The Lover’s Ethic #88

If your partner is not being fulfilled in bed, and they are sure it’s not because they’re not attacted or grown weary of you, then the weight falls elsewhere. It falls on them. There is only one way to bring this out and fulfil your partner: communication.

 ———

I am convinced beyond reproach that all sexual problems are problems of communication. The problems of communication however are much too diverse to determine and fix easily. Sometimes it’s just more than a matter of “I would like you to do this rather than that”. Sometimes a person just doesn’t like anything, or their body is to a certain degree what I call ‘cold’. This is where the situation gets tricky, this is where the sex isn’t the problem. This is where sex becomes perplexing and the matter diverges so much that a human mind finds it difficult to stay with it.  

The cold body problem is a matter of an emotion counteracting another, an impulse combating another, and this battle is internal, always. This impulse takes many forms and harbours a few fascinating designations: trust, love, guilt, rapport, surrender… etc… Not one word can indefinitely establish and determine what exactly is the source of the cold body other than a clash of impulses. The only thing we can do is to court communication, it is speech and a certain degree of emotional proximity. What meagre and unreliable tools, but it’s better that nothing, especially if we care for our lovers. All the designations perhaps converge on one point: a person’s relationship to their own body and themselves — this inner conflict is mediated by either the body’s constitution and/or the person’s upbringing. Quite simply, cold body is not a partner’s issue, it is an issue of self, it is an issue of one’s relationship to themselves, to their own body.

Fascinatingly, the cold body seems to have a general continuity amongst race and upbringing, so the factors are perhaps much too diverse to determine, but there’s only one way to begin: speech, communication.