Pleasure Mechanics

Romantic Sex

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Romantic Sex :: Free Podcast Episode

What makes sex romantic?

There is a myth that all sex is romantic – this is far from true. Sex can be totally primal, focused exclusively on the physical sensations and release. Sex can be anonymous and generate orgasms without you ever knowing the other person’s name. Sex can be fierce and intense, venting extra physical and emotional tension. And sex can be deeply romantic, all about connecting with your partner and finding profound emotional intimacy together through the physical act of sex.

What Is Romantic Sex?

If romance is not about flowers and candlelight, what are the core elements of romantic sex?  The experience of romance is different for everyone, but there are some common themes that work for most of us.

Here are the most common elements of romantic sex:

  • Authentic emotion: Romantic sex is deeply emotional. It expresses intense desire, longing and affection. Romance can express the full range of emotions from urgent lust to deep affection.
  • Drama: Romantic sex cuts through the routine of everyday life and creates a moment of drama. This might mean an elegant dress-up date at a fancy restaurant or a slow dance in your living room. Romantic sex gets you out of your rut so you can truly pay attention to your feelings and connection.
  • Presence: For a truly romantic experience, you need to both be fully present, paying attention to one another and allowing yourself to feel your connection. If you find yourself distracted, try to come back to the moment and allow yourself the luxury of paying full attention to your partner, your emotions and the experience of romantic sex.
  • Personalization: One of the reasons roses and candy can feel unromantic is because these gestures are totally generic. To create an authentic romantic sex experience, you need to personalize the experience as much as possible. Perhaps your partner loves tulips, so you can forget the roses and fill the room with a few dozen tulips instead. Pay attention to your partner’s expressions of desire and met their specific needs. Nothing is more romantic than being paid attention to.
  • Connection: At the core of romance is the intimate connection between two people. Allow yourself to get vulnerable enough to really feel this connection. Look into your partner’s eyes, make as much skin contact as possible, and let yourself celebrate the specific connection you have. Verbalize and express what you specifically adore about this person to maximize your connection.  

Healthy Fucking

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Healthy Fucking :: Free Podcast Episode
What is the difference between having sex, making love and fucking? The same physical acts can create very different subjective experiences. Many of us crave more fucking, but don’t know quite how to get there.

PassionateMarriagePassionate Marriage is one of the best books about sex and relationships that we’ve ever come across, and the entire book is well worth reading.

Get your free Audible version of Passionate Marriage by clicking here!

After exploring many facets of sexual intimacy, David Schnarch turns his attention to the experience of fucking, and why so many people find it harder to fuck their spouse than a stranger.  

Here are some excerpts from this exploration of healthy fucking:

Fucking involves a unique tone of engagement and experience. People who know it know when they feel it – and with whom they feel it. To those who like it, it’s often more important than orgasm itself. Fucking embodies a lusty, lascivious eagerness for pleasure… a delicious, desirous wantonness. It is the opposite of crudeness; it is sex embellished with erotic virtuosity. There is deliberate intent to arouse (and satisfy) passion. Fucking makes for intense sexual encounters.

Fucking involves doing and being done – as in doing your partner and being done by him or her. It’s the doing and being done that some crave and others fear. It involves energy exchange through patterns of coordinated stimulation and role behaviors.

Do you know what it feels like when somebody’s doing you – not just bringing you to orgasm or having intercourse  but really doing you? Do you know what it feels like to do somebody else?

Fucking is the subjective experience of doing each other and being done simultaneously.

Many people, male or female, have a hard time cranking loose their eroticism with the person they married.

The real issue here is potency, in this case manifested as sexual intent.

In marriage, sexual intent can involve love, caretaking, mutuality and nurturance, among others. We so rarely address sexual intent that we never think of fucking as loving (in fact, many think of it as “debased sex” and the farthest thing from making love). We think love and caring lead to desire for tender sex, but we don’t associate these with the carnivorous intent involved with doing your partner. The only part we think is involved in fucking is people’s “dark” side.

This brings us to the other issue noted above: what “kind” of aggression is involved? Society may accept that anger can be healthy – but not when it’s mixed with sex. Becuase sexualied aggression too often fuels degradation, abuse, and rape, all forms of it have been banished from the bed. The problem is that healthy aggression plays a role in healthy fucking.

Think of it as a productive way to use pent-up energy in the relationship. Having sex with as much energy as you expend at the gym is good for you physically and emotionally, and much better for your relationship. People don’t have sex to the point of exhaustion the same way they do in their workouts, but it would probably help everything if they did.

Get your free Audible version of Passionate Marriage by clicking here!

Your challenge: Fantasize about what it means to fuck. How does it feel in comparison to making love? Do you crave fucking more in your relationship? If so, what steps can you take to open up to healthy fucking?

Lust, Love and Attachment: Helen Fisher on The Nature of Love

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Lust, Love and Attachment :: Free Podcast Episode

In this podcast, leading love researcher shares the difference between lust, love and attachment. She uncovers the nature of these three different circuits associated with love and challenges our assumptions about “happily ever after” relationships. Hit the “play” button above to reveal the truth about how humans are wired for lust, love and attachment. Check out Helen Fisher’s book Why We Love for more on the nature of love.

This podcast challenges our notions of what is normal and natural in love.

We have concrete scientific evidence here from a well respected researcher that your relationship isn’t broken if the mutual passion has waned. In fact there is some biological inevitability that this will happen over time. Additionally there is nothing wrong with you if you feel passion for a coworker even though you love your partner. It is scientifically confirmed that lust and romance are not the same. So is it really ok if you feel love for your partner and intense attraction for another?

What matters is what you choose to do about having any kind of feelings outside of your primary relationship. This is up to you and your ethics, values and ideals, but having the feelings is very natural and normal. To have feelings for someone other than whom you are technically devoted to does not mean there is anything wrong with your relationship, it is just how we humans are wired.

So many of us feel tortured by this reality of experiencing different levels of passion or excitement for different people at various points in our lives. What happens if we didn’t see these feelings as problematic but made peace with what is and then go on and decide on the choices you want to make. My hope is some of you will experience a bit more freedom within yourself so you can be more present with enjoying your erotic life instead of wishing for something else.

We have spoken in other podcasts about how to keep long term relationships exciting. We emphasize that you need to keep life interesting by doing new stimulating things together in and out of the bedroom. We will fully admit that we love reading the same advice we give regularly in this highly respected author’s book. We think we all need to keep hearing this hopeful, practical piece of advice until we are really putting it into action.

Our challenge to you this week if you are in a long term relationship where excitement has waned a bit (or if you wish to take preventative steps!) is to consider what kind of excitement and novelty will you introduce into your relationship to increase your excitement in life, and thus with each other.

Remember if you want to explore novelty in the bedroom check out our erotic mastery courses. These online, multimedia courses guide you in mastering new erotic skills to experience more orgasmic pleasure, skill and confidence.

Fight Free Travel: Five Tips

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Fight Free Travel: Free Podcast EpisodeWe just got back from a week long retreat in rural Canada.

Every year, we spend some time by the lake, with no phone and no internet. Just the distant call of loons.

Every year, we are reminded of the pleasure of being device free and slowing down our pace of life.

We tune into the sounds of the lake lapping on the stones, the trees swaying in the wind and the hum of dragonflies.

Each year we bring a big stack of sex & relationship books, diving deep into the research to inspire our offerings. We sketch, we play, we recharge and reset.

When we returned home, we realized with surprise that we had traveled hundreds of miles, with a teething baby, without a single moment of stress or conflict. We both were feeling super grateful and in love with one another, refreshed from our travels, and excited to get back to life.

This was a perfect example of one of the themes of our discussions this week:

Happiness Is A Choice.

We both love to travel but early on in our relationship it often caused stress and fighting. We deliberately worked on it over the years, and changed the patterns that were causing stress. We just proved we can travel stress free, and wanted to share our strategies for making traveling with your lover a total pleasure.

Find Out:

  • How To Use Codewords In Your Relationship
  • Easy Communication Techniques To Reduce Conflict
  • How To Make Any Travel A Sexy Adventure
  • Proven Strategies For Minimizing Burn Out

Esther Perel On Preventing Infidelity

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Esther Perel on Preventing Infidelity: Free PodcastEsther Perel’s second TED talk is just as brilliant as her first. In her latest talk, she tackles the common issue of infidelity.

Challenging culture’s assumptions about cheating is just the beginning. She then goes on to question the very nature of infidelity and proposes that it often isn’t really about sex at all. Perhaps cheating is about seeking the feeling of being more “alive” and “awake.”

In this podcast, Charlotte shares some of her favorite excerpts from Esther Perel’s TED talk on infidelity and then challenges you to adopt certain behaviors and attitudes that may prevent cheating in your life, and are surely going to make you feel more alive!

“So if we can divorce, why do we still have affairs? Now, the typical assumption is that if someone cheats, either there’s something wrong in your relationship or wrong with you. But millions of people can’t all be pathological. The logic goes like this: If you have everything you need at home, then there is no need to go looking elsewhere, assuming that there is such a thing as a perfect marriage that will inoculate us against wanderlust. But what if passion has a finite shelf life? What if there are things that even a good relationship can never provide? If even happy people cheat, what is it about?

Affairs are an act of betrayal, and they are also an expression of longing and loss. At the heart of an affair, you will often find a longing and a yearning for an emotional connection, for novelty, for freedom, for autonomy, for sexual intensity, a wish to recapture lost parts of ourselves or an attempt to bring back vitality in the face of loss and tragedy.

When we seek the gaze of another, it isn’t always our partner that we are turning away from, but the person that we have ourselves become. And it isn’t so much that we’re looking for another person, as much as we are looking for another self.

Now, all over the world, there is one word that people who have affairs always tell me. They feel alive.”