male and female symbolsFollowing on from part one yesterday and my previous post on sexual pitfalls, here are more of my thoughts on sexual values….

6. Stop trying to teach old dogs new tricks. Trust me, you haven’t got time to revolutionise the wheel.

No matter which way you look at it, everything finds its way back to boundaries and values and part of getting to a better place in life both on a personal basis with your self-esteem and also in your relationships, is learning to accept people and their values for what they are so that you can work out if this is something that’s worthwhile continuing to spend energy on. Even when someone’s values are shady and you know better, this doesn’t give you the right to expect them to take on your values. You need to know your limits, be able to recognise when you feel good or bad, and don’t coast on other peoples values or try to enforce change.

If you have to school them on how not to behave like a dog in heat and treat you with respect, you’re setting yourself up for pain. It’s important to stop trying to squeeze a  square peg into a round hole.

When you’re with a guy that values getting laid as often as possible by as many different people as possible, why embark on Mission Impossible and seek the ultimate validation of trying to get him to only sleep with you?

Is a man more special and of greater value because he used to want to shag around with a lot of people but eventually with a lot of persuasion, he’s agreed to change his ways?

When you’re with someone who says ‘Yes, I want to be with you but I believe in open relationships or regular threesomes’ – if you don’t believe in it and it goes against your value system, why stay?

When you’re with someone who treats you like an inanimate object, dry humping you without thought for your sexual needs, touching you without care, riding you like a pony that they don’t care about, or using you as someone to practice their sexual dark side with, they’re telling you a lot about how they feel about you, especially when you factor it into the context of how poorly the relationship is working or how bad you feel about yourself.

As women we have to stop playing the teacher, the fixer/healer/helper and recognise that when we have to teach someone basic skills to value us and treat us with care sexually, it’s a rocky foundation to set the relationship on as you start out on the premise of being devalued and have to seek validation.

If someone consistently treats you like a piece of meat and contextually, when you factor the sex into the bigger picture of the relationship, your needs are failing to be met and your living outside of your values, you’re wasting time that you don’t have.

7. You have to stop chasing the ‘feeling’ created by sex and stop living in the moment or clinging to ‘moments’.

I get it, sex feels good and even when someone isn’t up too much in other departments, it’s easy to convince ourselves that because we feel so good during sex that you just need to extend that feeling for longer periods of time and across your relationship.

Unfortunately the very premise of things being focused on sex is very short term thinking.

When you’re with a guy who enjoys ‘hooking up’ with you, he’s thinking about now and getting his needs met, and not living beyond that moment. He assumes that because his needs are met, he’s living in the moment and he’s showing you who he is irrespective of anything coming out of his mouth that not only are you living in the moment too, but that you know the deal and you’re OK with it.

He’s very ‘of the moment’ reaping the short-term benefits but leaving you with at best, a medium-term hangover. He doesn’t think about the consequences and to be fair, neither do you. It’s time to pause for thought and think beyond the now or the short-term because one of you has to and you are the only person responsible for you and living out your values.

It’s not thinking beyond these ‘feelings’ and the ‘moment’ that is a sexual pitfall for you and these guys are relying on this thinking, your libido, and your confusion about emotions and sex and reaping the benefits – they exploit the opportunity.

There will always be sexually opportunistic people but you do not have to provide the opportunity.

If only some of you really thought about things, put aside the sexual feelings, put your feet in reality, removed the fur coat of denial, and the rose tinted glasses, you’d think ‘Woah…hold on a flipping second! Haven’t we been here before? I know the pattern – no good will come of this. I feel good now and crap later.’

For the average woman that loves a Mr Unavailable or an assclown or keeps going back to the scene of the crime, a lot of it is about recreating a feeling no matter how long ago that feeling was experienced or how much pain is experienced in between.Sex does and can feel good but the way sex makes you feel is not something that’s sustainable all day, week, month, year long.

Remember sexual communication is not emotional communication and it’s important to distinguish the two because if you don’t, you’ll continuously disappoint yourself trying to translate sex into emotions.

Be careful of dangerous optimism where you cloud out the reality and entirety of the person because you’re opting to focus on the feeling or the nostalgia you feel for the ‘moments’.

There is a difference between feeling good sexually and feeling good emotionally and it is easy to kid yourself with your vagina and your over active imagination that the feelings created by sex or the supposed attraction and chemistry you feel, can correlate to the rest of the relationship. Trust me, in fact, trust yourself and your past experience – they can’t.

8. You decide your value, not ‘them’, so if you don’t want sex to be the focus, don’t allow it to be the focus.

I hear from women who don’t understand why they are involved with insubstantial men who are only interested in getting laid, the size of their breasts, weight, age etc. A bit of digging and more often than not, these same women really place a high value on appearance and their sexuality and it’s what they lead with and look for in other people. If you want to be valued for more than sex, you must value more than sex and value your own qualities, characteristics, and values that add the real substance to a relationship.

You will come across conflicted if you’re sex focused yet complaining about not being respected or valued for your more substantial qualities. You’re also double standarding…yourself.

If you spend most of your time having sex with someone or talking about it or arranging it, trust me when I say that they’re in no danger of finding out very much about you and the character you want them to value so much. If sex dominates, let’s say 90% of your interaction, it’s safe to say it’s sexually based.

You’re not having sex in isolation – you’re contributing to it too so there’s no point steering the ship into the sex seas and then wondering why it’s still floating there instead of in relationship waters.

If you trade on your looks and sex appeal you communicate that these are the two prime things that you value and you will inadvertently (and at times consciously) draw in superficial people. Much like how we correlate common interests to the whole person and assume things about them, we assume that someone that possesses the appearance and sexual qualities that we value in ourselves will be a person that we love and will love us back, but that’s giving too much credit to two things that don’t determine compatibility.

On the flipside, just because someone does seem to only value the sex or the sexuality, this doesn’t mean that this is what your value is. This is why it’s important for you to know your value rather than you effectively going up and down in the ‘value markets’ depending on who you’re involved with and how they treat you.

If that someone’s mindset is sexually focused, it’s what they value and until they shift that perspective, you could substitute you with another woman, and it’s still what they’d value. Yes it’s personal but the best way not to let yourself take it too personal is not to stick around trying to make them value you in a different way.

If you value substance and they value superficial stuff, then you know already that you do not share a similar value system. This is OK – it leaves you free to move on.

9. Do not justify, do not explain.

One of the last guys I dated had the displeasure of hearing me say ‘I’ll be damned if I’m going to explain or justify myself as to why I don’t want to sleep with you’. Saying ‘NO’ is more than enough.

Any decent guy, even if he’s got a hard-on big enough to poke your eye out, will respect your position without creating an expectation of an explanation.

Society seems to have taught us that we have to be near apologetic when we don’t want to get down on the first date or sleep with someone just because they want to even if we don’t. We feel sorry that we’re not ready, that we feel uneasy, or we just don’t bloody well feel like it, and then we go against that feeling to ‘please them’ and devalue ourselves in the process.

Stop explaining why you don’t want to have sex – who are you trying to convince? Them, or you. Get behind your own convictions and sexual values.

You’ve got to stop feeling like not wanting to shag somebody you hardly know warrants a major explanation because by explaining, you are potentially opening up a dialogue, when you could decline, move on, and have your boundary set. If you keep explaining and discussing, you have Women Who Talk and Think Too Much.

10. Make sure how you see sex is how they see sex – shared sexual values.

If you see sex as an intimate act between two people in a relationship or moving towards a relationship, do not assume that the other person shares the same beliefs without sanity checking yourself. Why do I suggest that you check with yourself?

Anybody can say anything that they want to but if you listen to yourself and are aware of their actions and how you feel, you can take some first steps to recognising whether you’re with someone who you share common sexual values with.

How do they talk about you? How do they talk about women? Their exes? Are they making sexual comments about stuff that if it happened you’d be uncomfortable with? How comfortable are you?

The biggest test: If you have a pattern of being involved in casual relationships or with assclowns and Mr Unavailables – how much of what you are feeling is familiar?

Whatever feels familiar, examine it and take it as a warning signal that you may be inadvertently slipping into your regular pattern.

How you think, feel, and act is not how they think, feel, and act, and when you make blind assumptions without assessing the true situation and the true person. You cannot do this if you’re assuming and correlating stuff based on how you think and see things.

Once you’ve checked with yourself, also don’t be afraid to ask the questions that you need to in order for you to feel comfortable about whether you are genuinely sharing common sexual ground.

Your thoughts?

 

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