Anyone who has ever been in a supermarket checkout line has seen them, the magazine headlines:
12 Tips for Better Orgasms!
10 Steps to a Bigger Orgasms!!
7 Tricks for Louder Orgasms!!!
Bigger Better Louder Orgasms if You Do These 29 Easy Things!!!!
The message here is clear: We’re supposed to want orgasms and we’re supposed to want them to be good. Conventional wisdom says that we should want this enough to read about it and work on it and think about it when we’re in line paying for our groceries. We should be worrying about this a lot.
But what if we didn't? What if we just had sex with no goal in sight? Well, I'm here to tell you that it could be a beautiful thing.
Do something for me: Imagine you’re enjoying a beautiful scenic drive. The scenery is amazing, the temperature is perfect. You’ve got great music and you are genuinely enjoying the experience. Do you have that picture in your head? OK. Now keep that picture but add a child in the backseat who, every five minutes, shouts out, "Are we there yet?!"
How does that change the experience? Suddenly, you’re stressed out and just want to get where you’re going as quickly as possible. Here’s the thing: In the first (childless) version, you eventually would have arrived at your destination. Or maybe you wouldn’t have because something different and awesome caught your eye along the way. Either way, you’d get somewhere - and you'd be a lot more likely to enjoy yourself in the process. Journey not destination.
So how can you make something similar happen in your sex life? Here are a couple of awesome things you get to do when you let go of the goal of orgasm and focus on the sex at hand. Taking orgasm out of the equation lets you appreciate the entirety of the sexual experience, rather than stressing about whether everyone has orgasms or if the orgasms are the right kind or orgasms or if the orgasms are good enough. You can just enjoy yourselves. Then, when you're done, you can just lie back and think, "We just had some sex. That was hot." If you focus on the journey and stop worrying about where you'll end up, you're suddenly free to explore all sorts of new stuff! What happens when you touch him this way? What makes her moan that way? Try stuff out, have fun, play - you may not get to an orgasm but you might learn some awesome new tricks that feel great for both of you. In the long run, that's what really makes for great sex.
JoEllen is a writer, speaker, researcher and mental health advocate whose work explores the impact of depression on sex and relationships. Since 2012 she has written about sex, mental health, and how none of us are broken on her award-winning site The Redhead Bedhead. JoEllen has led workshops nationwide on sexual communication, navigating consent, having casual sex kindly, and dating as an introvert. She has toured sex shops, spoken at length on dildos, and even started a sex school but she is happiest and most effective when writing and speaking on behalf of quiet people who have sex. Check out her video series on attending conferences as an introvert and her extensive writing on sex and depression. JoEllen has spoken at Clark College, University of Chicago, Woodhull's Sexual Freedom Summit, and the Playground ConferenceJoEllen's book The Monster Under the Bed: Sex, Depression & The Conversation We Aren’t Having is now available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook.