Dirt and gold
Here are two real and rather typical stories in which partners once found themselves on different sides of their personal borders. History first. He is honest and decent, but modest and shy. She is an energetic girl with leadership qualities. Meeting, love, wedding. Both of them were first lovers. In bed, the young husband turned out to be gentle and sensitive, although not too active. My wife did not experience orgasm, but decided that there was nothing terrible in this, and preferred simply to enjoy the closeness of a loved one. Everything was smooth and calm. And suddenly she met another man, romantic and self-confident, in bed with whom she experienced such a thrill, about the existence of which she had no idea. The woman decided that communication on the side should not continue, but tactfully explain to her husband that other types of caresses, which are of great pleasure, are possible, will be useful for marriage. And - miscalculated: the spouse considered her claims "lewd" and "unacceptable for a decent woman," the wife found it necessary to respond to insults ... and it almost came to a divorce. The second story. An inexperienced girl got married - and found that she was completely indifferent to sex, she would only be hugged and kissed. More knowledgeable in bed matters, the spouse did not lose hope to wake her sensuality, but the wife obviously did not get pleasure from caresses and preferred that the sexual act end as soon as possible. He tried to introduce oral sex into a sexual "diet", but received an angry rebuff: the wife said that from one thought of touching the mouth with a member of her nausea, did not respond and her husband's attempts to caress the clitoris with his tongue. After that, the husband declared her frigid and said that she would leave her if she did not turn to a sex therapist. The final of both stories is successful: both couples have reached specialists, they found out that none of the partners have any physiological obstacles to getting pleasure, and they learned to listen to each other's desires and allow themselves more than before. But if the participation of sexologists in the situation was not - all would end either the collapse of the family, or the need for one of the two to perform "depraved" from their point of view, through action. Unfortunately, so many families live, and in the generation of our parents, this was even more common. And in either case, the personal range of sexual acceptability (it's the range of acceptability of caresses) played its role. In the scientific literature this term is defined as "the aggregate of forms of sexual behavior in intimate proximity, which do not engender negative emotional reactions in partners and are regarded by them as permissible." It includes both types of caresses, and touching this or that part of the body, and the variety of sex, and position. For each of us, the range of sexual acceptability is strictly individual, and is limited mainly by moral, ethical and aesthetic criteria. In rare cases, there are also physiological limitations. And often we consider not only unhealthy and unlawful deviations (like pedophilia or zoophilia), but also completely accepted and natural in other couples sexual actions, say, anal sex. This is our personal norm (we also remember that the norm is not the point, but the range?), And the partner has to reckon with it. As we have to bear in mind its boundaries. In the relationship of the couple should work so-called golden rule of sex: in bed, you can allow everything that suits both partners. The key word is "both". "As soon as there is an inconvenience to one of the partners, this rebound is reflected in the other. Doing something unacceptable in bed through force, as an assignment to a partner, puts in a delayed action mine, which sooner or later explodes and leads to disgamy - a violation of marital interactions. " Therefore, from the golden rule follows the second, "silver": if you feel uncomfortable - say about it. Silence is costly to us.
Maiden shyness
In a pair, you have to give up, as a rule, to a woman. This is the result of patriarchal upbringing: "a woman is a weak sex, her job is to yield and endure, this is woman's wisdom." Yes, and nature is established so that a woman in sex is passive: she can not take any sexual intercourse in general, because a woman's orgasm for conception is not needed. "Virtually in all biological species, the courtship initiative belongs to the male. Women always display men, give feedback, adjust, adapt. In bed, almost everything is set by a man: the frequency of sexual acts, and their duration, and forms of interaction. Part of this is justified: after all, a woman can not, for example, lengthen the sexual intercourse only at will, with an orgasm of a partner, it somehow ends. In a typical sexual situation, the partner has much less choice. " That is why the range of sexual acceptability in men is usually broader than that of women, and the process of knowing each other in most couples is a slow and gradual expansion of the partner's range to the male boundaries. Strong sex is more willing to experiment to diversify the usual sexual scenario. And the longer the couple together, the shorter the prelude - the varieties are usually looked for in types of sex, new positions, unusual places for making love, using sex toys. And then much depends on the attentiveness and tactfulness of the man, and it is much easier for them to declare a partner who declined from this or that "indecent proposal" frigid than to accurately find out why she is uncomfortable to perform this or that sexual action. Sometimes the obstacles to a normal sexual life are completely unexpected. Say, George Selyukov told me the story of one of his patients - a woman who can talk to a specialist on any sexual topics, but at the same time a terrible social phobia: she finds it difficult to make new acquaintances and develop relationships, which means that there is practically no sexual life as such. But to get to the bottom of the reasons and understand how they can be eliminated or circumvented, there must be absolute trust between partners, and unfortunately, not every couple can boast of this. Most of the problems arise from the fact that one of the partners has a very vague idea of the range of acceptability of the other. For example, we often try to submit to the partner in everything in bed and not show any initiative, because we are sure that men like "submissive", although in fact most of them like active partners (the main thing is not to overdo the stick: the commanders in their bed already Do not excite). Men sometimes have no idea that in fact hard sex, with elements of submission, like a very small number of women, and orgasm with anal sex is experienced only by individual representatives of the fair sex. On the range of sexual acceptability, the difference in the sexual constitution of partners is also reflected. With a weak sexual constitution, we simply will not feel desire too often - and this is another reason for the partner to decide that we have problems, if, for example, he has a strong sexual constitution. A compromise will help here: for example, you can not make love too often, but you can deliver pleasure to the partner in "unseasonable" time in an alternative way, taking into account your range.
Fruits of enlightenment
The boundaries of the personal range of sexual acceptability are formed quite early, long before the first experiment. Going to bed for the first time, we sometimes already in detail imagine how this should happen - and severely disappointed when the reality turns out to be quite different. The talk of the family life of the art historian of the Victorian era, John Ruskin, was a talk of the town. Studying the female body only on the ancient statues, he was shocked on the first wedding night by the discovery that women have hair in intimate places, and even got sick for a long time. This, of course, is almost anecdotal, but the first sexual experience is rarely inspiring: almost none of the girls undergoes an orgasm with a sexual debut. The formation of a range of sexual acceptability affects everything that we have learned about sex, since childhood, and this information is not always scientific. After all, with sexual education in schools we still did not work out, and parents preferred to keep silent about the sensitive issue or even to impose a taboo on it ("belching Victorian upbringing"). As a result, the teacher becomes a street, and in urban folklore, sex is overgrown with an insane number of legends that have nothing to do with reality. Adolescent girls often make up a model of ideal relationships for romance novels and films. Having read books about how a prince on a white horse, a sensitive and attentive lover, abducts a beautiful stranger, the girls expect the first fireworks described - and after real experience disappointment does not make you wait. Sex in sugary ladies' novels is described very patterned and monotonous, with the same set of caresses and positions. Have you ever met in such stories, that a woman takes pleasure in a partner with oral caresses, or that lovers try other positions than missionary, and - very rarely - "a woman from above"? So it's no wonder that other girls enter into sex life with the conviction that a blowjob is dirty and unworthy of a decent woman, not to mention the position of a "man from behind." Their range of sexual acceptability is initially limited, and unreasonably. Another useless source of information for sexual education is porn films. If in romance novels sex is maximally "chaste", then in porn, on the contrary - it is coarsened and reduced to instinct. So, the prelude is absent or very short: it seems that a woman is excited instantly, and yet this is far from the case - in bed, it takes a lot of time for the desire to reach its maximum. Much of what is shown in porn is just an illusion: the operators know how to create the impression of a huge size of male genitalia, and the editors glue together half an hour of sexual acts from two-five-minute pieces closer to reality. So it turns out that the main guardian of the borders of our ranges is an elementary ignorance in matters of sex. Another story from the experience of George Selyukov: a man complained that his wife during an orgasm does not make any sounds, but, on the contrary, is silent. Obviously, the previous sexual experience, coupled with porn films, taught him that during orgasm a woman should scream and generally react very violently. Meanwhile, there is a kind of orgasm, when a woman "flies away", and it is unthinkable at the same time, but the sounds do not burst out. The specialist had only to explain this to the man - and the problem disappeared. Fortunately, with the accumulation of experience, the range of sexual acceptability is expanding. If there is an insurmountable barrier, a sexologist will help him overcome, which nowadays often has to perform an enlightening function, helping partners to choose the forms of proximity that are suitable for them. All this is possible if the couple has love, the desire to constantly build relationships and grow in them - both individually and together.