I have a hard time suspending my thoughts during sex too. It helps me to make it a practice to do things with my partner that we deliberately agree to just feel and experience, all analysis shelved until later. If it helps, don't call it sex—categorize it as touching, or play, or meditation. Discuss it first, make sure you both understand and agree, and if so set aside some time to just touch each other and feel without intending to have an orgasm or end up inside each other's holes or anything. Try blindfolds if you're a visual person. Talk during the experience—try describing what you're feeling as if you've never experienced anything like it—"I feel your hand resting on me lightly and my skin is getting warmer in that spot," "That feels very tickly and I find myself wanting to push your hands away," etc. Not so much with the "I like it," "I don't like it," because it's not as helpful—something that one "likes" at one moment can become a "dislike" later.
This is a way to practice awareness and being present in the moment, so you can keep that awareness during sex. Another thing to do, because it seems your thoughts are worries about how your partner is feeling, is to work with her to create an agreement so you can let go and trust her to communicate with you. It really helps me that my partner and I have the kind of structured relationship that means I'm encouraged (nay, required!) to tell him how I'm feeling and what I want during sex, and I can trust that he's going to tell me. You can negotiate an explicit agreement, or practice another kind of play as well as the awareness play, where you follow her direction and do exactly what she asks for or tells you, and in return she describes exactly how it feels. Since she may be having the same worries, you can switch. This will build in the habit of good communication during sex that I think is really vital.
Doing things in this structured way may work for you—it does for me because I can stop worrying about what I'm "supposed" to be doing as it's right there in the rules we set up. If not, that's fine too; make it more spontaneous. The key is to practice building good communication. Get those scared thoughts out of your head and into the open. That's the only way to put those persistent questions to rest—get answers! And get a way to really trust that you're always going to get those answers.
It's one of the most damaging myths in human existence, right up there with the "one true religion" myth, that people are supposed to automatically know how to have good sexy sex without ever talking about it. It's not true. No one just automatically knows how to have good sexy sex. No one is born knowing this stuff, and the information isn't beamed out of your one true love's eyes when you first meet and the violin and flute music starts up on the soundtrack. |
