Sex and HeartHow I transformed devastation into love and loving lust

I received this request from a reader.

“I would really like to you to give some advice on addressing “wandering eyes” in men. Last night while walking in the park with my husband we came upon a ball field. There was a very petite well-enhanced blonde mother who was grabbing all the coachs’ attention (including her teenage son’s friends). My husband actually slowed down almost to a stop and peered around me to look at her while doing the 10 second up/down look. I stopped walking, glanced at her and looked at him–I was speechless. He was picturing her naked right there in front of me with this lustful look on his face and even looked around me to do it. I was shocked that he didn’t hide it. I know that this is a problem for a lot of women and would really appreciate some advice.”

First of all it’s normal and natural for men to check out women. It’s almost as if it’s built into their DNA. Can you in all honesty say to me that YOU NEVER notice a well-built man or one that has a certain look that makes your heart beat a little bit faster? Or maybe a man smiles at you as he passes by, and this makes you feel good, and maybe even a little spark of something sexual glimmers inside you.

Doe this mean anything to you? Do you imagine this man in your bed having sex with you? Of course not, unless you’re totally single, ready, and available, or you are just not that into your man. Unless you are trolling for a new guy, it would be a passing thought, and it’s just as quickly gone.

And so it is with your man.

Now when out with their woman, men “should” have learned along to the way to be discrete about their natural instinct to simply look, and this is all it is. For the most part, they are not even aware they have done it, given a woman a quick once over. It’s SO quick that if you had blinked when he did this, you would have missed it.

In this case and in any other similar ones, and this is VERY important, it may NOT be as you have imagined. I can almost guarantee you that if you are with a good man, it’s rarely if ever what you think.

You really DON’T know he was undressing her with his eyes. Really you don’t. You are majorly making assumptions here. Yes he was checking her out. It was likely as a reflex, as I just explained, BUT he was also looking to see what the obvious to do was about which you described. You were looking to see what was going on too, weren’t you? Commotion creates curiosity.

AND for all you know, and this is likely a more accurate depiction of this scenario, he was looking not in awe at her enhancements but in shock and horror, in astonishment. As in WOW!!! Why would she do that to herself? How silly she looks. How plastic. And the hair! Can we say so uninviting, so unappealing. How pathetic. How sad. Yuck. Of course I’m translating HIS words into girl speak.

That said, let’s say your man actually did obviously and blatantly stare at another woman, tongue hanging, eyes bugged out. It’s clear he desires her. My first question to you would be, “why are you with a man who has seemingly no regard for your feelings, who would be this disrespectful to you? He doesn’t seem at all committed.” Think about this first.

Okay so let’s say this is a first time occurrence. If his look lasts for more than an instinctive split second, and if it bothers you for more than a split second, then you need to let him know that what he did feels bad. It made you feel uncomfortable, insecure, angry, whatever it was you felt. And you must speak up in the moment.

If you initially let it go though and this incident continues to eat at you, then you still need to say something. You don’t want it to fester and then have it come out at another time in a totally inappropriate, out of proportion way. You could say something like this:

“The other night when we were out walking, it seemed as though you were ogling that blonde woman, and that felt so bad. I felt so not enough in that moment.”

A good guy would apologize and make it right is some way, in his way.

My reader’s response:

“Wow I never thought I could say anything like that if a man does that. I always felt it’s ok to look at the menu just don’t order.”

There is a distinct difference between a brief glance over that even you as a woman would engage in in this kind of situation, and flat out eyes wide staring for fifteen seconds.

BUT we don’t really know if he was staring at the woman, or if he was simply wondering what was happening or if he was staring at the “spectacle” that is she, a caricature of a real woman.

We women have a tendency to project our insecurities on to our men. And it’s okay to be mistaken.

If after voicing your feelings over what you think was going on, he still gets defensive, then you will know that maybe you were correct in your assessment, and there are maybe things you need to talk about. Maybe you need to rethink this man. But do talk first.

“Tinque…you are awesome!! I know they will look (I walked through the red light district in Amsterdam with him once)  It’s the 15 second look and re-look that made me feel icky and so undesirable…so not enough…maybe it was the fact that she had that “porn star look” (sorry but that’s what she looked like…unnatural body…fake tan…bleach blonde)…maybe scared the porn use will skyrocket again…then the sexual rejection will come back again. Maybe I feel my man doesn’t look at me that way. I wish men (more importantly…my man) would look at me with “lust in their eyes”. I felt totally turned off from him in that moment. I felt like giving up trying to deal with the lingering feelings of rejection and turning around and walking away.”

Can you see how she’s boarding that run away train in her brain? A few seconds long look at something totally freakish (and I am sure that’s exactly what he was thinking) and she has gone from, “I know men look to, I WILL be rejected. My man never looks at ME that way, with lust.”

Her fears are understandable, and maybe they are well founded since he has had a problem with porn before, but since she has chosen to be with this man, she cannot live her life thinking, “what if”.

If his porn habit escalates, if he starts neglecting her, then and only then is there something to deal with. In the meantime, she must work under the assumption he looks a little at porn or not at all. And when he notices women out in the street, it’s nothing more than a passing glance. Maybe he will think briefly that she’s attractive, but that’s it, nothing more to be thought about or done about it. If he is turned on at all, then this is only fuel for his fire for HER.

Now in this case in Amsterdam, very much like the case in the park, he may very well have been looking at her in astonishment and couldn’t stop looking because she looked liked such a cartoon. You know how people can’t get enough of looking at car wrecks even though they’re hard to look at?

And lastly I would have her ask herself this, and this is crucial:

“How do you know he doesn’t look at YOU with lust in his eyes? Have you looked? REALLY looked? Have you checked his eyes right before you make love?

Have you ever looked at HIM with lust in your eyes, soft, open, come take me eyes?”

Please think about this. Think about this long and hard, and then go give him THOSE eyes, and see what he does.

xxoo

Does it seem as though you’re just not that much in the mood much of the time? From everything you read and hear about, does it feel like you’re all alone in this? And that something must be missing in you, or maybe something is amiss with you?

Or maybe it’s the opposite, and there are many women you know or have read about who lament over the same thing, low libido, little or no desire.

Maybe you’ve always felt this way. Or maybe you used to want it all the time in the early stages of your relationships only to have this peter out. Maybe life has just taken over, and making love is the last thing on your mind. Or maybe your hormones have changed, and you just don’t want to anymore.

And your man complains. Or he doesn’t say anything, but you can feel his longing. Maybe you caught him taking care of himself in the shower or elsewhere, and this made you feel badly or sad.

Or maybe you feel like you’re missing out. Or you are just missing it. You miss the closeness and connection it brings, the passion, feeling good in that way. Your heart beating fast in anticipation. Or your heart purring contentedly after a mind blowing orgasm or even a soft, gentle one.

Is there something wrong with you? Can this even be “fixed”? Maybe you’ve resigned yourself.

If there have been sudden changes or even gradual ones, I would first suggest ruling out anything medical. Then I would recommend having blood work done or a saliva test to see if your hormones are out of balance, a common thing. Your hormones can be re-adjusted with a choice of one of the varied alternative treatments available, such as bio-identical hormones made up just for you at a compounding pharmacy.

Or you can experiment on your own with the many wonderful herbs and/or supplements available, such as black cohosh, red clover, wild yam, chasteberry/vitex, false unicorn, ginseng, evening primrose oil. I would suggest trying one at a time, and see how you feel.

DHEA, a precursor to hormone production, has been documented as being effective for treating low libido in peri and post menopausal women. DO NOT take it for more than three months at a time though. And allow a good break in between.

Regardless I find herbal supplementation useful no matter your age or sexual status. Our hormones are always fluctuating, and the balance is delicate. Finding an herb or two which works well with your body to keep you feeling more aligned and feeling good is a good thing. There are few if any people who lead completely peaceful, idyllic lives, so in my view, nourishing this vital part of you is important.

Aside from this there could be any number of other things going on here; stress is a big mood killer, tension within yourself or your relationship, things on your mind interfering, or a combination of things.

Any one of these factors will affect how you feel about having sex. Maybe you don’t even think about it at all or if you do, you feel too tired or anxious to do anything about it. Or you dismiss the notion because you’re just not in the mood for whatever reason. Or you just can’t figure out why you feel lackluster, but you just don’t feel like it.

This may or may not bother you, yet I would venture to say that it does whether you are aware of this or not and whether you have been wildly sexual at one time or have never been.

One thing to consider is that a woman’s conscious arousal is often NOT instinctual/biological, a have to have it now kind of thing, and it’s certainly not as obvious as male libido/arousal usually is. And very often even if we are physically in the mood, we may NOT be aware of it.

Studies have been done on male and female arousal, and the findings were surprising even to me. With the men it all played out as would be expected. When straight men see images of naked women alone, having sex with themselves, with other women, or with men, arousal is obvious. Brain scans corroborate the evidence. And the men were all well aware of their arousal.

Most women though were not only aroused by ALL of the above images, they were also aroused by seeing men with men as well as with animals getting it on, as evidenced by brain wave scans and vaginal lubrication monitors. BUT in a great many cases, the women were completely unaware of their arousal and in fact denied being aroused at all.

So a woman’s libido is far more complicated than a man’s. AND a woman’s sexual response is far more affected by what’s going on in her brain than anything else. This is one of if not THE most important point to keep in mind. SEX FOR A WOMAN IS LARGELY WITHIN HER BRAIN.

But the good news is a woman can teach herself to not only become more aware of her far more frequent than she might think arousals, her libido CAN be trained to run higher. This CAN be something you can reprogram. And it’s mostly by simply paying attention.

When K and I first got together, I was not per se sexually repressed, BUT I was somewhat shy, felt a little insecure about my abilities and capabilities, and I was just not all that free, liberated; I was not all that open, not as much as I knew I could be and wanted to be.

I liked sex though and wanted it because it made me feel wanted and desired and desirable as well as connected to my man.

I’ve never had nor do I now have any sort of strong sex drive really. I did engage in sex purposefully though. Now I make sex a priority.

But as good as my sex life was, increasingly I felt that there must be more. More of what I wasn’t sure. I just felt there was more to be experienced and felt and on different levels, maybe depths and certainly more to release and let go of.

From somewhere and somehow, I got the idea to explore my body and come to know it more intimately, see what I might be able to feel beyond what I had felt already, see if I could become even more comfortable within myself and just see what my body could do.

I read anything and everything I could get my hands on, tantra being the biggest draw. This was a big piece in raising not only my awareness about sex and about my own sexual responses, it also got me to thinking about and wanting sex far more. Instant libido lift.

So maybe you are not feeling sexual. Try having it anyway. You may very well be surprised how you can become aroused and get into it very quickly just by doing, by allowing, by keeping your mind, body, and heart as open as possible in that given moment

Read about sex, Watch sexy movies together. Talk about sex, with your partner and/or with your friends.

When you try out new to you things, yes you may feel weird or shy or insecure at first, guilty even but the more you gain confidence as your experiences expand to places you may not have even dreamed about AND you receive a positive response from your partner, the more everything will expand and in all ways, in your body, your heart, and your essence, AND your ability to feel more, bigger and more nuanced sensations, different feeling orgasms, bigger and more intense ones, and just more.

It has been great fun uncovering what my body is able to do, and the exploration continue. How about you?

xxoo

Committed love What is it? What does it look like? How does it play out in the real world?

My definition of committed love looks like this.  It means I want to be with you and only you, body, mind, heart, and soul. I adore you and cherish you.

I am passionate about you, can’t imagine being with anyone but you.

I love being with you even if we’re doing nothing, just BEING together.

I am whole onto myself, yet you fill me up even more, take me to places I can only touch on alone. You don’t complete me, but you make me feel bigger, more expansive than I do alone. We feel great by ourselves and even better together.

I love you and want you more every day, nearby me, inside my body, inside my heart. I feel more at ease and comfortable, more ME the more we are together, separate yet as one. You bring out the best in me in all ways.

And this kind of commitment isn’t necessarily voiced aloud, yet the understanding of it is so profound. There is no question in either person’s mind, no words needed even though they may slip out now and then or more often. I have come to prefer the randomness and spontaneity of the occasional. The words never carry lost or diminished meaning this way.

Yes it does feel really good to hear, yet the actions say so much more, in the open, welcoming, glowing eyes, a safely comforting embrace, the warm, accepting, enveloping heart, through passionate lovemaking. Committed love is not calculated. It just is.

The deeply intimate bond I speak of rarely if ever happens without having been together for a while, years even, that place you can only get to with time, as your energies and spirits intertwine and feel almost as familiar as yourself.

This kind of love goes way beyond lust though lust definitely still factors in. It’s when you know each other so well, there are no more surprises, yet each moment together is a surprise, a happy one even in the midst of challenge or turmoil. Each minute a delight even if there’s pain. Each hour soul filling even if there’s a feeling of disconnect. For even when you feel a distance, there is an energetic cord between you, invisible yet tangible which cannot be broken.

It’s not a question of forsaking all others. The others don’t even figure into the picture. We may or may not recognize there are others, “appealing” others even, but they are passing images in the periphery. We don’t want them. We only want each other.

When two people are deeply connected in love and passion, it’s not that there’s no one else in the world. Yes we notice attractive people, BUT we are not attracted. Yes there may a little buzz of arousal, BUT there is no desire for that person.

And yes we have friends, dear ones, deeply loving ones, but it’s a different feeling, fulfilling in another way altogether.

It is often said that over time love becomes predictable, but I have to say my heart flutters more now when K walks in the door at night than it ever did in the beginning, and the joy emanating clearly from his eyes and through his smile, love radiating from him when he sees me tells me he feels the same.

Sex is never boring, people are. A little creativity and imagination go a long way. Relationships never grow stale, people do. None of this is hard work. It feels easy. The work on self is the challenging bit, difficult at times, painful, but the bond between us is our anchor, our source of respite, home. This is true love. This is committed true love.

xxoo

Is there really a difference? Is one “better” than the other? Isn’t deep commitment far more meaningful than what any piece of paper would dictate? Or are marriage vows the ultimate? Or does it depend on circumstances?

It seems to me that there are many people, women predominantly, who become so consumed with the IDEA of marriage and all they imagine it entails including (and maybe more importantly to them) the pretty dress and the flowers and the party. These women seem to get all caught up in a romantic creation and sometimes seem to close their eyes to the truth of what is.

It seems as though many of these same women lose sight of what this is really all about. Deep commitment, loyalty, fidelity, and most importantly, lovely, luscious love, profound, playful passion, and truly intense intimacy.

I’m not against marriage at all. In fact there is something delicately sweet and special about the real idea of marriage that goes beyond words. Yet paper or no paper, it wouldn’t change my feelings for my partner. Or would it?

We are deeply committed to each other, possibly more so than a great many married couples. Both of us can only imagine being with each other ’til death do us part, so why marry? I could ask this.

There’s something really sweet and lovely about living in the moment too, day by day, and not at all with the thought of “just in case something better comes along”. This notion wouldn’t even cross our consciousnesses, for we have found what we want in each other and then some. In fact we exceed our most secret dreams of what could be possible in a love partner.

There is no question of exclusivity or not. It just is. So in reality there is no “future”. There is only right now. And right now is amazing, incredible. Why would we mess with this? I could ask this.

For in a way, marriage feels like a constraint imposed by society and the government meaning it can be difficult to maneuver within the legal system without it. Meaning if anything happened to either one of us, the other would have no legal rights whatsoever. Which would mean neither one of us would be legally entitled to anything belonging to the other. So why not marry? I could ask this.

I resist and reject this imposition, yet it’s a very real one and one we may very well be faced with one day. It feels like a cruel thing to force onto  couples, those like us who carry fear and distaste around the idea of making what is such a beautiful thing into a contract.

But on the other hand there is still something kind of nice about the idea. If K asked I wouldn’t say no, but he has fear around it as do I, fear that it will change the dynamic between us. It probably won’t, but fear is fear. That said we probably will marry someday, as an afterthought, not as an event, and sadly it feels to me, as a convenience.

The real deal is already between us, so sealing that would feel anti-climatic.

Though actually going through with marriage still scares me. Like I said it wouldn’t change anything unless we set ourselves up for changes. Yet there is still that tiny little piece within that’s afraid this will spoil the fabulous thing we have by maybe unconsciously setting expectations that weren’t there before. I understand these fears are illogical, yet they persist.

But then again it would be maybe a little something extra that only we would share between us. So for us maybe the difference between being deeply committed as we are and actually getting married would be like the difference between a Veuve Clicqout Grande Dame and a Cristal champagne, both delicious and decadently expensive with little if any variance in quality and taste, aside from what WE determine are the subtleties of difference.

The point in writing this piece is this. I have been noticing increasingly that women are rejecting perfectly wonderful men because they don’t want or can’t go just yet to signing what is aside from financial reasons a worthless piece of paper. Love is in the heart. A ring and a fancy party cannot change that. I am asking you to reconsider. A deeply committed man trumps an indifferent man any day or worse a lying, cheating husband.

A marriage certificate guarantees nothing on an emotional/spiritual level and not even on a financial level. Ultimately only you can decide what feels best for you, but I ask you to please think deeply about this before saying no to the next guy who in all other ways make you go all weak in the knees, brings a smile to your lips, brightens your day, and makes you feel SO good.

xxoo tinque

The very BEST gift you can give to a man is to be happy yourself. You do this by filling yourself up. With hobbies, people, and activities you love. You fill yourself up with passion.

You do this by only DOING for your man when it makes YOU feel GOOD, when it makes YOU feel like LOVE. Never out of obligation. Never with an agenda such as a seeking of validation or attention.

The biggest part of your happiness lies within YOU and by loving and embracing YOU.

And maybe a critical piece here is if YOUR MAN is an IMPORTANT, contributing part of your happiness, meaning he makes you laugh and love even bigger. Meaning the things he does for you fill you up even more. Meaning the love and adoration he bestows on you make you expand and bloom all the more beautifully.

When your man has created some of this happiness for you and he knows with all he has how happy he makes you feel, then that’s the ULTIMATE gift of all.

If this man of yours, this wonderful being who loves you KNOWS he can and does make you feel GOOD, that you feel DELIGHTED being with him even if it’s doing nothing at all, he will be yours FOREVER.

And he will know this in your beautiful, welcoming smile and embrace at the door when he returns home, in your soft contentment emanating from you in the warm, comforting snuggle you share in bed every night and/or every morning, in your pleasure radiating out of you from the small gestures to the grand ones, in the joy, the ecstasy he brings to you from the mind blowing orgasms he helps give you.

Your satisfaction in all things, sexually and otherwise will flow out copiously in your actions and through your energy. And this will make for one happy man himself. And he will love you all the more for it too.

Not much else, maybe nothing else will make him feel happier than feeling yours.

The VERY BEST thing you can do for your man and yourself is not only to find your joy and love within but also to ALLOW HIM to make you feel happier still.

xxoo