When it comes to sex, we tend to buy into the myth that bigger, harder, faster is best. While that approach might make for entertaining viewing on screen, what looks good is not necessarily what feels good. What feels good is a balance and a flow between the yin and the yang elements of sex. 

No doubt you are familiar with the Taoist concept of yin and yang, that the whole is made up of complementary opposites. Yin represents the softer, flowing side of life and yang represents the firmer, directed side. Too much of either puts us out of balance and life is not as harmonious as it could be. This applies just as much in our sex life as in the whole of life. In fact, we need the balance in the whole of life to have it in our sex life. Part of the problem is seeing sex as something separate from the rest of life. Thinking of sex as just what happens between two sets of genitals is a big part of the problem, it’s too linear and too detached, too yang.

When we take sex out of the ‘box’, and look at it less as an isolated behaviour separate from life, and view it more systemically, then we stay in a more balanced state sexually. Let’s look at this more specifically.

Starting with the physiology of our bodies, a lot of people would consider the yin and yang of sex as bluntly as being turned on or turned off, which is way too binary - there’s a lot more going on behind all that! What turns us on and turns us off, what enables desire and what dampens it, is a complex interplay within and between our nervous and endocrine systems.

Our nervous system is constantly flowing between the yang, up-regulated sympathetic system and the yin, down-regulated parasympathetic systems. If we are too much in the sympathetic, we’re stressed and we can’t become sexually aroused. Yet if we are too much in the parasympathetic, we’re so down-regulated we fall asleep, and can’t become aroused that way either. We need to be in a balance between the two, in a state of alert-relaxation, and from there flow between more yin parasympathetic romance and tenderness as well as more yang sympathetic system passion and excitement.

Now, in parallel within our nervous system there’s a balance between what we could consider the ‘yin’ hormones of oxytocin and vasopressin, the bonding hormones that give feelings of connection, as well as the endorphins, the feel-good hormones, that are released by tender, cuddly, yin activities; and the yang hormones of dopamine, the reward chemical, that leads you to want more (including more of your true love), and norepinephrine which makes you feel excited.

We need dopamine and norepinephrine, which are stimulated by novelty and interesting activities, so it's important that your relationship is stimulating and not complacent. And we need oxytocin and vasopressin as they are connecting and keep you feeling safe and connected and generally good about each other. So, both the tender affection and interesting activities are necessary in a relationship to produce the balance of bonding and desire. You need to be both tender and flirty, having cuddles on the couch as well as exciting adventures, to create both connection and interest. 

You need the balance in the lead up to sex and you need the balance during sex. Intensity is fine, but if all you’re having is shagadelic sex, striving for orgasmic intensity, then it’s yang without yin. Particularly if it’s tense intensity, which tends to happen if you go too fast too quickly and aren’t ready for it, as this produces cortisol, the long-term stress hormone, which is not good for feeling positive about yourself or your partner.

The focus on intensity, tension and orgasmic climax can also cause a dopamine drop after the big O, leading to a feeling of withdrawal from your partner as well as feeling irritated and disconnected. You need the oxytocin and vasopressin so that you balance out the dopamine drop and keep the happy feelings going. 

What’s happening physiologically then manifests experientially as a flow between the yin and yang emotions – tenderness and passion, romance and eroticism. 

When I talk to clients and others about this approach to sex, many people are so mired in the linear intense approach that they have no concept of what I’m talking about. So, I use metaphors to convey the concept.

A very simple metaphor is music. The standard view of sex is like heavy thrash metal - only intense. Very few us like that kind of music, it’s way too much! Yet we tend to approach sex like that. So ,think of sex more like a symphony, where you have quiet passages as well as more intense passages. There’s a journey in the music, not just one long lead-up to a grand finale.

My favourite metaphor is to think of sex like a picnic. There are no rules as to what you should eat in terms of order, pace and quantity. As enticing as pavlova might be, you don’t have to eat it to have a ‘successful’ picnic, and eating pavlova is certainly not why you’re having a picnic. You’re having a picnic because the whole experience is enjoyable, even if you only eat the dips, and even if you don’t eat at all and just enjoy the conversation.

When you get into a flow, instead of taking a linear direct approach to the main KPI of orgasm, and instead sink into a flowing encounter, each encounter becomes a unique co-creation of mutual pleasure and satisfaction.

How to do this? Most importantly, keep the balance and flow in the whole of your life and relationship. I call this beforeplay. It’s the bulk of life, making sure there’s a balance of the calm, cuddly, safe yin elements as well as the more exciting, flirty, active yang elements of relating. In this way your relationship never becomes complacent, you are always focused on keeping yourselves connected and engaged.

Then when it comes to more intimate engagement, don’t go racing straight to the genitals! Make sure there is plenty of non-genital engagement – which includes having good conversation and connecting mentally as much as engaging with your entire bodies and enjoying the feeling of kisses and touch and whole of body skin contact. Don’t get genital until your body really wants it.

Pay attention to how you’re feeling on the inside, and make sure you are letting each other know how you’re feeling and what you’re wanting. Never make assumptions. Learn to communicate both verbally and non-verbally at all stages of engagement, so that you don’t fall into the same old tired linear script.

Focus on pleasure rather than orgasm. Orgasms are great, but they are an outcome of sex, not the purpose of sex. When you focus on the pleasure, rather than just ‘getting each other off’, you’ll find sex way more satisfying. Not that there is anything wrong with orgasms! But don’t assume you have to have them, or else you’ve ‘failed’. Nor limit yourself to one and think you’re done if there is more love-making to be expressed in an encounter! And when you do orgasm, focus on opening and releasing rather than tensing and forcing.

Never underestimate the importance of a conducive environment. Let your surroundings help get you in the mood. Having a beautiful tidy bedroom with music and soft lighting really does help a lot of people sink into the enjoyment of erotic connection (not to mention practicalities like having a lock on the door!)

And make sure that when the encounter comes to a close you continue to cuddle and chat so that you keep your nervous systems relaxed and the calming pleasure hormones flowing.

This approach to love and life means that you are priming your body to have balanced neural and endocrine systems on the inside, which manifests as pleasure, connection and all the good things about love and sex on the outside!
 

When a wine ages well it becomes more complex, layered, subtle. You want to savour the experience of drinking it, not guzzle it down. Sex that ages well is the same. Mature sex takes its time, appreciates all aspects of the experience, doesn’t set out to hit ‘goals’, just enjoys the experience as it unfolds.

Actually, ideally sex at any age should be like this, an experience you savour and appreciate moment by moment, rather than consuming it rapidly to get to the ‘end point’.

Yet I do think that this kind of sex, actually making love, can become easier with age.

That is if we’re aging well. If you’re caught up in the belief that only youthful physicality is good, that anything different from what we were like at 25 is somehow less, then you won’t age well. You’ll feel inadequate, slow, ugly, sexually ‘past it’. To age well you need to notice and appreciate all the positives that come with age – qualities like wisdom, confidence, patience, not to mention things like financial security and more time. When we take all of those good qualities into our sex life, we really can engage in the way I always promote – with a chilled build, with mutuality, without expectation, no KPIs other than pleasure and connection. With this comes the ability to have self-awareness to express what you want and like and the safety and compassion to hear what your partner likes and wants. From that you co-create beautiful, meaningful experiences, whether they are simple, brief loving encounters or hours of erotic interplay. A whole realm of sexual engagement is available to you, depending on what is right for you at that time. It’s what you co-create moment-by-moment.

That is an experience to savour, one to finish on a high with and to take that goodness out into the rest of life. If being able to afford and appreciate a good wine in this way is a benefit of age, well then, the holistic, life-enhancing advantages of mature lovemaking take the benefits way beyond those of a mere wine!

There’s a belief that only queer people need to come out. It’s as if heterosexual is the default, so there’s no need for heterosexuals to examine their sexuality.
 
Even if you are LGBTQI+, coming out is often more about your sexual orientation, which is who you are attracted to, or your gender identity, which is what your internal sense of your gender is, and less about who you really are as a sexual being.
 
When it comes to who you are as a sexual being, well, that’s a totally individual thing. There are eight billion sexual identities on this planet, as we all have a unique sexual identity.
 
And that sexual identity is not a static thing, it changes and evolves over your lifetime. Who are you as a sexual being at 18 is going to be different at 80. Who you are as a sexual being when you have babies and toddlers is going to be different to when you’re an empty nester. Who you are as a sexual being at the start of a relationship is going to be different to who you are fifteen years into a relationship. Importantly, no stage is better or ‘more sexual’ than another, it’s just different.
 
At least, it is if you are actively engaged with the concept of who you are as a sexual being, rather just being in default mode. Default mode is when you are simply responsive to what comes to you, either in terms of what happens to be going on in your body, or in terms of what your partner is or isn’t presenting to you. And much of this will be based on a lack of quality sexual understanding but rather a whole lot of myths around what it is to be ‘sexual’ or not.
 
To be actively engaged in your sexuality is to really pay attention to what is right for you, both in general and in the moment. And you need to be equally aware of your partner’s sexuality, both in general and in the moment.
 
And while much of that is to do with behaviours, what you like to do or don’t like to do, it’s actually way more subtle and layered than that. What style of sexuality do you prefer – more playful, more sensual, more raunchy? What about the pacing – faster, slower? How do you like it at different stages of a sexual encounter, particularly in the lead-up? What even is a lead-up for you? How about time of day? What you’ve eaten? What kind of atmosphere? What do you need to not be distracted, to not be tired, to feel connected? How do you need your relationship to be? How do you know when you’re done? What do you like to do or not do afterwards? How is your sexuality different during the week versus on weekends, when you’re on holidays versus work weeks? How frequently do you tend to want to engage sexually and how do you like to relate in between? What even is ‘sex’ to you and why do you do it?
 
All these questions and more are so important to clarifying who you are as a sexual being. You might like to go through the questions above alone or with your partner. Consider how you might have answered differently in the past and how you might answer in the future. You’ll probably find that your discussion ranges wider than these questions alone. You might find yourself identifying beliefs that may or may not be helpful, events from your past that have affected how you see yourself as a sexual being either positively or negatively. You might find you’ve made assumptions about yourself and very likely you’ve made assumptions about your partner if you have one.
 
This process will highlight and clear negative energies around shame, guilt, fear, compulsion, entitlement, sadness, trauma, and through that will enhance positive energies of pleasure, connection, joy, bliss, zest, contentedness. And you will also examine your lifestyle to make changes to enhance the good and remove the bad. It’s a fascinating and wonderful process.
 
Try it on your own, and if you find you’d like some support, see me or my colleagues at the LoveLife Clinic, do one of my online courses, or attend one of my wonderful retreats!

It’s amazing how when you focus on improving your love life, the whole of life improves. Health, wealth, career, friendships, family – it all starts shifting when you start looking at yourself, your primary relationship (if you’re in one), your sexuality and everything that goes along with connection, love and intimacy.

Sometimes it is just about sex and engaging in it from a more authentic, more meaningful place. But that’s rare. More commonly I find that life shifts far more broadly and deeply.

You see, in the process of examining connection, meaning, relating, understanding, pleasure, purpose, there comes a clarity and a freedom to be your authentic self. It allows for clearer communication and deeper understanding, you find more mutuality and support. This brings joy and openness, so there’s a greater pleasure in the existence of life. While life and love doesn’t necessarily become easier, there is a greater ease. There’s less stress and more flow, less worry about what’s ‘not’ and more appreciation of what ‘is’. More mindfulness. More love.

And along the way there’s a lot of letting go of things that are no longer aligned. A client just this morning used the analogy that it’s like in nature where there’s a burning off of the undergrowth to allow new growth to come through. He has been finding that strange things are happening around jobs, projects, friendships. Stuff is clearing. What’s emerging for him personally and within his relationship is clearer, simpler and richer.

Another young woman I’m working with is finding the same thing. She was stuck in anxiety caused by belief systems that just weren’t aligned with who she is really is. As she becomes clearer about herself and her truth, old friends and old ways of being are going and she feels lighter and free to welcome in new people and new possibilities and to create an authentic life for herself.

I recall a client who once said “I came to you for premature ejaculation but it’s been an entire existential shift!” or an attendee at a couples retreat who said “I was expecting you to improve our sex life, but you’ve turned it upside-down and inside-out and I’m looking at the whole of life in a slightly bewildered but exciting new way!”

It’s why I call my brand LoveLife, because by transforming your love life you really do transform your love of life.

Sometimes relationships are so bad it’s clear you need to run a mile – there’s violence, coercion, repetitive cheating, they’ve gambled your life savings away… But actually, even in the worst of relationships it can still be hard to end them. There’s often the remembrance of when it was good, the magical thinking that if only, not to mention the fear of what’s on the other side of separation.

So, when a relationship isn’t right, but isn’t horrendous, it can be even harder to end it. You like each other, you get on well most of the time, but you’re not a great match. Maybe your values are different, maybe your wants in life are different, and you get in negative patterns that aren’t anyone’s ‘fault’, but they repeat over and over and over.

In those situations, you are even more likely to get stuck in an endless weighing up of the good and bad. As the title of an excellent book by Mira Kirchenbaum puts it, it’s too good to leave too bad to stay.

Some people get stuck, others do something interesting, generally unconsciously: they force a crisis. A client came to this realisation in session the other day. She was stuck in a relationship where they are both good people, but they want different things in life. She had been working with me to clarify what she does want in life and in a partner, and it had become clear that this relationship wasn’t it. But even with this realisation, she was still compelled to engage in the relationship even more, to move in with the partner, even though she knew it would be a disaster. It didn’t make logical sense.

Then the light bulb moment hit – she realised she was trying to force the relationship to explode. If the relationship became so toxic, so unbearable, it would be easy for her to end it. But while it would be easier, it would also end with bitterness and hurt and probably a good deal of trauma to deal with after! She realised it would be far better to end it now, maturely, with love and respect.

When you read it here, you’d think that it’s obvious that we should end relationships before they get so bad, before you’ve become bitter and twisted. But humans being the fallible creatures that we are, it’s hard to break strong bonds with another, and it’s scary to have to face the unknown on the other side.

It takes courage to end a relationship well. You have to let go of the future you’d planned, athe hopes you’d had. You have to let your heart break. It’s hard and it’s scary. But it’s not traumatic. And in being brave you are also giving yourself freedom to live the life you want with someone who is a good match – and you’re giving your partner the same freedom. So, if you're in this situation, and therapy hasn't worked, be brave.

Feeling awkward in sex is perfectly normal, natural and ok. Even if you've been with the same person for a long time, things can get awkward. Maybe you haven't been sexual for a while, and it feels awkward. Or maybe you're trying something new, and it feels awkward. Or maybe you've been coming to see me and I'm asking you to do homework that feels a little bit awkward. Maybe one of you is feeling awkward or you're both feeling awkward. It's all ok.

The best thing to do when you're feeling awkward is just to acknowledge it. So one of you might say: "I'm feeling a little awkward about this," and the other will reply reassuringly: "That's ok sweetheart, you're safe, it's ok, anything I can do to help?" Or maybe you're both feeling awkward, and one says "I'm feeling a little awkward about this," and the other replies with "Yeah, I am too!" and then you can have a nice chat and a cuddle, feel more secure and then give it a go. Admitting you're feeling awkward gets it out in the open, clears it.

Whereas if you keep it on the inside and push on through, the awkwardness tends to come through anyway, in ways that aren't very sexy. That's if you even push on through, very commonly the awkward feeling stops people from doing anything at all.

Sometimes people cover awkwardness with humour, but it's not funny humour, often it can be a juvenile, often blunt, attempt at sexual humour that feels cringy, coarse or sleazy: "He he, let's go play hide the sausage in the bun". It's not at all ressuring and soothing - and not at all sexy. So try not to make jokes to cover your awkwardness.

Another thing people do, again, it's juvenile, but this time in a coy, babylike way. Often they put on saccharine baby voices: "Ooh, let's go do naughty things in the bedroom". I see couples do this in the clinic, and it is very cringy. It's not mature and it's not sexy.

Just be honest. Be adult. Be clean. Put any negative feelings on the table. Let each other know where you're at and what you're feeling. And then you can genuinely give it a go in a mutual, supportive way - and that is sexy.

I had a client come to see me this morning. She opened up with: “I don’t want to be here as I know you are going to judge me.” She then confessed that she finds a work colleague attractive. And then went into a long, confused, fraught spiel about what it did or didn’t mean. 

I didn’t judge her. I did help her figure out what was going on for her.

To summarise: 

• No, you’re not a bad person if you find people other than your partner sexually attractive.
• No, you’re not being unfaithful if you find people other than your partner sexually attractive.
• No, it doesn’t mean there’s a problem with your relationship if you find people other than your partner sexually attractive.

It is totally normal and fine to have those feelings. The issue is what you do about them.

If you act on those feelings and are unfaithful to your partner then that is not good. That’s a problem. (Unless you have negotiated and agreed to a consensually non-monogamous relationship with your partner and this is within the parameters of what’s agreed to).

But what’s also not good is if you judge yourself. That’s feeding more negativity into what you are feeling and making the situation worse.

So, what to do? 

1. Accept the feeling. It’s actually a nice feeling. It’s not that dissimilar to seeing a nice slice of cake and thinking about how delicious it would be to eat it. It’s a good feeling to feel attraction and also to feel attractive if you sense the feeling is mutual, it’s a buzz, it’s tapping into a life force energy. 
2. But know if for what it is, simply an attraction, a fantasy, a nice feeling. It’s not a reality. The reality of acting on the feeling might be momentarily nice, like eating the slice of cake, but unlike a fantasy, the reality has consequences.
3. Choose not to act on it.

Now, it is possible that finding someone else attractive could highlight dissatisfaction in your own relationship. In which case, talk about it and improve your own relationship.

It’s also true that the feelings could be hard to deal with, especially if the object of desire is someone you see frequently. That’s where willpower and self-control come in. Just like with not eating a slice of cake even if it looks particularly delicious.

I would also suggest that it’s preferable not to be fantasizing about that person while making love with your partner. If the thought comes into your mind at that time, don’t panic, just open your eyes and smile at them and come into the present moment.

As humans, there really are many things in life that are attractive and appealing, including other people. And also as humans, we have the power of choice to decide on how we engage with those attractive and appealing things, whether it’s cake, pokie machines, online shopping, alcohol, drugs or the cute new colleague.

I’m always hearing clients say that one initiates, or one doesn’t, or used to, or whatever. It’s always framed as though initiation is something one partner does, with a question, a suggestion or an action, to which the other agrees or rejects.

It’s a pretty limited, unidirectional way of thinking about initiation. It puts a lot of pressure on each partner. Both can feel pretty powerless. The one initiating has to be brave, hope the other is receptive, and risk rejection. The one responding to the initiation doesn’t have much scope to reply other than yes or no, with the yes assuming a lot and the no risking the other feeling rejected with all the consequential grumpiness or resentment that might follow.

No wonder people are reluctant to initiate, it’s fraught with anxiety, pressure, expectation, fear, guilt – none of which are in any way erotic feelings!

So, let’s ditch that approach to initiating and move towards one that is much more creative and explorative and allows for infinite possibilities.

Think of initiation as a dance between the two of you. It’s a lot more subtle and creative. It can start in many ways, usually less direct than a question or request. There is suggestion, flirtation, hints, without any definite outcome in mind. The other responds in kind. This dance both avoids the unsexy yes/no binary that unilateral initiating leads to, and allows for playfulness, sensuality, sexiness which can actually create interest, desire and arousal.

If you take on board the non-linear approach to lovemaking that I advocate, then there is no pressure for the dance to lead anywhere other than to connection and pleasure, so the dance is already ‘sex’ because it is already pleasure and connection. Then the dance continues until you’ve had enough, with or without genital involvement, orgasms, and the usual KPIs of linear sex.

This dance of initiation is a lovely way to connect, share, co-create, and live a life that in many ways is always the dance!

Some clients confessed to me recently that their bedroom activity has become sitting in bed on their phones “like two passengers in business class”. Each in their own little world and no connection between them at all. It’s pretty dire.

Sadly though, it’s so common. If there’s one issue that comes up over and over again in sessions, it’s phone use. They are so enticing, so readily accessible, and so utterly absorbing.

When you’re on your phone, you’re not with your partner. Your consciousness has been sucked into that alternate reality, you are not here and now, you are there.

Now of course phones are amazing technology and incredibly beneficial when you engage with them in an active manner. The problem is when you passively lose yourself in them. There’s none of you left here. Active engagement with phones is good, part of you is aware of what you are doing and is making conscious choices about how to engage and how long to engage. Passive engagement is a zombie-like absorption into another dimension where there’s little conscious control of what you’re doing and how long you’re there for.

 There are three impacts on your relationship when you don't manage your phone use well:

1. As an individual you’re not getting proper relaxation time. Instead, you’re engaging in mindless time-wasting which leaves you feeling jangled and not rejuvinated.
2. You’re wasting precious ‘us’ time, time where you can connect and enjoy each other’s company, relaxing together.
3. You miss out on the ‘chilled build’ which couples need to connect and create desire for lovemaking. So, sex becomes less frequent and poorer quality.

What to do? Have a phone policy! And support each other to keep it.

I recommend you put your phones to the side at times when you can maximise connection, such as when you’re having dinner or going for a walk. And I insist that you put your phones aside in the bedroom. Some couples successfully ban phones altogether in the bedroom, which I admire. However, they are useful, and with discipline you can have them in the bedroom. The important thing is to make sure you put them down when you are both in the bedroom to make sure you have quality time together before you pick up your phone (at which point you might not want to as other more delectable activities are occurring!)

We need to accept that it is difficult to manage our phones, they are very very enticing. It takes mental will and discipline to manage their use. So, support each other kindly in creating and implementing an approach that works for you as individuals and as a couple. That way you can have all the benefits of phones and all the benefits of a connected, sexual relationship!

Consent has become an important topic, one that is absolutely necessary, important and overdue. 

However, as an accredited Psychosexual Therapist who has spent over ten thousand face-to-face hours talking in intimate detail with people about their sex lives, I know that as well-intentioned as the consent conversation is, until we start addressing what comes before consent, we won’t solve the problem of people being able to give consent. 

We tend to assume we know what sex is and what it is we are consenting to or not. But do we? We can’t consent if we don’t know the parameters, our own internal assumptions, of the thing we are consenting or not to. 

The first question I ask people when they come to me with their myriad issues, the essence of which comes down to being able to navigate sexual relating, is ‘what is sex’? The immediate response to which is generally a puzzled-look followed by, ‘oh, I’ve never really thought about that before.’ 

This is the problem – what do we mean when we refer to sex? What are we consenting to? So many people have a very limited view of sex, one that is generally framed in a patriarchal manner – that sex is something that men do to women and the woman has to agree to or say no. Even in same sex attracted couples I often see this approach: I have to agree to what you want, or what I think you want, or I say no. 

Our language is riddled with words that promote this. Take the term ‘penetration’ – who on earth thought that such an aggressive word was appropriate for the act of sex. And who does the ‘penetrating’? The penis owner! Why not call it ‘envelopment sex’ and move the focus to the vagina inviting, welcoming in and embracing the penis? (I can assure you that I’ve solved a lot of ‘women’s sexual dysfunctions’ simply by changing the language.) 

This tends to be accompanied by another unhelpful belief that sex is a linear process. It has a ‘green light’ early on followed by a series of KPIs that have to be met, leading to the ultimate and final one of the male ejaculation. Then the act is complete – and hopefully she’s had an orgasm along the way.

So many people say they have sex because ‘that’s what you do – don’t you?’. So many young people I see view sex as what they see on porn, they feel they are consenting to those behaviours. So many people in long term relationship view sex as something they have to do to keep their partner happy. Interestingly, aside from a small proportion of entitled folk (and that’s just as often a woman as a man) most people are more concerned about their partner than about themselves.

Let’s take this a step further – not only are people not conceptualising what sex is for themselves, they’re not discussing it with their partner. Even couples who have been together for decades don’t talk about sex much beyond the ‘sex tonight dear?’ – unless it’s a problem, in which case they can talk about it endlessly in a most unsexy way. Even though most people would say that they want a positive sex life, very few go anywhere near the depth of discussion that is required to be able to co-create something meaningful.

Note the language I’m using here. Firstly, “co-create”, yes, sexual intimacy needs to be co-created. It needs to be ‘where are you at’ and ‘where am I at’ and from that we co-create. Not just at the start of an interaction, but all the way through. And secondly, “meaningful” – what is the meaning of sex? The model of sex as ‘getting each other off in the way that we think we should be without talking about it or even wondering why’ doesn’t work. We need to understand the why. 

And to do that we need to step outside the model of sex that we inherited from the millennia of patriarchy, which, while it’s been around for a very long time, does not represent what really drives humans sexually. Let me be brief: most other mammals only have sex to reproduce, when the female is fertile, and there is no ‘fatherhood’, their infants are self-sufficient enough for a mother to manage them on her own. But humans have big brains and big skulls, so we have to give birth to our young when they are very helpless or they wouldn’t fit out the birth canal. A prehistoric mother couldn’t raise an infant to a viable age on her own. There was evolutionary pressure for the fathers to stay around. Men who embraced fatherhood were more likely to have offspring who reached reproductive age and continued their gene line.

Parents who bonded and loved and supported each other and their vulnerable young were the ones whose genes survived. How, in part, did this bonding happen? Through activities that released the bonding and pleasure hormones – sexual intimacy, from touches, hugs, kisses to all kinds of genital engagement.

Sex in humans is primarily a bonding activity, the emotional component is an essential part of quality sex in humans. We need to embrace it as such and teach our young people that. It is something that two people do to create connection through pleasure. There are no other KPIs. It is a moment-by-moment co-creation where each brings to the moment their true selves

I know clinically that this shift in attitude changes everything. It moves it from performance to self-expression, from a physical behaviour to an emotional, dare I say spiritual, connection. Let’s move the consent conversation in society at large in the same direction. Let’s talk about the beauty and the goodness and the mutuality of sex and inspire our young people to engage in a way that is pleasurable and life-enhancing. And as their parents and elders, let’s sort out our own sexuality so that we can model and discuss sexuality as the important and wonderful part of life that it can be.