Permission to Be Bad in Bed

There's no shortage of advice on ways to have better sex. Candles, massages, hotel rooms, certain kinds of cream. What's rarely considered are the particular benefits that can flow when two people candidly admit to one another that sex between them might be bad, that it might go really rather wrong, that one or other of them might have a dysfunction or lose interest or become debilitatingly shy or scared. This seems on the surface like a direct route to disaster. We must surely do our best to convey an atmosphere of resoluteness, confidence, and experience. We must lend our partner and ourselves courage by focusing on the upsides. We must intimate that sex would be wonderful so that it can stand any chance of actually being so. We cannot evidently talk of problems lest we bring them into being. But this is to misunderstand the psychology behind any kind of achievement, sexual or otherwise. We are at our most free and resourceful not when we need to guarantee a successful outcome, but when we are in the luxurious position that the stakes are low, when the price of failure is minimized, when we know that nothing important will be lost if the results are at the beginning at least mediocre. The privileged state we call play is a form of creativity in which for a time we're liberated from the pressure to impress. We played so well as children because people don't expect children to be anything other than flawed and clumsy. It's a lack of expectations that sets the scene for our highest moments. Our best drawings may emerge when we aren't hampered by any need to draw well. Our cleverest sentences can slip out when there isn't any requirement to sound clever. We're at our funniest when we have no thought of amusing anyone. Conversely, it's the very need for flawless outcomes that makes it less likely there will be any. We lose our hold on our genuine but fragile talents when we suspect that our witnesses will begin to shout, grow impatient, or ridicule us for being something less than stellar. We need to optimize our chances of physical pleasure by making ourselves fully at home with the possibility of disastrous sex. It might indeed all go very wrong. They might not like what we're doing. Our bodies may do something very uncalled for. There might be an odd atmosphere or mood. But we would survive. We don't need to let the threat of disaster destroy the future. Terrible sex might occur and everyone would live. Therefore, one of the paradoxically most sexy things sexy defined as pertaining to the achievement of good sex to say to a potential partner on an early dinner date when it's clear where things are headed would be, "There is one thing I should mention. Sex with me may really be quite bad. " To say this winningly with a smile, with self-possession, and a sound sense of the tragic comic nature of being human can suggest to the other person that what they have on their hands is someone uncommonly honest, brave, and worth sticking around with. Sex might indeed not be brilliant at first, though it might well be, but something as important will be guaranteed. They will know we aren't prideful, defensive, or ignorant of our flaws, that we might be someone worth sticking with. It can be the greatest gift to lend someone we like permission to be bad in bed.