The difference between sex & making love – part 1
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The difference between sex & making love – part 1
You may have come to a place where you feel that sex as you know it is not all it was cracked up to be. You are not alone, many women and men feel the same way. They don’t want to give up on the sexual act but they start to feel dissatisfied with their love-lives and intuit that something deeper and more meaningful is possible. It is possible to recognise here that there is a difference between sex and making love, and the making love part has been missing.
Actually this is a great moment, and one to be celebrated because it means that change and expansion is now possible. The way forward may be confronting and it will definitely require a lot of honesty.
You may have come to the understanding that there is a difference between sex and making love as a single person, or as someone in a committed relationship. Perhaps you have had a number of unsatisfactory sexual experiences or even years of (at some level) just going along with sex because isn’t that what’s expected of you, and anyway, what else is there? There may be a lot of apparent reasons why you feel that something is not right with your sex-life.
Some of them might be:
- Your partner is not fulfilling you sexually.
- You feel you have to perform sexually in a certain way to please your partner.
- Orgasms have become routine without intimacy or depth of feeling.
- Orgasms are something you never experience but you feel you should.
- Sex has never really been the amazing experience you were told it was going to be.
- Sex has become habitual and quite a humdrum affair.
- You don’t experience the intimacy you would like.
What is interesting here is that although there can always be apparent external reasons why the love-life is not fulfilling, essentially none of them are really true.
That might feel like a lot to take on, so I will say it again – none of those good external reasons for why it is not working are essentially true.
Why? Because every so called external reason, if you take it apart deeply enough, will lead back to you. Try it and see. Even when someone might complain about a partner doing x, y or z then the question to be asked is:
- Why am I with them in the first place?
- Or why am I allowing myself to go along with this?
- Or why am I reacting/responding in this way?
... And you can then begin deeply contemplating those questions.
So could that mean that to begin changing our sex or love lives, we have to start with ourselves? Yes – and this applies whether we are in a committed partnership or single. (Although of course this does not mean ignoring or excusing the behaviours that our partner may be doing that are not loving.)
Firstly, we need to learn to know ourselves (which also means learning to love and appreciate ourselves) so that we can begin to understand why we are doing what we are doing with whomever. There really is no quick fix. But let’s not be hard on ourselves.
Let’s acknowledge that this is a massive subject that cannot be covered in just one article; to gain a deeper understanding of the difference between sex and making love and the other areas explored in this article please consider reading several of the articles linked here and giving yourself the time to consider some of the ideas.
Filed under
Sex, Making love, Relationships
