings often spontaneously, animatedly and exuberantly felt and expressed.  Literally it has come to refer to filling up with and bubbling over with  positive emotions.  The word itself has an older meaning, now falling out of use, which has to due with bubbling up and over with any type of feeling.

Ebullient love refers to bubbling up and over with love’s natural joy.  It is the sparkling, bubbly champagne type of love.  This kind of love usually is seen as wholehearted, vitalizing, sometimes rhapsodic, thrilling, ardent, vibrant, blithely elated, extraordinarily cheery and, even at times, spiritually awesome.  Descriptions like overjoyed and overwhelmed with love frequently have been used to describe ebullient love experiences (See “Happier Love and Six Big Ways to Make It So!” Link “Pet Love”).

Examples of Ebullient Love

Ebullient love can be seen in the response of natural joy of an infant picked up and lovingly played with, cuddled and snuggled by a similarly effervescently happy, loving parent.  It also is often evident in the joyous greeting and heartfelt interaction of people reuniting after an absence.  Sometimes it is not so obvious but definitely felt in people walking hand-in-hand with a spring in their step and smiles on their faces.  Occasionally it comes more internally with mindful stillness as one person joyously observes deeply and reverently a person they deeply and reverently love.

Couples, deep friends, comrades and whole families simultaneously, mutually can become elated together with their ebullient love as they dance, hug, sing, shout with joy while they celebrate their connecting and uniting love on sundry special occasions.

Lovers fully present with each other in the existential now can repeatedly tap into their ebullient love and be infused with its happiness again and again.  This may lead to the most loving of embraces in the simplest and most ordinary of times, making such times extraordinary and very special (See “Many Good Feelings Brought on by Love”).

Small, Medium and Large Ebullient Love

Sometimes ebullient love is felt in rather small and also medium size amounts.  A sudden flash of momentary joy on observing someone you love just be themselves in some idiosyncratic way can trigger a bit of heartwarming ebullient love.  Receiving a special hand squeeze, a smile, a compliment or even just a nod or a wink may trigger a surprisingly impactful, tiny spark of ebullient love joy.  Sometimes couples dancing together in intimate connection brings on these precious, ebullient feelings.

Engaging together in prayer, mutual meditation, rituals of the spirit and the heart and jointly appreciating the awesome and the grand can bring on a quieter, deeper form of ebullient love.  When that happens, people sometimes describe their love joy as jointly feeling at one with each other and the universe, overwhelmingly awesome, deeply spiritual, exploding with joy and beyond their ability to describe what they are experiencing.  Profound mixtures of love and sex experienced together can do the same thing.  A great sense of total connection and unity also can  be part of the ebullient love experience.

The River of Ebullient Love

Ebullient love flows like a river full of delightful twists and turns, safe but exciting little rapids, eddies, tributary waterfalls with rainbows and endless other precious, elation surprises.  It is the kind of love that keeps you aware of and fully feeling the here and now with little or no attention given to the disturbances of the past or the future.  It is like you might repeatedly feel traveling down a pleasant but exciting river.  Furthermore, it tends to create memories that you can later tap back into and by doing so re-experience a bit of the abiding nurturing which ebullient love often provides (See  “Living Well via Loving Well” and “Quality Love, Quality Life?”).

Reward – Reinforce – Motivate

All the rivers of love - Adamant Love, Compassionate Love, Passionate Love, Serene Love as well as Ebullient Love - have their rewarding functions.  However, nothing rewards us quite like ebullient love.  This form of love often is immediate, obvious, easily experienced, lighthearted, fret free and very delight-full.  It can be seen as providing a great many of feelings which help make living with and in love extremely desirable.

Ebullient love provides strong reinforcement for doing all the other things we do about love.  Its wide variety of various joys and other good feelings reward our learning how to seek love, relate with the love, behave with love, improve with love, bond with love and bask in love.  Not only that, but ebullient love helps make love attractive, intriguing, playful and fun to share.  It, therefore, is a great help in making life feel worthwhile.

Ebullient love plays a major role in helping us celebrate our love connections, strengthen our love bonds, mutually and repeatedly nurture and enrich each other, live happily and feel fulfilled.  Beyond that, it also is a part of letting us experience and appreciate the majestic nature of love itself.  Because of all that, ebullient love is a great motivator to seek and keep doing life in ways that bring and share many of life’s most wonderful experiences.

Infectious Ebullient Love

People usually enjoy being around those experiencing ebullient love.  That is because it tends to be automatically infectious and, therefore, very easily shared.  This makes it great for relationships.  Being part of a mutual, ebullient love event can make for a sort of happy, upbeat bonding.  It is the sincere “I am happy for your happiness” and the “your joy is my joy” type of heart touching, ebullient experience.

An Outline for Growing Ebullient Love

How good are you at being happy?  Lots of people are not nearly as proficient at getting themselves happy as they might be.  Lots of them grew up being unknowingly trained to think that things and events come along to make us happy or not.  Too many grew up in families where they absorbed the non-conscious, antiquated idea that overt happiness is frivolous, suspicious or even sinful.  That is a leftover from the Puritan days when secular happiness was considered Satanically inspired and only the somber were godly.  We now know that usually happiness has much more to do with your mindset and mindfulness than do the things and events which happen to you.  Your mindset and your mindfulness are things you can do something about.  We also know that not making yourself sufficiently happy, frequently enough is a very unhealthy way to live.

If, on an average day, you are good at making yourself happy and you are good at the getting and giving of love you may be able to produce lots of ebullient love experiences.  Perhaps you know someone or are yourself the kind of person who is really proficient at enjoying being loving and loved.  Some of the people who are described as romantics are experts at this.  Their mindset is to enjoy the manifestations and elaborations of romantic love and they do it with relish.

Natural Happiness, it turns out, is extremely healthy.  So is Real Love (See “Wellness: Its Necessity, Healthy Real Love”).  Learn to focus frequently on the things that you can savor, enjoy, appreciate, be inspired by, find enriching and be delighted with as you also learn to deal with and dismiss more quickly unhappy stuff and healthy happiness is likely to come your way quite a lot.  Along with that, become increasingly love centered, love oriented, love mindful, love knowledgeable, love active and love receptive and you are very likely to be quite healthfully often happy.  Do that with others who are doing likewise, and maybe with a super special other, and that is a way to voyage on the river of ebullient love.  So, work on your mindset and your mindfulness habits for love and happiness and ebullient love is likely to become more and more a part of your life.

Now, let me suggest you happily go talk all this over with a perhaps lovable somebody.  In the process, you might tell them that they can regularly receiving our mini-love-lessons via our free subscription system?  That may help put a bit more much-needed love knowledge into our love hungry world.

As always – Go and Grow with Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question:  Is it “love makes you happy” or “with love you can make yourself happy - or not” ?

Do You Start and Part with Love?

How do you do ‘Hi’s’ and ‘Bye’s’ with those you love?   To keep a love relationship healthy it is best if every (yes every) ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’ experience includes at least a brief love connecting and sharing experience.  Every “Hello, I’m home” event is best done with a hug, a pat, a caress, a nuzzle or a kiss.  Going past each other to whatever you want to get to next without any expression of connecting love can be detrimental to your love relationships.  Likewise, every “So long” is better done with similar brief expressions of love.

In some relationships the lack of such love when parting can lead to hours of vague anxiety, worrying “is anything wrong”.  Starting off time together with a little demonstration of love means that the following time is more likely to go well.  Ending a time together with expressed and received love actions makes your next encounter more likely to be a bit sooner, a bit better and a bit more wanted.  People who start and part with love are seen as having better attitudes, better cooperation likelihood, less stress and a host of other small but significant benefits.

Many couples and many families I see in counseling for reasons of deteriorating relationships have not been greeting each other or saying goodbye to each other with any love at all.  Sometimes there is no greeting or saying goodbye what so ever.  Often when I get them to experiment with a little ‘start and part’ love action improvement begins.  This is one of the simplest and quickest ways to start toward the repair, or enhancement, of a love relationship.  Notice that this is the way most pet dogs (who were put in the world to teach us love according to an old Indian legend) do it.  Actually many apparently love- connected mammals greet and part with what looks like shows of affection.  So maybe love starting and parting is natural.

It is not only failing love relationships that often lack this love expression ‘start and part’ behavior. ‘Blah’ and ‘in a rut’ stagnant, and semi-functional relationships frequently exhibit this lack of love ‘start and part’ way of doing things.  So, I would like to suggest you check out how well your love shows in ‘start and part’ situations.  Might you do well to greet your spouse, children, friends, and maybe even yourself with an improved, more love demonstrative ‘start and part’ set of actions?  Would you like to dedicate yourself to starting every encounter with a brief but sincere show of love?

Be sure to do that before you try to take care of anything else each time you encounter a loved one even if you have been away from them only for a brief amount of time.  When coming together after work, going to the store , visiting with others, etc. making some action to lovingly touch, saying words of love followed by asking “How are you feeling” delivered with a loving tone of voice and loving facial expressions are usual ways to create a pleasant and caring environment.

Coming in from outside while saying a term of endearment like “Hello, Sweetheart”, giving a good morning kiss upon waking, smiling at first sight of one another, and adding a caress or pat are also quite helpful.  Departing with similar sentiments and behaviors works in much the same way.  If you already do these sort of things ask yourself how can you improve?  If you don’t already do this sort of ‘start and part’ love might you want to dedicate yourself to making a plan to do so, and enacting it?

If when coming together you usually begin with some sort of practical ‘what’s to be done’ talk, or ‘what has been done’ inquiry a sense of low grade aggravation is likely to grow.  If the last thing said on departure is something like “Remember to mail the letter, pickup the cleaning, do your homework”, etc. that person’s return to you is less likely to be happy.

If the last thing said is a message of love the reverse is true.  Get the practical messages said but end with an expression of love.  If the first thing said upon coming together is “Did you remember to pay the bills, do your assignment, call so-and-so”, etc. a small dose of subconscious emotional abrasion may occur.  That abrasion experience could later lead to growing difficulty, or at least to fairly strong disappointment.  If instead a happy “Hello, darling, it’s so good to be with you”, or something like that, starts a new encounter with each other it is much more likely to go smoothly.  Usually it only takes 20 seconds or less to start or part lovingly.  The return on your loving effort can yield hours of happier time together.  Of course you can take longer than 20 seconds and do it even better if you want to.

If you are the recipient of loving ‘start and part’ behaviors do you soak them up, reciprocate in kind, and cycle the love being offered?  Ignoring, or quickly moving away from such tokens of love deprives yourself and your loved one from the healthy, positive effects of these small important actions.  Unfortunately, in our fast paced, often goal oriented and impersonal daily lives there is an insufficiency of loving behaviors, so savoring those love actions that do come your way can enrich your life.

A good love relationship takes good love teamwork.  Good teamwork love takes good sending and good receiving.  Being a good receiver and an equal participant when a loved one initiates a ‘start or part’ love action helps the process of good teamwork love quite a lot.  So, if a love ‘start or part’ action comes your way take it in and send some back.

People sometimes say to me things like, “Dr. Cookerly, doesn’t starting and parting with love get to be an empty habit or meaningless activity”?  It can if you let it but it doesn’t have to.  Be creative!  Also all around the world friendly, affectionate greeting and parting rituals make life work better.  It’s healthy for those in all loving relationships to develop their own, informal love rituals.  If you get a sense that your rituals are beginning to feel empty or meaningless that might be a message from your inner wisdom-filled subconscious to do them better.

So, here’s a simple challenge.  Make an experimental ‘start and part’ with more behaviors of love action plan, and carry it out.  Then see if you and those you care about like the results.

As always – grow in love!

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Related posts:

1. Listening with Love

Heartbreak Mending and the Deep, Multi-Love Remedy

Synopsis: Heartbreak and the fallacy of time mending; heartbreak defined; heartbreak’s secret benefits; heartbreak’s dangers, and five things you can do that are likely to help are all covered in this mini-love-lesson.

Heartbreak And the Fallacy of Time Mending

We all can become heartbroken from the loss of a loved one or the loss of love itself.  Loss can come from a breakup, divorce, a death, abandonment, betrayal, a severe lasting estrangement, a major defeat in life where someone or something you truly love is lost and also by experiencing a severe contradiction to your understanding of how love is to be carried out in your life.  Wherever there is love there is the potential for love loss and, therefore, heartbreak.

The good news is wherever there is heartbreak there is the potential for heart mending.  Without mending, heartbreak can destroy people’s lives or at least large segments of people’s lives.  Therefore, knowing how to assist and hurry the mending process is very important.  Some say time alone will cure heartbreak but that is not true.  More accurately it is that given enough time we slowly, eventually may stumble across some of the things that bring about mending.  It’s what happens ‘in the time’ that makes the difference and, while for many it’s very slow, the process can be hurried somewhat when you know certain actions to take.

There are people who get stuck in their brokenhearted living and stay there for the rest of their lives, not recovering at all.  You do not have to be one of them, nor do those you care about.

What Is Heartbreak

Heartbreak can be defined as intense, emotionally painful, overwhelming and seemingly crushing distress, grief and ongoing agony over the loss of a major, love involvement.  One of the major functions of love is that it brings us into deep, heartfelt connection with the loved.

Another major, love function is that love provides us with vital, psychological, life nourishment.  When our connection to life nourishing love is lost we become at risk. Depression, despair, fear, anxiety, grief, loss of will to live, loss of energy, loss of functionality, and a sense of profound agony and emptiness can result.  These are some aspects of what true heartbreak is.

Heartbreak is seen as a more severe form of heartache, heart sorrow, having an empty heart and other terms indicating hurt is occurring over the absence, or loss, or distancing of someone or something loved.

To be truly heartbroken is a serious and dangerous condition though the term heartbreak and heartbroken are often inaccurately used to indicate milder forms of disappointment and disillusionment, usually connected to romance.  Heartbreak also can be understood as a serious, pathological, neurochemical imbalance occurring in the brain following the loss or severance an important love relationship.

Heartbreak’s Secret Benefits

Having a broken heart may tell you a lot about what you need to know.  It may tell you that the way you are going about love needs an overhaul.  The agony of a broken heart may tell you that who you are choosing, or who you are letting choose you for love relating may need some drastic change.
Heartache and heartbreak from the loss of a love may tell you how important love is in your life, and to give love much more serious attention, and not take it for granted.

Heartbreak may persuade you to expand the number of sources and kinds of real, healthy love relationships in your life.  Heartbreak can tell you to get yourself repaired and then learn how not to be so vulnerable and susceptible, but instead be stronger and more able to cope with love gone wrong.  That usually points to the need for considerable, healthy, self-love improvements.

Heartbreak often is what it takes for a person to finally re-orient and re-direct their lives into more healthy and constructive pathways.  For many people without having experienced serious, broken heart problems they never would have given love enough thought to learn how to do it well.

Heartbreak’s Dangers

Heartbreak can be quite dangerous.  Love loss can and often does bring on serious, suicidal depression.  It also can trigger major abandonment feelings and fears, and a sense of being lost in life.  Heartbreak may result in a retreat from life and an overly defeated, self protective lifestyle.  It can lower your immunity system defenses and make you vulnerable to infectious diseases, and it can cause or exacerbate stress illnesses like heart attacks and strokes.

Heartbreak is known to cause people to turn to various addictions for escape from the pain of heartbreak, although the pain still is there undealt with.  Heartbreak also is thought to be a major cause of addiction relapses.  So, if you are suffering or if someone you care about is grieving with a ‘broken heart’ watch for these danger signs and get real help.

None of these need be your result.  Most people recover from heartbreak.  Most people who get help recover faster, and sooner, and also more thoroughly.

What Helps

One approach to recovering from heartbreak is to take a deep, multi-love approach.  This means purposefully developing your healthy, real love of life, others, self, spiritual love, possibly family love, friendship love, possibly the love of a cause or a worthy involvement, and then throwing yourself into those loves.  Later you can learn to give yourself a chance at a love, similar to the love you have missing from your life, but go about it in a more likely to succeed manner.

In my work with the families of murdered children, those recovering from divorces and breakups, widows and widowers striving to recover, sole survivors of family tragedies, and in my own former recovering from love loss I have found five things that particularly can help many people get started on a path to recovery.  It takes hard work, but it’s easier than living without healthy, real love in your life.

Here are five things that you, or those you care about, can do to help recover from heartbreak:
1.    Go to counseling with a very loving, love-centered counselor or therapist.

2.    Get yourself into daily psycho-educational experiences about love, and love relationships, and everything that’s related.  This means read about healthy real love, watch video presentations, listen to audio talks, journal, search the Internet, go to classes, workshops, seminars, retreats and anything else you can find that relates to learning the how to’s of healthy, real love.

3.    Immediately, but very slowly, and in small steps involve yourself in all sorts of other love and love potential relationships with pets, friends, positive family members, groups of people who are or may be positive and loving.

4.    Increasingly do anything and everything that is potentially distracting and which later may have the potential for being enjoyable.  Start with spectator events like going to happy movies, and then later get involved in things that move your muscles a lot because motion helps change emotion usually for the better.  Even the mildest and briefest of distractions from emotional pain are useful in helping you heal and are likely to help you grow stronger the longer you repeat them.

5.    Slowly and in small steps immediately get into increasingly healthful living.  Exercise, healthy diet (including some strictly pleasurable comfort foods, especially chocolate, a mood elevator, are okay in small amounts), affirmations work, meditation, prayer, yoga, art, sports, upbeat music, nature, etc. all can be part of a healthful lifestyle.  These things first can be first done alone if you prefer, and then later with others doing similar things.  Get a physician’s help, and other health professional’s assistance, and possibly a trainer who may help with motivation. All this can be part of your healthy, self-love program.

This outline is much too brief but is aimed at helping you to get going toward heartbreak recovery, or to help someone you care about who is suffering a broken heart.  It points the way toward a ‘path that many have traveled’ to full, heartbreak recovery and beyond.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
If you already have been a survivor of serious heartbreak, do you know how you did it so that you can do it again if need be?

Catharsis Empathy - A Love Skill

Synopsis: Hank on alert; confrontation and bafflement; a wife and sister’s explanation; preventing fighting; catharsis empathy unraveled; and the benefits are all parts of this very important love skills, mini-lesson.

Hank On Alert

Hank went on alert when he overheard his wife and sister sounding mad and nasty in the kitchen.  Cautiously he eavesdropped more.  He figured out they were not mad at each other or at him, but rather at someone else they both knew, and that brought him some relief.  As he listened he was appalled at all the putdowns and criticism they were viciously leveling at this acquaintance.  Then he heard mean-spirited sounding laughter and got anxious again.

He worried maybe this negativity he was hearing eventually would spill over onto him.  Their talk sounded unreasonably one-sided, irrational and illogical.  Hank really wished his wife and sister would be more balanced in their appraisal of this person.  Surely, the unfortunate, targeted person they were talking about wasn’t all bad and maybe even had some good traits.  Besides, being so negative and mean-spirited was bound to be bad for them too.  He wanted the women in his life to be pleasant and kind, and what they were doing sounded so sour and ungenerous.  He screwed up his courage and decided to confront them about their negativity.

Confrontation and Bafflement

Hank bravely walked into the kitchen ready to argue and cajole, but he was caught entirely off guard.  His wife saw him and lit up with a big smile saying, “Hi Hank, come join us.  Your sister and I are having a great talk.  I just love chatting with her.” Everything seemed cheerful and Hank was baffled.  Slowly he diplomatically got around to bringing up his great puzzlement over what was really going on between them.

A Wife and Sisters Explanation

Hank’s wife explained it this way, “We’re helping each other blow off steam, or maybe more accurately, we’re bonding with each other as together we vented out our toxic, bad feelings.  It helps us get clear and feel better.  It’s a lot like what you do at a football game.  You scream and holler insults at the other team or at the referee, and pretend to hate them.  In doing so you bond with your buddies there with you.  We just were doing the same thing more personally.  If anyone ‘really meant’ what they were saying when you are screaming about how awful the other team is, you’d think they were stupid or maybe crazy.”

Then Hank’s sister added, “It’s also like going to a rock concert.  You’re mostly there for the feelings brought on by instrumental music, not the ideas and information in the lyrics. You’re there sharing your emotions and your feelings, and because there’s a like-minded crowd you can do it bigger and better.”

Preventing Fighting

Hank’s wife then thoughtfully added, “I just realized a lot of our fights happen when I want you to be my ‘cheerleader’, and I want to feel like you’re on my side but you start playing devil’s advocate and reasoning with me and trying to calm me down.  When that happens I feel you are not on my side, and even sometimes like you’re my enemy, and I want to get away from you and find somebody who will treat me with empathy, and feel what I feel whether I’m right or wrong.  Besides, that right or wrong stuff that has nothing to do with it”.

Hank replied, “This is a whole different way for me to think and it’s going to take me a while to wrap my mind around it.  I think you’ll have to tell me when you want me to be your cheerleader or to just listen with empathy and not try to reasoned it out.” His wife replied, “Okay, I know you get worried when I cathart, so I’ll try to remember to ask you to be my care companion and not my instructor or fixer or debater.  Thanks for hearing my point of view and being willing to try to be empathetic when I have to vent.”

Catharsis Empathy Unraveled

What Hank ran into and misidentified can be called “catharsis empathy”.  It refers to a time in which one or more people need to vent, or let various emotions out, and have the feeling that the person they are venting with is right there with them, on their side, is joining with them without criticism, and is helping bad feelings come out.

Often when there are pent-up, negative feelings and the dam breaks to let them out, lots of things get said that make no real sense unless you understand the words just help the feelings get vented or experienced better.  It’s like when you tell your kids “It’s time to go to bed” and a kid replies “I hate you, Mommy”.  You know they don’t really hate you.  They are just venting frustration.  It’s not to be taken seriously, but instead understood with empathy.

The Benefits

Cathartic empathy helps people unburden themselves and at the same time helps them become bonded with one another.  When done intimately and personally, it helps us grow more love-bonded.  Receiving empathy and the ‘comradery’ feeling that comes with it while venting helps clean out psychological toxicity.  That, in turn, leads to the ability to think much more clearly afterward.  When one person wants cathartic empathy and not intelligent discourse, it useful for them to say something like Hank and his wife and sister talked about.  An example would be “I just want you to be my cheerleader ,not my coach; just hear me and feel with me, okay?”

It useful to ask loved ones “Is this one of those ‘be your caring cheerleader’ times, or is it something else?”.  Getting good at identifying such times, and showing empathy when catharsis or when any emotional expression occurs is a ‘super important’ love skill. Thousands of arguments and fights, and even breakups might be prevented by showing empathy to a catharting, venting loved one – instead of that ‘blowing off steam’ leading to destructive conflict which so often happens.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
So, how good are you at asking for and giving empathy when emotional catharsis is needed?

Related posts:

1. Listening With Love and IN and OUT Brain Functions
2. Emotional Intercourse
3. Talking to Feelings First, Then Topics – A Love Skill
4. Connection Matching – A Love Skill
5. Intercourse Absent Lovemaking – a Love Skill 

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