Is It Time to Really Embrace, Enjoy and Embody Your Sexual Truth?

Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay    

“Having clear boundaries means that we are in touch with the healthy, loving part of ourselves to know what does and does not work for our higher good, and to choose accordingly.” ~Michael Mirdad

Over the last few years I’ve been doing a lot of work around boundaries, identifying my own needs, wants and desires and learning the skills of communicating and holding them in a healthy way. However, it wasn’t until my boundaries around sex were a bit challenged that I realised I had been unquestioningly operating from a paradigm of “sex belongs in a committed relationship” for as long as I can remember.

This paradigm had not resulted in good experiences or entirely healthy or fulfilling relationships. I twisted my priorities, compromised in ways that are not for my higher good across many of my needs and beliefs, shamed myself and tried to shape those significant others in fruitless attempts to fit “the whole of me” into this version of life.

Even if there was great sexual chemistry and intimacy, there was always other dimensions of me packed away painfully unable to fully express themselves, if at all, within the confines of those “committed relationships”. But there were also times when I found myself compatible with people in other areas and entered into a full romantic relationship with them, even although there really was no chemistry.

This was not a paradigm that allowed for free expression. It was constricting, there was always over-compromise and incompatibility.

I was brought up to believe that love was a feeling, one “you will just know when you feel it”. It turns out that “feeling” of attraction is a biochemical response, based on the neurobiology being wired through the years our childhood where our home life and relationships with our siblings and parents becomes our subconscious definition of love. For most of us this love was conditional.

This was reinforced in movies and TV, this mythical feeling seemed to have people do all sorts of major life changing things for love. So giving away parts of myself, not having all my needs met, wasn’t even a conscious concern, my biochemical reactions were running the show. That didn’t mean I didn’t feel the pain of having parts of myself locked away, it just meant I was used to that feeling, it felt normal.

Now I know the best relationships are the ones which are built on compatibility, and there are so many dimensions to that. It's far more than just whether you're friends and have chemistry, which is how I would have defined a good relationship up until the last few years.

Compatibility is multi dimensional, and there are a few models out there that attempt to define the various dimensions. But really we get to decide what is important and to what degree. These are things like values and beliefs, sexual chemistry, emotional intimacy, humour, interests, future goals, spirituality, affection, financial beliefs, how well you both contribute to the day to day routines and necessary functions of the home, how safe your nervous system/body feels around the other person, and even appreciating someone because you believe in who they are, regardless of what they give you, you like being around their energy.

I’m an ideas person, I have big ideas about the ways in which our world will evolve, and yet in very few of my relationships have I experienced people who “get me” in that way. Most often I was disregarded for my talents and capacity for ideas and steered more towards what I could bring to the table practically. I didn’t presence myself in that way, I was used to it, it was normal in my childhood home and the society I was brought up among. And that is just one way in which I’ve over-compromised.

In her first novel Amy Snow, set in the early Victorian era of high society England, Tracey Rees captures beautifully the kind of attitudes that perpetuated female oppression that were still evident in my own childhood; and still exist in many places in the world today.

The novel centres around Amy Snow, named for the bank of snow she was abandoned on as a baby. Amy was found by eight-year-old Aurelia Vennaway, the only heir of Lord and Lady Vennaway. It is through Aurelia’s stubborn wanting that Amy is allowed to remain in their home, brought up by the servants and despised by the masters. Aurelia, however, treats her as a little sister; she is Amy’s only advocate and becomes the light of her life and centre of her existence.

When Aurelia dies of illness in her twenties, the now seventeen-year-old Amy must leave her so called home and go on a journey of discovery to seek her own identity and place in the world. Aurelia has left her a trail to follow that exposes Amy to more people, places, ideas and ideals, giving her choices beyond her upbringing. It is through this journey that there are so many parallels with any of us who are making our way in the world – whether for the first time or starting over…again.

This paragraph, expressed by Aurelia’s mother – Lady Vennaway - captures something of the attitudes I was brought up regarding sex:

“She had loved every moment with him she told me. More than anything she had loved their coupling – in the hay loft behind the dairy! She felt her soul flood with light, so she said. I stopped her there, I would listen to no more. I had extensive experience of these things after all, and her suggestion that it could be enjoyable was obscene. Profane!”

But the young heiress had found her own way in these matters, despite not marrying due to her illness, and advises Amy posthumously through letters of a love affair she had:

“I pray for you that you might experience what I felt, when you are ready and the time is right. It was as soft and silky as the twilight and as luminous as the stars. It felt as though the whole world was ordering itself around me. I felt I were drinking him in through my fingers, palms, lips…absorbing every inch to store in my memory. There was a fever to it, Amy, that was greater than I could have imagined. It felt ancient. It felt sacred. I am still marveling, years later, at the wonder of it and that it is so forbidden.”

As Amy starts out on her journey she meets two very different men, one she falls in love with, the other she is rather duped by in a way that “offends her sensibilities”. Again, I could relate to this from the kind of men I was warned about growing up:

“Thinking of Quentin Garland’s shameless usage of me makes my skin crawl. I feel so horribly stupid when I remember all the moments that my instincts told me the truth and I barely noticed, so bedazzled was I by the elegant figure he cut. I felt honoured and validated by his attentions when I was in low spirits, when I felt like an outcast, yet it was all mixed up in a sense that something wasn’t right. My instincts whispered to me but my insecurities made me deaf to them….By what right did he decide that my life, my heart, my future might be employed to serve his interests! Despicable regard for humanity!”

One of the people Amy has met on her journey is the indomitable and rather formidable elderly Mrs  Riversthorpe. She sets Amy straight:

“Pfff, sensibilities! Amy, you were born into disgrace and have been treated as such most of your life… You’re a young woman travelling alone in a society that reviles independence in a woman, you invite censure and misunderstanding! You can’t afford sensibilities!

I was young when I was seduced by a scoundrel who abandoned me.. A similar thing had happened a few years earlier to another young lady of my acquaintance. She killed herself for the shame of it…Clearly I made a different choice, anyone who would rather be dead than disgraced s a fool…

That was sixty five years ago. They have not all been easy years, they have not all been pretty, and they were filled with trials, but they were my years – all mine – and no one can tell me I should not have had them.

I have been talked about, you may believe it. Many of the stories are true, and many are not. That is the way of it when you step outside the cage. But I will not deign to correct a single one of them. So here you are, you find me not respectable but powerful, which is a different thing altogether.”

I suspect we all need a Mrs Riversthorpe in our lives to set our priorities straight. Now that I have weeded out this limiting belief that was taught to me but actually doesn't belong to me, that sex has to be part of a committed relationship, I am on a different track. I have a different view of it.

After a long, hard look I’ve discovered that my own truth is as long as I feel like I can delight in someone - and vice versa - with reverence, then that is what matters most. There has to be attraction, desire and respect. 

I am sad that I allowed the oppression that “sex only belongs in a committed relationship” brought, instead of allowing myself full and free expression. But I am wiser now, softer, more relaxed and in myself.

This part of me says I need not commit myself to a relationship if it were to mean giving away other parts of myself, I am free to express those also, I just need to sit people at my table accordingly. The other part was an illusion, a constriction of society’s making, a mother trying to do the right thing protecting her daughter’s virtue.

But I was never flighty of nature, I was always as deep as the ocean, there was never any real need to protect. Instead it created alarm, stagnation, held me back. I know pleasure and I know pain, I am now free to choose the former where there is attraction, desire and reverence. There is sanctity and healing to be found here in the empowerment and full expression of oneself in the embodied form.

There has been grief that it has taken me so long to learn this, but also gratitude that I finally have. If I can borrow from Tracey Rees for one final quote as Amy comes to the journey’s end that Aurelia set out for her, and she burns her letters to ensure her secrets remain so:

“My own chronicles too I set alight, the pages that I have covered with heartache and memories… they flare and flourish and suddenly they are gone. I say farewell to that whole part of my life. I shed my misfortunes in the fire, they do not define me. And in this way I claim another blank canvas on which to paint my identity – and my future.”

What I have come to believe is that sex is sacred, it is ancient, empowering, healing and should be treated as such. But the only relationship I need to be committed to is the one with myself. What is your relationship with your sexuality? And is it one that limits you or does it set you free?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy  Should We Abandon Happiness as the Impossible Dream? Do You Need to Change Your Narrative Around Sexuality? Relationships are Just a Series of Moments – True Love Lies Within and How Do You Know When You Are the Best and Highest Version of Yourself? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.