Category Archives: Unsolicited advice
Emotional labour: how much can I ask of you?
I’ve always been the one who gets to hear people’s secrets. Maybe I’m great at keeping them, or perhaps I just have the look of someone who’s keen to hear all the dirty details. Maybe both – I hope so.
Even before I started sex blogging, I’d have friends email or text to say ‘I did something super-hot yesterday and I’m not sure who else to tell so…’ We’d chat about it together, swap stories and share experiences, and give each other the best non-judgy advice or support we could muster.
Then I started a sex blog.
I still chat to friends about sex secrets and details, but I’m lucky enough that I have an outlet for it here. You read and respond and share and chat, and we have a special club where we can talk about this stuff. It’s awesome. It’s reciprocal. It’s simultaneously a shared joy and a shared burden – depending on what we’re talking about.
It also means that lots more people confide in me privately.
Foreplay for people who suck at foreplay
I’m not very good at foreplay. In fact, on the scale of ‘things I am incredibly bad at’ it ranks below even running, remembering birthdays, and ‘not eating the second half of an open tube of Pringles.’
But, as with most sexual things, I’m willing to learn. After recently being berated for the fact that my seduction technique often involves me stripping to my pants in the bedroom and shouting ‘DO YOU WANT SEX?’ so loud that he can hear it from the kitchen, I am working on getting better at it.
Touching, hinting, saying sexy things: you know the drill.
Here’s how my foreplay lessons are going…
All the love except eros
I’m not going to say the word. The V word. The one that’ll have half of you clicking away and the other half vomiting copiously onto the carpet.
But what I am going to do is write about non-sexual love. The love that I usually ignore here in favour of hot sex or wanking or – very occasionally – posts about men who give me that warm feeling in my chest.
Other kinds of love are often neglected – it’s the topic of one of my favourite posts over at BishUK: more than one love. He talks about everything and everyone we love but we never send cards to or buy roses for. Friends, family, community – the people who support and inspire and care for us.
How to get over heartbreak
Start with a super-sad song. One you’ve played over and over before, but never fully wept to. Put it on loudly and sit somewhere you usually don’t. The carpet. The bath. The filthy kitchen floor.
Then, grab something comforting. Chocolate, biscuits, wine, all of the above. Consume them while staring blankly into space, imagining that somewhere someone else is doing the same. Feel the weight and pain of all the shattering hearts that exist on the same planet.
Cry.
Two things: awesome sex ed and shitting on shitbags
Today I am frantic with work, and about to collapse in a pile on the floor. Please forgive me if I’m slow to get back to you or if your kind offer of a pint or a chat is met with just an incoherent scream of terror.
BUT I refuse to collapse properly before I’ve done a Monday blog. So here goes – a brilliant thing, and something that’s annoyed me…