Ask me five years ago, and I would have never believed you that the very behavior that once had a vice grip on my stomach would be the same thing blasting me off to orgasm-topia.
Years ago, if I caught my husband staring at another woman or checking her out, my body reacted first. My chest and stomach tightened, my heart raced, and my eyes went into high-alert search mode to find exactly what he was looking at. The comparison, the insecurities, the anxiety. It swallowed me whole, and fast. Even learning about things he’d previously kept from me regarding porn use could stir up anxiety and upset. This was my life for so much of our relationship. It was a lot.
And then it went from hard to weird. And if I’m being honest, it’s still weird.
Those exact experiences are now easily some of my hottest fantasies. I might still feel a twinge of anxiety or uncertainty when we’re talking about something or in the moment it’s happening. But later? When I’m alone masturbating or having sex with my husband? The whole experience plays through my mind. What he was looking at, why he was looking, what could have been going through his mind. And the naughtier the better.
Comparison, jealousy, anxiety, insecurity? All gone.
It’s not even that I’m working through those feelings while I’m turned on. They’re just not there. I’m not thinking about myself in relation to whoever or whatever caught his attention. I’m just enjoying the hotness of it all.
For a long time, this confused the hell out of me. How could something that caused such an intensely anxious or painful response also cause such an intensely erotic one? And of course, me being me, I wanted to figure it out. Which came first? Did trauma create this pathway? Was it healthy to explore something when I didn’t understand where it came from?
I didn’t have answers to those questions, and honestly deep down I knew I probably never would.
So eventually I just let myself enjoy what was enjoyable.
I already knew that fantasy didn’t have to mean anything about me, and it certainly didn’t mean I wanted to act on anything. It just was. But apparently knowing that and being comfortable not knowing why I liked something were very different things.
And then things got weirder even still.
I began noticing a shift during experiences of shared masturbation with my husband. When I was experiencing my own pleasure alongside his, rather than simply observing his, I could actually enjoy the fact that he was enjoying himself.
And that was new for me. Like really new.
I wasn’t sitting there comparing myself or getting caught up in what his arousal meant about me. I was enjoying myself, he was enjoying himself, and I could just enjoy that he was enjoying.
Then I started noticing it outside of those experiences too, like in the real world. Things that used to send me into a spiral weren’t quite hitting the same way anymore. yes, was there still a little twinge of anxiety, sure, but there was also excitement. I’d started catching myself looking forward to revisiting something later in fantasy.
Which was pretty mind boggling considering where I started. The more I let myself enjoy my husband’s turn ons, the less gripping power some of those old insecurities seemed to have over me.
It felt like bringing these moments into a space of pleasure was slowly retraining my nervous system.
I was showing myself, through pleasure rather than reasoning (which is where my head normally lives), that not everything was a threat.
Not every thought was some huge, scary first step toward impending doom. Not every attraction was going to cost me the entire life I’d built. Not every visual stimulus in the world needed to mean something about me, my body, or my worth.
And oof, I could literally feel my shoulders soften with the removal of that constant need to compare myself to every body I saw. I hadn’t really realized just how much energy I’d spent doing that until I wasn’t anymore.
For so long, I’d treated my emotional reactions as the truth about an experience. If something hurt, it must be threatening. If something made me anxious, then certainly there was something to fear.
But instead here I was, bringing those same experiences into my erotic imagination and having a completely different response.
It didn’t mean the hurt I’d felt wasn’t real. And it didn’t mean everything that had happened was suddenly okay. I could still have feelings about those things. I just didn’t have to carry all of that into my fantasy each time.
My emotions didn’t have to limit my fantasies.
I think that’s been one of the strangest and most freeing parts of all of this. Being able to feel one way about something in everyday life and another way when I’m aroused, and not needing to make that to make sense.
I can just say, “I don’t know why this turns me on so much.”
And actually trust the pleasure and my body.
Which, for someone who spends an awful lot of time in her head trying to why everything to death, is a pretty big deal.
I couldn’t have planned this if I wanted to. I didn’t set out trying to shift my feelings about anything. I wasn’t trying to work through jealousy or change how I felt about my husband’s turn ons. I was just riding alongside what felt good, with curiosity.
And somehow, that was doing something that years of trying to reason myself through insecurity hadn’t.
I still sit and wonder, Can pleasure actually change our relationship with the very things that once scared the hell out of us?
I don’t know if that’s what would happen for anyone else. I don’t even know how far that shift goes for me. But I do know that something that once felt almost entirely threatening has become a source of genuine excitement.
And I’m learning more and more that I don’t need to understand every bit of that to enjoy it.
We call it Bodysex for a reason. It’s about moving into the body’s experience.
I’ve read and talked about that philosophy a lot, but really feeling what that meant was different.
I had spent so much time trying to think my way into feeling safe only to realize that pleasure felt in my body could actually offer me a different path there. One I could actually feel rather than just understand.