Sex When You Don't Feel Like It

Should I Tell? While old-school sex therapy often spoke of sharing fantasies with our partners as a means of connection and a definitive insight into the kinds of sex we want, contemporary approaches suggest it is neither necessary nor is it an accurate jumping off point for negotiating new activities, especially if your fantasies are out of sync w

Lehmiller’s research into popular fantasies

Instead of certainty, adopt a little curiosity. Put your investigative journalist hat on and allow yourself to consider the fantasy from various points of view.

If anyone knew this about me, they’d dump me, for sure! So instead, we abandon ourselves—vow to never engage with that part of ourselves, bury it deep, deep, way down. After a while, its presence becomes a distant memory but is still felt as a sense of numbing, dullness, bleakness or lethargy, a lack of enthusiasm for play, or a cloak of shame that

When we are quick to judge, criticize ourselves or others, or withdraw from lovers because of fantasies, it may be useful to slow down and be attentive to that which is making us uncomfortable.

what Morin calls the “Core Erotic Theme”

This intoxicating blend of information is the essence of what Jack Morin, PhD, defined as the “peak erotic experience.”7 Morin’s unique “Sexual Excitement Survey” (not to be confused the Dual Control Model’s sexual excitement scale [SES]), conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, invited hundreds of men and women (straight, lesbian / gay, and bisexual) to

things simply because we enjoy them with no hidden meaning or ulterior motive. They’re just good old-fashioned fun.

Fantasies about or involving objects or locations may provide an opportunity to externalize certain feelings unrelated to sex, so we can get to know them better from a manageable distance.