Talking to your partner about experimenting sexually doesn't have to be awkward
Have you considered keeping a sex diary?
Steamy movies give us the impression that sex happens seamlessly. With one swift move, you’re swept off your feet, clothes come flying off and instinctively, people just know exactly what their partner needs. Without saying a word, you’re experimenting sexually and all it takes is a few grunts and moans to reach climax.
There are no inconvenient pauses because of leg cramps or, horrifyingly, the condom slips off. No one stops mid-shot to say, “no, that’s not it, a little higher” or “wait, your arm is on my hair”.
Films lead us to believe that you’re automatically going to know how to please your partner and vice versa. Sex is intimate and passionate, but it can be pretty weird and awkward too.
In our social environment, where talking about the act and experimenting sexually doesn’t really make for polite dinnertime banter, we fear we’re going to hurt the other person’s feelings, or be shamed for revealing our fantasies.
Good lovers are made. Not born. #fiafseduction
— Esther Perel (@EstherPerel) November 6, 2014
So instead, we stay mum, dissatisfied with our sex lives with an oblivious partner. Worst case scenario? We spend our lives in sexless marriages and unhappy relationships.
Talking about sex, pleasure and trying new things should be part of communicating in a healthy relationship. “People aren’t used to women asking for and talking about their own pleasure. They get taken aback. I think this entire conversation starts with women masturbating more,” laughs Anamika*. If you don’t try, you won’t know what you’re missing out on. Figure out what you like and don’t like, then you can ask the same of your partner.
“It’s unfortunate. I know 35-year-old women who didn’t know the difference between clitoral orgasm and vaginal orgasm because they’d never experienced one or the other,” she adds.
Once you get comfortable with your own body, then how do you approach the subject of sexually experimenting with your partner? We asked couples for their advice on initiating these conversations.
Talking to your partner about experimenting sexually, without the awkwardness
Picking your words carefully in that first conversation
If could be a different sex position. Maybe you want to get really naughty in your dirty talk. Is BDSM sounding like something you want to try? For a lot of us, these subjects have been taboo for so long, that even talking about it with someone you’re in a long-term relationship with, or married to, can be scary.
Akshara Parmar broached the subject with her partner over text messages. “My boyfriend and I had been dating for 2-3 months. We never did much dirty talk or sexting. I felt awkward about it. I couldn’t just one day turn around and say ‘You’re not satisfying me. Spank me hard, I like it rough’.”
She says she didn’t want to scare him away. “Few men are comfortable with a woman’s sexual empowerment and knowledge. I had to take baby steps.” She started the conversation by asking him if he thought about changing things up a bit.
Instead of just telling your partner what you want, ask them what they’d like to try as well. There are two in this sexual tango and offering reciprocation ensures you both feel involved. Her friend advised that she stay away from language that targetted their shortcomings. “In place of ‘you don’t do this’ or ‘you never want that’, try saying something like ‘I’ve always wanted to try this’ or ‘how do you feel about doing that?'”
She feels that picking her words carefully in that first conversation made a huge difference. It took their relationship, physical and emotional, to a new depth. The more they spoke about it, the more they learned about each other’s desires and likes. “Turned out I was also doing things he wasn’t very fond of,” she laughs.
Creating a sex wish list
Geetika Tandon* and her husband created a sex wish list. Eight years into her marriage, she had started feeling their sex life stagnate. “It all became very routine. I knew his foreplay moves, he knew mine. While it was satisfying, it had become repetitive.”
She wanted to bring the spark back into the bedroom but wasn’t entirely sure how to go about it. Her husband suggested a diary that they’d write in when they were alone. They used this method to initially communicate back and forth without that in-person awkwardness.
“I’d write something and leave it in the bedside table drawer one day and he’d open it later, write his response. Whether he agrees or doesn’t want to do it. Maybe he has a suggestion on how we can do it. It was like very slow texting, that itself became a game and kind of erotic,” she laughs.
She was curious about them trying partner sex toys and wrote that down on her wish list. In the comments section, he approved quite excitedly. He propositioned role-playing. Hotel room sex was on his bucket list, and after reading about it, she was game.
“Over a few months, we became a lot more spontaneous as well in our lovemaking. We still use the notebook from time to time but it helped us get to the point where we could talk about it face-to-face with excitement and not embarrassment.”
Be a guiding hand and let your body language do the talking
Sometimes talking can kill the mood, we get it. In the heat of the moment, you don’t always want to chart out all your erogenous zones and really spell thing things out.
You can be a guiding hand to lead them to where you’d like to be touched, kissed and caressed. Your body language can say as much as your words.
“Instead of saying faster and slower, we came up with the two tap-three tap method. Two taps on the shoulder mean go slow, three mean fast. I’m not much for talking during sex and prefer to stay in the zone, this helps communicate what I want,” says Shreya*.
When Mahima Atwal* first met her new partner, he seemed a little apprehensive in bed. “I wanted to do it doggy style so I just slowly kind of started turning over and paying attention to how he responded and then we just went with it.”
Lying in bed afterwards, he expressed to her that he thought girls found doggy style demeaning so wasn’t sure how she’d feel. “I quite enjoy it. Goes to show that when people don’t talk about experimenting sexually, you can miss out on so much with your partner.”
Finding erotic inspiration to act out
The floodgates of their raging hormones were opening but Atwal didn’t really know what else to do.
“We seemed to have crossed this bridge but it was still pretty early on in our relationship and both of us were new to having sex lives. We wanted to have fun but didn’t want to go from 0 to 100 straight off the bat.”
They began sharing clips of videos and text from movies, series and erotica that they found arousing. Looking at those as an instructions manual, they’d try out moves and scenarios. Along the way, discovering what they both enjoyed together and apart.
She says having these vague guidelines helped her try new things, but what she stayed aware of were cues from her partner (and vice versa) while they were being intimate on what they were comfortable with and when to stop.
Erotic inspiration can come from a song, a movie scene, sexy stories and even ‘adult’ activities and games you can find online.
Using post-coital downtime to talk about sexually experimenting
There’s nothing like an orgasm to open your mind to new things. Your body is flooded with oxytocin, known as the love hormone, after climax. Those few moments after sex is when you feel the closest to your partner with deeper feelings of affection.
Communicating with your partner about daily life can be hard when they don’t open up. Talking to them about experimenting sexually can then become harder than trying to fit 10 gulab jamuns in your mouth (we’ve tried).
Pallavi Saini took advantage of the post-coital bliss to bring up blindfolding and teasing the next time. “It didn’t mean he outright agreed to it, but at least he was receptive to the idea. We started talking about it and one thing led to another and we were discussing sexual fantasies. This was the most honest conversation we had about sex in our entire relationship,” she says.
Whether you find it comfortable to do it over text messages, in a notebook or in-person, sexual communication is a part of the bedrock of a healthy relationship that’ll last. Talking about sex as a couple will give you more freedom to ask for what you want.
Maybe they’ll recoil in fear at what you propositioned, it’s possible. But it’s more likely that they’re also in the same ‘we don’t talk about sex and desire in our culture’ boat, wanting to explore their fantasies with you and you both end up having some pretty mind-blowing sex.
*Name changed upon contributor’s request for anonymity