The Ethical Slut has been called ‘the bible’ of non-monogamy

– But its sexual utopia is oversimplified

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In 2022, University of Melbourne evolutionary psychologist Dr Khandis Blake estimated that among young people, “around 4-5 per cent of people might be involved in a polyamorous relationship, and about 20 per cent have probably tried one”.

Polyamory statistics in Australia are limited. But recent research in the US shows just over 11% of people are currently in polyamorous relationships, while 20% have engaged in some form of non-monogamy. In the UK, just under 10% of people would be open to a non-monogamous relationship.

“To us, a slut is a person of any gender who celebrates sexuality according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you,” write the co-authors of The Ethical Slut, a now-classic guide to non-monogamy (tagged “the Poly Bible”).

Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton are the co-authors of The Ethical Slut.

When it was first published more than 25 years ago, shattered social norms and stigma around non-traditional relationship styles. Now in its third edition, revised to address cultural changes like gender diversity and new technological innovations (like dating apps), it’s sold over 200,000 copies since its first publication in 1997.

As a non-monogamous practitioner myself, I welcome literature that aims to destigmatise relationships that sit outside monogamy.

Sexual educator Janet W. Hardy and psychotherapist Dossie Easton, two self-described queer, polyamorous “ethical sluts” – friends, lovers and frequent collaborators – bring readers into their world of multiple partners and multiple kinds of sex. It encourages them to think about their own desires, and how they might be achieved in ethical ways.

Easton decided against monogamy after leaving a traumatic relationship, with a newborn daughter, in 1969. She taught her first class in “unlearning jealousy” in 1973. Hardy left a 13-year marriage in 1988, after realising she was no longer interested in monogamy. The pair met in 1992, through a San Francisco BDSM group.

Two years later, sick in bed, Hardy stumbled on the film Indecent Proposal, where a marriage crumbles after millionaire Robert Redford offers a madly-in-love (but struggling with money) married couple, played by Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore, a million dollars for one night with Demi.

“A million dollars and Robert Redford, and they have a problem with this? It made no sense to me,” Hardy told Rolling Stone. “I really got it at that point, how distant I had become from mainstream sexual ethics.” And so she reached out to Easton to propose they collaborate on a book on non-monogamy.

The Ethical Slut is a significant guide to navigating sexual freedom, open relationships and polyamory – responsibly and thoughtfully. It’s aimed at readers exploring non-monogamy, or supporting loved ones to do so.

What is The Ethical Slut?

The book is divided into four parts, each offering mental exercises to help readers embrace a sexually diverse lifestyle. It aims to support those interested in exploring non-monogamous relationships, free from stigma or shame.

The first part offers an overview of non-monogamy. An ethical slut approaches their relationships with communication and care for their partner(s), whether casual or committed, while staying true to their desires.

In the second part, the authors urge readers to break free from the “starvation economy” mindset, which conditions us to think love and intimacy are scarce resources. This is what leads to fear and possessiveness in dating, sex and relationships, they explain.

In part three, readers learn how to handle jealousy and insecurity, while managing conflicts effectively.

Finally, the authors cover various non-monogamous sexual practices. There are tips for navigating swinging and open relationships as a single person, group sex (orgies), and advice on asking for what you want in a sexual encounter.

‘Everything’s out on a big buffet’

The Ethical Slut’s appeal lies in its ability to help people shift their mindset about monogamy, in a society where other forms of relationships have often been deemed immoral. (Though this is changing.)

Co-author Hardy told the Guardian in 2018:

What I’m seeing among young people is that they don’t have the same need to self-define by what they like to do in bed, or in relationships, like my generation did. Everything’s out on a big buffet, and they try a little of everything.

Ezra Miller has talked about his ‘polycule’.

Five years later, in 2023, many celebrities openly identify as polyamorous. Ezra Miller has talked about his “polycule” (a network of people in non-monogamous relationships with one another), musician Yungblud has called himself polyamorous, and Shailene Woodley has been in and out of open relationships.

Books like Neil Strauss’s The Game (2005) view sex and relationships as ongoing competitions, requiring varied strategies to effectively land a partner. Instead, The Ethical Slut encourages developing genuine, consensual connections through communication and honesty. Relationships are seen as fluid and open to change, with endings viewed as opportunities for growth and development, not failures.

Rather than teach readers to mimic a social norm that will “win” them sex or relationships, The Ethical Slut pushes readers to think beyond what is “normal”.

Dating apps like Feeld, PolyFinda and OkCupid enable individuals to link profiles with their partners, promoting transparency and openness about their relationship status and desire for diverse sexual experiences.

And more books with varied and nuanced takes on non-monogamy have emerged since 1997, such as More than Two, Opening Up and Many Love.

A utopian mirage?

There’s much to appreciate in the messages The Ethical Slut conveys. However, it’s framed with a utopia in mind – one that doesn’t quite exist.

A key aspect of this book is challenging the starvation economy that influences monogamous relationships. In an ideal world, breaking free from this mindset about love and intimacy seems like paradise. The idea of loving more than one person is beautiful, connected and certainly achievable. But it’s also a significant challenge.

For many, longing for love and connection is not just a concept but a real, lived experience. Withholding affection in relationships can be emotionally abusive and manipulative. It’s essential to recognise non-monogamous people may still be susceptible to – or even perpetuate – these behaviours.

The authors present themselves as spiritually and morally enlightened in their non-monogamous choices and their sexual practices. Monogamy is framed as a negative byproduct of a regressive culture, rather than a genuine choice in its own right. Substance use is severely frowned on, echoing longstanding taboos around the use of drugs in sexual play.

The Ethical Slut frames monogamy as ‘a negative byproduct of a regressive culture’, rather than a choice.

The Ethical Slut makes universal assumptions about people’s experiences without considering broader social and personal influences. For instance, the section on flirting assumes a global understanding on what constitutes flirting cues between people. It lacks cultural, gendered and neurodiversity awareness.

Rejecting sex is not always easy

The authors assert “being asked [for sex], even by someone you don’t find attractive, is a compliment and deserves a thank-you”. Yet a simple “Thank you, I am not interested” is not always easy.

Research has shown women need to find ways to gently reject cisgender, heterosexual men to avoid violence (like “I have a boyfriend/husband”). And many men often do not take no as an answer. Thanking men for compliments can also lead to further hostility and aggression.

The authors advocate for women to say yes more, assuming women only say no due to shame and stigma. But the real fear of experiencing violence is a major deterrent. For example, recent research in the UK on recreational sex clubs has found that cisgender, heterosexual men may show sexual interest in trans women, only to immediately become violent with them.

These assumptions are echoed in discussions about barrier methods, sexual health testing, birth control and abortion options. The Ethical Slut assumes everyone has equitable access to sexual health education, and reproductive health services and products.

Yet the overturn of Roe vs Wade in the US has shown this is not the case. People who experience menstruation and pregnancy are increasingly losing – or never had – those reproductive freedoms.

Emotions are ‘choices’

The book envisions an idealised world where emotion and logic unite to challenge social constructs of monogamy, possessiveness and control. It’s underpinned by a belief our emotions (including jealousy) are choices we make about life events.

In The Ethical Slut, jealousy is solely attributed to the person experiencing it, overlooking its complexity in various contexts. Jealousy can be a sign of insecurity, grief or relationship issues, among other things.

Managing jealousy is presented as something an individual needs to address on their own. The book lacks guidance for dealing with partners who might contribute to jealousy by not fulfilling emotional needs, breaking boundaries, failing to communicating effectively, or purposely trying to evoke the feeling.

The person experiencing jealousy is held solely responsible for their emotion, ignoring the role of the non-jealous partner. Suggested responses, like “I’m sorry you feel that way, I have to go on my date now”, reaffirm this mindset.

Jealous partners are advised to write journal entries, practice mindfulness or go on a walk to deal with their emotion. In a book about sex that is fundamentally about relations with others, jealousy becomes lost in the hyperfocus on the individual.

The person experiencing jealousy is held solely responsible for their emotion.
< The book’s explanation that emotions like jealousy are normal and natural, may emerge unexpectedly and should not be shamed, contradicts the idea that emotions are choices. People don’t necessarily choose to feel grief, anxiety, insecurity or sadness. Intellectualising emotions as conscious choices does more harm than good.

The book also praises compersion, the act of feeling joy at your partner’s happiness – even with other partners – as a positive experience, possible when a partner feels secure. “A lot of us experience jealousy that we don’t want, so compersion can offer a pathway to a better place,” says Easton. Yet the book provides little guidance in how this can be achieved.

Compersion can also be weaponised against those who experience insecurities, with statements like “if you were really poly/non-monogamous, you’d feel compersion for me”. Some have suggested compersion should be seen as a bonus, not a requirement, in non-monogamy.

‘A too-perfect picture’

Non-monogamists may face challenging conversations about emotional needs. The book’s advice assumes a certain level of emotional intelligence, experience and good intentions. It lacks guidance on dealing with emotionally unintelligent partners, malicious intentions, potential abuse, or what to do when conversations go terribly awry.

While I applaud the book’s push towards destigmatising non-monogamy, it paints a too-perfect picture. The odd sense of censorship is even there in its depictions of potential challenges, which seem cherry-picked to demonstrate a sense of ease with the lifestyle.

Stories about managing jealousy come to neat and tidy endings. One example is Janet’s story about falling in love with another partner and having the discussion about it with her “primary” partner. Her primary handles the discussion well and they go on to have a fulfilling relationship. There are few genuinely negative examples.

As a result, The Ethical Slut feels like it’s working to hide any potential downfalls to embracing a non-monogamous lifestyle. But providing examples of where things do not work and how people manage that could be quite useful.

Nevertheless, the book is an important introduction to non-monogamy. Perhaps it’s best used as a stepping stone for deeper exploration.

Complete Article HERE!

Can a monogamous couple happily become nonmonogamous?

— It’s possible but not easy, experts say.

Exploring ethical nonmonogamy isn’t always easy for couples who have been monogamous in the past.

By Ian Kerner

Can a monogamous couple become nonmonogamous? Of course, they can — but do these couples survive and thrive? What are the pitfalls and what are the pleasures?

More and more I’m seeing couples in my practice of all ages who have always been in monogamous relationships but now are seriously thinking about opening up their relationships. They are young couples just starting out, couples with young kids and a mortgage, and empty nesters looking to find their wings.

The reasons for taking the leap vary. Often one or both partners may be feeling sexually dissatisfied in the primary relationship — it may be boredom, mismatched libidos or a desire to explore new horizons. Sometimes there’s a hunger for the excitement and energy that come when people first connect with someone new. It’s also possible one or both partners don’t believe in monogamy. For some couples, sex has always been an issue, even though the rest of the relationship works.

No matter the reason, interest in nonmonogamy — participation in nonexclusive sexual relationships — is on the rise. In a 2020 study of 822 currently monogamous people by Kinsey Institute research fellow Justin Lehmiller, nearly one-third said that having an open relationship was their favorite sexual fantasy, and 80% wanted to act on it.

What happens if your relationship starts off as monogamous, and you or your partner change your mind? That doesn’t have to doom your relationship, Lehmiller said. “Research suggests that relationship quality is actually quite similar in monogamous and consensually nonmonogamous relationships,” he said. “Both relationship styles can work well — and both can fail, too.”

I believe the key to successful nonmonogamy is in one word: consensual. Known as ethical nonmonogamy, this approach is different from monogamous relationships in which partners cheat on each other. An ethically nonmonogamous relationship involves two people who identify as a couple but who are not committed to a traditional relationship, according to sexologist Yvonne Fulbright.

“They’ve given each other the opportunity to date or have sex with other people independently,” said Fulbright, who is based in Iceland. “Often a key component in these relationships working out is that the other relationship is only sexual, not romantic or emotional. There’s no deception about engaging in sex with others.”

Some couples may find ethical nonmonogamy easier than others. That includes those who have discussed the possibility of an open relationship from the beginning as well as LGBTQ couples. “In my experience, gay and queer couples have more ease with nonmonogamy,” New York-based sex therapist Dulcinea Alex Pitagora said.

“They’ve had to do more introspection and communication around their sexual or gender identity,” Pitagora said. “This additional time spent understanding who they are, what they want, and learning how to communicate it dovetails very smoothly into communicating about nonmonogamy.”

For couples who choose to open their relationships ethically, there can be benefits. “Nonmonogamy can be fulfilling and a catalyst for self-growth,” Wisconsin-based sex therapist Madelyn Esposito said. “This self-growth can deepen understanding and desire for your primary partner as you have the space to explore yourself and your own sexual needs outside of relational confines.”

In an open relationship there is often less pressure to have all your sexual needs met from your partner, Florida-based sex therapist Rachel Needle said. “And there is less pressure on you to meet all of your partner’s sexual needs. This gives you the opportunity to enjoy sexual activity with your partner but do it without added tension or anxiety.”

Sometimes the heat generated outside the bedroom even finds its way back into the primary relationship. “Many nonmonogamous folks find that partner variety revs up their libido, and that this transfers over into increased sex in the primary relationship,” Lehmiller said. “Something else we’ve found in our research is that, beyond sex, these relationships can also mutually reinforce each other. Specifically, being more satisfied with a secondary partner actually predicts being more committed to the primary partner.”

But making the leap into ethical nonmonogamy isn’t always easy for couples who have been historically monogamous. Often, one partner is “driving,” and the other is a reluctant passenger going along for the ride. Sometimes a couple can’t agree on what constitutes nonmonogamy (casual sex with different people versus repeatedly seeing one person), or they can’t agree on rules (posting a profile online, staying overnight, bringing someone home, no kissing).

One partner might be worried about the social stigma if others find out or just can’t get beyond all the cultural messaging that idealizes monogamy. Nonmonogamy can trigger strong feelings such as jealousy and possessiveness. “Even bringing it up as a curiosity can feel threatening to some couples/partners,” Fulbright said.

What should you consider if ethical nonmonogamy is on your mind?

There are any number of positive motivators for couples to try nonmonogamy, but what you don’t want to do is rely on nonmonogamy to slap a Band-Aid on existing problems. “Using nonmonogamy to fix a relationship is as effective as having a baby to fix a relationship — it’s a terrible idea,” said Rebecca Sokoll, a psychotherapist in New York City. “You need a strong and healthy relationship to make the transition to nonmonogamy.”

Don’t do it to distance yourself from your partner. “Ethical nonmonogamy can also be a defense mechanism, a delay tactic, a hide-and-seek game and an aversion to closeness,” said Minnesota-based psychotherapist Hanna Zipes Basel, who specializes in this area. “I see couples succeed when they enter nonmonogamy with an already secure functioning relationship, when they are both equally desiring nonmonogamy, and/or they have had prior experience or done their homework.”

“Get educated on the wide array of philosophies, structures and agreements that are possible in the ethical nonmonogamy world through books, podcasts and articles,” suggested sex therapist Sari Cooper, who directs the Center for Love and Sex in New York. “Journal about what each of you is looking for through this transition and discuss these goals with your partner to see if you’re on the same page and, if not, what overlaps or compromises might work.”

There’s no doubt that ethical nonmonogamy requires communication — and lots of it. “I suggest a ‘what if’ conversation before anyone takes anything into action,” Los Angeles-based sex therapist Tammy Nelson advised. “Talking about the potential positives as well as the pitfalls of a possible exploration can prevent problems that could come up later. The more you talk about the issues before they happen the better.”

A therapist experience in working with couples pursuing ethical nonmonogamy can help you weigh the potential pros and cons, guide you through the process and provide you with a neutral, safe space to discuss things.

Determine what ethical nonmonogamy looks like to you both and agree on your parameters — more rigid rules may be best when starting out — and plan to keep the conversation going.

“I see dozens of couples a year who come to therapy to try and negotiate their expectations in advance,” said Kimberly Resnick Anderson, a sex therapist in Los Angeles. “Couples who do their homework ahead of time have a much better success rate than couples who jump right in without preparation.

“Even couples who prep responsibly are often surprised by their reactions to certain situations and need to renegotiate boundaries.”

In my professional experience, the couples who succeed at nonmonogamy often don’t require many rules at all, because they trust each other, prioritize the primary relationship and hold each other in mind throughout the process.

If ethical nonmonogamy doesn’t work for you — or leads to a breakup — that doesn’t mean it’s a loss. “Consider a couple with children who, without ethical nonmonogamy, would have split up, and for whom nonmonogamy stabilizes their relationship,” New Jersey-based sex therapist Margie Nichols said.

“Eventually, that stability doesn’t last, but ethical nonmonogamy allows the couple to uncouple consciously and take time with the process,” Nichols said. “Because of the thoughtfulness, the family can remain living together or near each other and still love and care for each other, and there is no bitterness or rancor between the two. I’d call that a success — despite divorce.”

In the end, couples who succeed are fiercely committed to their primary relationship: They protect it, cherish it and care for it. They ensure that their foundation is solid and secure, and they continue to grow and expand as a couple in ways beyond sex. Nonmonogamy may be an exciting new chapter for a couple, but it doesn’t mean the story of their relationship comes to an end. It should feel like an exciting beginning.

Complete Article HERE!

How to close an open relationship

How to close an open relationship

By

Over the past few years, conversations about polyamory have become more and more commonplace.

In fact, recent research by Lovehoney has uncovered that, as Brits become more sexually explorative and adventurous than ever, one in four Brits say they would consider an open relationship or some kind of polyamory in their lives, while 31% of Brits do not believe in monogamy at all.

Often when we speak about non-monogamy, there’s an assumption that decisions about the dynamic of a relationship made between couples (whether they’re about polyamory or anything else really) are permanent and unchangeable. A common misconception in relationships is that once a boundary is laid down, it’s immobile.

That myth can put people off trying an open relationship. A quick scroll through the non monogamy subreddit will show bouts of people concerned that an open relationship may have no end if they come to dislike it, or already do.

But while boundaries should always be respected, they’re subject to change as individuals and couples grow. If a relationship dynamic is making you uncomfortable, you have every right to negotiate with your partner and propose a new chapter.

Closing open relationships is more common than you might think. Hairdresser Izzy, 31, and her husband shift manager James, 35, opened their marriage after five years of being in a relationship and one year of marriage.

‘We’re both bisexual but neither of us have had a chance to explore things with the opposite sex, always being in hetero relationships,’ Izzy tells Metro.co.uk. ‘We decided to give each other that chance as like a gift.’

For two years, they loved having an open relationship.

‘Neither of us got serious with other people and we still had sex with one another and made lots of time for dates,’ Izzy shares. ‘In a way nothing changed between us really, just I slept with women and Jake slept with men and we felt like we were finally getting to explore our queer identities.’

Things changed for the couple when Izzy got pregnant.

She tells us: ‘Lots of poly couples make a pregnancy work. I’ve seen couples who involve the other partners and the kid gets to have a load of parents who all of them. For us, though, it felt icky.

Multiethnic couple holding hands and walking
Communication is key

‘Being pregnant made me want to close our relationship again and just focus on the three of us, at least for the time being.’

Bella and James think they will eventually re-open their relationship but not until their child, now six months old, is a bit older.

‘I think because we weren’t serious with any of our partners, it didn’t feel natural to involve polyamory with our pregnancy or keep it going,’ Bella adds. ‘And soon I would be so big that sex would kind of be off the cards, wouldn’t it?’

Thankfully for the couple, closing the relationship wasn’t a huge deal.

‘Again I think because we didn’t have any romantic attachment to any of the people we were sleeping with, like we weren’t serious or committed to any of them, [closing the relationship] was sort of easy,’ Bella explains. ‘When we found out we were pregnant, we both just kind of said we should probably stop.’

Gigi Engle, a certified sex educator who specialises in relationship diversity, says closing a relationship can be complicated, ‘but so is opening a relationship’. The key is good old communication.

She tells us: ‘If both partners are down to close the relationship, it’s totally doable. You just have to be on the same page about it.

‘But the thing about open relationships (and relationships in general) is that both people have to want that style of relationship for the relationship to thrive.’

She adds that if one partner wants an open relationship and one partner wants a closed relationship, this is a recipe for disaster.

She continues: ‘Really, what it comes down to is, are you okay with it if your partner wants to close the relationship?

‘If you don’t want to close it, is that a compromise you’re willing to make? It’s really okay if you don’t want to close it, and it’s okay if you do.’

Cropped hands of lesbian couple holding hands against purple background
It’s okay for your relationship to change

If you are on different pages, Engle suggests involving a qualified psychosexual therapist to try to work through that conversation, ‘because you’re fundamentally incompatible on this topic’.

‘It may have to end the relationship, which isn’t a bad thing because you deserve to live your truth,’ Gigi comments.

‘There’s nothing wrong with wanting to close your open relationship. A lot of couples who have close really open relationships often close them at least for periods of time.

‘For instance, like when one partner gets pregnant, the couple may decide to close the relationship during the time of the pregnancy because there’s so much emotional support needed.’

Students Sammi*, 22, and Danielle*, 21, opened their relationship after they’d been together for three years.

Sammi tells Metro.co.uk: ‘My partner had never been with a male before and wanted to experiment, I was eager to explore being open and sleeping with other people except my partner, we didn’t have sex particularly often as we both take antidepressants and find our libidos don’t line up as often as we’d like.’

The couple discussed the idea for a while, downloading dating apps together and making sure they understood and respected each other’s boundaries, before starting to see other people.

‘Soon we started dating others and further on, we ended up having threesomes with people we had each met individually which was an exciting experience,’ Sammi shares. ‘But my partner struggled with this and found it hard to articulate their exact feelings as they weren’t sure what they were feeling themselves.’

Eventually Sammi’s partner, who is non-binary, realised the envy they were feeling wasn’t over Sammi sleeping with men, but over the men themselves.

‘In the end, my partner realised that actually the jealousy was more envy of the males I was meeting as they themselves did not identify as female,’ Sammi explains. ‘We decided to close the relationship again as it brought up feelings we didn’t want to have to work through.

‘So basically our open relationship triggered a gender identity crisis for my partner but ended in an awakening.’

Sammi also realised that she was having sex with men for validation, and she and her partner found this unhealthy – adding another reason to close the relationship.

The conversation about closing their open relationship was made a lot easier because they’d discussed the importance of communicating any and all feelings right when they first discussed polyamory.

Sammi says: ‘We didn’t have a timescale in mind, just for as long as we both enjoyed it and felt we wanted it to be open.

‘I really can’t emphasise the importance of communication during this time as I really think it would have ended us if we couldn’t be open and discuss these things without judgement from the other side.’

Gigi recommends discussing the potential closure of an open relationship from the very beginning, when you first discuss the idea of opening the relationship.

‘When opening, it has to be clear that this might not work and that you’re willing to work through that possibility together,’ she says.

If you want to close your open relationship, these conversations can’t be avoided.

‘You should be living your most authentic life so that you don’t end up miserable and resentful of your partner,’ Gigi says.

She adds that some people go back and forth on opening and closing their relationships, while others open their relationship for a few years then close it again because they’re done with that part of their sexual exploration.

‘It’s completely fine to do and doesn’t make you boring,’ Gigi shares. ‘It doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything wrong.

‘After many years, relationships shift, they change, they never stay stagnant.

‘And what works for you at one point in your life may not work in another.’

Complete Article HERE!

Are we destined for multiple loves?

Millennials think we are

Jemima Kirke, Sasha Lane, Alison Oliver, and Joe Alwyn in the TV adaptation of Conversations with Friends.

“Is it possible we could develop an alternative model of loving each other?” This is the question posed by the character Bobbi in Sally Rooney’s debut novel Conversations with Friends, and is a core tenet of the story. Spoken by a 21-year-old, are these words merely youthful idealism?

By Lauren Ironmonger

Conversations with Friends follows university students Bobbi and Frances, whose lives become entangled with those of a wealthy couple in their 30s, Melissa and Nick. Similar to Rooney’s Normal People, it’s set in Dublin but rather than an intense love story, Conversations with Friends depicts monogamy (and the prospect of marriage) as rather bleak. Melissa and Nick sleep in separate beds and have both had affairs. The affair Nick has with Frances, the core plot line, seems to reinvigorate their marriage and they return to monogamous life. The farce is that the success of their “monogamous” relationship hinges precisely on the relationships that exist outside of it.

Now, the novel has been adapted for television as a limited series on Amazon Prime, starring Alison Oliver, Sasha Lane, Jemima Kirke, and Joe Alwyn.

In an interview with The Telegraph London, Kirke spoke of the cognitive shift the role required her to make. “It’s remarkable that someone of that age [Rooney] has so much discipline and focus, but as I was finally reading the book, I was thinking, ‘This is marriage written from the perspective of a 22-year-old.’ I don’t think that’s good or bad. Her writing is beautiful but there were moments when I struggled to make something work.”

Kirke, 37, is no stranger to married life and its potential to fail after splitting with her husband of eight years in 2017. And while she’s not opposed to marriage, she does take a more carefree approach to it. “The perspective of marriage as something super-permanent and spiritual is really antiquated.”

Jennifer Pinkerton spoke to more than 100 Australians aged under 40 for her book Heartland: What is the future of modern love? She says that the decline in people getting married is not a phenomenon that’s just relegated to Millennials and Gen Z. “Globally, marriage has been a downward travelling trend for 50 years now. When we speak about fewer people getting married, it’s not just the younger generations.” (The only exception to this, she notes, is gay marriage).

Certainly, however, this downward trend has accelerated in the past decade. In 2020, 78,989 marriages were registered in Australia, a 30.6 per cent decrease from 2019, and the largest annual drop ever reported by the ABS since 1961. Obviously COVID-19 has played a role but there are other key trends too. Pinkerton suggests that a high divorce rate means young people, seeing their parents getting divorced, have grown disillusioned with marriage. Global instability is another big one. “Climate change and war mean that the future is less certain,” says Georgia Grace, a Sydney-based sex and relationship therapist. She adds that the sex positive movement means that acceptance for different relationship models is changing.

Nina Lee, 32, is part of this declining group. A Sydney-based hairdresser and owner of Extra Silky, she married her long-term partner Aedan Lee during lockdown last year. While the couple isn’t religious and didn’t face familial pressure, marrying was just something they both knew would happen. “It felt like a natural progression”, she says, adding that it was about “solidifying our love.”

Alice, 22 (who is using a pseudonym for privacy reasons) lives in Sydney, and has been in a monogamous relationship for three-and-a-half years. Both are bisexual, and her partner identifies as non-binary. “Love is a choice to be together”, she says. “I can’t imagine anything less romantic than having a legal document officiate my relationship.”

For Millennials, there can be certain dealbreakers in finding love. Harriet, 34, has never wanted children. “Even when I was a little girl, I never played house with dolls – if anything I would play ‘dog mummy and daddy’.” Harriet’s last serious relationship ended after seven years. In her early 20s, the question of kids wasn’t such a concern. Now, it can make dating a little more complicated. “I make sure to talk kids and politics on the first or second date.”

Are rigid constraints of marriage a thing of the past? “Younger generations are now more likely to crave fulfillment, connection and flexibility rather than permanence in relationships,” says Pinkerton.

Polyamory, then, is a natural result of this shift in values. Georgia Grace says that she is increasingly working with people interested in exploring this. While popular perception of polyamory is that it’s just about promiscuity, there’s no singular model for what it can look like. “I work with couples to create a relationship structure that works for them,” she says. “Non-violent communication, consent and having a network of supportive, sex positive friends and family are at its core.”

In Melbourne, Emil, 29, works supporting people living with HIV, and is also a sex worker. They document encounters with clients and lovers on Instagram, posting polaroids of men alongside captions about the intimacy of the meeting.

The overwhelming majority of clients are straight men. Their reasons for visiting are myriad – for many, it’s a means to be a version of themselves outside of monogamous, heterosexual love, for others it’s a way of indulging a fetish or sheer curiosity. One quote accompanies an Instagram story picturing a man’s chest: “I hope you understand how hard this is for me. I always have my religion at the back of my head.”

Complete Article HERE!

Why Do People in Relationships Cheat?

A new study breaks down the reasons—they’re complicated

By Gary W. Lewandowski, Jr

Cheating: it’s the ultimate relationship violation and a notorious relationship killer. A favorite gossiping pastime, the phenomenon is frequently discussed but difficult to study. The goal is to avoid getting caught, so why confess infidelity in the name of science?

But scientists can offer us new insight on a topic often shrouded in stigma and mystery. As researchers have recently demonstrated, cheating is rarely a simple affair. There are many reasons why people cheat, and the patterns are more complex than common stereotypes suggest. A fascinating new study sheds some light on these motivations.

The investigation included 495 people (87.9 percent of whom identified as heterosexual), who were recruited through a participant pool at a large U.S. university and through Reddit message boards with relationship themes. The participants admitted to cheating in their relationship and answered the question at the root of the mystery: Why did you do it? An analysis revealed eight key reasons: anger, self-esteem, lack of love, low commitment, need for variety, neglect, sexual desire, and situation or circumstance. These motivations not only influenced why people cheated but how long they did so, their sexual enjoyment, their emotional investment in the affair and whether their primary relationship ended as a result.

Though most cheating involves sex, it is rarely just about sex itself. Most participants felt some form of emotional attachment to their affair partner, but it was significantly more common in those who reported suffering from neglect or lack of love in their primary relationship. Around two thirds of participants (62.8 percent) admitted to expressing affection toward their new partner. And about the same proportion (61.2 percent) engaged in sexually explicit dialogue with them. Roughly four out of 10 (37.6 percent) had intimate conversations, while one in 10 (11.1 percent) said, “I love you.” Those who reported feeling less connected to their primary partner experienced greater emotional intimacy in the affair, perhaps as a way of fulfilling that need. Similarly, when infidelity was linked to lack of love, individuals found the experience more intellectually and emotionally satisfying.

Participants’ satisfaction with sex differed depending on the reason for their affair. People reported feeling more sexually fulfilled when they cheated because of desire, lack of love or a need for variety. Those who cited a situation as the primary cause were far less satisfied. Much of the sexual activity was limited to kissing (86.7 %percent) and cuddling (72.9 percent). In fact, the study found that only half of the cheaters reported having vaginal intercourse.

The reason for the infidelity also greatly impacted its length. In some cases, the relationship was a brief tryst, while others were a longer and deeper attachment. Those who cheated because of anger (such as a wish to “seek revenge”), lack of love or need for variety had a longer affair, while those motivated by the situation (such as those who were “drunk” or “overwhelmed” and “not thinking clearly) ended it earlier. Women also had a longer affair on average than men.

In the end, only a third of participants ultimately admitted the cheating to their primary partner. Women were more inclined to fess up than men. Those who came clean were more likely to have cheated out of anger or neglect rather than sexual desire or variety. This suggests that their confession was possibly a form of retribution and a way to exact revenge instead of a way to clear their conscience. The participants who confessed were also more likely to form a committed relationship with the affair partner.

While infidelity is typically a clandestine enterprise, some cheaters were less careful than others, perhaps intentionally. Those cheating because of lack of love went on more public dates and displayed more public affection toward their partner. PDA was also common for those seeking variety or looking to boost their self-esteem. On the other hand, situational cheaters were less inclined to cheat out in the open, perhaps because they hoped to return to their primary relationship without getting caught.

So is an affair really a relationship killer? Ultimately, the fate of the participants’ primary relationship depended less on the act itself and more on what motivated it. Cheating was more likely to end a relationship when it arose from anger, lack of love, low commitment or neglect. And it was less likely to do so when the infidelity was circumstantial. Surprisingly, only one in five (20.4 percent) of relationships ended because of the affair. The same number of couples (21.8 percent) stayed together despite their primary partner finding out, while slightly more (28.3 percent) stayed together without their partner discovering their infidelity. The remaining relationships broke up for noncheating reasons.

Rarely did infidelity lead to a real relationship. Only one out of 10 of the affairs (11.1 percent) ultimately turned into a full-fledged commitment—one of the preconceptions that turns out to be true.

Complete Article HERE!

How I Have Sex

— “I Can End Up Feeling Nothing Even When All the Right ‘Spots’ Are Touched”

By

The first time I remember thinking about sex was at the age of 15, when I started dating my first boyfriend. As teenagers, we were curious about this and started thinking about it more when there was someone else to talk to. I explored sexual behaviors like kissing, fingering, and oral sex between 15 and 18, and 19 is when I had peno-vaginal sex for the first time.

But I hadn’t realized until then that I was demisexual. So even in my early 20s, I was meeting people on dating apps and thought of sex as something you had to do as a “right of passage” after dates. So I did meet up and have sex without really having an emotional connection. Rather, I thought I had some basic level of emotional connection with them — but I later realized that I was just grasping for straws. I was just creating a connection with somebody, but I didn’t actually have it with these people and didn’t enjoy these experiences. My friends kept talking about this amazing sex that they were having, and I realized only later that I was looking at the wrong place.

Since that time sex was something I thought about in connection with someone I had feelings for; I didn’t even think that it could be otherwise. Demisexuality, I would say, translates into kind of a conditional sexual attraction. I think a lot of people don’t know that sexuality, or any asexual spectrum identity for that matter, doesn’t have anything to do with sex drive. There may be some people who are demisexual and don’t experience any sexual attraction outside of their emotional attachment, but that’s not the case with me. Sexual attraction is like a spectrum: ‘Oh, I’ve met this person who I find really attractive’ versus ‘I am actually in love with this person, and I actually want to have sex with them.’ So I can find someone attractive but not want to have sex with them. And plus, sexual attraction occurs very selectively for me, much more selectively than for someone who’s not very sexual.

People say that everyone is a demisexual, that sex is better when you have an emotional bond. It’s not about if it’s better or bad, it’s that you don’t experience sexual attraction at all unless there is an emotional bond.

My current boyfriend and I, we started out as friends — which turned into friends with benefits. After some time, I felt attracted to him, and I wanted to have sex with him, even though he was romantically involved. We had an emotional bond as close friends, but it got better when we got romantically involved because it added another layer of depth to the emotional connection.

It doesn’t matter if my partner is demisexual or not, it’s just the emotional connection between us that counts. In my current relationship, it was emotional, romantic, and considerate. Realizing that I no longer ‘had’ to do this pointless casual sex rigmarole, and incidentally getting into a monogamous romantic relationship where I had deep emotional feelings for my partner, all made it so much better. I was lucky it all happened together.

I would say I feel a lot more agency when it comes to sex life, ever since I came out as demisexual. Instead of going along with the other person’s wishes, I’ve become more confident in vocalizing what I want and saying no when I want to. Earlier, I used to always be like: Okay, I’m not feeling it in this moment, but that’s not how I’m supposed to feel and the other person is expecting me to say yes, so I would just go along with that. I don’t do that anymore.

Building anticipation is the most important aspect of foreplay for me. It’s not so much about the specific acts done during it, as it is about creating that mood and the anticipation, and building up to that moment of urgency where you feel like you can’t wait anymore! One time that I particularly remember enjoying was when my partner made it completely about me and took it really slow. When I tried to reach out to reciprocate, he gently stopped me and told me to let him do what he wants to me. That made me feel like my pleasure was important and cared about, and the intimacy of that feeling made it the best foreplay I’ve ever experienced!

The usual pleasure centers do the trick for me. Nipples are particularly important — just stimulating them alone, without touching any other part of me, can suffice as foreplay if I’m sufficiently in the mood that day. Also, it’s very important for me that attention be paid to the less ‘usual’ erogenous zones—neck, back, torso, thighs. Simply being held like I’m important and desirable to the person is just as important as specific erogenous zones being touched, if you know what I mean. I can end up feeling nothing even when all the right ‘spots’ are being touched if the person doesn’t make me feel like they desire me (as opposed to simply wanting sex). I don’t think this deprives me of any pleasure — as someone who has had sexual experiences without emotional part, I didn’t enjoy them anyway. So I don’t think I’m missing out on anything.

Exhibitionism appeals to me — being watched while engaging in sex. Maybe because the thought of involving someone else in the bedroom feels exciting, but at the same time I’m not fully comfortable with the idea of actually having someone join us in the activity. So someone watching us is the perfect middle ground. I’ve tried clitoral and vaginal stimulating sex toys individually as well as in partnered sex. Clitoral stimulation from a vibrator is the fastest way for me to climax — probably the first time I ever climaxed with a sex toy! Four times in a row was a new feeling for me.

I would say I’m on the higher end of a normal sex drive, contrary to what people believe about demisexuals. People don’t understand the difference between sexual attraction and sex drive: sex drive is the desire to have some kind of sexual experience whereas sexual attraction means wanting to have sex with another person — and those things are not mutually exclusive.

On the whole, lust and love exist as separate frames. Sex drive, for me at least is completely independent of my sexuality. Because sex drive can exist independent of a partner, I can personally have a sex drive alone as well. But the drive to do it with somebody else, that only really occurs if I have a deep emotional attachment with them. But I do have to say that I’m more satisfied with partnered sex because there’s foreplay involved, which I typically get lazy and skip when it’s just me.

Physical attraction matters very little to me — if you compare it with the emotional connection, the physical is insignificant. I prefer people without a gym body. As somebody who myself has struggled with body image issues all my life, I once dated someone who had a six-pack and was a model. It was very intimidating to me and I couldn’t see past that exterior and engage with him as a person. I wanted someone who looked like a regular Joe.

People who actually end up falling in love and having serious relationships and sex within that relationship, and being monogamous with each other, it’s uncommon nowadays. I value monogamy — but I’m not 100% sure if my monogamy is connected to my demisexuality or not. But I am demisexual, and I am also monogamous. You can be monogamous or polyamorous — that’s independent of your sexuality.

Over time, the novelty factor around sex has, of course, worn off, because it can’t stay forever. I also find that I share some of the same thoughts about sex as before: the desire to feel intimate with your partner, when I experience emotions with someone, those things have remained constant. It’s just that the language I use now to talk about it is more evolved. I have become more corporate in how I feel and how I view sex: I feel this pressure to conform and think of it and approach it in the same way other people do. And I realized that your personal and social identity don’t have to be homogenous; everybody doesn’t have to be the same. That’s the most dominant change that I’ve experienced.

As a demisexual and bisexual, it can be kind of tricky to deal with which part of me is more important, so to speak. Am I equally both things? Which of it makes me more queer? There is also the whole aspect of a lot of queer people who don’t think that demisexuality makes you queer — which makes me feel like we’re being nudged. There may be demisexual people out there who choose to say that ‘I am demi, but I don’t feel like I’m queer, I’m still straight,’ and that’s their prerogative. But the problem is that a lot of people who are LGBTQ tacitly assert that you don’t have the right to identify as queer just because you are demisexual. That makes me feel unseen and sad.

I understand that the whole thing of slotting ourselves into a certain sexuality or gender. It’s not a strict label, but rather just a rough way to understand whereabouts on the spectrum a person might be. And that ultimately, to understand a person better, you need to ask them because they are the only ones who can answer those questions for you, because everybody is completely unique — even two demisexual people could be completely different. I’ve had this conversation with somebody else who was also a woman who was demisexual, and bisexual like me, and we still differ so much in how we approach sexuality and love and sex.

Complete Article HERE!

5 Signs an Open Relationship Could Be Right for You

(and 3 That It’s Probably Not)

Sometimes it’s good to shut the door on monogamy.

By Zachary Zane

Here’s a universal truth we generally don’t discuss enough: It’s totally normal to fantasize about other people even when you’re so happy in a relationship that your heart almost bursts every time your partner wrinkles their nose right before laughing at one of your terrible puns. That definitely doesn’t always mean that you want to act on those urges—that might seem like a bad idea for a variety of reasons. But in some cases and for some people, acting on these thoughts with the blessing of their partner is a really attractive idea. Enter: non-monogamy.

Non-monogamy refers to relationships that allow people to have sexual and/or emotional intimacy with people besides their primary partners. People who may be interested in non-monogamy include those who want to explore multiple facets of their sexual orientations or who don’t feel as though it’s natural to only love one person romantically, for instance. Fortunately for people who are interested in pursuing something like this, relationship models beyond monogamy are rising in mainstream visibility, which is where open relationships can come in.

More people are visibly warming up to the idea that it’s OK to want to have sex with more than one person for life. (Forever is a really, REALLY long time.) But knowing that open relationships are a thing doesn’t help much when it comes to figuring out if one might be right for you.

Since every relationship has its own strengths and weaknesses, there’s no One Easy Trick that will reveal if an open relationship could be great for you and your partner. However, there are various tip-offs that can indicate if your relationship would thrive or crumble after opening it up. To help you figure out where you fall, we reached out to experts in ethical non-monogamy (as in being non-monogamous without being an asshole). Here are the signs they say can hint at when it might and might not make sense to consider experimenting with an open relationship.

Here’s when it could make sense to have an open relationship.

1. You’re both genuinely interested in non-monogamy.

As the founder of the educational platform Unscripted Relationships, Stephanie Webb, Ph.D., often gets the question, “How do I get my partner to agree to an open relationship?” That’s completely the wrong way to go about opening up a relationship, says Webb.

“You don’t ‘get’ them to,” Webb, whose Ph.D. is in communication with a focus on nontraditional relationships and who has personally practiced ethical non-monogamy for over a decade, tells SELF. That kind of phrasing implies that one partner is interested in an open relationship and trying to bend the other’s will, which definitely isn’t a healthy relationship dynamic for introducing non-monogamy (or just in general).

“Many people do not want to be in an open relationship and forcing a [partner] is not a way to approach it at all,” Webb says. “Instead the interest can be raised, but not pushed. If the [partner] draws a line and wants monogamy because that is what was initially expected in the relationship, it should be respected or the relationship should end.”

With that said there’s a huge difference between a partner who makes it clear that they would never want any form of an open relationship and a partner who is interested but may need time to understand how an open relationship would manifest.

“Fears and insecurities about a new type of relationship style are typical,” board-certified clinical sexologist Rhoda Lipscomb, Ph.D., tells SELF. Experiencing these emotions at the thought of opening up a relationship doesn’t automatically mean it’s not a good idea. “This can actually help the couple so long as they are able to communicate well about what the fears mean and move forward at a pace that works for both of them,” Lipscomb says. That brings us to our next point.

2. You’re ready to communicate your ass off.

A healthy open relationship does not start after a single talk. “Opening a relationship takes so much time and work,” Webb says. Properly navigating this new terrain requires a series of ongoing conversations where you and your partner discuss what you’re looking to get out of the new relationship dynamic along with any rules you need to follow to make that happen.

Perhaps in order for you both to feel fulfilled and safe in your open relationship, neither of you can have sleepovers, play with friends, tell each other details of your trysts, have sex with other people without protection, or have sex with others inside your shared home.

Discuss emotional boundaries too. Are you both only interested in having sexual connections with other people? Or are you OK with polyamory, which allows for emotional connections and even loving other people too? Making sure you both agree upon these types of boundaries is key.

3. Your relationship currently stands on a foundation of honesty and trust.

Every expert quoted in this piece made one thing abundantly clear: Successful open relationships can require even more honesty and confidence in your partner than monogamous ones.

When a couple has this foundation, it’s a lot harder for non-monogamy to harm their bond, Lipscomb says. But without that trust or ability to be completely truthful, it’s much easier for an open relationship to exacerbate your relationship issues or create new ones. For instance, if you don’t trust your partner as much as possible, will you believe them when they say they’ll always use protection? If you feel like you can’t be honest with them, will you be able to share what about an open relationship makes you feel most vulnerable—which is the only real way you can get reassurance for those fears?

It’s necessary that both of you feel comfortable discussing questions and concerns you might have even if you’re a little nervous. Otherwise, your open relationship could implode pretty quickly.

4. You and your partner have mismatched libidos or kinks.

“Some folks have a partner who is uninterested in having a sexual relationship but still desires an emotional connection,” clinical psychologist and American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists–certified sex therapist Kelifern Pomeranz, Psy.D., tells SELF. This may happen when one partner falls on the asexual spectrum, is taking medication that stunts their libido, is too stressed from work to want much sex, or for any number of other valid reasons. On a similar note if one of you is all about a certain kink and the other has absolutely no interest, allowing one partner to practice that kink with others might offer a solution.

Of course these types of situations still require honesty, trust, and thorough communication. Those are nonnegotiable in any good relationship, especially open ones.

5. You’re in a mixed-orientation relationship.

If you’re in a mixed-orientation relationship, you may already know that term for it, but just so we’re on the same page: A mixed-orientation relationship means that partners have different sexual orientations.

Here’s when opening up your relationship might not be the best idea.

1. It’s in direct response to infidelity.

One of the worst things you can do after a partner cheats is immediately open the relationship. That’s not to say you can’t open it up if one of you has cheated in the past, but there’s that trust issue again: You both need time to work through infidelity as a unit before bringing anyone else into the mix, even if it’s no longer in secret.

“Open relationships of all kinds require trust, knowledge, consent, and emotional (and sometimes physical and spiritual) labor,” says Webb. “Infidelity breaks trust; opening the relationship when this kind of trauma has occurred is not impossible, but it does not set anyone up for success either. I recommend doing the work to rebuild the relationship and then approaching openness from a foundation of trust.”

2. Your relationship is already on the brink of ending.

Opening up a relationship in a desperate attempt to stave off a breakup isn’t a great idea. Without the strong, healthy bond that’s necessary for an open relationship to work, introducing non-monogamy might just push you over the breakup precipice.

People who try an open relationship as a last-ditch effort to avoid a breakup typically already have one foot out the door, Lipscomb says. “They do not have a strong connection and want someone—anyone—other than their primary partner,” she says, but they might be staying because of children, a fear of what their family will say, comfort, worries about hurting their partner, social stigma around divorce, or other reasons. An open relationship might seem like the perfect compromise in these cases, but it won’t work as a bandage over fundamental relationship issues or unhappiness.

3. One or both of you can’t handle jealousy.

It’s a misconception that people in successful open relationships never feel jealousy. The difference is that they know jealousy can happen, respect boundaries in an attempt to avoid it, and deal with it in a healthy manner if it arises anyway.

None of this is possible without—say it with us, folks—honesty, trust, and communication. That essential combination is what allows you to say something like, “Hey, I don’t know what it is, but I get wildly jealous when I know you’re seeing that guy.” It’s also what allows your partner to accept this kind of statement from a loving, empathetic place and reassure you as necessary.

Issues besides jealousy might come up when you’re in an open relationship, just like they would in a monogamous one. Bottom line: “Partners need to be able to listen to one another with compassion and not defensiveness, communicate their wants and needs, express themselves honestly, and take responsibility for their actions,” says Pomeranz.

Complete Article HERE!

The Bored Sex

Women, more than men, tend to feel stultified by long-term exclusivity—despite having been taught that they were designed for it.

The “distracted boyfriend” meme gets reversed.

By

Andrew Gotzis, a Manhattan psychiatrist with an extensive psychotherapy practice, has been treating a straight couple, whom we’ll call Jane and John, for several years. They have sex about three times a week, which might strike many as enviable, considering that John and Jane—who are in their 40s—have been together for nearly two decades. Based on numbers alone, one might wonder why they need couples counseling at all.

But only one of them is happy with the state of play. And it isn’t Jane.

“The problem is not that they are functionally unable to have sex, or to have orgasms. Or frequency. It’s that the sex they’re having isn’t what she wants,” Gotzis told me in a recent phone conversation. And like other straight women he sees, “she’s confused and demoralized by it. She thinks there’s something wrong with her.” John, meanwhile, feels criticized and inadequate. Mostly he can’t understand why, if his wife is having sex with him and having orgasms, she wants more. Or different.

Despite “fears of seeming sex addicted, unfaithful, or whorish” (Gotzis doesn’t like these terms, but they speak to his patient’s anxieties, he explained), Jane has tried to tell John, in therapy and outside of it, what she’s after. She wants to want John and be wanted by him in that can’t-get-enough-of-each-other-way experts call “limerence”—the initial period of a relationship when it’s all new and hot. Jane has bought lingerie and booked hotel stays. She has suggested more radical-seeming potential fixes, too, like opening up the marriage.

Jane’s perseverance might make her a lot of things: an idealist, a dreamer, a canny sexual strategist, even—again channeling typical anxieties—unrealistic, selfish, or entitled. But her sexual struggles in a long-term relationship, orgasms and frequency of sex notwithstanding, make her something else again: normal. Although most people in sexual partnerships end up facing the conundrum biologists call “habituation to a stimulus” over time, a growing body of research suggests that heterosexual women, in the aggregate, are likely to face this problem earlier in the relationship than men. And that disparity tends not to even out over time. In general, men can manage wanting what they already have, while women struggle with it.

Marta Meana of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas spelled it out simply in an interview with me at the annual Society for Sex Therapy and Research conference in 2017. “Long-term relationships are tough on desire, and particularly on female desire,” she said. I was startled by her assertion, which contradicted just about everything I’d internalized over the years about who and how women are sexually. Somehow I, along with nearly everyone else I knew, was stuck on the idea that women are in it for the cuddles as much as the orgasms, and—besides—actually require emotional connection and familiarity to thrive sexually, whereas men chafe against the strictures of monogamy.

But Meana discovered that “institutionalization of the relationship, overfamiliarity, and desexualization of roles” in a long-term heterosexual partnership mess with female passion especially—a conclusion that’s consistent with other recent studies.

“Moving In With Your Boyfriend Can Kill Your Sex Drive” was how Newsweek distilled a 2017 study of more than 11,500 British adults aged 16 to 74. It found that for “women only, lack of interest in sex was higher among those in a relationship of over one year in duration,” and that “women living with a partner were more likely to lack interest in sex than those in other relationship categories.” A 2012 study of 170 men and women aged 18 to 25 who were in relationships of up to nine years similarly found that women’s sexual desire, but not men’s, “was significantly and negatively predicted by relationship duration after controlling for age, relationship satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction.” Two oft-cited German longitudinal studies, published in 2002 and 2006, show female desire dropping dramatically over 90 months, while men’s holds relatively steady. (Tellingly, women who didn’t live with their partners were spared this amusement-park-ride-like drop—perhaps because they were making an end run around overfamiliarity.) And a Finnish seven-year study of more than 2,100 women, published in 2016, revealed that women’s sexual desire varied depending on relationship status: Those in the same relationship over the study period reported less desire, arousal, and satisfaction. Annika Gunst, one of the study’s co-authors, told me that she and her colleagues initially suspected this might be related to having kids. But when the researchers controlled for that variable, it turned out to have no impact.

Many women want monogamy. It’s a cozy arrangement, and one our culture endorses, to put it mildly. But wanting monogamy isn’t the same as feeling desire in a long-term monogamous partnership. The psychiatrist and sexual-health practitioner Elisabeth Gordon told me that in her clinical experience, as in the data, women disproportionately present with lower sexual desire than their male partners of a year or more, and in the longer term as well. “The complaint has historically been attributed to a lower baseline libido for women, but that explanation conveniently ignores that women regularly start relationships equally as excited for sex.” Women in long-term, committed heterosexual partnerships might think they’ve “gone off” sex—but it’s more that they’ve gone off the same sex with the same person over and over.

What does it all mean for Jane and the other straight women who feel stultified by long-term exclusivity, in spite of having been taught that they were designed for it and are naturally inclined toward it? What are we to make of the possibility that women, far from anxious guardians of monogamy, might on the whole be more like its victims?

“When couples want to remain in a monogamous relationship, a key component of treatment … is to help couples add novelty,” Gordon advised. Tammy Nelson, a sex therapist and the author of The New Monogamy and When You’re the One Who Cheats, concurs: “Women are the primary consumers of sex-related technology and lubricants, massage oil, and lingerie, not men.”

Of course, as Jane’s example shows, lingerie might not do the trick. Nelson explains that if “their initial tries don’t work, [women] will many times shut down totally or turn outward to an affair or an online ‘friend,’ creating … a flirty texting or social-media relationship.” When I asked Gotzis where he thinks John and Jane are headed, he told me he is not sure that they will stay together. In an upending of the basic narrative about the roles that men and women play in a relationship, it would be Jane’s thirst for adventure and Jane’s struggles with exclusivity that tear them apart. Sure, women cheating is nothing new—it’s the stuff of Shakespeare and the blues. But refracted through data and anecdotal evidence, Jane seems less exceptional and more an Everywoman, and female sexual boredom could almost pass for the new beige.

It’s not uncommon for women to let their straight partners play in a “monogamy gray zone,” to give guys access to tensional outlets that allow them to cheat without really cheating. “Happy ending” massages, oral sex at bachelor parties, lap dances, escorts at conferences … influenced by ubiquitous pop-cultural cues, many people believe that men need these opportunities for recreational “sorta sex” because “it’s how men are.” It’s how women are, too, it seems.

Women cannot be pigeonholed; the glory of human sexuality is its variation and flexibility. So when we speak of desire in the future, we should acknowledge that the fairer sex thirsts for the frisson of an encounter with someone or something new as much as, if not more, than men do—and that they could benefit from a gray-zone hall pass, too.

Complete Article HERE!

Midlife sex problems?

New research says you’re not alone

By

Around 30 per cent of Canadians between the ages of 40 and 59 report at least one problem in the bedroom.

The most common sexual problem is low desire, according to a research study we recently published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Around 40 per cent of the women we asked, and 30 per cent of men, reported experiencing problems with low desire during the last six months.

Many women also reported difficulties reaching orgasm (15 per cent), as well as problems with vaginal dryness (29 per cent) and vaginal pain (17 per cent). Nearly a quarter of the men had difficulty ejaculating and maintaining or acquiring an erection.

These rates suggest that a variety of sexual problems are quite common among midlife Canadians. Our findings are also largely consistent with published research from the United States and the United Kingdom.

I am a PhD candidate in family relations and human development at the University of Guelph and my research typically focuses on “keeping the spark alive” in long-term relationships. My main interest is the intersection of relational and sexual elements within romantic relationships.

This study was co-authored with Robin Milhausen from the University of Guelph, Alexander McKay of the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada and Stephen Holzapfel from Women’s College Hospital Toronto. It was aimed at addressing a lack of available data on the frequency and predictors of sexual problems among midlife Canadians.

Novel sex enhances desire

Individuals who are married are more likely to report low desire than those who are not married, according to our results. Married men are more likely to report ejaculation difficulties.

These are interesting findings, and not unexpected. Other research has shown that sexual satisfaction decreases over time in long-term relationships. Together, this suggests that over-familiarity with a partner in some cases may lead to the sexual “spark” burning less bright, which may also contribute to sexual problems.

After years of marriage, it can take work to rekindle the sexual spark.

Our research also suggests that participating in novel sexual activities may enhance desire by breaking up routine and therefore enhancing the spark.

We also examined the effect of menopause — finding that postmenopausal women were more likely to report low desire and vaginal pain. This is consistent with other literature showing declines in desire for postmenopausal women. It complements other research, which suggests that physiological changes like thinning of the vaginal walls and reduced lubrication that can occur after menopause may lead to vaginal pain.

When doctors don’t ask

We conducted this research with a large national sample of 2,400 Canadians aged between 40 and 59. Our findings showed that sexual problems are very common in this age group. This is one of the largest Canadian demographics and will continue to grow. More national Canadian data is needed to understand the health-care needs for this group.

One important limitation of this study is that we based our research on participant self-reports and did not assess whether they met the diagnostic criteria for a clinical diagnosis of sexual dysfunction (e.g. erectile dysfunction).

Previously published research reveals that more midlife Canadians would like to be asked about sexual problems by their doctors, but more than 75 per cent had not sought help for these problems.

Read together with the results of our study, this suggests an emerging health-care issue that requires attention and research.

Complete Article HERE!

3 sex and relationship therapists demystify infidelity

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  • Sex and relationship therapists say infidelity is more complex than most of us are inclined to believe.
  • For example, couples can sometimes find renewed honesty and intimacy after the discovery of an affair.

Cheating = bad. Fidelity = good.

This is the logic to which most of us subscribe. And yet if you ask a relationship expert, they’ll likely offer a more nuanced perspective, both on people who stray and on the implications of affairs.

Over the past year, I’ve spoken to a series of therapists about infidelity among modern couples, and they’ve all surprised me with their insights. Below, see three of the most intriguing observations I heard about cheating:

Couples sometimes reconnect emotionally after the discovery of an affair

Couples therapist Esther Perel would never recommend that someone deliberately cheat on their partner in order to improve their relationship.

But she has observed the way some couples find renewed honesty and intimacy after it’s revealed that one partner has had an affair.

Perel told Business Insider, “It’s a reevaluation of what happened: How did we become so estranged from each other? How did we lose our connection? How did we become so numb to each other? And the galvanizing of the fear of losing everything that we have built sometimes brings us back face-to-face, with a level of intensity that we haven’t experienced in a long time.”

Most people who cheat don’t actually want to leave their relationship

Some people who cheat on their partners really do want out — and having an affair is the only way they know how to begin that process. But other people are simply looking to spice things up.

That’s according to Tammy Nelson, a sex and relationship therapist and the relationship expert at Ashley Madison, a website for people seeking affairs.

Nelson shared a hypothetical example: “Maybe their marriage gives them physical and emotional validation, but they’re not getting the sexual risk-taking that they would want. So they get that from the affair.”

In fact, Nelson said some people may only see their affair partner a couple times a year — “but when they do, it’s like a full blowout, and then they come back to their marriage and they’re perfectly happy.”

Don’t discount your gut feelings about your partner’s attraction to a ‘friend’

“Emotional affairs” are becoming increasingly common, and unlike with a physical affair, it can be hard to know if your partner is having one.

According to marriage and family therapist Sheri Meyers, it’s important to listen to your intuition. Maybe you’ve noticed your partner changing the way they act when the other person is around, or maybe they’ve been weirdly critical of that person.

If you feel like there might be something not exactly platonic going on between your partner and their friend, that’s worth exploring — even if ultimately you’re wrong.

Complete Article HERE!

How Satisfying Are Open Relationships Compared To Monogamy?

By

Monogamy;— to have only one partner at a time — is considered a social standard in modern human society. But is it a necessary component of a satisfactory relationship?

Canadian researchers present new findings, suggesting that it may not have to be the ideal relationship structure. People in open relationships report feeling just as happy and content as those in conventional, monogamous ones.

The study titled “Reasons for sex and relational outcomes in consensually nonmonogamous and monogamous relationships” was published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships on March 23.

“We are at a point in social history where we are expecting a lot from our partners. We want to have sexual fulfillment and excitement but also emotional and financial support,” said lead author Jessica Wood, a Ph.D. student in applied social psychology at the University of Guelph.

“Trying to fulfill all these needs can put pressure on relationships. To deal with this pressure, we are seeing some people look to consensually non-monogamous relationships.”

While monogamy is omnipresent, Wood said that open relationships are actually more common than most people would expect. Currently, somewhere between three to seven percent of people in North America are said to be in a consensual, non-monogamous relationship.

For the study, the team surveyed around 200 people in monogamous relationships and around 140 people in open relationships to compare the data sets. Both groups were asked questions regarding how satisfied they felt, whether they considered separating, general happiness levels, etc.

Research has shown that many people tend to have a negative perception of open relationships. Some find it to be immoral, some equate it to cheating or sex addiction, and some simply believe it offers low levels of satisfaction.

“It’s assumed that people in these types of relationships are having sex with everyone all the time. They are villainized and viewed as bad people in bad relationships, but that’s not the case,” Wood said. “This research shows us that our choice of relationship structure is not an indicator of how happy or satisfied we are in our primary relationships.”

The results of the study revealed that people in open relationships actually had similar levels of relationship satisfaction, psychological well-being and sexual satisfaction as those in monogamous relationships.

Sexual motivation appeared to be the biggest predictor of satisfaction, regardless of relationship structure. This was because of how closely sexual satisfaction is tied to our psychological needs.

“In both monogamous and non-monogamous relationships, people who engage in sex to be close to a partner and to fulfill their sexual needs have a more satisfying relationship than those who have sex for less intrinsic reasons, such as to avoid conflict,” she said.

Complete Article HERE!

How To Reject Sex Without Harming Your Relationship, According To A Study

Study Reveals How To Turn *It Down Without Hurting Your Relationship

 

By Joel Balsam

Long Story Short

You’re not going to be into it every night, but you shouldn’t make your partner feel bad if they are.

Long Story

Men are always down to get it on while women are more reluctant, at least that’s how the assumption goes. But it’s not true. Sometimes men are tired/sick/not in the mood — and that’s very OK. But if you’re having sex with your partner just because you want to avoid letting them down then you might be doing more harm than good.

A new study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that turning down your partner won’t hurt your relationship as long as it’s done gently.

Researchers conducted two surveys of 642 adults. In the first, participants were asked how they feel when they’re rejected with frustration or criticism. Then they were asked how they feel when their partner says ‘no’ and then states something like: ‘I love you, I’m attracted to you and I’ll make it up to you in the future.’

As you might have guessed, participants preferred to be let down gently.

Study author James Kim of University of Toronto said people often to try to avoid upsetting their partner to avoid conflict, but it’s really not so bad to say no.

“Our findings suggest that rejecting a partner for sex in positive ways (e.g. reassuring a partner that you still love and are attracted to them) actually represents a viable alternative behavior to having sex for avoidance goals in sustaining both partners’ relationship and sexual satisfaction,” Kim told PsyPost.

In the second study, Kim and his colleagues asked 98 couples to complete surveys every night for four weeks. The researchers found that — shocker — people were more sexually satisfied when they had sex. But, Kim says you can say ‘no’ sometimes while keeping up the tension. Just make sure you do it kindly and with some positive reinforcement.

“When people are not in the mood for sex and find that the main reason they are inclined to ‘say yes’ is to avoid hurting their partner’s feelings or the relationship conflict that might ensue, engaging in positive rejection behaviors that convey love and reassurance may be critical to sustain relationship quality,” the researchers said in their article.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question

How often can you gently say no before it becomes a problem?

Drop This Fact

Both men and women lose interest in sex, but women are more likely than men to be turned off, according to a recent study.

Complete Article HERE!

A Sexless Marriage

Name: Tammy
Gender: Female
Age: 36
Location: Springfield IL
My parents were Laurel Canyon hippies of the first order, free love, drugs and all that stuff. I used to be disgusted by all the sex my parents were having with other people. I just couldn’t understand why they didn’t just want to be with one another or divorce and remarry someone else. As soon as I could, I left the west coast for the Midwest. Now all these years later my own marriage is in trouble. My husband unilaterally ended our sex life after the birth of our last child three years ago. I haven’t let myself go. I’m still very attractive and have even improved my body after the babies. But nothing I do brings him back to bed. He said that we have children now, and people with children don’t do that sort of thing!

To spite him for shutting me out, I turned to another man for sex. I just wanted to feel desirable again. I fear my affair will be found out and it will destroy my marriage. Funny thing, my parents with all their multiple sex partners remained happily married for 51 years till my father’s death two years ago. They were honest about their lives; I am not! I feel ashamed, but I am also having the best sex of my life and I won’t give it up.

My husband is a decent man and a good father. How can I continue to live this lie? If I come clean it will likely break up my family and I’ll look like a cheating slut. Is there any other option? I wish I could have been more accepting of my parent’s lifestyle; maybe the karma wouldn’t be so rough now.

[A]hhh, bad luck doll! That karma thing sure enough can be a bitch.

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard this same story from a frustrated and desperate man or woman trapped in a sexless marriage, I’d have enough money to lay down my keyboard, give up my status as the most fabulous and revered sexpert in the universe and retire to Maui. Unfortunately, by the time I hear from most of the people they have already suffered through years of abstinence, all the while begging and pleading for the sex they want and need. By the time they write to me it’s often way too late. The die is cast. They’re married with kids and often have a stray affair workin’ on the side. As you suggest, Tammy, it’s a pretty unbearable situation.

My first thoughts are that by the time things get to the point of sheer desperation, a happy ending is virtually impossible. A lot of people are gonna get hurt regardless of how this resolves it self. If that’s a given, maybe you should be asking yourself; what can be salvaged from the impending wreck?

Tammy, you write something very telling in your message when talking about your parents. You say, “They were honest about their lives; I am not!” In the end, if you can reclaim your integrity, regardless if it means the demise of your marriage and family, as you currently know it, you will have regained something of inestimable value.

I also want to address your comment: “If I come clean it will likely break up my family and I’ll look like a cheating slut.” Perhaps, but at least you’ll no longer be a lyin’, cheatin’ slut. Come on, how could what others think of you trump what you already think of yourself. You are down on yourself because you expect sex in your marriage. And when that disappeared, you didn’t shut down as a sexual being. Does that equation make you so bad, a slut even?

I wholeheartedly believe that married people deserve a rich and fulfilling sex life, unless there’s mutual agreement for another arrangement. Unilaterally depriving a spouse of a rich and fulfilling sex life is an act of sexual violence. It’s the kind of sexual violence that will cause frustration, anger and desperation. And inevitably lead to infidelity, which in turn destroys the marriage and traumatizes the kids. So Tammy, if you are a cheating slut, what does that make your husband? Neither you nor your old man is without blame. So time to buck up, darlin’, and do the right thing. Regardless of how the chips fall.

And one more thing, you say you were disgusted by your parent’s hippy, free love lifestyle — at least they were open an up-front with you about who they were. Consider the trauma your kids will experience when they learn dear old mom was bumping someone other than dear old dad. What kind of example are you setting for them? You see where the honesty thing is a good idea right from the get go, huh?

Ok, so I think there’s a consensus that the truth must be told. I suggest that you generously offer your husband the first right of refusal. He may not deserve it, but that’s the way to go nonetheless. Offer to stay with him and raise your kids together, but not in a sexless marriage. If he can’t bring himself to bone you the way you need it, when you need it, with vigor and passion; then he needs to free you up to find that bone in someone else’s drawers. And if he can’t live the cuckold life he ought at least to be man enough to leave the marriage with as little stink as possible.

Good luck

Casual Sex: Everyone Is Doing It

Part research project, part society devoted to titillation, the Casual Sex Project reminds us that hookups aren’t just for college students.

By

[Z]hana Vrangalova had hit a problem. On a blustery day in early spring, sitting in a small coffee shop near the campus of New York University, where she is an adjunct professor of psychology, she was unable to load onto her laptop the Web site that we had met to discuss. This was not a technical malfunction on her end; rather, the site had been blocked. Vrangalova, who is thirty-four, with a dynamic face framed by thick-rimmed glasses, has spent the past decade researching human sexuality, and, in particular, the kinds of sexual encounters that occur outside the norms of committed relationships. The Web site she started in 2014, casualsexproject.com, began as a small endeavor fuelled by personal referrals, but has since grown to approximately five thousand visitors a day, most of whom arrive at the site through organic Internet searches or referrals through articles and social media. To date, there have been some twenty-two hundred submissions, about evenly split between genders, each detailing the kinds of habits that, when spelled out, can occasionally alert Internet security filters. The Web site was designed to open up the discussion of one-night stands and other less-than-traditional sexual behaviors. What makes us engage in casual sex? Do we enjoy it? Does it benefit us in any way—or, perhaps, might it harm us? And who, exactly, is “us,” anyway?

Up to eighty per cent of college students report engaging in sexual acts outside committed relationships—a figure that is usually cast as the result of increasingly lax social mores, a proliferation of alcohol-fuelled parties, and a potentially violent frat culture. Critics see the high rates of casual sex as an “epidemic” of sorts that is taking over society as a whole. Hookup culture, we hear, is demeaning women and wreaking havoc on our ability to establish stable, fulfilling relationships.

These alarms have sounded before. Writing in 1957, the author Nora Johnson raised an eyebrow at promiscuity on college campuses, noting that “sleeping around is a risky business, emotionally, physically, and morally.” Since then, the critiques of casual sexual behavior have only proliferated, even as society has ostensibly become more socially liberal. Last year, the anthropologist Peter Wood went so far as to call the rise of casual sex “an assault on human nature,” arguing in an article in the conservative Weekly Standard that even the most meaningless-seeming sex comes with a problematic power imbalance.

Others have embraced the commonness of casual sex as a sign of social progress. In a widely read Atlantic article from 2012, “Boys on the Side,” Hanna Rosin urged women to avoid serious suitors so that they could focus on their own needs and careers. And yet, despite her apparent belief in the value of casual sex as a tool of exploration and feminist thinking, Rosin, too, seemed to conclude that casual sex cannot be a meaningful end goal. “Ultimately, the desire for a deeper human connection always wins out, for both men and women,” she wrote.

The Casual Sex Project was born of Vrangalova’s frustration with this and other prevalent narratives about casual sex. “One thing that was bothering me is the lack of diversity in discussions of casual sex,” Vrangalova told me in the café. “It’s always portrayed as something college students do. And it’s almost always seen in a negative light, as something that harms women.”

It was not the first time Vrangalova had wanted to broaden a limited conversation. As an undergraduate, in Macedonia, where she studied the psychology of sexuality, she was drawn to challenge cultural taboos, writing a senior thesis on the development of lesbian and gay sexual attitudes. In the late aughts, Vrangalova started her research on casual sex in Cornell’s developmental-psychology program. One study followed a group of six hundred and sixty-six freshmen over the course of a year, to see how engaging in various casual sexual activities affected markers of mental health: namely, depression, anxiety, life satisfaction, and self-esteem. Another looked at more than eight hundred undergraduates to see whether individuals who engaged in casual sex felt more victimized by others, or were more socially isolated. (The results: yes to the first, no to the second.) The studies were intriguing enough that Vrangalova was offered an appointment at N.Y.U., where she remains, to further explore some of the issues surrounding the effects of nontraditional sexual behaviors on the individuals who engage in them.

Over time, Vrangalova came to realize that there was a gap in her knowledge, and, indeed, in the field as a whole. Casual sex has been much explored in psychological literature, but most of the data captured by her research team—and most of the other experimental research she had encountered—had been taken from college students. (This is a common problem in psychological research: students are a convenient population for researchers.) There has been the occasional nationally representative survey, but rigorous data on other subsets of the population is sparse. Even the largest national study of sexual attitudes in the United States, which surveyed a nationally representative sample of close to six thousand men and women between the ages of fourteen and ninety-four, neglected to ask respondents how many of the encounters they engaged in could be deemed “casual.”

From its beginnings, sex research has been limited by a social stigma. The field’s pioneer, Alfred Kinsey, spent decades interviewing people about their sexual behaviors. His books sold, but he was widely criticized for not having an objective perspective: like Freud before him, he believed that repressed sexuality was at the root of much of social behavior, and he often came to judgments that supported that view—even when his conclusions were based on less-than-representative surveys. He, too, used convenient sample groups, such as prisoners, as well as volunteers, who were necessarily comfortable talking about their sexual practices.

In the fifties, William Masters and Virginia Johnson went further, inquiring openly into sexual habits and even observing people in the midst of sexual acts. Their data, too, was questioned: Could the sort of person who volunteers to have sex in a lab tell us anything about the average American? More troubling still, Masters and Johnson sought to “cure” homosexuality, revealing a bias that could easily have colored their findings.

Indeed, one of the things you quickly notice when looking for data on casual sex is that, for numbers on anyone who is not a college student, you must, for the most part, look at studies conducted outside academia. When OkCupid surveyed its user base, it found that between 10.3 and 15.5 per cent of users were looking for casual sex rather than a committed relationship. In the 2014 British Sex Survey, conducted by the Guardian, approximately half of all respondents reported that they had engaged in a one-night stand (fifty-five per cent of men, and forty-three per cent of women), with homosexuals (sixty-six per cent) more likely to do so than heterosexuals (forty-eight per cent). A fifth of people said they’d slept with someone whose name they didn’t know.

With the Casual Sex Project, Vrangalova is trying to build a user base of stories that she hopes will, one day, provide the raw data for academic study. For now, she is listening: letting people come to the site, answer questions, leave replies. Ritch Savin-Williams, who taught Vrangalova at Cornell, told me that he was especially impressed by Vrangalova’s willingness “to challenge traditional concepts and research designs with objective approaches that allow individuals to give honest, thoughtful responses.”

The result is what is perhaps the largest-ever repository of information about casual-sex habits in the world—not that it has many competitors. The people who share stories range from teens to retirees (Vrangalova’s oldest participants are in their seventies), and include city dwellers and suburbanites, graduate-level-educated professionals (about a quarter of the sample) and people who never finished high school (another quarter). The majority of participants aren’t particularly religious, although a little under a third do identify as at least “somewhat” religious. Most are white, though there are also blacks, Latinos, and other racial and ethnic groups. Initially, contributions were about sixty-per-cent female, but now they’re seventy-per-cent male. (This is in line with norms; men are “supposed” to brag more about sexual exploits than women.) Anyone can submit a story, along with personal details that reflect his or her demographics, emotions, personality traits, social attitudes, and behavioral patterns, such as alcohol intake. The setup for data collection is standardized, with drop-down menus and rating scales.

Still, the site is far from clinical. The home page is a colorful mosaic of squares, color-coded according to the category of sexual experience (blue: “one-night stand”; purple: “group sex”; gray: the mysterious-sounding “first of many”; and so on). Pull quotes are highlighted for each category (“Ladies if you haven’t had a hot, young Latino stud you should go get one!”). Many responses seem to boast, provoke, or exaggerate for rhetorical purposes. Reading it, I felt less a part of a research project than a member of a society devoted to titillation.

Vrangalova is the first to admit that the Casual Sex Project is not what you would call an objective, scientific approach to data collection. There is no random assignment, no controls, no experimental conditions; the data is not representative of the general population. The participants are self-selecting, which inevitably colors the results: if you’re taking the time to write, you are more likely to write about positive experiences. You are also more likely to have the sort of personality that comes with wanting to share details of your flings with the public. There is another problem with the Casual Sex Project that is endemic in much social-science research: absent external behavioral validation, how do we know that respondents are reporting the truth, rather than what they want us to hear or think we want them to say?

And yet, for all these flaws, the Casual Sex Project provides a fascinating window into the sexual habits of a particular swath of the population. It may not be enough to draw new conclusions, but it can lend nuance to assumptions, expanding, for instance, ideas about who engages in casual sex or how it makes them feel. As I browsed through the entries after my meeting with Vrangalova, I came upon the words of a man who learned something new about his own sexuality during a casual encounter in his seventies: “before this I always said no one can get me of on a bj alone, I was taught better,” he writes. As a reflection of the age and demographic groups represented, the Casual Sex Project undermines the popular narrative that casual sex is the product of changing mores among the young alone. If that were the case, we would expect there to be a reluctance to engage in casual sex among the older generations, which grew up in the pre-“hookup culture” era. Such reluctance is not evident.

The reminder that people of all ages engage in casual sex might lead us to imagine three possible narratives. First, that perhaps what we see as the rise of a culture of hooking up isn’t actually new. When norms related to dating and free love shifted, in the sixties, they never fully shifted back. Seventy-year-olds are engaging in casual encounters because that attitude is part of their culture, too.

There’s another, nearly opposite explanation: casual sex isn’t the norm now, and wasn’t before. There are simply always individuals, in any generation, who seek sexual satisfaction in nontraditional confines.

And then there’s the third option, the one that is most consistent with the narrative that our culture of casual sex begins with college hookups: that people are casually hooking up for different reasons. Some young people have casual sex because they feel they can’t afford not to, or because they are surrounded by a culture that says they should want to. (Vrangalova’s preliminary analysis of the data on her site suggests that alcohol is much more likely to be involved in the casual-sex experiences of the young than the old.)  And the old—well, the old no longer care what society thinks. For some, this sense of ease might come in their thirties; for others, their forties or fifties; for others, never, or not entirely.

This last theory relates to another of Vrangalova’s findings—one that, she confesses, came as a surprise when she first encountered it. Not all of the casual-sex experiences recorded on the site were positive, even among what is surely a heavily biased sample. Women and younger participants are especially likely to report feelings of shame. (“I was on top of him at one point and he can’t have forced me to so I must have consented . . . I’m not sure,” an eighteen-year-old writes, reporting that the hookup was unsatisfying, and describing feeling “stressed, anxious, guilt and disgust” the day after.) There is an entire thread tagged “no orgasm,” which includes other occasionally disturbing and emotional tales. “My view has gotten a lot more balanced over time,” Vrangalova said. “I come from a very sex-positive perspective, surrounded by people who really benefitted from sexual exploration and experiences, for the most part. By studying it, I’ve learned to see both sides of the coin.

Part of the negativity, to be sure, does originate in legitimate causes: casual sex increases the risk of pregnancy, disease, and, more often than in a committed relationship, physical coercion. But many negative casual-sex experiences come instead from a sense of social convention. “We’ve seen that both genders felt they were discriminated against because of sex,” Vrangalova told me. Men often feel judged by other men if they don’t have casual sex, and social expectations can detract from the experiences they do have, while women feel judged for engaging in casual experiences, rendering those they pursue less pleasurable.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise: the very fact that Vrangalova and others are seeking explanations for casual-sex behaviors suggests that our society views it as worthy of note—something aberrant, rather than ordinary. No one writes about why people feel the need to drink water or go to the bathroom, why eating dinner with friends is “a thing” or study groups are “on the rise.”

It is that sense of shame, ultimately, that Vrangalova hopes her project may help to address. As one respondent to a survey Vrangalova sent to users put it, “This has helped me feel okay about myself for wanting casual sex, and not feel ashamed or that what I do is wrong.” The psychologist James Pennebaker has found over several decades of work that writing about emotional experiences can act as an effective form of therapy, in a way that talking about those experiences may not. (I’m less convinced that there are benefits for those who use the site as a way to boast about their own experiences.) “Often there’s no outlet for that unless you’re starting your own blog,” Vrangalova points out. “I wanted to offer a space for people to share.”

That may well end up the Casual Sex Project’s real contribution: not to tell us something we didn’t already know, or at least suspect, but to make such nonjudgmental, intimate conversations possible. The dirty little secret of casual sex today is not that we’re having it but that we’re not sharing our experiences of it in the best way.

Complete Article HERE!

Do YOU believe in true love?

It may be killing your sex life: Those who believe in soulmates make no effort to improve chemistry in the bedroom, study finds

A study found that people who believe in ‘sexual destiny’ expected satisfaction to simply happen if they were meant to be. These individuals saw a lack of chemistry as a sign of incompatibility and instead of working to resolve the issues, they ended the relationship

By Stacy Liberatore

[S]cientists have uncovered the secret to a happy sex life – time and effort.

A new study has found that individuals who believed in ‘sexual destiny’ expected satisfaction to simply happen if them and their partner were meant to be.

The team had discovered that these individuals saw a lack of chemistry in the bedroom as a sign of incompatibility and instead of working to resolve the issues or giving it time, they simply ended the relationship.

‘People who believe in sexual destiny are using their sex life as a barometer for how well their relationship is doing, and they believe problems in the bedroom equal problems in the relationship as a whole,’ said Jessica Maxwell, a PhD candidate in the department of psychology at the University of Toronto.

‘Whereas people who believe in sexual growth not only believe they can work on their sexual problems, but they are not letting it affect their relationship satisfaction.’

Maxwell collaborated with a team at Dalhouse University to explore how ‘people can best maintain sexual satisfaction in their romantic relationships’.

Together they conducted six studies during their analysis to uncover the factors that impact a couple’s relationship and sexual satisfaction, reports Psychology Today.

During the study, researchers interviewed a range of couples, a total of 1,900 participants, who were at different stages of their relationship – some individuals were still in college, others lived together and a few were new parents.

Each couple was asked a series of questions that reflected either their ‘sexual soulmate’ or ‘sexual growth’, the idea that sexual satisfaction takes time, ideologies.

The team found that couples who followed the ideas of sexual growth had more of a connection during sex, higher sexual satisfaction with their partner and even a better relationship than those who endorsed the sexual destiny belief.

The team found that couples who followed the ideas of sexual growth had more of a connection during sex, higher sexual satisfaction with their partner and even a better relationship than those who endorsed the sexual destiny belief

And people who were firm believers ‘that two people are either sexually compatible or they are not’ reported lower relationship quality and less sexual satisfaction.

It was also found that this group viewed sexual performance as playing a key role in determining the success of a relationship – which may have added pressure during sexual encounters and affecting performance.

But the other group, sexual growth believers, were much more open when to sexual changes from their partner – even if they were not compatible.

This has suggested ‘that individuals primed with sexual growth are not threatened by incompatibility information and still think it is important to work on the sexual relationship in such cases’, reads the study published in APA PsycNet

‘Those primed with sexual growth may be deeming sex to be more/less important to maintain their global relationship views, but their belief in effort and work allows them to remain committed on working to improve their sexual relationship.’

Maxwell said there is a honeymoon phase lasting about two to three years where sexual satisfaction is high among both sexual growth and sexual destiny believers.

But the benefit of believing in sexual growth becomes apparent after this initial phase, as sexual desire begins to ebb and flow.

‘We know that disagreements in the sexual domain are somewhat inevitable over time,’ she said.

‘Your sex life is like a garden, and it needs to be watered and nurtured to maintain it.’

Complete Article HERE!