I’ve been thinking about how to have great sex.
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.
In my experience, to have great sex (not just a virtuoso athletic performance, but really mind-blowing stuff) you need to be in a great relationship. The best relationships I know, whether between friends or lovers, brief or long-term, share the same essential qualities.
First, broad-based compatibility. Yes, they say opposites attract, but all the evidence points to the sad realization that opposites don’t last. The differences that lure us toward the strange and unfamiliar eventually cripple a relationship; mysteries and misunderstandings make such love a dance where we’re constantly out of rhythm and stepping on one another’s toes.
Broad-based compatibility allows us to recognize in our new partner much of what is true about ourselves: we complement each other with similar intellects, similar moral values, similar energy levels, similar family histories, similar abilities to adapt to new circumstances and, thankfully, similar sexual chemistry. These common traits provide the solid platform for the conversations that are the most important form of intercourse in any loving relationship: conversations in which we talk honestly, listen carefully, with insatiable curiosity about our partner. With opposites, the more we share, the less comfortable we become because the other person seems more and more a stranger. When we share broad-based compatibility, the more we talk the more we realize we’re made for one another.
Deep lovemaking takes time. Those initial, compatible conversations are just that: initial. They tantalize us with the possibility that this might be someone we can know and trust, someone who might learn to know and trust us. But such knowledge and trust are only earned over time. Time allows for numberless conversations, experiencing each other in gatherings of friends, watching our partner with people not like us, getting to know our partner's family, and seeing how our partner handles small inconveniences. How does your partner navigate conflict? What does she do when she's wrong about something? Does he know how to repair a breach in a relationship?
One of the dangers in becoming sexually intimate too soon is that, once we’ve experienced this profound pleasure, it becomes the object of our insatiable appetites. Conversations become foreplay, something to get through quickly so we can plunge into pleasure. I'm not suggesting that you wait until you're married or committed to have sex; I'm simply saying that it takes time to know and trust one another. We’re foolish to think we can rush into such intimacy by skipping through significant moments of sharing and rushing to the repetitious routines of sex we’re so skilled at. This should be in capital letters over every new and potentially lasting relationship: TAKE YOUR TIME.
Third, deep lovemaking requires deep transparency. True, the touch and sights and tastes and smells and sounds that come with sexual pleasure allow us, over time, to experience more and more of one another, body to body. And thanks be to God for these sensual explorations!
Sharing the fears that haunt us, our secret desires, our deepest beliefs, ghosts from our childhood, our wild ambitions, wounds from past relationships unveils the deepest truths about us. This allows our lovemaking to become the profound experience of being accepted and loved just as we are.
I remember a wise person once noting that making love with our eyes open is not nearly the breathtaking experience that comes with making love with our I’s open, our deepest selves available to one another.
Whether you’re a woman or a man, gay or straight, young or not so young, whenever you were first someone’s lover you weren’t very good at it. You were awkward and clumsy. You bumped elbows and knees, you misplaced kisses; you were not at all skilled at this thrilling but unpracticed venture. Ah, but over time, with one or many lovers, you honed your skills. To each new tryst you brought the accumulation of expertise these repetitions provided.
Recently the magical singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell reached back to 1982 for this timeless quote: If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want endless variety, stay with one. (Esquire, The End of Sex, by George Leonard, 1982). Even if you honed your skills and became a master at the practice of sex, you may well have remained a novice at the surprising, unexpected pleasure available in an intimate long-term relationship.
Becky and I live in an intimacy that’s sixty-two years old. Like most people in long-term relationships (perhaps including you) we've been through what Dickens called the best of times and the worst of times. We met as awkward, hormone-driven teenagers, married in our early twenties, and set out with visions of our future that our experiences together both exceeded and plundered. We built a life together around my career, which soared before I crashed it by the time I was forty. The best and the worst.
To our great delight and gratitude, in our mid-twenties we had a girl and then, sixteen months later, a boy. Six years later, Becky decided she could raise one more child but didn’t need to be pregnant again when there were so many abandoned, unwanted children. So we adopted a two-year-old boy who grew into a brave young man who died in a tragic car accident at twenty-four while serving in the Peace Corps in West Africa. The best and the worst.
There were times during graduate school when we shook dimes out of a plastic piggy bank to buy Cokes from a machine in the basement of a class building, and later times when we made more money in one year than my father earned in his lifetime. We first lived together in a 150-square-foot campus dorm suite (!), and decades later built a 5,600 square foot home on a wooded hillside acre. We made it through a lengthy separation in our fifties and, once we were back together, adjusted to prostate cancer surgery and menopause, the birth of three grandchildren and the continuing evidences of aging. The best and the worst.
Imagine an intimacy that manages to re-define itself in each of these new circumstances. This kind of love-making requires adaptations of old sexual skills, and the giggling surprise of discovering new ones.
But as always, the skills are not the point. The compatibility is. The transparency is. The adaptation is. Although pleasure is essential to the relationship, the ebbs and flows of the relationship shape and re-shape how we give and receive pleasure.