Experiencing sex now that I am older and a bit more conscious and self-aware will continue to be an interesting experience to say the least. And I want to discuss how I have now come to view sex. This will be a lengthy read, so buckle up.
Women are often raised to accommodate and to prioritise other people(Primarily MEN). To show love through giving, through caring, through putting ourselves second. Meanwhile, men are often encouraged to pursue what they want and prioritise desire more openly, especially sexually.
So pleasure becomes strange. You become comfortable giving but are unfamiliar with receiving. You become comfortable being wanted but uncomfortable wanting. You become comfortable being touched but disconnected from being felt...and so the cycle continues
And I think that contributes to why it took me so long to realise that my experience during intimacy mattered too. I also think this connects to something that I hear women talk about all the time, which is that intimacy starts in the mind.
For many women, desire is deeply connected to the brain. You may not necessarily be in the mood at first, but the right words, the right atmosphere, the right emotional connection, feeling desired, safe, chosen, all of those things can create desire.
That is why presence, foreplay, and attention matter. Intimacy starts before anyone takes their clothes off. And I think this is also why people say we have lost the art of kissing.
The art of making out, touching, and simply being close to each other. Everything feels so outcome-driven now…every kiss must become sex…cuddle must become sex…touch must become sex.
I remember watching a tik tok of a woman talking about how she eventually started hating kissing because she realised she was only kissed before sex. Every kiss became an indication. Every cuddle became a lead-up. She realised she was never kissed simply because someone wanted to kiss her.
Underneath intimacy, a lot of women want four things among many other things. To feel loved, desired, sexually wanted and understood.
For the longest time, I did not even understand what cumming was. I knew what sex was in a general sense, but orgasms felt completely separate. The only time I ever experienced cumming was by myself and never with another person. So naturally, I developed this belief that cumming was not really something that happened during sex. It was not something I expected, and eventually it became something I stopped caring about, or so I thought.
When I first started having sex, I was having sex because my partner wanted it, not because I necessarily wanted it. So whether I came or not was irrelevant because I was not centred in the experience in the first place. Looking back now, the pattern feels obvious. He would cum, and that was the ending. That was the goal. My experience was secondary, and because that was all I knew, I accepted it.
One of the hardest things to admit when I look back, is that there genuinely felt like there was no difference between if he was using his hand or some fleshlight suction cup to jerk himself off and when he was inside me. The only difference was that I happened a body, a face, tits, and emotions attached. I was not being experienced as a person. I was not being touched because someone wanted to feel me or know me or enjoy me. I was simply there as part of somebody else’s release.
After enough experiences like that, you stop expecting your pleasure to matter because it was never part of the experience to begin with. You stop evaluating sex by whether you enjoyed it because enjoyment was never presented as something that belonged to you. So I never measured “good” sex by whether I came. Not because I thought orgasms were meaningless, but because for most of my sexual experiences, orgasms were not even part of the conversation.
As I got older, something shifted. I moved from having sex because somebody else wanted to, to having sex because I wanted to. But interestingly, my understanding of good sex still never became centred around orgasms. It became centred around connection.
When I think about intimacy, I do not think about the climax. I think about connection. I think about the difference between holding hands and having someone buried deep inside you. I think about breathing the same air, feeling their skin against yours, feeling their warmth, their heartbeat, their sweat, their weight, their reactions. I think about feeling someone be present with me and allowing myself to be present with them.
It feels grounding in a way that is difficult to explain unless you have experienced it. It feels like choosing each other in real time and reminding each other through touch and closeness that you are both there and fully experiencing one another.
I remember one moment with my ex that made something click for me. We were having sex, and I remember lying there and looking at him and realising that he was not with me at all. His eyes were closed. His head was tilted back. He was holding me, but not because he wanted to feel me. He was holding me because he needed something to hold himself up. Even his breathing felt disconnected. You could tell he was focused on building himself up to cum.
And I remember lying there and realizing that I was not enjoying what was happening. It was because he was not there with me. We were not sharing an experience or creating something together. He was having an experience, and my body simply happened to be involved in it.
That became one of the clearest moments in my life where I realised I never wanted to feel like that again. Because there is a difference between someone having sex with you and someone doing sex to you.
That “with” matters because that is the difference between feeling like a participant and feeling like a body.
Sex is not entirely about cumming, because orgasms are fleeting. They happen, and then they are over. What will play on repeat days after is the feeling…the experience
Xoxo
Nirvana