When you just aren’t enjoying sex, what can you do about it? The answer to that is multifaceted since people vary enormously, but for now I’ll pin it down to three different situations:

1. If you have had good sex in the past, and you just aren’t getting turned on right now, you might want to accept that you are going through a non-sexual phase in your life, and that’s fine. At some point in the future you will probably start to feel sexual again. Meanwhile concentrate on putting your energy into something else that calls you.

2. If you are just having trouble with this particular partner, then you need to address it very specifically with this partner. That means talking and listening to each other. As I’ve said before, communication requires being able to listen without judgment. Since we are taught to be judgmental as we grow up, that often isn’t easy. It would benefit us all to learn to establish personal preferences instead of thinking that because we feel that something is bad, others shouldn’t do it, and they are bad people if they do. That’s not useful. A nonjudgmental approach is the basis of the art of communication. Once you can state your own preferences clearly and listen to your partner, you may be able to work out how to have sex together than satisfies you both.

However, communicating doesn’t always solve this problem. Sometimes a person’s touch just doesn’t do it for you. Maybe you are attracted to them on some other level, but not sexually. We all vibrate at different frequencies and, just as you may experience certain kinds of music as jarring, so also you may experience another person’s touch as jarring. Your vibrations are too different. This is nobody’s fault. It can sometimes change but not usually simply by wishing it to change.

3. Plenty of people have never had sex that feels really good, although most will never admit it because they think there is something wrong with them. If this is your situation, let me assure you there is nothing wrong with you, because there is no “normal” when it comes to sex. Many people aren’t really in their bodies at all, and you are never going to have really good sex until you are fully inhabiting your own body. It’s also true that standard sex—a little foreplay, intercourse, the man’s orgasm, and that’s the end of it—doesn’t work for most women without some variation at the very least. Or you may be on of those people who needs something absolutely different: a BDSM relationship or a lover of the same sex, for instance. How can you find out what works for you? More on that in my next post . . .

Mikaya Heart is an award-winning author and a coach in the art of being fully alive.

Her most recent book is The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women.

• www.mikayaheart.org

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