Category: Self-Esteem

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How to deal with relationship anxiety

Relationship anxiety reportedly affects 1 in 5 people, but is it normal?

By Navit Schechter

Relationships with others are essential to our physical and mental wellbeing. They can be a source of great pleasure and support for some, however for others, they can trigger feelings of anxiety and cause a great deal of distress.

What is relationship anxiety?

Relationship anxiety or relationship-based anxiety, refers to anxiety that arises in intimate relationships. It is not a recognised, diagnosable condition and as such there are no guidelines for how to treat it, however it is a reportedly common problem predicted to affect approximately 1 in 5 people.

There are many reasons why someone might feel anxious about their relationships. They might fear being abandoned or rejected or worry that their feelings are not reciprocated. Some may worry that their partner will be unfaithful or that the relationship will not last. Others may have fears about being sexually intimate with a partner or committing to another person and missing out on other options in life.

Relationship anxiety is a reportedly common problem predicted to affect approximately 1 in 5 people.

Anxiety and dating

Feelings of anxiety are especially common at the beginning of a relationship or when dating. Before the relationship is fully established, uncertainty around how the other person feels or the status of the relationship, can be difficult to tolerate. Many people fear judgement or rejection from others to such an extent that the resulting anxiety effects dating performance e.g. feeling so self-conscious that it is hard to make eye contact or maintain a conversation. This fear can be so great in some people that, despite wanting to be in a relationship, they avoid dating altogether.

Anxiety and sex

Anxiety can affect both the sex life and physical intimacy of a relationship. Anxiety can effect our libido or sex drive for a number of reasons and it can also make having sex difficult, or impossible, on a physical level. This can cause further anxiety and create a negative cycle. The worrying thoughts and tension we experience when feeling anxious can make it hard to relax enough to be able to enjoy sex or be present enough to be physically intimate with another person. Sex-related fears e.g. fears over appearance, performance or being vulnerable with another person can also make having sex and connecting physically very difficult for some people, and lead to it’s complete avoidance for others.

Why we feel anxious in relationships

The tendency to feel anxious about relationships is often a result of the attachment patterns we experienced with our parents or caregivers when we were young. These influence how we understand our needs and go about getting them met. If we experienced anxious-type attachment patterns, we are more likely to experience higher levels of relationship anxiety.

Low self-esteem and a long-standing negative view of yourself can also contribute to feelings of anxiety in a relationship. If you have beliefs that you are not good enough or don’t have as much to offer in a relationship as other people then you will likely think that this is what your partner thinks about you as well.

Low self-esteem and a long-standing negative view of yourself can contribute to feelings of anxiety in a relationship.

Previous romantic relationships will also effect how we view our present ones. When we form relationships, we place a great deal of trust in someone else which can lead us to feel exposed and vulnerable. If a past partner was unfaithful, ended the relationship suddenly or was dishonest then you may grow to expect this from future partners.

The relationship itself can also cause you to feel anxious. It would be natural to experience anxiety if your partner was secretive, critical, controlling or abusive. If your partner is threatening or abusive, details of organisations that can support you can be found at the bottom of the page.

Signs of relationship anxiety

It is normal for most people to experience some level of unease or worry about their relationship at times, however for others this is more intense and enduring. The following are signs that you may be experiencing relationship anxiety:

  1. You frequently worry about what you mean to your partner, what your partner is doing when you are not around and whether your relationship will work out.
  2. You worry that your partners feelings for you have changed if you haven’t heard from them in a while.
  3. You blow situations out of proportion, easily feeling hurt or angry at minor issues.
  4. You don’t trust your partner and are hyper vigilant for signs that they have been unfaithful, dishonest or will leave you.
  5. You experience frequent symptoms of anxiety when thinking about your relationship e.g. tension, sweatiness, difficulty concentrating.
  6. You frequently check up on your partner e.g. checking their emails or text messages to try and find out what they have been up to.
  7. You frequently ask your partner for reassurance about their feelings towards you.
  8. You go out of your way to please your partner, at the expense of your own needs.
  9. You don’t express your feelings or opinions and don’t feel like you are able to be yourself when you’re with your partner.
  10. You make critical comments to your partner or are demanding and controlling.
  11. You are aloof, distant or guarded with your partner, withholding parts of yourself from them.
  12. You are clingy and always want to be around your partner.
  13. You are reluctant to be in a serious relationship or commit to your partner fully as you are scared that it won’t work out and that you will be hurt, disappointed or betrayed.
  14. You test your partner’s feelings for you e.g. by pushing them away to see how much they will fight for you (which is then taken as a sign of their feelings).
  15. You sabotage the relationship e.g. secretly meeting up with an ‘ex’ in an attempt to feel more in control.

How relationship anxiety affects you and your relationship

If relationship anxiety is not remedied, you might find that your anxious thoughts become more and more frequent. This can cause further anxiety, feelings of hopelessness and depression in the long run. Relationship anxiety may impact on your partner and relationship as well. It can result in you keeping your partner at arms length or even ending the relationship altogether. It can also be played out through being confrontational and controlling or passive and needy. Our behaviours impact on how others feel and therefore respond to us. In some cases, relationship anxiety can create a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the behaviours that you display as a result of your fears, themselves cause the negative outcome that you feared.

If anxiety about your relationship becomes excessive, impacts on your relationship or affects your quality of life then it might be time to do something about it.

Tips for overcoming relationship anxiety

1. Manage the way you think

Recognising the thoughts you have that are causing your anxiety is important. This may be negative thoughts that you have about yourself and your worth or a tendency to “mind read” or make assumptions about what others are thinking. Make sure that the perspective you have is based on the ‘facts’ or reality of the situation rather than interpretations you have made based on habitual thinking patterns and past experiences.

Relationship anxiety is often the result of excessive worrying. We tend to worry in response to situations where the outcome is uncertain. In order to give us a sense of control, the mind focuses on the potential negative outcomes that ‘could’ happen. Mindfulness practices can help us to recognise this tendency of the mind. By noticing our thoughts and feelings with an attitude of curiosity and acceptance, we can watch them come and go whilst giving up any attempts to prepare for, or control, what happens in the future. This allows us to experience life without getting caught up in past stories of pain, or imagined future worries.

A short course of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) can help you to develop a more balanced perspective of yourself, improve your self-esteem and learn how to view your relationship more realistically which, in turn, will help you manage how you feel.

2. Manage the things you do

The things that we do also effects the anxiety that we feel. When you feel anxious, you may feel compelled to seek reassurance or check up on your partner. Whilst this may help you feel better temporarily, in the long-run it will keep you feeling anxious and may even effect your relationship. Managing the negative thoughts that you have that are creating your anxiety, whilst avoiding acting out of anxiety, will lead to longer-lasting and positive change.

Clearly communicating with your partner can also help you to manage relationship anxiety and strengthen your relationship, as it will give you the both the opportunity to express how you feel and what you need from each other. It might be tempting to avoid talking about difficult issues, however these generally don’t tend to disappear, and can cause resentments to build up.

Some people who experience relationship anxiety can get so caught up in their anxious thoughts that other areas of life get forgotten. Make sure that you schedule time, each day, to do the things that you need to do to feel good about yourself. Continuing with your own hobbies and interests, maintaining other relationships and doing the things that are important to you will help you feel good about yourself and better able to manage feelings of anxiety.

3. Manage physical symptoms of anxiety

General anxiety management techniques can also help you to feel more balanced and calm which, in turn, will help you to think more clearly and positively. Taking regular time out to relax and exercise, getting enough sleep, listening to relaxation exercises or guided meditations, practising yoga, keeping a journal and eating regular, balanced meals can all help the body and mind to feel calmer.

Links to further support:

If you are feeling overwhelmed by anxiety and finding it hard to cope with this on your own, a short course of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) can help you to understand the origins of your anxiety and make the changes you need to overcome it, once and for all. Your GP will be able to refer you to a local therapy service or you can find details of private therapists near you here.

If your anxiety is impacting on your relationship, relationship therapy with your partner may help. You can find more information about relationship therapy here.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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It took us long enough, but we’re finally paying attention to women’s pleasure

By Erin Magner

While the history of women and pleasure is fraught with stigma, it appears we’re in the midst of a pleasure revolution. Now, female-identifying founders are creating pornography, sex toys, sex-education platforms, and erotica, all of which normalizes and celebrates a woman’s right to get off. Not only are consumers turned on by this building movement—the global sex toy market alone is expected to be worth $35 billion by 2023, up from $23.7 billion in 2017—but investors, too, are shuttling millions of dollars into sexual wellness start-ups such as Dipsea, a sexy short-story app, and Unbound, an e-tailer selling sex toys and other bedroom accessories. In short, there’s never been a better time than now for having a vulva and loving to orgasm.

So how did we get to this place of openness when, just two decades ago, Samantha Jones’ unapologetic pursuit of big Os on Sex and the City was considered radical? While there have been many twists and turns throughout the history of women and pleasure, it can be argued that the modern movement’s roots first planted in the 1950s. Back then, attitudes toward sexuality were still, in many ways, informed by the repressive Victorian era—when society demanded a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude toward female desire. Yet in 1953, sexologist and biologist Alfred C. Kinsey, PhD, published his landmark (and controversial) book titled Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which shed light on women’s then-rarely discussed habits regarding masturbation, orgasms, and sex before marriage. (Spoiler alert: Among the 6,000 women interviewed for the book, all of those activities were highly popular.) From there, the world slowly but surely opened its eyes to women as sexual beings.

The early history of women and pleasure

Four years following the release of Dr. Kinsey’s book, William Masters and Virginia Johnson began their pioneering work on the physical mechanisms behind sexual arousal at Washington University in St. Louis. Their most groundbreaking findings are still frequently cited today, like the four stages of sexual arousal—excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution—and the idea that women are able to have multiple orgasms. “Even the very suggestion that sexual pleasure might be important for women and not just men was massively radical during those times,” says Zhana Vrangalova, PhD, professor of human sexuality at New York University and resident sexpert for sex-toy brand Lelo.

As the history of women and pleasure progressed, a succession of cultural milestones continued to help champion the idea of non-procreative sex among women. First, the birth control pill hit the market in 1960, which officially allowed women to have sex without the prospect of pregnancy. Helen Gurley Brown’s book Sex and the Single Girl (1962) gave advice for sex and dating as an unmarried woman, and a group of Boston women later self-published the seminal Our Bodies, Ourselves (1970), which provided evidence-based information to teach women about their sexual anatomy. Then as the hippie counterculture spread a message of free love, leaders of the second-wave feminist movement encouraged women to take an active role in their own sexual experience. You know, like men had been doing for centuries beforehand.

Despite all of this progress, however, Dr. Vrangalova points out that the framework for female pleasure in the 1960s and early ’70s was still largely based on a male perspective. “Given that the ’60s were a time when women were still very much second-class citizens, the way sexual pleasure was conceptualized was the way men, rather than women, thought about pleasure,” she says. “There’s no doubt women participated, but it seems like they adopted the male-driven vision of sexual pleasure, rather than focusing specifically on female pleasure. This was an inevitable product of the times—even scientists across diverse fields believed that whatever findings were true of men were also true of women, more or less.” For instance, at this point in the history of women and pleasure, there was still a pervasive view that women, like men, should be able to reach orgasm through vaginal intercourse alone.

“The ’60s were a time when women were still very much second-class citizens, and the way sexual pleasure was conceptualized was the way men, rather than women, thought about pleasure.”
—sexologist Zhana Vrangalova, PhD

Thankfully, in 1976, sex educator Shere Hite’s book The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality re-emphasized the importance of clitoral stimulation in reaching orgasm—an idea put forth by Dr. Kinsey two decades previously. (It wasn’t until 2005, however, that researchers led by Australian urologist Helen O’Connell, MD, would actually create a full map of the clitoris’ internal and external structures.) Then, in 1982, a book titled The G Spot and Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality, brought this then-little-known erogenous zone—and the concept of female ejaculation—into the public consciousness.

But soon after, new discoveries around women’s pleasure began to cool off, a phenomenon that Dr. Vrangalova attributes to the early days of the HIV/AIDS crisis. “Unfortunately, that swung the pendulum on sexual pleasure—male and female—back toward the more conservative end of the spectrum, and America entered the Dark Ages of abstinence-only sexual education,” she says. “This had the incredibly harmful effects of sexually crippling an entire generation of Americans with lack of information, increasing fear of sex and STIs, and increasing stigma around pleasure, especially if it was outside of long-term committed relationships.”

Women are sexual beings, but there’s a pleasure gap to close and stigma to stop

Fast-forward a decade, however, and pleasure once again started to creep back into the zeitgeist. But even in 1999, when Sex and the City was must-watch viewing, 40 percent of women still claimed to experience sexual disfunction, characterized by a lack of sexual desire and difficulty attaining arousal.

According to public-health researcher Katherine Rowland‘s new book, The Pleasure Gap, this feeling of sexual dissatisfaction still endures, despite all the strides that have been made during the past 60-plus years. “Among the women who I spoke to, the persistent low desire was heavily associated with the idea that sex should revolve around penetration as the main course, with maybe a polite prelude of a foreplay, rather than thinking about sex as a broader universe of intimacy,” Rowland previously told NPR. “It’s the combination of a larger culture that privileges male sexuality over women’s, a culture that doesn’t teach women that pleasure belongs to them. A lack of anatomical self-knowledge. And feelings of sort of persistent danger and women being often censored and censured for expressing their desire.”

Yet on all of these fronts, the tides have been slowly turning in recent years, thanks in large part to the rise of the digital age. “The internet and smartphones enabled unprecedented access to vast amounts of sexual pleasure information and to all sorts of alternative and more liberal sexual values and lifestyles,” says Dr. Vrangalova, who notes that online porn and erotica helped to normalize the concept of “a women’s right to pleasure.”

Furthermore, the #MeToo movement of 2017 set the stage for the current pleasure revolution. “There are a lot of women who relived their traumas during #MeToo…it wasn’t a linear path,” says Alexandra Fine, sexologist and CEO of next-gen vibrator company Dame. “But it does ultimately feel like it empowered women to reclaim their sexual pleasure as their own and to speak more openly about it.”

It’s that open dialogue around sex that’s leading women to get curious about their own pleasure patterns right now—and that’s clearing a path for companies to create products and services that help them get to know their own bodies. “[At Dame,] we’re hearing so many stories of women being really honest about what their sexual experiences are in an unfiltered way that wasn’t available before,” Fine adds.

What to expect from the next chapter in the history of women and pleasure

As knowledge gaps continue to emerge around women’s sexual pleasure, organizations like Allbodies—a digital sex-ed platform—are stepping up to fill them. Allbodies co-founder and doula Ash Spivak says there are still many vulva-owners who feel alienated by conventional pleasure wisdom, either because they’ve previously experienced trauma or by virtue of the fact that everyone’s body works differently. “We have so much emphasis on orgasms in general as being the pinnacle, but pleasure is a spectrum,” she says. “There’s so much room in there to really play around and that’s really never been taught.”

“We have so much emphasis on orgasms in general as being the pinnacle, but pleasure is a spectrum. There’s so much room in there to really play around and that’s really never been taught.”
—Ash Spivak, Allbodies co-founder

There are also plenty of institutions that aren’t yet ready for an open dialogue around female arousal at this point in the history of women and pleasure. For instance, Facebook still doesn’t allow advertising for sex toys—although it does allow ads for sexual-health companies, like those promoting erectile-disfunction treatments for men. And Fine says targeting this is the next frontier of the pleasure revolution.

“This conversation around advertising policy is a really interesting place where it’s showing up,” she says, noting that Dame sued the New York City MTA in 2019 for refusing to run its vibrator ads in the subway. Changing this reality is part of her bigger mission for Dame. “If we can’t have public discourse around sexuality because we think it’s inherently inappropriate, then we’re pushing sex to the shadows. And the things that happen in the shadows when it comes to sex harm women.”

Fortunately, research is continuing to unveil nuances of the female sexual experience, which can only help to erase shame and popularize the idea that there’s no one-size-fits-all path to pleasure. One 2019 study, for instance, debunked the idea that all orgasms are positive experiences—some women do, indeed, view them as negative at times, particularly when they feel coerced into having sex or pressured into climaxing.

Brands are even contributing to our collective knowledge. Dame, for instance, asks members of its Dame Labs community to test its prototypes pre-launch and then uses feedback to fine-tune each product. For instance, Dame engineers were surprised to learn when developing the company’s first internal vibrator, the Arc, that testers considered the toy’s external sensations to be even more important than its internal stimulation properties—even though testers said they would purchase the toy to use internally. The engineers edited the design accordingly, and as a result, pleasure won.

And while pleasure is a right entitled to all people, vulva-owners certainly included, Fine, for one, believes there are even bigger health gains to to glean from knowing as much as possible about the female sexual experience. “I really believe that sex is part of our wellness—it’s literally what creates our life,” she says. ‘Why would we think it’s not constantly impacting [us]?”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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On How To Create Your Sexual Potential

7 Lessons From A Sex Therapist

By Nan Wise, Ph.D, MSW, M.A., LCSW, CST

According to Canadian sexologist Peggy Kleinplatz, Ph.D., the vast majority of problems that bring people into sex therapy stem from what she calls the “North American sex script” that centers on having heterosexual intercourse with orgasms in all the right places, meaning, women should be experiencing orgasms reliably through sexual intercourse, which is actually not the case.

Even with additional clitoral stimulation, less than half of women (43%) report experiencing orgasm through intercourse 75% of the time. In other words, our cultural view of sexuality is narrow, limiting, and performance-oriented, favoring what does not appear to come naturally.

Inspired by Kleinplatz, I have gleaned seven lessons from my own research and work with clients. These lessons, or take-aways, offer an invitation to understand and explore yourself and your lover in a whole new dimension of sexual pleasure:

1. Do not judge your erotic self or the erotic experience.

Practice radical self-acceptance. Learn to love your body, exactly as it is. This is one of the biggest lessons, mentioned by nearly all of my participants. They also become curious about their own sexuality and went about exploring what turned them on. Learn to embrace your unique erotic fingerprint—whatever it is.

Let yourself be exactly as you are in the moment. And let the moment be exactly as it is. Sex is our willingness to be sexual beings, however that shows up. Remember first and foremost that good sex is about being present.

2. Tune in.

Shift your focus inward to listen closely to what you want and what your body yearns for. What are your fantasies? How do you like to be touched? Why not explore all areas of your body that can give you pleasure? Become keenly aware of what pleases you across the senses beyond touch—don’t forget about sounds and tastes. Are you interested in perhaps being more active when you tend to be receptive? More receptive when you’re usually more active? Making subtle shifts in your habitual roles may reveal new ways that you can be turned on.

Paying attention to sensations is key for pleasurable sex. If your mind wanders and starts to get into “spectatoring” mode—becoming goal-directed or self-conscious—simply notice that without judgment, letting those thoughts be exactly as they are while you bring your attention back to the senses. 

3. Be patient—about getting turned on.

When you want to have intercourse, for example, don’t begin until you and/or your partner are sufficiently aroused. Allow the sex to unfold without rushing into it. Although this advice may seem simplistic, it’s hugely important to experiencing the pleasure of sex. Slow down and savor the sensations. Let them build. Enjoy the journey without concern about the destination.

4. Stay connected to your partner.

You have a number of tools to use with your partner—to manage defenses, be an attentive and active listener, and be open to differences in erotic fingerprints or desire. Respect these differences and you will feel more connected. Often the best way to connect is actually going beyond words.

Look into your partner’s eyes and breathe with your partner while sitting silently. See the person in front of you, the being you fell in love with. Spoon your partner and hold them and synchronize your breath to synchronize your nervous systems. This actually works. We are like tuning forks and go into “cardiac” entrainment with lovers (and even our pets) when we settle into the connection. Good sex is connected sex.

5. Take risks.

We often feel hesitant to speak up with partners about parts of ourselves that we think they will judge or worry that if we tell them how we truly feel, we will hurt them. We tend to play it safe when in doubt. But another way to look at this is that there is a risk to not taking risks. If we don’t explore some of the scarier places with our partners, if we don’t explore the corners of our erotic selves, we tend to shut down and stagnate. And stagnation, itself, is dangerous to relationships.

Sexual potential unfolds when we bring all of ourselves into the mix. We are always, always shifting and changing and growing. Taking the risk to reveal how these changes affect us, our thoughts, our fears, our feelings, even our fantasies tends to revitalize the partnership.

6. Prioritize pleasure.

Allow sex to play a larger role in your life. Your work with your seven core emotions has paved the way for more keen awareness and insight into how and why pleasure is so important to your life, so allow sex to play a larger role. Make time for sex, expand your notion of what sex is, nurture it, and explore it. It’s a journey without an end.

7. Tolerate emotions and embrace the transformative nature of sex.

Because of the blend of emotional and physical drivers of sex, any type of sexual experience or activity has the capacity to stir up all kinds of emotions. One of the most important lessons for good sex and also good relationships, in general, is to learn how to more fully tolerate our feelings, other people’s feelings, and our feelings about other people’s feelings. And sometimes the most challenging feelings to tolerate, believe it or not, are intense feelings of pleasure—which for some can feel scarily out of control.

When we can learn to simply allow the feelings to be as they are, stay present to ourselves and to each other, the experiences we can have with and through sex can be truly healing and can revitalize our mind, body, and spirit. It is a tangible form of connection to others, a source of immune-boosting energy, and a vast reservoir for pleasure.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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This Is How I Wish My Parents Talked to Me About Sex

By Alexia Lewis

By the time I turned 18, I still never got the “sex talk” from my parents. I entered the world equipped with only the knowledge mass media, pop culture, and my high school freshman sex-ed class could give me. At the time I thought I dodged an awkward bullet, but a few years later, I realized I missed out on a lot of helpful information. And it’s become the norm for a lot of teens to only know how TV shows or movies depict relationships or sex and never have anyone actually knowledgeable and relatable to talk to about our real experiences.

During my first week of college, I witnessed a ton of uncomfortable situations through my frightened 17-year-old eyes. Most of us freshmen were trying to fit in with our 20-year-old peers, but we had no idea what we were doing when it came to navigating relationships, sexual or otherwise. Most of those twenty-somethings didn’t even know much more than we did. Even though we were considered independent and exploring relationships in the young adult world, my experience in college didn’t feel too far off from high school. The young and uneducated were learning about sex and relationships in the most hurtful ways possible, from the simultaneously young & uneducated.

While my experience seems to be the norm for most teens, it doesn’t have to be. And you as parents can make all the difference in having a genuine conversation about sex with your teen. This is how I wish my parents talked to me about sex.

Understand the Internet Changes Everything

I know you were a teen once too, but there are new beasts in teens’ lives that are more vicious than the average adult can understand without first-hand experience.

Our world is interconnected in an extraordinary way. In this Catfish era, entire relationships can be conducted via text message or DM and can become virtually sexual even before the first real-life meet up. It’s different now than when you were my age, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Monitoring phones only makes us better at hiding our activity. And attempting to “disconnect” us from the world or taking our cell phone away only makes us better at using friends’ phones during school.

Teens feel bad enough, weird enough, and alone enough that we don’t need our parents’ judgment to accentuate those emotions.

Considering that this interconnectedness is inevitable, embrace it and try to encourage our knowledge and mastery of emotional intelligence on these platforms in addition to in real life. Teaching us how to navigate both worlds now will make us balanced and ready for the emotional and sexual relationships of the real world to come.

Keep the Conversation Real

The “sex talk” conversation can be over before it even starts if it doesn’t feel authentic. As important as it is to come to me as a concerned parent, come to me as a real person, too. A real person who was my age once, who had these same feelings and extreme transformations happening all at one time, and who understands that the world that I live in is a wild ride. There’s an organic way to be on my level outside of just lecturing me by saying “I was your age once.” Connect with me, tell me your own personal stories, share with me your experiences. Allow me to relate to you triumph and your trial, let me reflect and identify even if it’s in silence. Don’t force me to open up because at times, when you’re a teen and there’s so much you’re not supposed to do or know, revelation is in absorption.

It’s different now than when you were my age, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Monitoring phones only makes us better at hiding our activity.

Please, Don’t Condemn Me

Teens feel bad enough, weird enough, and alone enough that we don’t need our parents’ judgment to accentuate those emotions. On top of the wide range of changes we go through, the last thing we need is our parents telling us there’s something wrong with us too. Telling us we shouldn’t be having sexual feelings at such a “young age” doesn’t stop us from having them. Accept me for where I am and understand that may be different from where you were at my age and that’s okay. As teens, we’re growing into our own young adult selves, and we can only do that successfully when we have some sort of support.

Prepare For Awkward Moments

Within these conversations, don’t make us feel like we have to say what you want to hear. Be open enough to hear some things you aren’t ready for. Also, be tactful enough to understand that there may only be one chance to have this conversation the right way. Create a safe space, an understanding space, and most of all, an accepting space. Accept us for where we are in our experience, and we’ll accept you trying to guide us. It may be awkward and it will feel weird, but it will make a world of a difference. You can make the world of a difference.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Why So Many Women Aren’t Enjoying Sex as Much as They Could

The messages you hear about sex while growing up have consequences in adulthood, a study suggests.

By Claire Gillespie

For many of us, sex ed doesn’t end in high school. It’s not unusual to have to do some serious work decades after the first mention of the birds and the bees––often to try to repair the harm that was done back then.

That’s the focus of a recent study, published in the American Journal of Sexuality Education, which asked nearly 200 women to share the types of messages they’d received about sex and sexuality when they were growing up. And the vast majority of them had only negative experiences to report.

Think of all the crappy messages you’ve received about sex and your body over the years, and you’ll relate: you shouldn’t have sex before marriage, having sex during your period is disgusting, masturbation is shameful. Those messages may come from direct conversations with parents, educators, or religious leaders, or they may come from the mass media, such as Facebook, YouTube, or chat rooms.

Wherever they stem from, their impact can be long-lasting. It’s not too much of a leap to connect negative messages about sex to difficulty reaching orgasm, body image issues, a lifeless libido, and less satisfying sex in general.

For the study, participants were asked to share memorable messages they received about reproductive and/or sexual health, and their responses prove just how crucial those early messages about sex are.

One participant said they “…wish that I wouldn’t have been taught about sex as if it were a bad thing, from my school.” Another revealed that her first encounter with shame around sex came when she had chlamydia in her early 20s, and the reaction of a family member made her feel “ashamed and disgusted.”

Several participants shared negative experiences connected to strong religious-based abstinence messaging around sex. “‘Don’t have sex. If you have sex, you’re going to get pregnant and we’re going to kick you out.’ This was my sex talk from my parents,” said one. “This stuck with me for years and still does.”

But the sole aim of the study wasn’t to remind women of just how much negativity they absorbed about sex. Study authors also share different ways to combat any unfavorable lingering feelings. When the women were asked what helps them develop more positive attitudes to their sex lives, here are the four main takeaways.

Having open dialogues about sex

Many participants said the “main catalyst” for a more positive attitude toward their own sexuality was having honest conversations with friends and family, as well as hearing more discussions about sex in society in general. One participant said she had “lost some of the shame associated with menstruation and sexual health” as a result of “growing older, educating myself, and falling into fairly liberal, well-educated friendship circles.”

Getting more (and better) sex ed

Many interviewees said their perceptions of sex, health, and their bodies improved thanks to further education about sex, menstruation, fertility, and reproductive health. “This education was often initiated by the individual and included conducting independent research, asking questions of friends, family, and medical practitioners, and reading further into topics on websites, blogs, and in books,” the researchers write.

Becoming body positive

A big part of sexual empowerment for the study participants came from working on developing body comfort and acceptance and autonomy. “This paradigm shift toward empowerment often stemmed from participants educating themselves about their bodily functions,” the researchers write.

“My perspective about menstruation and reproductive health has changed over time,” said one participant. “I now see them as amazing biological functions that are a testament to how impressive the human body is, thanks to friends who have empowered me to embrace my own fertility.”

Ditching gender stereotypes

The women in the study felt more positively about their bodies, sexual health, and sex in general when they questioned traditional beliefs about womanhood and femininity, as well as challenged stereotypical gender roles.

It’s undeniable that young women need positive messages about reproductive and sexual health as part of their upbringing. Perhaps a good starting point would be for every parent, educator and religious institution to get a copy of this study.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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4 Things That Help Women Feel Less Stressed About Sex

By Kelly Gonsalves

Negative feelings about sex are no joke.

Most women grow up with some pretty negative messages about their bodies and sexuality, and even though many of us are able to shake off a lot of that shame and stigma as we get older and move through the world, those early messages we got have some lasting effects that follow us through adulthood.

Lingering shame around experiencing pleasure is likely at the heart of women’s ongoing struggles with having orgasms and struggles with lagging libido. And body shame more broadly can take a lifetime to overcome, and it’s been linked with riskier sexual behavior, sexual dysfunction, and less satisfying sex, not to mention poor confidence and all the mental health struggles that come with feeling bad about your body.

OK, so what actually combats all the underlying negative feelings women have around sex?

That was the big question at the center of a new study published in the American Journal of Sexuality Education. The team of researchers—including behavioral scientist Angela Cooke-Jackson, Ph.D., MPH; interpersonal communication researcher Valerie Rubinsky, Ph.D.; and health researcher Jacqueline N. Gunning—surveyed nearly 200 women about the types of messages they received about their bodies and their sexuality growing up. The vast majority of them grew up with negative messages about sex: that they shouldn’t have sex until they’re married, that they’ve got something “pure” they’ll “lose” when they start having sex, and that people will judge them if they do.

But when asked what helped them develop healthy, positive feelings about their sex lives, there were four main factors that stood out:

1. Hearing more open conversations about sex

Open dialogue with friends and family about sex, in addition to growing societal conversations about sexuality, was the “main catalyst” for women’s shift to a more positive view of their sexuality. Indeed, past research has shown that open conversations between kids and their parents about sex tend to make kids wait longer to have their first sexual experience and practice safer sex when they do. Other research has shown talking to friends about sex increases women’s sexual self-esteem and ability to ask for what they want in bed.

2. Getting more and better sex ed

Literally just getting more information about sex—from friends, the internet, books, or really anywhere—made women feel more positively about it. “Many participants cited further education on the topics of sex, reproductive health, fertility, and menstruation as the catalyst for their improved perceptions of body, self, and health,” the researchers write. “This education was often initiated by the individual and included conducting independent research, asking questions of friends, family, and medical practitioners, and reading further into topics on websites, blogs, and in books.”

3. Getting comfortable with your body

How you feel about your body is deeply tied to how stressed out or how comfortable you feel about sex. Fortunately, the researchers observed that as people developed more bodily acceptance and autonomy, they started to have more positive feelings about it. When you know your body well and feel like you’re in tune with it, you start to love it more. “This paradigm shift towards empowerment often stemmed from participants educating themselves about their bodily functions,” the researchers write, adding, “Emerging from this theme were many notes of menstrual symptom management as a catalyst for improved views of reproductive health. Once women learned to manage symptoms of their reproductive health and menstruation, they felt a sense of control over and ownership of their bodies.”

4. Ditching gender stereotypes

Past studies have shown women have better sex when they have more feminist beliefs, and a similar trend appeared in this research: As women evolved their definitions of womanhood and femininity and ditched traditional gender roles, they felt more positively about their bodies, sexual health, and sexuality in general. “[There’s] a direct correlation between sexual knowledge and sexual agency, with the development of feminist ideologies contributing to young women seeking sexual knowledge and subsequent sexual assertiveness,” the researchers explain. “It is evident that young women place value on informative, accepting or positive messages, body literacy, and sexual autonomy in their transition to adulthood.”

If you’re looking to develop a healthier relationship with your sexuality—and start having better sex—these are four solid places to start.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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The Link Between Commitment & Good Sex

Researchers May Have Finally Figured It Out

By Kelly Gonsalves

Sex with a stranger or a new flame can be thrilling, but there’s something to be said for the kind of intimate, comfortable, deeply connected sex you can have with a committed partner you’ve been with for years. A lot of research has demonstrated that commitment is associated with higher sexual satisfaction, such that a person enjoys sex more when they’re having it with a person they’re committed to. 

Here’s the question, though: Does commitment make sex better, or does good sex make you more committed?

For a new study published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, a team of researchers surveyed 366 couples about their commitment levels and sexual satisfaction over the course of their first five sessions of couples therapy. The researchers wanted to understand whether an increase in commitment one week would predict an increase in sexual satisfaction the following week, or vice versa. 

“Partners may be more committed to a relationship which offers them more sexual benefits,” they write in the paper on their findings. “Partners who are satisfied with the extent to which their sexual needs are met may be more devoted to the future of their relationships.”

But the opposite could also be true: “As partners’ commitment to each other grows, they may be more likely to devote more time and energy into the sexual component of their relationship, thus enhancing each partner’s sexual satisfaction,” the researchers hypothesize. “With a foundation of strong commitment, couples may develop a sense of safety in their relationships that leads partners to engage in more sexual exploration and thus enjoy more satisfying sexual lives together. Conversely, lower levels of commitment may inhibit partners from communicating about or enjoying their physical intimacy to the fullest extent.”

So which was it? Well…both.

When they analyzed the data, they found a bidirectional relationship between commitment and sexual satisfaction—more of either during one week led to more of the other the following week.

That said, after the first three sessions, these effects plateaued. Between the two directions, sexual satisfaction continued to predict commitment longer into the five weeks than the other way around. The researchers surmise that as time goes on, “the benefits of sexual satisfaction are important in improving commitment, but the safety and investment of commitment is less important in predicting sexual satisfaction.”

There are many ways to interpret these findings. The biggest take-away is that the two really are linked: When you improve your overall relationship and stability as a couple, your sex life will indirectly improve as well. And when you improve your sex life, your overall relationship will probably also get a boost. It may be that after a certain commitment threshold is met, being more and more dedicated to or in love with each other stops increasing the pleasure you get out of sex. Fair enough.

But the general principle definitely still stands: Want better sex? Work on strengthening your relationship. Want to strengthen your relationship? Sex is a great place to start.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How To Boost Your Sex Life While Looking After Your Mental Health

by Bonnie Evie Gifford

We’d all like a bit more passion between the sheets (and on the streets, if that’s what does it for you), but can you give your sex life a boost without risking your overall wellbeing?

Going through a dry spell. Having a crisis of confidence. Just feeling plain ol’ frumpy, fed-up, and unsexy. It happens to us all at some point or another (well, unless you’re some kind of fabulous, self-loving, body-confident kind of person who rarely has an off day – in which case, please tell us your secrets).

The thing is, when things feel bad, it’s easy to fall into a shame spiral, for your thoughts to automatically become more negative, and to allow self-sabotaging, defeatist thinking to rule. Worrying about a little thing like your sex life can feel trivial when there are so many other things to be concerned about – it shouldn’t be a priority… right?

Sex isn’t just fun, it’s good for you. Sex is good for your heart, the closeness that comes with sexual encounters can help lower your blood pressure, decrease stress, and even fend off illness. Studies have shown that those who have more sex report feeling healthier than those who don’t.

We share seven ways you can boost your sex life while still putting your mental health first.

1. Identify your stressors

Why is it you feel your sex life needs a boost right now? What is it that is causing you to feel dissatisfied. Identifying the cause (or causes) of your negative feelings around your sex life (be those feelings of anxiety, worry, stress, or dissatisfaction) can help you to uncover any underlying problems.

Stress can be a major factor in our overall sense of health and wellbeing. If you’re worried stress or work-related anxiety may be affecting other areas of your life, try these 10 simple ways to tackle stress right now, or discover how you can beat back to work anxiety (and stop it taking over your free time).

By taking the time to sit back and ask yourself these kinds of big questions, you can begin to reveal if there are any areas of your life that need addressing. We all experience periods of work-related stress, relationship worries, and ill mental health or wellbeing during our lives.

Acknowledging that you are struggling is the first step towards seeking help and support – be that of loved ones, or a professional. Through fixing what is really causing you disruption and discomfort, you may begin to see a positive impact on other areas of your life.

2. Acknowledge your libido

Throughout your lifetime, your sex drive will fluctuate. It’s completely natural to go through periods where you experience less sexual desire than others, for both men and women. It’s ok to not be feeling it.

If you are experiencing other relationship issues, stress, depression or exhaustion, it’s worth noting that all of these can all be contributing factors to a lower libido.

If you’re worried, it can be worth speaking with your GP, checking out NHS inform’s advice, or talking with a psychosexual therapist. Sex therapists are qualified counsellors who have extra training to help with sex-related difficulties or concerns, and can help you feel more intimate with your partner, as well as exploring new ways to help you feel more comfortable.

Working with a hypnotherapist can also help decrease any embarrassment or nerves that may be affecting your libido, encourage you to reframe your thoughts, regain confidence, and even manage menopause symptoms.

As counsellor Graeme explains, having different libidos doesn’t have to negatively impact your relationship.

“In most relationships the sexual drive or libido is different in the partners. Of course, often when we start a relationship it feels like it will last forever; you can hardly keep your hands off each other; you are both very ready to have a sexual relationship; you seem to share the same level of desire and have a great time together. Of course this honeymoon period rarely lasts forever, and as the levels of hormones drop back to more normal levels we settle down into the day to day existence of being a couple. Each of us returns to our normal libido.

“All too often this can affect the relationship; the partner with the greater sex drive can feel rejected, or that the couple has fallen out of love. All of these are a reflection of them trying to make sense of the different drives.

“Talking to your partner about your relationship and the sexual side is very important. If the couple don’t discuss how they feel then misunderstandings inevitably appear as you assign thoughts and feelings to your partner. It can be difficult to talk about, but in the long run being honest about how you feel is going to allow you to be clear about what can and cannot change.

“It’s important to recognise that there is an element of reality that you can’t change. [Their libido] is another part of them that needs to be integrated into the relationship and will require negotiation and compromise.

“Mismatched libido is a relatively common problem in relationship counselling and couples can get past it and have fantastic long-term loving relationships by being honest, talking about it, and finding creative solutions that celebrate both partners’ needs and the whole relationship they have.

3. Make small changes to your environment

Your bedroom doesn’t just affect how you sleep – it can also have a surprising impact on your sex life. Creating a more relaxing, calming environment can help you to relax, gain higher quality rest, improve your sleep, and feel less distracted. As one nutritionist explains,

“Lack of sleep massively affects our hormones and daily lives. We are less able to deal with mental or physical stress, our metabolism can slow down, sex hormones are disrupted, and we can get cranky or distracted easily.

Removing your phone from the bedroom can help avoid one of the biggest passion killers – phubbing. If you ever find yourself scrolling, clicking on notifications, or automatically opening up Insta when you could be spending some quality time with the one you love, this could be a sign that social media is affecting your relationship and you may need to get control of your scroll. Find out more about the benefits of taking a break from your phone, and how sleep get help increase your sex drive.

4. Remember: confidence is sexy

Paris Hilton is quoted as having said “No matter what a woman looks like, if she’s confident, she’s sexy.” Is that really true? Can our confidence influence how sexy we feel?

Confidence and self-belief comes from our positive thinking, relationships, and friendships. It can affect your mood, behaviour, and even how you carry yourself. When we have low self-confidence, our negative self opinions can affect other aspects of our lives, from relationships to our careers.

If we can’t believe in ourselves, why should anyone else? Yet changing our own negative self-view can feel impossible. NLP Coach Vicki explains how working with a life coach can help boost your confidence and self-belief,

“Once you start to notice your self-talk and your self-language you will soon come to realise that you are self-sabotaging. Becoming aware of your self-sabotaging thoughts and language will allow you to realise the damage you are creating, you can then replace with self-praising thoughts and language.”

Counsellor Wendy explains how you can begin stepping outside of your comfort zone and improve your confidence.

5. Rediscover foreplay and rekindle intimacy

If you’re in a long-term realtionship, improving your sex life often starts with working on your relationship. Lulls in desire and the frequency of sexual acts can become more common when you are with someone for a longer period of time.

Focusing on improving the quality of your relationship and increasing your sense of intimacy can help you to feel closer to one another, whilst resparking feelings of desire. Planning date nights together, practising open communication, setting aside quality time together, or doing activities outside of the bedroom can all help.

Bringing the focus back to foreplay, over the main act itself can help to increase both your desire and libido. Spending time together touching, kissing, or just being close with each other can all act as ways in which you can feel closer, helping you each to focus on the here and now.

6. Ditch nasty habits

We’ve all had that one (or more) bad habit that we know we should kick, but we just… haven’t gotten around to it yet. But what if your habit is having a bigger impact than you may realise?

According to one study, smoking is one of our biggest turn-offs in the bedroom, with over half (59%) of Brits agreeing. More than a quarter of us have considered ending a relationship due to our partner’s smoking habits.

Quitting bad habits like smoking or excessive drinking can increase your energy levels, improve your immune system, and increase your life expectancy. Hypnotherapy, behavioural therapy, group therapy, and telephone counselling for smoking are all options that can offer a supportive, expert environment to help you change your habits for the better.

Looking after yourself through addressing addictions and practising self-care can help boost your sense of wellbeing and encourage you to start reprioritising the things that matter most in your life.

7. Come together outside of the bedroom

Increasing your passion in the bedroom may be the end result, but it doesn’t have to be the sole focus. By addressing your overall intimacy, you can feel more relaxed, closer to the ones you love, and more able to open up and share.

Emotional intimacy and closeness is key to having a more fulfilling partnership. It can help you to better meet your partner’s needs, as well as communicate your own.

Holding hands, hugging, or touching more can all help release more oxytocin, allowing you to feel calmer, less stressed, and closer. Research has shown hugs can have a huge range of benefits, from protecting us against illnesses to boosting our overall health, happiness and sense of wellbeing.

Creating quality time in your busy schedules to be together can be a great first step towards putting your partnership first, and reaffirming with each other how important you are. While life’s stresses and strains may continue to get in the way, nurturing our relationships with the ones we love is vital in showing them how much we care for and appreciate them.

If you are concerned your mental health may be affecting your overall sense of health and wellbeing, it’s important to reach out and seek help. Contact your GP to find out what help is available in your local area or call Samaritans on 116 123 to speak to someone 24/7.

To find more sex and relationship help and support, visit Counselling Directory. Or discover how hypnotherapy and life coaching can help improve your confidence and self-esteem.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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What do we really know about male desire?

Not much, according to Canadian sex researchers

Winnipeg relationships therapist Sarah Hunter Murray found a male desire that’s less voracious, indiscriminate and skin deep, and more emotionally complex – fragile, even.

By Zosia Bielski

Although sex researchers historically gave male subjects centre stage, they paid surprisingly little attention to how men actually desire. Today, contemporary sexologists say our cultural understanding of men’s sex drive remains simplistic and leans on old clichés – that male libido is always sky-high, self-centred and ready to go, with practically anyone. Men who aren’t this way are still treated as exceptions, not the rule.

Canadian researchers and clinicians are starting to push back on these ideas by asking deeper questions about the inner world of male desire. They’re looking at how heterosexual men lust (and don’t) within their relationships, what motivates them to have sex with their partners, what frustrates them in their intimate lives and how they process rejection from the women they love. What they’re finding counters much of what’s been previously assumed about men.

“We’ve got this stereotype about men’s desire being constant and unwavering. More recently, we’ve got #MeToo highlighting stories of men’s sexual desire being dangerous, toxic and about power. But what else is going on?” said Winnipeg relationships therapist Sarah Hunter Murray.

Murray interviewed nearly 300 men and spoke to hundreds more over a decade in her therapy practice – executives, truck drivers, athletes, teachers and dads among them. Their insights are included in Murray’s recent book, Not Always in The Mood: The New Science of Men, Sex, and Relationships, which offers a rare glimpse into a world we think we understand, but possibly don’t at all.

Notably absent from Murray’s book are the usual tales of raging male libido. One husband is too stressed out by the family business to think about sex. A boyfriend turns down his girlfriend’s advances for two months as he dwells on an unresolved argument. Another husband tells Murray his sexual interest piques when he and his wife talk late into the night. In her conversations with men, Murray found a male desire that’s less voracious, indiscriminate and skin deep, and more emotionally complex – fragile, even.

While Murray offers a strikingly new perspective on heterosexual male sex drive, other Canadian researchers are studying men’s sexual problems in long-term committed relationships. In Halifax, clinical psychologist Natalie Rosen is looking at why men experience low desire with their partners. At the University of Waterloo, PhD student Siobhan Sutherland is exploring male and female partners’ sexual complaints, which happen to be the same. And at the University of Kentucky, Canadian researcher Kristen Mark mines “sexual desire discrepancy” in couples, finding it’s sometimes wives and girlfriends who are more interested in sex than husbands and boyfriends – guys who find this scenario particularly troubling because of social expectations about the supposedly more carnal male gender.

Their emerging research suggests serious blind spots around male desire are harming relationships and holding couples back from broaching what they want in their intimate lives.

“If we ignore the nuances of sexual desire in men, we risk continuing to perpetuate stereotypes – that men’s sexual interest is uniformly high and independent of context – to the detriment of the many men whose experiences are multifaceted,” said Halifax’s Rosen. “In enhancing our understanding of men’s sexual desire, we can improve individual and couple sexuality and ultimately promote the quality of intimate relationships.”

The Globe spoke to researchers – and men – about busting the most pernicious myths lingering around male desire.

Not in the mood

Despite stereotypical depictions in pop culture, real-world men aren’t always fired up.

“The myth is that men are a sex toy that you can pull out of your closet and it’s always ready to go when you are. Well, no, that’s not actually the case,” said CJ, a 41-year-old government employee in St. John’s who is divorced and now in a relationship with a woman he’s known for two decades. (In order to protect the men’s privacy, full names are not used). “If your time and energy is spent on the adulting – paying bills, working overtime, trying to keep your energy up for elderly parents or young kids – is there really time to connect emotionally and build that bridge that ends up in the bedroom?” said CJ.

Adam, a Kitchener, Ont., retiree who’s been with his wife for more than two decades, also disputed the notion that the male sex drive runs non-stop, no matter what. “If I’m focused on something or upset about something at work, I just want to be alone or work something out in my head. You don’t want to have any kind of interaction with anybody,” said Adam, 67. “My partner used to talk about the ‘tent time’ or the ‘bear time.'”

In conversation with Murray, the Winnipeg relationships therapist, men pointed out that sex wasn’t at the forefront of their brains when they were sick, tired, stressed out at work or feeling emotionally disconnected. “Men’s sexual desire is not a static trait that never changes and is impermeable to outside influences,” wrote Murray, who holds a PhD in human sexuality. “We’ve gotten used to talking about the complexities of women’s desire being affected by how much sleep they’re getting, how much stress they’re under or by being a parent, but we simply don’t talk about this with men,” she said.

Halifax’s Rosen is currently recruiting couples for one of the first studies to look at men struggling with lowered desire within their relationships. “There’s so much pressure in how men’s desire is supposed to conform to the stereotype of always being ready and interested in sex,” said Rosen, an associate professor in psychology and neuroscience at Dalhousie University and director of the school’s Couples and Sexual Health Research Laboratory. “The men I’ve seen clinically feel a lot of shame around it, like there’s something wrong with them. Their family doctors don’t bring it up with them and they don’t see representations of themselves.”

Faking it

During their first therapy sessions with Murray, men often boasted about their robust sex drives. Subsequent conversations saw them dialing it back. Numerous husbands and boyfriends confessed that “some of their desire was feigned rather than authentic,” Murray wrote.

Men told her that they agreed to sex they didn’t fully want because they felt they had to. Having been socialized all their lives about high-octane male desire, men were playing the part. They were also faking it for the sake of their girlfriends and wives, who took sexual rejection and lagging male libido personally. “Men talked about this fear that their female partner might not be open to them saying ‘no’ to sex,” Murray said.

In St. John’s, CJ copped to faking sexual interest before. “It’s almost on a scale of 1 to 10. I’m not really there but I’m at a 6 and a half so I can go along with it,” CJ said. “Other times you kind of take one for the team, realizing that she’s probably done the same thing for you.”

Through her first interviews, Halifax’s Rosen is finding that men with low sexual interest are still reporting they regularly have sex with their female partners. Rosen said the men felt guilt and obligation to “please their partner to maintain the relationship.”

The female gaze

The standard thinking still goes in heterosexual dynamics: Men do the complimenting (and the objectifying), the desiring and the pursuing – and are naturally content with the setup. Not exactly, the men interviewed said.

“Men really don’t get checked out very often,” said Alexander, a 22-year-old Toronto student who has been with his girlfriend Mary, 21, for more than a year. “We have better sex when she’s complimented me and encouraged me. …It changes the whole tone of the evening,” Alexander said. “If a woman initiates even just one component of sex, that is the biggest vote of confidence.”

In her conversations with hundreds of men, Winnipeg’s Murray found many wanted their spouses and girlfriends to look at them, compliment them and act on their own urges. “Interview after interview, it started to become very clear that the most salient and important experience that increased men’s sexual desire was feeling wanted by their female partner,” Murray wrote. “A lot of women don’t think to outwardly demonstrate their desire for their male partners.”

Waterloo’s Sutherland asked 117 heterosexual couples in long-term relationships about their problems in bed for a study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine in March, and found men and women voicing pretty much the same concerns: frequency of sex, initiation and how much their partners showed interest. “We used to think that women just wanted to be romanced and men just care about sex. That’s not true. Men want to feel wanted as well, and for women to show interest in them,” Sutherland said.

Beyond skin deep

Current assumptions about male libido still often go like this: sex for men is about getting off, a practically robotic function.

Look deeper and many men balk at that assumption. For Kitchener’s Adam, intimacy is how he connects with his wife. “I may touch my partner … I’m not intending to be crude, but sometimes she reacts in a way that [suggests] this is the only motive I would have,” Adam said. “There are times when men are struggling to find a way to show intimacy. A touch is presumed to be a claim on the body, instead of just a way to connect and make some contact.”

Toronto’s Alexander expressed frustration with literature and pop culture that depict sex as solely about physical gratification for men. “If we’ve just had sex, I don’t want to go to sleep,” he said of his girlfriend. “I want to reflect on what just happened with her.”

In research interviews and therapy sessions with Murray, husbands and boyfriends described feeling their sexual-interest spike on date nights, long walks and during close conversations – the stuff of rom-coms. “To hear men talking about romantic and sweet things about their partner that turn them on, it challenged my own assumptions,” Murray said.

The therapist argued that women who are constantly cynical about the nature of their partners’ sexual desire might be missing the bigger picture. “When we have a limited belief about what turns our partner on, we unfortunately miss the more complex, nuanced, and meaningful ways that he feels desire for us,” Murray wrote. “Many of men’s emotional bids for connection go unnoticed.”

Mars, Venus and Planet Earth

Waterloo’s Sutherland found that women and men voiced virtually all the same desire-related problems in their relationships. Here, she hit on something sexologists increasingly note: When it comes to intimacy, there is often less difference between the genders than there is between individual people. “There used to be this idea that men are from Mars and women are from Venus,” Sutherland said. “We find more and more in our research that it’s just not the case.”

Winnipeg’s Murray found gender norms were limiting couples’ experiences in bed, particularly the sexual scripts that tell men they need to pursue and women they need to be the gatekeeper. CJ agreed: “If you’re conforming to the same roles, if you’re not stepping outside a little bit, it has a detrimental effect. It becomes a flow chart: I initiate. You respond. If yes, then bedroom. If bedroom, then missionary.”

Speaking to distraught couples, Murray noticed that false assumptions about raging male libido left both men and women feeling inadequate: Some women questioned whether their own lower desire was dysfunctional, while some men who didn’t experience near-constant sexual urges told Murray they felt broken.

The author wants relationships to become a place of respite from gendered expectations about desire that have little, if anything, to do with individual couples.

“These misconceptions hold us in antiquated boxes about what men and women should be, and don’t leave room to have a new discourse around what we actually want to experience,” Murray said. “It doesn’t let us be our authentic selves.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Not That Kind of Girl

In her influential 1959 Atlantic article, “Sex and the College Girl,” Nora Johnson predicted that young, educated women pursuing expansive new opportunities would likely end up disappointed. She spent the rest of her life finding out what could happen instead.

High-school students graduate in 1960. Nora Johnson’s articles, novels, and memoirs followed women as they matured from infatuated teenagers to aging lovers.

By Annika Neklason

Every few years, new concerns bloom about the changing ways young people are approaching relationships, from the stigmatized early years of online dating in the 1990s and 2000s to the panic over campus hookup culture in the early 2010s to the dawning concern that rather than having too much sex, Millennials aren’t having enough. Many young people are now experiencing a sex recession, my colleague Kate Julian wrote for the cover of this magazine in December.

But long before Tinder or Match.com were founded, and even before most universities went coed, the seeds of these ideas were planted in another Atlantic article: Nora Johnson’s influential “Sex and the College Girl.” Written in 1959, the article captured a snapshot of college romance on the lip of the sexual revolution and the second-wave feminist movement: Young women were pulling back from romantic commitment and domestic life to explore their options; young men were left bewildered and resentful as their relationships shifted in turn.

Johnson framed the moment not as one of ecstatic liberation, but rather as an uncertain and sometimes overwhelming introduction of possibility for female students. She observed educated women navigating a convoluted path of desire, respect, security, and shame in pursuit of the dream of a full life: “a husband, a career, community work, children, and the rest.” Only an exceptional few could achieve that life without sacrificing personal or professional goals along the way, she predicted. For many of the rest of them, this pursuit would end in “an ulcer, a divorce, a psychiatrist, or deep disappointment”; and for some of them, those who were put off by the apparent futility of trying to balance all the expansive possibilities, “the most confining kind of domestic life.” Without the “moral generalizations” of her grandmother’s era, Johnson’s college girl was left to forge ahead toward those difficult choices with more subjective, and personal, judgment—carrying “her belief in herself,” or what she calls the “modern version” of herself, forward into the unknown.
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Johnson wrote “Sex and the College Girl” when she was 26, just five years after graduating from Smith. Though young, she was already beginning to establish herself as an author. She’d grown up as the daughter of a Hollywood filmmaker, surrounded by “an encampment of storytellers,” as she later recalled, and had published her first and ultimately most successful novel, The World of Henry Orient, a year earlier. Like “Sex and the College Girl,” the book drew on her own experiences as a student, fictionalizing the crush she and a friend had nursed for an actor-musician while they were in high school.

As Johnson grew older, the subjects of her writing generally did too, maturing as the decades wore on from students navigating the college dating scene to married couples to divorcées to aging lovers. But though the characters changed, the sense of uncertain possibility she described in “Sex and the College Girl” remained—sometimes joyful, sometimes dutiful, sometimes onerous, but never entirely gone. Johnson’s love stories, told in an era of expanding female choices, were weighted with the consciousness of them.

In “Sex and the College Girl,” the choices were myriad, novel, and full of potentially far-reaching consequences. Female students faced decisions about who to date, what to offer physically and emotionally, and how much to hold in reserve for how long. Beyond that immediate horizon stretched a broader array of opportunities and potential pitfalls: children, careers, and all of the self-betterment and intellectual rigor their educations were preparing them for. Commitment and marriage, in a sense, presented an out—a sense of certainty, a solid support system. “Joe has a future,” Johnson wrote. “He knows exactly what he is going to do after graduation … The decision about [the college girl’s] life keeps her awake at night, but when she is with Joe things make more sense.”

Two years later, in “The Captivity of Marriage,” Johnson described the constrained choices of the women who stuck with their Joes. Now juggling the responsibilities of raising children, keeping a house, and engaging in “community or P.T.A. work of some kind,” married women “feel … like a pie with not enough pieces to go around,” Johnson wrote. But the new responsibilities and family and community ties did not put the “undefined dreams” of their younger years to rest; instead, the wife and mother “vaguely feels that she is frittering away her days and that a half-defined but important part of her ability is lying about unused.” That feeling of dissatisfaction, Johnson observed, was coupled with the lingering “quality of excitement that comes from strangeness and the idealization of still-unknown experience” that made the concept of sex with an unfamiliar partner attractive. But those choices, which would take women away from their husbands and children, were now taboo. In their place were new choices, more limited but still unfamiliar and consequential. “Choosing a house and everything that goes into it, and a school, and a competent doctor are decisions that the young mother makes without adequate knowledge,” Johnson wrote, “and she can ill afford mistakes.”

She described the fallout from one error in judgment a year later in “A Marriage on the Rocks,” an article published in the July 1962 issue of The Atlantic. “The moment when it first becomes apparent that one’s marriage was a mistake,” she opened the piece, “is the beginning of probably the longest, darkest period in the human lifetime.” She chronicled the slow fracturing of a union that, to the college girl, had carried a promise of lifelong certainty in an otherwise unknown future. Unhappiness settled in and grew unbearable as the relationship devolved into “the endless opening of wounds … capitulating one’s beliefs … [and] adjusting oneself to the dismal and baneful workable compromise.” But choosing to break free of  that unhappiness meant exchanging it for a new, unknown one, defined by a sudden and “terrible feeling of having no one around on whom to blame everything.”

Johnson expressed the frustration of seeing a marriage fail while knowing that, with the newly available options for women to marry for love and to define more aspects of their life and work, “all of us … have the potential to become the greatest lovers on earth.” She wondered: “All this freedom and opportunity are breathtaking. Do we deserve them, and can we possibly live up to their obligations?”

Divorce loomed large in Johnson’s life. Her parents’ marriage ended when she was 6 years old, and they moved to separate coasts, leaving Johnson to shuttle back and forth between her mother’s New York home and her father’s star-studded Hollywood life for much of her childhood and adolescence. “My heart begins to tear, a long ragged rent which I have spent my life trying to mend,” she reflected in her 1982 memoir You Can Go Home Again, looking back on the dissolution of her family. She recalled how her mother’s attempts to become “an elegant divorced lady in a lovely house in the most exciting city in the world” transitioned into a second marriage to a possessive man who resented Nora when she returned home for a time as an adult after her own first marriage failed.

By the time she turned 32 in 1965, Johnson had already been married, divorced, and married a second time herself. In The Atlantic’s June 1961 issue, in which “The Captivity of Marriage” was published, she was introduced to readers as “happily married and the mother of two daughters.” When “A Marriage on the Rocks” was printed in the July 1962 issue,those details were omitted from her introduction. By the time she published You Can Go Home Again at the age of 59, her second marriage had also ended in divorce. In that sense, she fulfilled the melancholy predictions of “Sex and the College Girl” twice over.

But she had also built a successful career as a writer of novels, memoirs, articles, and, once, in collaboration her father, a movie based on The World of Henry Orient. Decades later, in an essay for The New York Times, she wrote about something she hadn’t predicted: finding love again. Johnson “was a long-divorced 71”; George was 83 and “recently widowed.” He became her third husband. “What astonished us,” she wrote, “was that the electricity we generated was as strong and compelling as love had been 50 years before, that it scrambled the brain every bit as much. Yet more surprising was that we had a rousing and delightful sex life.”

They still faced daunting choices and disappointments. At first they lived together in Florida, but they grew bored and moved to New York, only to grow bored there too, and be cold, and miss Florida. They dealt with natural disasters and health problems. They had difficult conversations. And then, seven years after they met, George died.

All Johnson’s stories resist the neat closure of the happily ever after. The security that Joe seems to present in “Sex and the College Girl” proves illusory; love degrades, fractures apart, or abruptly ends. “Marriage, entered upon maturely, is the only life for most women,” Johnson wrote in 1961. “But it is a way of life, not a magic bag of goodies at the end of the road.” Even old age, retirement, and George, who she said “brought joy and magic to my life,” don’t put the uncertain possibility of other paths to rest or stave off the sting of disappointment.

But her stories also resist the closure of a final failure. The college girl grows up, gets married, gets divorced, gets married again. She makes the wrong choices and then gets to make new ones. “This, then, is what the result is for a girl who has been brought up in a world where the only real value is self-betterment,” Johnson concluded in 1959. “She has had to create her own right and wrong, by trial and error and endless discussion.”

This is the story that Johnson wrote again and again, for several decades, until she died in 2017: There’s no happily ever after, or any ever after at all, but there’s happiness. Heartbreak. Regret. Magic. Surprise. Her extraordinary work was also a life lived, and recorded in pieces, over decades of love stories.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Here’s How To Decide On A Safe Word

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No matter who you’re sleeping with, how long you’ve been sleeping with them, and what type of sex you’re having — if you’re not feeling it anymore, you’re allowed to tap out at any point, for any reason. While it’s important to discuss consent and knowing what you and your partner(s) are comfortable with before turning up the heat, knowing something like how to decide on a safe word can be a great way to keep everyone safe and comfortable during sex.

“A safe word is a word selected by sexual partners together that when used indicates one partner would like to pause sexual activity for any reason,” McKenna Maness, sex educator and former education and prevention coordinator at The Santa Cruz AIDS Project (SCAP), tells Elite Daily. “Perhaps sex got too intense, or the partner is physically uncomfortable or in more pain than they would like to be, or roleplaying crossed into something less desirable for that person, they’re overstimulated— in any of these cases, the partner who would like to stop can say their safe word and the other partner would know that it is time to stop immediately and check in!”

Although having a safe word can be a tool for communicating with your partner(s), it it no way means that partner(s) are allowed to skip the boundary convo or try something new without first getting consent. “It should not be your goal to make someone use their safe word. A safe word exists for reasons of safety. Boundaries are made for a reason and not everyone likes theirs’ pushed. At the same time, it does not make you weak to safe word out,” Lola Jean, sex educator and mental health professional says.

“Safe words” have roots within the BDSM community and are often associated with more kinky types sex. Additionally, expressing when you’re not feeling something or need a time out, can be useful in all types of sexual activity — from bondage and role play, to gentle spooning and basic missionary. Whether you’re going at it and your legs are in a weird position so it kind of hurts, or you want to check to make sure your contraceptive is in place, a “safe word” is nothing more than a signal that you need to stop and check in.

“You always have the right to stop whatever you and your partner(s) are doing to each other for any reason — communication is key and safe words facilitate that!” Maness says. If you just got your IUD replaced or you’ve had the worst day ever and can’t stop thinking about your terrible coworker Shannon, you may not realize that you’re not trying to have sex tonight until you’ve started to have sex. Safe words, then, are like an immediate “eject button” from sex, without feeling pressure to explain what you’re feeling in the moment, before winding down the physical touching or expressing everything on your mind to your partner(s).

When choosing a safe word, it may be helpful to pick a universal phrase — like traffic light colors. “It’s easier to remember the difference between yellow and red even when in the depths of sub space,” Jeans says. “You can add words like ‘Red Stop’ to end completely as opposed to just “Red” to stop what you are currently doing.” If your first grade teacher ever used a paper traffic light as a public-shame discipline system (I’m triggered) or if you’ve ever been in a moving vehicle, it’s easy to remember that “Red means stop.” Words like traffic light colors, that hold deep cultural significance can be great choices for a safe word, as you’re unlikely to forget them.

If you’re not a big talker during sex or a verbal safe word doesn’t feel comfortable, Maness suggests incorporating a physical “safe word” or a physical signal that you need a time out. Yet, like a safe word, a physical tap-out should be a motion you wouldn’t otherwise do during sex. “Maybe tapping your partner’s shoulder or winking, a peace sign or crossed fingers — as long as they will see it and understand it,” Maness says.

If you’re someone who likes to laugh or joke during sex, it may be a good fit for you and your partner(s) to choose a funny safe word. “My safe word is ‘Mike Pence’ because that would make someone stop dead in their tracks during a scene to question what was going on —plus I do like a safe word that makes me giggle,” Jean says. Although humor may play an important role, Jean also speaks to the importance of finding a word that’s memorable and literally easy to say. “When choosing a safe word, it’s important that it is something you can easily remember and say. It should be a word that would likely not come up within play or a word you don’t say very often. (I rarely would use Mike Pence’s name in my sexy times.) Mike Pence is also an easy two syllable punch.”

Maness too agrees that choosing a safe word ideally means picking something unforgettable. “It has to be something you will absolutely be sure to remember during sex. If you are single or non-monogamous, you can choose one just for yourself and communicate it before sex, and if you have a partner you consistently hook up with, whatever that looks like for you, you can decide together what to use,” Maness says. “It could be parachute. It could be persimmon. It could be shovel. Just make sure it’s memorable and you both/all know what it means.”

Maness also suggests thinking about a word you wouldn’t otherwise say when having sex. Something completely random like an inanimate object, an inside joke, or something otherwise unfamiliar to the communication you and your partner(s) typically have during sex. Though it may feel right to have your safe word be something silly or totally random, using it is a serious move. “Using a safe word — even with a long term partner — has a certain weight to it that other words do not. A safe word means business. It means slow the f*ck down and check in with your person,” Jean says.

Of course just like finding the right safe word for you, understanding exactly what your safe word will mean is another important conversation. “It’s important to set forth what the safe word or signal means too— usually it means ‘stop now’ but you could also ask your partner to give you physical space when you use it, or tell them you want comfort and aftercare at the point where you use it,” Maness says. “Using a safe word is revoking consent in that moment. Your partner shouldn’t take offense, or be upset or hurt. You aren’t necessarily ending the sex permanently, although if you are that’s fine too.”

If using a safe word means your boundaries were crossed, you may want to further discuss with your partner how you’re feeling and what you need to feel comfortable and safe when having sex. Your safe word could mean anything from, “Your knee is knocking into my hip and it kinda hurts can we switch positions” to “I don’t like where this is going, we need to stop”. Having an open dialogue with your partner about what your safe word means and how it will be used is just as important as choosing the right word for you. “It’s a great tool that just requires honest/open conversation,” Maness says.

If you are thinking about the right safe word for you, take time to ponder your personal boundaries, preferences, and the types of sex you do and (maybe more importantly) do not want to be having. During any sexual encounter — a LTR, one night stand, or super hot orgy with ninety people — the most important thing factor is active consent. When it comes to deciding on a safe word, you get to choose how it’s used, when it’s used, and what it means.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How to Make Sex More Dangerous

Refusing to provide children with medically accurate sex education isn’t ideological — it’s negligent.

By Andrea Barrica

I cried the first time I saw a naked man. As a young woman growing up in a conservative Catholic household, I couldn’t even look at my own genitals, and thought I would go to hell for masturbating. The abstinence-only education I received — at school, at home, in the church — left me with years of shame, isolation and fear.

I’ve watched the recent battles over allowing comprehensive sex ed in Colorado, Utah and Idaho, and I know how much is at stake for children. As a sex educator and entrepreneur, I’ve spoken with thousands of similarly miseducated young people, and I know the mental and physiological damage it can inflict.

Americans laugh at the embarrassment parents face in talking to kids about sex. But it’s not a joke. Fewer students now receive comprehensive sex ed in our country than at any time in the past 20 years. Since the late 1990s, conservative activists — often with the help of conservative presidents — have steadily chipped away at sex education by funding and mandating abstinence-only policies in schools.

Only about half of all school districts in the United States require any sex ed at all. Of those that do, most mandate or stress abstinence-only instruction. No birth control. No sexually transmitted infection prevention. No consent

In fact, 18 states require that educators tell students that sex is acceptable only within the context of marriage. Seven states prohibit teachers — under penalty of law — from acknowledging the existence of L.G.B.T.Q. people other than in the context of H.I.V. or to condemn homosexuality. Only 10 states even reference “sexual assault” or “consent” in their sex education curriculums.

And in districts where comprehensive sex education is provided, parents are largely allowed to opt out of such instruction for their children.

Conservatives often frame sex ed as government overreach, arguing that lessons in sexuality and relationships are best provided by parents. But most parents can’t or don’t provide such guidance. Refusing to provide children with medically accurate information about their own sexual development isn’t ideological; it’s negligent.

It’s not even effective. States that place a heavy emphasis on abstinence-only sex ed have seen much higher rates of teen pregnancy, even when studies control for factors like income and education levels.

During the Obama administration, funding for abstinence-only sex education was shifted toward more comprehensive sex education — and teen pregnancy dropped nationwide by 41 percent. The Trump administration, embracing an abstinence-only approach, has reversed course, cutting more than $200 million in funding for the program.

Despite the dreams of social conservatives, few teens actually practice abstinence. Nearly 60 percent of students have sex before they graduate from high school, according to some surveys. Many do so without any instruction from parents or schools on condoms, infections or consent.

Perhaps that’s why one in four American women will become pregnant by the time they turn 20.

Or why a quarter of all new cases of sexually transmitted infections occur in teenagers — and the number of S.T.I.s has been at all-time highs.

Or why only 41 percent of American women have described their first sexual experience as wanted.

When we refuse to teach students about sex, we don’t stop sex — we just make it more dangerous. And it’s not just because of S.T.I.s.

Kids who lack information and ownership over their bodies are more likely to be taken advantage of. When children are taught that all premarital sex is negative, it’s harder for them to fight, or report, abuse or coercion.

Abstinence education negates the possibility of consent. When I was a teen, I was taught that men would try to get sex from me, and that my job was to say no. That made me feel as if the coercion and violations that happened to me were my fault. All sexual acts are equally wrong, so if a boy went too far on a date with me, it was my fault for letting him touch me at all.

Keeping children in the dark allows predators to set the narrative. They count on the culture of silence and the sense of shame. When virginity is prized as the highest honor, those who are assaulted can feel even more worthless — and may avoid reporting abusive or predatory behavior out of shame and confusion.

For L.G.B.T.Q. children, things can be even more bleak. A lack of inclusive sex education contributes to feelings of isolation and shame, while enabling bullies. L.G.B.T.Q. kids have even fewer resources, and face more drastic consequences — from physical abuse to homelessness — when they attempt to report assaults.
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When we promote abstinence over medically accurate sexual health, it inflicts a lifetime of physical and psychological harm on young people.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In many countries, the right to accurate information about sexual health is deemed essential. Children raised in the Netherlands, for example, begin sex ed in kindergarten. American teens give birth at a rate that is five times higher than that of their Dutch counterparts. Most Dutch teens report their first sexual experience positively.

We joke about sex because it’s difficult for us to talk about. And in part because our parents weren’t able to talk with us about it, we’re unable to talk with our kids. We can break the cycle for the next generation of young people by fighting for accessible and comprehensive sex education.

Their safety is more important than our shame.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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5 Healthy Relationship Boundaries You Should Set From The First Date

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When you first start seeing someone new, the thought of setting healthy relationship boundaries might slip your mind. It’s easy to get caught up in all the butterflies when your date walks in and seems to be every bit as cute and charming as you hoped they’d be, but setting clear boundaries from the beginning is a great dating habit to have. Talking about what you want and need and figuring out where you stand helps set you up for success with a person you might want to enter into a relationship with. And at the very least, it helps you weed out people who aren’t as compatible with you.

“The first few dates can set the foundation for your reading your potential partner accurately,” psychotherapist, author, and relationships specialist LeslieBeth Wish tells Elite Daily. “But you need to be sure to use the best building blocks. The goals of your first few dates are to test your initial intuitive assessments about this new person. And the smartest way to do that is to ask effective questions and to set clear boundaries.”

So, what kind of boundaries should you be setting from the beginning of a budding new relationship? From communication to intimacy, here are some things you might consider discussing from the first date.

1 Clarify Your Communication Styles

From the beginning, you should both make it clear how you prefer communication to be. This means mentioning things like texting styles and talking about how you feel about social media. Do you want to text all day, every day? Or would you prefer to touch base once a day and maybe share the occasional meme on Instagram?

“[Both people] should identify what their communication styles are going to be so that one is not either offended or overwhelmed by the communication,” author and relationships expert Alexis Nicole White tells Elite Daily.

You just want to make sure that you’re both on the same page about how you want to communicate and how often from the get-go. And of course, if you end up in a relationship, things might change as you get more serious, so make sure you think about your needs and talk about them as they evolve.

2 Share Your Personal Space Requirements

Personal space encompasses a lot of things, so make sure you really think about your needs. How much time do you need to yourself? How private do you prefer to be? (Would you share your phone password with a partner?) Ask yourself questions like this so that, when you find yourself on a date that’s going well with someone you want to keep seeing, you can talk about what’s important to you.

“Individuals should address their space requirements immediately in the beginning of the relationship so that it is clear,” White says.

This is another thing that will likely change over time, as more and more things come up over the course of a relationship. On the first date, it might just be a discussion of how much time you like to spend with a partner, for example. In a serious relationship that’s moving toward living together or getting married, on the other hand, you’ll definitely want to talk boundaries in terms of finances.

3 Get On The Same Page About Future Dates

You can tell a lot about how you’re really going to click with someone by trying to make plans for future dates. You want to be on the same page in terms of what sorts of things you’re interested in and what activities suit both of your lifestyles. Wish suggests talking about what kinds of dates you both like going on and setting boundaries that way — with an emphasis on making your dates “resemble real life.”

“Most of healthy, long-term relationships spend their time doing ordinary things!” Wish says. “Take charge to set a boundary for how you would like your next few dates to be. Go for walks, attend free local events, meet at your favorite breakfast or lunch spot. And, yes, even add a few errands.”

This will help set the course for how your (potential!) relationship goes, and as a bonus, will help you get to know your date better.

4 Be Clear About Commitment And What You Want

White also points out that it’s important to address commitment head-on.

“[Both people] should be clear about what their expectations are in a relationship as far as commitment is concerned,” White says.

If, for example, you’re looking for a serious, monogamous relationship, but the person you’re on a date with is looking for something more casual or open, it doesn’t really matter how much chemistry you have — it’s just not going to work out. This is definitely something you want to be up front with about from the beginning, so that neither person gets hurt or feels like they’ve wasted their time.

5 Know Where You Stand On Physical Intimacy

And last but not least, if physical intimacy comes up on the first date, it’s best to address it before anything happens. If, for example, you don’t like to kiss on the first date, mentioning it before it happens ensures that you both feel more comfortable. Or, if you can’t tell if your date is OK with a first date kiss or even something like holding hands, the best thing you can do is just ask! “Can I kiss you?” is both a great way to get consent and an opportunity to start a conversation about how you both want to move forward.

It’s OK to be intimate or even have sex on the first date (though Wish does suggest setting a “sex-pectation boundary”) so long as you both are into it. White brought up an important reminder, which is that “no one should feel entitled to having sex” when dating new people. (And really, that goes for every scenario!)

The important thing to remember in any dating situation is that you want to make sure you and the other person are on the same page. Whether it’s when you want to text each other or if and when you want to take things to a more physical level, it’s all about communication. Setting healthy boundaries from the beginning can only help.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Age Doesn’t Determine Whether A Person Is Ready For Sex.

Here’s What Does!

By Nichole Fratangelo

First-time sex has a lot of logistics attached to it—like where it happened, when it happened, and who it happened with. For most of us, it’s the “when” that holds a ton of weight. As a society, we tend to place so much importance on how old we were when we first shared that intimate moment with someone else. We rarely even consider if we were mentally, emotionally, and physically ready to do it. Now, new research shows your age really isn’t the only thing that matters when it comes to sexual readiness; there’s much more in-depth criteria that includes physical, emotional, and psychosocial well-being.

A study published in the journal BMJ Sexual and Reproductive Health questioned 2,825 people between ages 17 and 24 about their first sexual experience, including the nature of their relationship with the person they had their first sex with, both of their ages, and how much sexual experience their partner had. The researchers also asked about their socioeconomic status, their education level, family structure, ethnicity, and how and when they’d been taught about sex.

What does it mean to be “ready” for sex?

Rather than focusing on age as a key factor, the researchers used four distinct points to gauge how ready each person was based on the World Health Organization’s standards for sexual health. WHO defines sexual health as “a state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being in relation to sexuality,” which includes a “positive and respectful approach to sexuality and sexual relationships, as well as the possibility of having pleasurable and safe sexual experiences, free of coercion, discrimination, and violence.”

Only those who met all four criteria were considered “sexually competent”—that is, ready to have sex—at the time they first did it.

“The concept of ‘sexual competence’ represents an alternative approach to timing of first sexual intercourse, considering the contextual attributes of the event, rather than simply age at occurrence,” the researchers wrote in the paper. “This departs from the traditional framing of all sexual activity among teenagers as problematic, and recognises that young age alone does not threaten sexual health, any more than older age safeguards it.”

Here are the four main criteria:

1. Contraceptive use

Are you using birth control of some sort? A person who isn’t willing and prepared to use contraception during sex is not mature enough to be having sex. That’s why researchers included it as such a major point, especially for those doing it for the first time. Of those surveyed, most people did use reliable contraception, but around one in 10 did not.

2. Autonomy

Are you having sex because you truly want to do it, or does it have to do with peer pressure or drunkenness? Sex should always be on your own accord and not because it’s something everyone else around you is doing.

3. Consent

Here’s a crucial one: Did both parties verbally and physically agree to have sex? If not, neither party was ready to do the deed—one person was forced into it and experienced sexual assault, and the other person assaulted someone, which is the furthest thing from sexual competence. The researchers excluded instances of forced sex from their study, but they noted that almost one in five women had reported not being in charge of the decision to have sex for the first time.

4. The “right” timing

Do you feel like this is the “right time”? Participants reported whether they personally felt like they’d picked the appropriate time in their lives to start having sex. Though the study didn’t specify, there are many personal reasons why it is or isn’t a good time to start having sex; they weren’t ready to have sex—you might be struggling with stress or insecurity and don’t want to complicate it by introducing intimacy in your life, or you might be very erotically charged and have a lot of free time, so why not? Other factors like finding a partner they feel attracted to and comfortable with could factor into this question.

More women than men felt their first sexual experience did not happen at the right time—40 percent versus 27 percent, respectively. This was the most commonly reported negative feature of first-time sex.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Encourage teens to discuss relationships, experts say

BY Carolyn Crist</a

Healthcare providers and parents should begin talking to adolescents in middle school about healthy romantic and sexual relationships and mutual respect for others, a doctors’ group urges.

Obstetrician-gynecologists, in particular, should screen their patients routinely for intimate partner violence and sexual coercion and be prepared to discuss it, the Committee on Adolescent Health Care of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advises.

“Our aim is to give the healthcare provider a guide on how to approach adolescents and educate them on the importance of relationships that promote their overall wellbeing,” said Dr. Oluyemisi Adeyemi-Fowode of Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, who co-authored the committee’s opinion statement and resource for doctors published in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

“We want to recognize the full spectrum of relationships and that not all adolescents are involved in sexual relationships,” she said in an email. “This acknowledges the sexual and non-sexual aspects of relationships.”

Adeyemi-Fowode and her coauthor Dr. Karen Gerancher of Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, suggest creating a nonjudgmental environment for teens to talk and recommend educating staff about unique concerns that adolescents may have as compared to adult patients. Parents and caregivers should be provided with resources, too, they write.

“As individuals, our days include constant interaction with other people,” Adeyemi-Fowode told Reuters Health. “Learning how to effectively communicate is essential to these exchanges, and it is a skill that we begin to develop very early in life.”

In middle school, when self-discovery develops, parents, mentors and healthcare providers can help adolescents build on these communication skills. As they spend more time on social networking sites and other electronic media, teens could use guidance on how to recognize relationships that positively encourage them and relationships that hurt them emotionally or physically.

Primarily, healthcare providers and parents should discuss key aspects of a healthy relationship, including respect, communication and the value of people’s bodies and personal health. Equality, honesty, physical safety, independence and humor are also good qualities in a positive relationship.

As doctors interact with teens, they should also be aware of how social norms, religion and family influence could play a role in their relationships.

Although the primary focus of counseling should help teens define a healthy relationship, it’s important to discuss unhealthy characteristics, too, the authors write. This includes control, disrespect, intimidation, dishonesty, dependence, hostility and abuse. They cite a 2017 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of young women in high school that found about 11 percent had been forced to engage in sexual activities they didn’t want, including kissing, touching and sexual intercourse. About 9 percent said they were physically hurt by someone they were dating.

For obstetrician-gynecologists, the initial reproductive health visit recommended for girls at ages 13-15 could be a good time to begin talking about romantic and sexual health concerns, the authors write. They also offer doctors a list of questions that may be helpful for these conversations, including “How do you feel about relationships in general or about your own sexuality?” and “What qualities are important to someone you would date or go out with?”

Health providers can provide confidentiality for teens but also talk with parents about their kids’ relationships. The committee opinion suggests that doctors encourage parents to model good relationships, discuss sex and sexual risk, and monitor media to reduce exposure to highly sexualized content.

“Without intentionally talking to them about respectful, equitable relationships, we’re leaving them to fend for themselves,” said Dr. Elizabeth Miller, chief of adolescent and young adult medicine at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, who wasn’t involved in the opinion statement.

Miller recommends FuturesWithoutViolence.org, a website that offers resources on dating violence, workplace harassment, domestic violence and childhood trauma. She and colleagues distribute the organization’s “Hanging Out or Hooking Up?” safety card (bit.ly/2PQfxEM), which offers tips to recognize and address adolescent relationship abuse, to patients and parents, Miller said.

“More than 20 years of research shows the impact of abusive relationships on young people’s health,” Miller said in a phone interview. “Unintended pregnancies, sexually-transmitted infections, HIV, depression, anxiety, suicide, disordered eating and substance abuse can stem from this.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!