Last night, while talking with my partner, I realized something.
I think we often confuse being sensually satisfied with being sexually satisfied.
They’re connected, of course. But they aren’t quite the same thing.
Sexuality is only one place where pleasure lives in the body. Sensuality is much larger. It’s our capacity to experience pleasure through our senses: through what we taste, touch, smell, hear and see.
And lately, I’ve been wondering whether the way we nourish those senses throughout the day might be its own kind of foreplay.
Not foreplay in the conventional sense.
Foreplay for the body itself.
The first sip of something delicious. Warm water running over bare skin. The smell of perfume at the base of your throat. Music loud enough that you feel it somewhere beneath your ribs. The weight of beautiful fabric against your body. The pleasure of eating something slowly enough to actually taste it.
These moments seem completely unrelated to sex. But I’m not sure the body experiences them as unrelated as we think.
They all ask the same thing of us:
Can you receive pleasure?
For a long time, I couldn’t.
I remember a period of my life when intimacy often felt like a chore. Something I thought I was supposed to want, but couldn’t seem to actually feel myself wanting.
And for a long time, I thought I just didn’t have much of a sex drive.
But lately, I’ve started wondering whether I was looking at it too narrowly.
We tend to treat desire as though it exists in a separate compartment of a woman’s life. If she doesn’t want sex, we look at sex. Her relationship. Her hormones. Her attraction. Her libido. Her stress.
And of course, sometimes the answer does live there.
But I wonder if sometimes we should be asking a much larger question:
How much pleasure is this woman experiencing at all?
Does anything make her close her eyes because it feels that good?
Does she notice what her body responds to?
Does she let herself want?
Because desire isn’t something we simply switch on when we walk into the bedroom.
Foreplay begins much earlier than we think.
A peach can be pleasurable.
A song can be pleasurable.
Clean sheets can be pleasurable.
Someone’s hand against your back can be pleasurable.
Being wanted can be pleasurable.
Sex can be pleasurable.
But they all ask something of the same part of us:
the ability to feel.
And I wonder if that’s what so many of us are actually hungry for. Not simply more sex. Not simply more food, beauty, attention, affection or excitement.
But to feel more deeply inside our own lives.
Maybe the question isn’t only whether your sex life turns you on.
Maybe it’s worth asking:
Does your life?