Rough Times? Have More Sex

GetLusty has already discussed why having more sex equates to a better quality of life. But why do you need to have more sex when life gets rough? Sometimes, in relationships, we can forget that sex is really wonderful. It gives us oxytocin and a surge of other positive-brain chemicals.

Lidia-Anain Bjorkquist is back with a post from SexLoveJoy about why running to your partner during life's tough times is necessary, rather than running away from him/her.

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Hard times, problems and stress are things that we can’t avoid forever. We all eventually go through times that are rougher than others, we all have problems that corner us, and we all have our stress limits. These things are universal but how we cope with them varies from person to person.

For many avoiding sex while they are going through rough times is standard. It is easy to put off intimacy and avoid being sexual with our partners when we have real life problems attacking us from all sides. Sex doesn’t seem that important when you’ve been laid off, when there’s barely any money in the bank or when you aren’t sure if you’ll be able to make all your bills this month. I have known this kind of stress and too often I’ve fallen back on worry instead of falling into my partner’s arms.

At times when stress levels reach maximum overload, our sex drives slow down.

There isn’t a person among us that can’t say that at one time in their life they’ve completely lost their sexual appetite due to dealing with life’s problems – if it didn’t go away it at least slowed down or was ignored. Our sex drives are meant to push us towards having procreation sex not recreational sex which is why we instinctively find it easy to avoid intimacy and sex when life is turbulent.

We are programmed machines that know that the last thing we need and desire is bringing a child into a world in which we are barely managing. Our bodies shut down that side of us and it is too easy to say, “sex just isn’t that important right now. I’ve got a lot bigger things to worry about.” We are programmed machines but thank heavens that these days we can control our procreative powers therefore we don’t need to shut down our sex drives. Ever.

In those moments when life is attempting to beat us down being more intimate and having more sex might be the best answer. Ever.

Holding hands, hugging, cuddling, kissing, sex and orgasms release oxytocin which bonds lovers and acts as a physiological peacemaker. When life becomes threatening, we most need an abundance of “feel good” hormones circulating through our bodies. Turning to our partners for intimacy and sex heals us literally from the inside out. It is so much easier to face stress when the oxytocin that was produced while we were hugging, kissing or sharing an orgasm with our partners is helping us not overreact at the world. Those moments of intimacy that don’t seem “important” are vital to keeping us healthy and stress free.

Yes, problems won’t go away if we don’t deal with them and you might say that having more sex has never solved anything for you. But it is important that during rough times you keep the oxytocin cycle that bonded you to your partner going. The more you hold hands, cuddle and orgasm the more oxytocin you produce. The more oxytocin you produce, the less stress your body internalizes, the less stress you feel. Then, the more you are able to face problems, the more you seek intimacy and sex with your partner for comfort... and it keeps going round and round.

Intimacy and sex reduces stress, bonds you and gives you a joyful boost. All of which you need especially during rough times!

More intimacy and sex is definitely the answer for me, especially when there isn’t anything that we can immediately do to solve our problems; we don’t worry. What we do is turn to one another, we become more intimate. We have more sex and we allow for love and faith to get us through those roughest times.

Sex might not be important but it is healing!

There are a lot worse things that people can turn to when they are having hard times. Falling into your partner’s arms when life is pushing you down is the right thing to do. That hug after a hard day of work, cuddling on the couch while you talk about how you’ll make it through another cross-country move after an unexpected layoff, and making love even when you know that tomorrow is going to be the roughest day yet, will help you cope with stress, will push you forward and will heal your weakened heart, body and soul.

At the very least having more sex with your partner during rough times will keep you bonded because oxytocin is one hell of a sweet natural drug.

Here’s to you and your loved ones always drawing in closer when times are rough and to the Celestial Planning Committee getting my partner and I through this very rough patch life has put in our path.

This is a post from Lidia-Anain Bjorkquist, the woman behind sexlovejoy.com.

Lidia is a SFSI certified sex educator who helps her clients to cultivate healthy sex lives and mindful relationships that empower them to thrive both in and out of the bedroom. She believes that shameless exploration and expression of sexuality, love and pleasure are the keys to creating lasting joy. Find her on Facebook and Twitter @SexLoveJoy.

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3 Books For Deeper Love

Besides Fifty Shades of Grey, what are some other informational pieces to put your mind to use? We have already discussed the first 3 Books to Lust Over. Want more? Well, Lidia-Anain Bjorkquist is back with some more recommendations for your reading and relationship improvement pleasure! 

Lidia loves books so we had to share her love and inspiration. Below is just a small sample of the wonderful books she recommends and why. Head over to SexLoveJoy to find out more about Lidia and her writing!

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#1 What Makes Love Last?: How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal

Written by: John Gottman and Nan Silver

Book Description

In this wise, accessible, and long-awaited book, celebrated research psychologist and couples counselor John Gottman plumbs the mysteries of love: Where does it come from? Why does some love last, and why does some fade?

Gottman has spent decades observing the conversational patterns and biorhythms of thousands and thousands of couples in his famous “Love Lab.” Now he applies this research to fundamental questions about trust and betrayal. Doubts are common in relationships. Partners often worry. Can I trust my partner? Am I being betrayed? How do I know for sure? Based on laboratory findings, this book shows readers how to identify signs, behaviors, and attitudes that indicate betrayal—whether sexual or not—and provides strategies for repairing what may seem lost or broken. With a gift for translating complex scientific ideas into insightful and practical advice, Gottman explains how a couple can protect or recover their greatest gift—their love for one another.

Why I want to read it:

Although I’ve read several books that seem very similar to this one, I can’t get enough and am hoping this one has some new research about love that I haven’t come across in my other reading.

#2 You Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married): Looking for Love in the Age of Divorce

Written by: Dana Adam Shapiro

Book Description

Fast approaching the age when bachelors go from seeming curious to seeming weird, Oscar-nominated documentarian Dana Adam Shapiro set out across the country with a tape recorder in search of modern answers to an age-old question: Why does love die—and what can we do to prevent it from happening?

It all began as a self-help journey in the purest sense. A serial monogamist for more than two decades, Shapiro had just ended his fifth three-year relationship and wanted to know why the honeymoon phase never lasted until the actual honeymoon. Believing that you learn more from failure than from success, he spent the next four years interviewing hundreds of divorced people, living vicariously through the romantic tragedies of others, hoping to become so fluent in the errors of Eros that he would be able to avoid them in his own love life.

The result is a timely treasure trove of marital wisdom—a provocative look inside the hearts, minds, beds, and e-mails of regular people who’d thought they found “The One” and lived to tell the tales of what went wrong. Shockingly intimate, universally relevant, and profoundly personal, this is a page-turning, voyeuristic peek into the private lives of our friends and neighbors that is as racy as it is revelatory. But ultimately, You Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married) is a hopeful investigation of modern love and a practical guide for any couple looking to beat the roulette-level odds of actually staying together forever.

Why I want to read it:

This one intrigues because I believe that enduring love is something that we are all capable of if we value laughter more than being right. Can’t wait to read this one with the one I love most.

#3 Vagina: A New Biography

Written by: Naomi Wolf

Book Description

An astonishing work of cutting-edge science and cultural history that radically reframes how we understand the vagina—and consequently, how we understand women—from one of our most respected cultural critics and thinkers, Naomi Wolf, author of the modern classic The Beauty Myth.

When an unexpected medical crisis sends Naomi Wolf on a deeply personal journey to tease out the intersections between sexuality and creativity, she discovers, much to her own astonishment, an increasing body of scientific evidence that suggests that the vagina is not merely flesh, but an intrinsic component of the female brain—and thus has a fundamental connection to female consciousness itself.

Utterly enthralling and totally fascinating, Vagina: A New Biography draws on this set of insights about “the mind-vagina connection” to reveal new information about what women really need, and considers what a sexual relationship—and a relationship to the self—transformed by these insights could look like.

Exhilarating and groundbreaking, Vagina: A New Biography combines rigorous science, explained for lay readers, with cultural history and deeply personal considerations of the role of female desire in female identity, creativity, and confidence, from interviewees of all walks of life. Heralded by Publishers Weekly as one of the best science books of the year, it is a provocative and deeply engaging book that elucidates the ties between a woman’s experience of her vagina and her sense of self; her impulses, dreams, and courage; and her role in love and in society in completely new and revelatory ways sure to provoke impassioned conversation.

A brilliant and nuanced synthesis of physiology, history, and cultural criticism, Vagina: A New Biography explores the physical, political, and spiritual implications of this startling series of new scientific breakthroughs for women and for society as a whole, from a writer whose conviction and keen intelligence have propelled her works to the tops of bestseller lists, and firmly into the realms of modern classics.

Why I want to read it:

The feminist in me, the sex educator in me, the erotic creative in me and my vagina are all excited about reading this book, even though they don’t think they will agree with much of what is in it.

This is a post from Lidia-Anain Bjorkquist, the woman behind sexlovejoy.com.

Lidia is a SFSI certified sex educator who helps her clients to cultivate healthy sex lives and mindful relationships that empower them to thrive both in and out of the bedroom. She believes that shameless exploration and expression of sexuality, love and pleasure are the keys to creating lasting joy. Find her on Facebook and Twitter @SexLoveJoy.

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3 Books to Lust Over

OK, besides the Fifty Shades of Grey, what are some other steamy and informative pieces to put your mind to use? Well! We met Lidia-Anain Bjorkquist at CatalystCon last week. Of course, we wanted to share her great work, including SexLoveJoy.

She loves books so we had to share her love and inspiration, below are just a small sample of the wonderful books she recommends and why.

Looking for fall reading? Check out these lusty books below! Thanks Lidia for these awesome book recommendations.

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It is a fact that I read a lot. I really do have a lust for reading and consuming books. It is also a fact that my favorite season for retreating into books for escape, healing, learning, and all things revitalization is Fall. My Amazon wishlist of books is currently filled with over five hundred books that have been asking to come home to me.

Yes, they beg me daily as I look through the wishlist seeing which one’s cry is the loudest and new releases usually don’t cry loud enough. But this year there are so many great books coming out in September that I am feeling torn. Books that are coming out in September have made their way to the very top of my list; cannot wait to get my hands on these new releases and I haven’t even gotten through my new August read.

I am private about my collection of books but because these because all seem like great reads, I’ve decided to share (a shortened version of) my Fall reading list with you. It might sound silly but it makes me feel extremely vulnerable to share this list publicly.

List is in the order that I will be reading them.

1) The Erotic
2) Playing Well with Others: Your Field Guide to Discovering, Exploring and Navigating the Kink, Leather and BDSM Communities
3) Hot and Fast: Sexy, Spontaneous Quickies for Passionate Orgasms

Book #1

Title: The Erotic

Written by: Lou Andreas-Salomé

Book Description

Lou Andreas-Salomé may seem to be a figure remote from us, one belonging to a pre-1914 Europe, but in many ways, she is our contemporary. She travelled in a highly romantic world as socialite, sociologist, and author. She was part of Georg Simmel’s salon, the most exclusive in Berlin, frequented by elusive poet Stefan Georg, dramatist Paul Ernst, social theorist and polymath Max Weber, and Georg Lukács, among others.

Salomé’s unique contribution to the erotic was that she argued sexual difference ran deeper than economics, and equality—the politics of Marx and the ideals of the French Revolution. For Salomé, to think about women and their erotic nature, you must start with their biological and psychological difference, not their economic situation.

Salomé was an outstanding theorist. Her books on Nietzsche and on Rilke are major studies. The field of psychoanalysis would not have developed in the way it did without Lou Andreas-Salomé. We cannot understand Freud’s “rationalism” or his anti-religious sensibility without Salomé’s writings. This new English translation is an essential text of psychoanalysis, one that shaped the very conception of the field.

Why I want to read it

Lou Andreas-Salomé is a woman that I consider an icon and that I highly admire because of her intelligence. She was a brave woman that lived and loved as she pleased in a time when this wasn’t acceptable for women to do. While many admire Anaïs Nin, I choose to admire the woman that Anaïs admired and I think she wished she could have been.

If you love Anaïs Nin then you should become familiar with Lou Andreas-Salomé due to one simple fact: All-things-Lou Andreas-Salomé > All-things-Anaïs Nin.

Book #2

Title

Playing Well with Others: Your Field Guide to Discovering, Exploring and Navigating the Kink, Leather and BDSM Communities

Written by: Lee Harrington and Mollena Williams

Book Description

Whether you’re a trembling novice or a jaded expert, there’s always something new to be discovered in the endlessly changing, complex and titillating world of kink. While there are plenty of other books out there that explain how to give a spanking or tie a half-hitch, Playing Well With Others is the first book that explains kink *culture* — the munches, parties, leather bars, conferences, workshops, fetish nights, exploratoriums and all the other gatherings of kinksters that turn BDSM and leather from a bedroom predilection to a lifestyle and a community.

You’ll learn to:

* Examine your own motivations, needs, wants and desires
* Ease your way into established communities
* Understand etiquette in different adventurous sex communities
* Familiarize yourself with the many types of events available to you
* Care for your relationships as you explore new territory
* Negotiate for play and aftercare
* Go back to the “world at large” without ruffling feathers
* …and, of course, answer the all-important question: What do you wear?! The team of Harrington and Williams offers 30-plus years of experience in diverse kink communities: top, bottom and switch; gay, bi and straight; female, male and trans; white and POC. Both former titleholders and international educators, they are an unbeatable pair of “sexual sherpas” with an inimitable voice and a great deal of wisdom. Playing Well With Others is an unprecedented and essential guidebook for anyone who wants to explore or understand the “community” aspect of the kink lifestyle.

Why I want to read it

I’ve heard Mollena Williams tell a couple of stories at Bawdy Storytelling and she blew me away with her storytelling. As a sex educator I like to stay up on what is written about sexuality by other sex educators, especially if it is a topic that I am digging deeper into in my personal life as well.

Book #3

Title

Hot and Fast: Sexy, Spontaneous Quickies for Passionate Orgasms

Written by: Megan Andelloux

Book Description

Megan Andelloux worked for nine years as a youth-focused sexuality educator in NY, RI, CT, and NJ before bringing her love for teaching at a locally run feminist sex-shop in Providence, RI.

She is a regular contributor for various media sources, a sexuality consultant for medical organizations, and a contributing author in the books “We Got Issue: A Feminist Response to Cultural Attitudes On Feminism” and “Sex and Society”. She lectures internationally at colleges, universities, medical schools, and sexuality institutions on issues surrounding sexual pleasure, sexual health, politics, and erotic justice.

Why I want to read it

Simply because it was written by Megan Andelloux. I am definitely a fan of her work and as a sex educator I want to pickup as many tips, tricks and techniques that I can pass on to clients and readers.

This post was cross-posted originally from SexLoveJoy.

This is a post from Lidia-Anain Bjorkquist, the woman behind sexlovejoy.com.

Lidia is a SFSI certified sex educator who helps her clients to cultivate healthy sex lives and mindful relationships that empower them to thrive both in and out of the bedroom. She believes that shameless exploration and expression of sexuality, love and pleasure are the keys to creating lasting joy. Find her on Facebook and Twitter @SexLoveJoy.

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