Sexuality and sensuality can be among the most precious expressions of loving, and of beauty, in a relationship and yet so often they are not. This occurs when your expression of sexuality does not rise up to include the respect and honor that will bring forth the true energy of love at its deepest levels.
There are several places where this lack of respect and honoring can happen.
For example, this can occur when one or both of you are being manipulative. The manipulation may seem like love, but it’s a different energy entirely that subtly dances with control and domination.
Another instance is when the sexual engagement comes with a sense of entitlement; when you feel, “It’s my right to have you,” “it’s my right because I took you out to dinner,” or “it’s my right because you’re my wife,” or “my sexual need outweighs your wants.” This belief then, this feeling that “you owe me,” produces a sense of entitlement. It drives the dominant action without consideration of what the other person may want or feel.
A third example is when your goal is just to “get off,” to have a sexual release without much, if any, care about what your partner feels or needs.
There are numerous other ways people go astray sexually, but these are the major ones.
It may seem that this lack of caring and respect happens more often with men, yet from my perspective it’s just more obvious with males. Women tend to be more subtle. Many are adept at making the lack of caring look as though it’s the man’s fault.
Ultimately, though, it is the absence of a true and complete regard for and connection with your partner that brings this dishonoring and disrespect about.
This is not surprising when so much of sex and sexuality occurs outside the scope of a truly loving relationship. In other words, sex occurs prematurely, before love has adequately developed. I’m talking about when you hop into bed before you’ve gotten to know the other person, before a relationship has had a chance to develop.
Too often, you’ve come together sexually first. Then, through some sense of obligation, a pregnancy or something else, you stay together. You develop some sense of caring and of meeting each other’s needs at a basic level, but you have not grown into the deeper levels of love’s energy.
You can consciously choose to change your thinking and your behavior about your sexual relationship. But unless you do so, you may never, or only over an extended period of time, develop the level of respect and caring that results in sexuality becoming the true expression of love. When you don’t reach a place where sexuality is a communion between you and your partner, sex remains merely an orgasmic release.
To step into a truly loving expression of your sexuality, then, seek to bring tenderness, caring and listening into your relationship. See your partner for who she or he really is. Attend to your partner’s desires and needs. And invite your partner to do the same for you. This requires that you be willing to examine who you are and what you desire, want, or need.
In the gentle exploration around who each of you are as individuals, as well as around your sex and sexuality, you may then encounter some of the most intimate and beautiful moments of being you can have with another person.