How to embrace your sexual fantasies with a partner
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Loading... - david Pierre
- 14 Jun 2022
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If the idea of sharing your sexual fantasies makes you want to crawl out of your skin, welcome to the club. Talking about sex with a partner is a vulnerable act anyway. Voicing your sexual fantasies can leave you feeling extra-exposed, especially if you think those fantasies are embarrassing or taboo. You might worry your thoughts and desires won’t line up with your partner’s or that they might judge what you’re into. You might even fear what your fantasy says about you or your relationship. As a professional sex coach and educator, I’m intimately familiar with how scary it can feel to admit your sexual fantasies to yourself, much less say them out loud to someone who could, in the worst-case scenario, reject you. But it’s important to talk about your fantasies with your partner – and to give them space to feel they can talk about their fantasies with you too.
Here are some steps for approaching the topic of sexual fantasies with your partner.
You’re not weird for having fantasies
Fantasies aren’t inherently smutty. They’re a natural part of being a sexual person. “The brain is the most erogenous zone in the body,” says licensed professional counsellor and certified sex therapist Kimberly Atwood. “Sex generally begins with the mind and our attitude toward sex, often fantasies.” The fantasies you’re having don’t mean there’s something wrong with you – they don’t necessarily have to mean anything about you at all. There are no limits to the unspoken desires people have. (FYI: some of the most common fantasies I hear from clients and in my research happen to revolve around group sex and “Think of [fantasies] as ways to express your [unconscious needs or desires] that you can’t control, just like dreams,” says board-certified sex therapist Dr Kristie Overstreet.
What’s your goal?
Thinking about certain sexual situations doesn’t mean you necessarily want them to happen. Perhaps you daydream about having a threesome but you know that if you watched your partner being intimate with another person, you’d freak out. Or you might get off on watching intense bondage porn‚ but the idea of being tied up in real life gets a hard no from you. This is why it can be helpful to think about your goal in sharing your fantasy with your partner before bringing it up. Do you want your partner to know you on a more intimate level? Are you more interested in figuring out if they’d be down to watch porn about your fantasy as foreplay or centre their dirty talk around it? Or do you want to play out the fantasy with them? You don’t need to have this all figured out before bringing it up. Telling your partner that you don’t know what you want to do with fantasy helps. Talking about these questions together can be enlightening and can foster intimacy. But thinking about these questions beforehand can help you know yourself and your desires better, at the very least. Obviously, if you decide to enact any of your fantasies together, you and your partner will need to have additional conversations about how to go about that in a way that suits you both.
There’s no pressure to act on your fantasy
OK, so you’re ready to tell your partner you’ve been thinking about something that turns you on, and you want to share it with them. Go for it! When you do, emphasise that even if you’re interested in trying out this fantasy, there’s no pressure to act it out right now, or ever, if it’s not their thing. Otherwise, your partner may feel you’re asking them to role-play on the spot. Then, ask how they feel about what you shared, but also let them know they can sit with it for a while. It’s fine if they aren’t ready to react or if they have a different reaction later than the one they had when you told them. You may find out your fantasy is one your partner has too, in which case, jackpot! It can also be a great time to ask if there’s a fantasy they’d like to share with you. Being vulnerable might encourage your partner to do the same. Read More…
