Looking for love in all the wrong places: before and after casual sex
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Looking for love in all the wrong places: before and after casual sex
From a very young age all I wanted when I grew up was to find love, be married and have six sons. But through a series of events that dream was shattered and I started looking for love in all the wrong places.
I met my first boyfriend when I was fifteen years old; I was so happy to be with someone who loved me but I fell pregnant at the age of sixteen, the pregnancy was terminated and I was forbidden to see my boyfriend again. I was broken-hearted, as we had planned to have a future together.
I started dating again a few years later but I felt different after my termination; I felt dirty somehow and I thought no one would want to be with me. I refrained from having sex again with any boyfriends until I was eighteen, when I entered into a steady relationship for two years. We had what I thought was a loving relationship and I had high hopes that we would get married until he slept with someone else, and once again my heart was broken. I was devastated and became less trusting of men and I started to blame myself for his infidelity by finding things wrong with myself, which culminated in my feeling very insecure and having low self-worth.
I jumped straight into a couple more short term physical relationships where I dumped them in a not-so-caring manner and when I look back it was because I had been so hurt in the previous relationships that I decided to hurt them first before I had time to open up enough to be hurt again. My heart had started to harden and I was beginning to toughen up around men.
Then it was all about sex
I moved to the Gold Coast in the mid-seventies and it was a time of open casual sex, women’s liberation, ban the bra, one night stands and it was where I started looking for love in all the wrong places. I started mixing with a group of women who loved to party; we smoked marijuana, drank flagons of wine, loved to dance and listen to live music and we would do our best to hook up with a man and take them home and have sex. Sexual gratification and relief became the name of the game. It was sport in a way, to see if I could get a man, and I thought that if I was good in bed that I might just find someone to settle down with. The next day we would all discuss the night before and laugh about how we dragged a man home and had a great night, but deep down I knew that it did not feel right and there was this underlying guilt afterwards, but I did not know any other way.
I equated sex as being love and that intimacy was sex and I was in deep illusion to think that it would be the basis for any lasting relationship.
Every relationship I had was based around sex – we would always get straight into it and I made it my business to be good in bed; there was never any getting to know each other first.
This went on for years, and every time I entered into a live-in relationship, which would last around 18 months to two years, the relationship would collapse and disintegrate around me and I could never understand why. Especially when I thought I was ticking all the boxes of being good in bed, a great cook, kept a clean home and was waiting on them hand and foot. I always put them first and my own needs last, hence my dissatisfaction with life and relationships.
I finally got married when I was 38 years old and the marriage lasted seven years. Once again the relationship was about sex and fun but that was not enough to sustain the relationship. I stuck it out for years even though I knew it was not true love, all because I did not want to be seen as a failure.
I spent a few years on my own after that and then entered another seven-year relationship. We had sex on the first night we met and I fell into the same trap of a relationship with no true connection or foundation, knowing from the very beginning that something was not right. My partner was exploring internet pornography and I felt even worse about myself than before and started wearing baggy clothes and putting on weight and feeling very unattractive.
Finding Love in all the right places
While I was in this relationship I came across Universal Medicine therapies and attended a number of presentations by Serge Benhayon.
What has unfolded for me over the ensuing eight years has been a realisation and an understanding of the low self-worth I carried and why I behaved in the way I did. I would look in the mirror and find anything about my face and body to pick to pieces and do the self-beat-up of not being good enough, so I abused my body through sex by allowing it to be used as it was. What also became clear was that I was equally abusive of the men I partnered up with by using them for sex and holding back the love I had to offer.
To have a true relationship with another one must start with by having a relationship with oneself, but how does one do that?
I started with Sacred Esoteric Healing, a gentle hands-on healing modality where I was able to feel my body and the hardness in my heart, arms and back as a result of bracing myself and shutting down the love I had to offer, and how I had closed myself off from receiving love.
I had always felt that there was something missing in my life and I found out what it was through these sessions by feeling the connection to the true me. It was so deeply settling to stop and feel the body being so still. Over time I was able to clear old hurts that were the basis of the abuse that I had imposed on my body for all those years. There was no recrimination or regret of my behaviour, but more of a nomination of what I had done and an acceptance that there might be another way to be.
Over the years my face and my whole body has softened, changed shape and I have an increased awareness around what is happening in my body at any given moment when I am present in and with it. I use the Gentle Breath Meditation® that I learnt at Universal Medicine to re-connect to me when I might be off kilter.
I have learned to love and care for myself in ways I never thought were possible. Simple things like, making my bed with care, taking baths when my body feels tired, massaging my body with cream, having daily walks and always listening to my body first and foremost.
Being intimate has taken on a whole new meaning for me – I now have an intimate relationship with my own body that I carry with me every day into all my interactions and relationships, because of the deep connection I have to myself.
This has taken away the old desire to have to be something I was not, just in the hope that I would be loved and possibly achieve intimacy by serving myself up on a sexual platter. Sex is not love, love is in everything we do in every minute of every day and when I live that, it reflects that same love to everyone and that is the true intimacy I had been looking for.
I absolutely love the woman I am today and I love my life and the intimate relationships I have with everyone. This intimate way of being no longer includes having sex for self-gratification, and there is now only making love through a body of love to reflect to others.
Now when I look in the mirror I see a loving woman looking back at me, who is just perfect as she is with no perfection needed or expected.
No more looking for love in all the wrong places – I have found the right place, right here, with me.
Thank you to Serge Benhayon, Natalie Benhayon, Universal Medicine and the many practitioners who have supported me along the way and still do to this day . . .
Filed under
Dating, Making love, Relationships, Sex, Body image
