How do stay spicy with your partners during COVID?
And this is kind of a question about like nudes or sexting.
Yeah.
So look, pandemic life has a lot of us feeling not so sexy.
This does not necessarily mean we don’t want to have sex.
It just means that some of us feel less in our bodies, less attractive, less desirable than we might have before.
I am a huge, huge, huge fan of taking lots of nudes of yourself and sending them to friends who will hype you up.
I think that so many of us feel uncomfortable with parts of our body or with how our body looks or with what’s going on with our bodies, and as a result, we end up like not taking pictures of ourselves or not doing things that create an opportunity for us to see and be seen as a sexy person, as a person who is sexy and sexual.
And when we send nudes to a partner who has consensus to receive them, that could be a lot of fun and very sexy.
And there also tends to be a lot of pressure we can put on ourselves because we care so much about this person continuing to find us sexy and so it’s like much, much harder to take a nude for them because we have like this huge standard for it, right?
So finding friends who you can send nudes to, who are like cool receiving your nudes and will send you nudes in return, can give you a way to start playing around with and experimenting with, taking pictures of yourself that are sexy without it being then sent to someone who you still want to want to have sex with you.
And it can give you a space to get a lot of encouragement and praise and reinforcement that even our best-meaning partners may not be able to give us.
I used to be a part of a group of fems who – we would all take like hot sexy pics and send them to the group and then we would all send these comments about like, “Oh, my god! You’re so hot! That bra looks fucking amazing on you. Oh my god! That pose, the lighting, spectacular.”
And it was a really good way to feel great about ourselves, great about each other, to get ideas of like angles we can use, shots we could do, lighting, posing, like all these different things that are involved in taking good pictures of ourselves.
And it made me so much more comfortable in taking a lot of pictures and finding ones that look good that I could then send to partners because I knew that there were people who love how I look, I knew that I knew what I was doing, and I had already gotten all this reinforcement for it so it’s much, much easier.
If you are only sending nudes or only sexting with the people that you are having sex with or trying to have sex with, it is so much more pressure than if you have like your friends who you do this with for practice because again, they want to help you, they want to support you, they want to be there for you, and you could be there for each other in figuring this stuff out where it’s not quite so high stakes as it would be with a partner.
So yeah, nudes and sexting can be great in keeping things spicy with your partner during COVID.
I’m a big fan of sharing porn so like either sending a link to porn that you are reading or watching or talking about like what kinds of stuff gets you super turn on, if there’s a book you’ve been reading that’s like a super spicy sex scene that you’re very into, that’s great. If you are into images, that’s spectacular.
I’ve got these fantastic anthologies, Nectar.
And gosh, what is the other one?
Ambrosia, which are these beautiful, queer, and trans erotica graphic or like comic anthologies.
So there are like a lot of different ways that you can introduce erotic art of various sorts into your relationship.
And something that I love about sharing porn is that it can be a way to bring up desires or ideas or fantasies without having to directly say it yourself as much.
So you can be like, “Uh, I just read this story. It was super hot.”
Send it to your partner and then you can have a conversation about like what you found hot, what they found hot, what you might want to try, what’s best to keep in fantasy.
I think that can be really helpful.
Also, set aside like a date night that is an experimental play night where you try new things, where the idea is to not to do the same things you always do.
I also love having people – so like especially people who are in relationships come to see me as their therapist and they are having some struggles around sex feeling more stale for them.
What I’ll do is tell them to pick one night each that is a night where they are just receiving sexually.
So it is not your job to give back at all.
There is no exchange happening.
It is not at all commodified.
It is, tonight is the night that you get a ton of pleasure.
Your partner’s job is to make you feel real good all night.
That’s all.
And then there’s going to be a night later where it’s their job to just receive.
The reason this can be really helpful is that I think a lot of us get in our heads about like, “Uh, I’ve been receiving too long.
I need to like do something for my partner now to make it even because I feel really unequal.”
And I get it.
But also, most of us are going to be super happy to spend some time making our partner feel good too.
And so, having a day where all you have to do is receive can make it much easier to like get out of your head and have a good time enjoying your own pleasure.
And it could give your partner space to like try some things out, experiment, play around, and see what can work really well for both of you.
