Tag: intimacy

Friends and Sex

If you can’t treat and trust your partner like a friend, then maybe you’re not ready to move forward in your relationship in love.

How do you treat your friends?

You are understanding and forgiving of your friends. You have a sort of unconditional love with your friends. They can do crazy things, and you can laugh with them about it. They can make huge mistakes and you can feel sorry for them because you know their intentions were good.

If you and your friend get into a heated debate, you can both walk away with your feelings hurt, then the next time you meet, you’ve put the issue behind, almost as if it didn’t happen and resume your relationship.

You can be supportive and love them no matter what they say, no matter what they do. Your friendship is pliable and never at risk of being lost. These are the conditions of your longest-lasting friendships. The kind where you can go without seeing them due to life circumstances, and no matter how long it’s been, you pick up right where you left off without missing a beat.

These are your real life BFFs.

Then there’s your relationship with your partner. How can you compare the two?

“Well,” you interject, “I’m not having sex with my friends.”

Good point.

It is well known that there is a bio-chemical reaction that takes place when bodies start to intermingle and are penetrated by another, not to mention the effects of the psychological and spiritual exchange that happens when body fluids are exposed to another.

It’s the nature of human beings. It’s what keeps us separate from the other mammals on our planet. Something about how we were designed has a part of us longing to have a long-term committed, loving, supportive, and monogamous relationship.

As much as some of us try to reduce sex to just an ordinary natural act, our body chemistry and tendency to deeply attach, even if against our will, overshadows any analytical representation that there really is a difference between having sex and making love.

Yet, there is an acute distinction between the two.

“Having sex,” refers to the simple act of copulation between two consenting adults. The idea is that these two parties can engage in and enjoy the act of having sex without all the complications and attachments of having a romantic relationship.

While this is an excellent ideal, I can tell you, based on the singles and couples I’ve consulted with, nothing could be further from the truth. These stories of one-night stands or frivolous sexual encounters did not come at a price, and science backs up and predicts the price being paid, whether you admit it at the time, or ever, the fact remains, there is no such thing as casual sex.

“Making love,” on the other hand, is the romanticized version of sexual intimacy which assumes a loving, (preferably monogamous) relationship with the intention to go on in life with each other with love, compassion, understanding and integrity.

Where things go sideways, is when one partner is making love while the other partner is having sex. There’s the rub, and there is danger ahead.

If you’ve had an experience, like this, then you have probably suffered emotional trauma and it would be understandable if you suffered love’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which would potentially include the inability to trust another potentially intimate partner.

Consider the idea of not engaging in a sexual encounter until you’re at least relatively certain that your partner has your best interests at heart. Do not go there until you feel as though he or she can be trusted by the placing of your heart in his or her hands.

Waiting until you feel as though you could love, care, understand, and accept him or her, just as you would any other friend, may be too much to ask. And that’s okay.

But at least, do your best to look after yourself, which is solely your responsibility.

If you feel like you can engage in casual sex, then have the talk, set and accept the ground rules before going there. Then, the onus is on you to manage the repercussions on your own with integrity.

Help to mitigate the effects of having these kinds of relationships is available to you, when you are ready.

If you are going to engage in making love, then by all means, have the love talk before you go there, if love is your intention.

No amount of preparation and caution can protect your heart from experiencing pain in a love relationship, but without love and the vulnerability with accompanies it, life is less than it could be.

Nakedness in Relationships

Relationships can be scary, especially the more intimate the relationship the greater the exposures. There are various degrees of nakedness in relationships. In less intimate relationships there is less nakedness, while the most intimate relationships include full nudity.

Of course, I am not referring to the nakedness of being unclothed, but of being fully exposed, allowing yourself to be seen intimately without any social or emotional covering or façade.

We all desire to connect with other people, to know one another to varying degrees. We find comfort in having people in our lives with whom we can relax, and just be ourselves.

You are so much more than your public persona. You have a particular view of yourself, of how you want the world to perceive you, so you adopt a fully adorned representation of yourself to present to the world. No one knows this is just an act, except for you.

Yet, you desire to drop all the act and to be fully open, honest, transparent, and fully naked, loved and accepted for who you are with no pretense, agenda, or need for covering the vulnerable you who is hidden underneath the multiple layers of your external representation.

You have many levels of intimacy, where you shed some of the public personas and let others have glimpses of who you really are among friends and family. Still, you yearn for someone with whom you can be fully naked, without the fear of stripped down to the most intimate details of your life and who you really are.

In most cases, the only hope you have is to find a romantic mate with whom you can share the most intimate details of your life without the threat of judgment. This is love. As much as you desire such a level of vulnerable intimacy, it is possible to trust someone not to judge you or disclose your innermost secrets to the world?

To be fully naked, not just in the body, but in the soul, where your partner can see and hopefully some grasp of, level of understanding, or at least an inkling of what private things have hurt you in the past, why you have certain sensitivities, what makes you tick, and what turns you on, not just in the sexual sense, but what makes your heart sing, and why.

Where do you doubt yourself? What are your shortcomings? What are your greatest fears?

What makes you happy? What makes you sad? What makes you want to throw caution to the wind and go for it?

This level of nakedness in relationships is what engenders true intimacy, entrusting your most intimate details in full view of your closest, most intimate partner. The one you can trust with all your transparent nakedness, fully exposed, with nothing left to hide.

This represents your most intimate relationship of all, yet it is elusive, and you fear opening up in such intimacy because you fear that you cannot trust anyone with the intimate details of your life.

It is likely that you trusted someone with some intimate details of your life only to have them disregard and disrespect you, judge you for intimating such details, and/or used your openness and honest against you.

You’ve learned, the hard way, not to trust anyone.

Still, your heart yearns to be joined with someone you can fully reveal yourself, who you can trust as the witness to the completeness of your life, as you are for him or her, the same.

This is the nature of the romantic soul mate, the one with whom you may have the potential of sharing an unconditional love.

You will run across many soul mates along the journey of your life, some who are potentially the best of friends, or the most intimate of lovers.

I hear countless regrets from those who later in life realize they once, or many times, had access to a potential soul mate but did not allow the relationship to explore the possibilities due to fear.

You must be able you overcome your fear to take the risk of experiencing nakedness in relationships in order to allow the soul mate to reveal him or her -self to you.

Your fear causes you to interrupt the idea with, “But…”

You’ve got to move your but to what. “What if…?”

Your what to when, “When should I…”

Your when to now. “Now is a good time to take action.”

Make a move to take the action to see if the possibility is closer than you thought.

If it turns out it’s not, keep looking and taking action to test the water, being mindful of the nakedness, or level of transparent intimacy you share, may not include actual nudity or be sexual in any way.

Don’t let your life be filled with the regret of having let him or her get away.

He or she is out there, waiting for you to reach out.