Cast your mind back to the last time something gave you a kick of surprising new lust. You know what I mean, right? The little moments during sex when someone said something with a particular intonation and it caused you to melt from the inside. The written erotica that made just a few tweaks to the kind of phrases you think about when you masturbate, and suddenly opened the door to a whole new avenue of fantasy. Maybe you were scrolling through your favourite porn site, and you discovered a fresh way to position two subs for a beating that gave you… well… feelings. Cast your mind back to how you felt when you were last turned on by something that surprised you. Now hold that thought, and treasure it: it may be much rarer in the future.

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The most sensible strategy, if you want to win someone back, is probably a combination of loving words and powerful actions: promise change, show how you’re working on that, tell me you love me, and remind me of all the things that I can’t help but love about you. That’s a pretty good strategy, right there, if you’re wedded to the idea of having one. There are two others, though, and enough time’s passed on each that I reckon it’s OK for me to tell the following stories. The first one is romantic, the second is horny as fuck.

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How do you feel? Part one of this piece talked about emotions, and the value of exploring them in detail. You’re probably best off reading that before coming back to this, because it was originally written as one piece, but here’s a brief summary: articulating your emotions is a skill – one to which we don’t always give enough time or attention. It’s often seen as something you either can do or you can’t. What’s more, some of us are given permission to do it where others are aggressively prevented from trying. This is heavily gendered, of course: men are told not only that they’re innately ‘bad’ at articulating emotions, but also that they shouldn’t be as emotional as women are. Cannot and must not. They’re allowed to show big scary feelings like anger, but punished for showing any that hint at vulnerability, and often discouraged from spending time with their feelings at all. I find this wildly unfair and, if I think on it too long, outright heartbreaking. Spending time with your feelings can help you know yourself better, and articulating your emotional needs is a very valuable skill when it comes to building relationships. Learning how to do it is a gift to yourself, as well as to those who love you.

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How do you feel right now, emotionally? If you came up with something like ‘sad’ or ‘happy’ or ‘angry’, can you drill down a little deeper into that emotion? Is it possible to identify what’s causing it, or is it a vague sense that you can’t explain? Are there other feelings swirling around to keep that first one company? Or even ones that seem to exist in conflict with it? It’s possible, after all, to feel both angry and content – one an immediate flash of something bad, set against a backdrop of a life that’s otherwise giving you all the things you need. How good are you at identifying your emotions? In how much detail could you answer the question: how do you feel right now?

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It’s embarrassing to admit that I don’t like myself very much. Far more embarrassing, though, to tell you all that sometimes I think I’m OK. The latter carries way more shame, I want to whisper it in small-font italics. Sometimes I think I’m quite good, actually. Occasionally the tall, loud, brash, opinionated mess that makes up ‘me’ doesn’t feel so obnoxious. I like myself when I’m with you.

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