How to improve your sex life and have extraordinary relationships
Over the years, writer and therapist Lucy Cavendish has been inundated with clients desperate for help and looking for ways to improve their key relationships with their co-workers, friends, family and partners. We all get stuck in certain patterns in our daily lives, and may not know how to improve things – especially in the bedroom. Writing exclusively for The LC, Lucy reveals the key to identifying how we can all improve our sex lives….
Sex is important. It is a vibrant part of our lives. The need to feel desired and loved and deeply connected to our own body, and another person’s body, can transcend thoughts and words and deeds. However, it is important to define what sex means for each of us. For some people, sex is the act of intercourse, and yet that is actually quite a narrow definition of what sex is. In order to improve our sex lives, it is important to think and feel rather more expansively when we are talking about sex.
For while sex can be transcendentally lovely, it can also be dark, complicated, exciting and thrilling. Sex can involve play. It can involve deep feelings of love. It can involve pleasure and it also can involve pain. Sex doesn’t necessarily need to be between two people. It can be a little bit more experimental than that. If we can dare to be a little bit more open to sex not just being two people in the missionary position, we can improve our sex lives immensely. We can entertain the idea of being brave enough to go into deep feelings and desires that maybe we have struggled to name.
Most people get “stuck” when it comes to sex because they see it as being an act that revolves almost solely around penetration, and typically also around both parties having an orgasm. Yet it is very exciting to see sex as something rather different. Imagine you were on a hallucinogenic drug, whereby your mind left your body – ask yourself what would you want to experience in your senses? What are your deepest desires? How would you like to feel in your body? Really concentrate on what you want, and what level of excitement you want to feel, and how you might get to that level.
Part of this is about expanding our minds so that we can visualise sex and intimacy as something that goes way beyond the usual constraints of what we believe sex to be. A lot of eroticism and arousal happens within ourselves and it is ignited in the world of fantasy. So we need to really ask ourselves what our fantasies are. Then we ask this of a partner – what are their fantasies?
It doesn’t mean to say we have to act on the fantasies, but it really is about being curious about ourselves and our partners because that opens up a dialogue between our bodies around eroticism and desire. It also means that we can get away from shame, because shame has no place in conscious relationships. This is the key to sex. It is a sensual and exciting experience, and that can range from having an intimate massage with two people exploring each other’s bodies to pretending you are strangers in a bar who go off and have wild, crazy, passionate sex as if you are on a one night stand.
The key is to feel free in the sensual landscape that exists within most of us. We have so many senses – including touch, smell, taste – and all these need to be present in a vibrant, connected, sensual life. But in order to do this – and to improve our sex lives – we need to invest in the concept of trust. Trust is important in sex because it means however wild or unfettered you become, you trust the person you are having this relationship with. The sky really is the limit and the only thing that holds you back is not letting your imagination run free. Once you do this, and you can find the ability to ask for what you want and to give your partner what they want, your sex life will be off-the-scale improved.
Lucy Cavendish is a writer and therapist, and the author of How To Have Extraordinary Relationships With Absolutely Everybody (Quadrille Press) – a practical guide for anyone who is curious about how to improve their relationships, using straightforward language and easy-to-follow advice. For more information, go to www.lucycavendishcounselling.com.
