Love does not write in pencil on your heart, it’s permanent. Impossible to erase. Sure, it might one day turn to hatred or disgust, like fresh wounds becoming twisted scars long after they were first carved into your flesh. But you don’t forget it easily. Love can change and it can die, you can lose it or throw it away or cure yourself of the cravings for it like a powerful addiction… but you can’t just erase it altogether.

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Apologies for the aggressively search-engine-targeted title here, it’s a question many people ask: how do I keep having fun sex in a long-term relationship? Sometimes it’s framed as ‘how do I keep sex alive’ or ‘how can I introduce new kinks to my partner?’. As I’ve written before, I find it upsetting how easily people assume that sex inevitably falls by the wayside when you’ve been with someone for a few years. My response to ‘sex just dies eventually in long-term relationships’ is ‘not in mine!’. Sex is one of my top priorities, and as a result the two long term relationships I’ve had were both satisfyingly fucky right up to the bittersweet, tortured end. So when a reader asked about sexual adventures, I thought I’d have a go at trying to articulate how I (and my partners, if they’re game) go about creating a culture of sexual exploration when we’re together. This isn’t just a guide for people who feel like their sex life has waned over time, but also for those in sexually active relationships who want to know how to introduce new kinks and sparks. Hopefully I can cover all this off in the same post, because I’m clever and great at multitasking. Also because I think the approach is similar no matter which of those situations you find yourself in.

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This gorgeous piece on waking him with a blow job is written and read by Molly Moore. Note that this piece involves sleep sex – an activity you should never do without the express prior consent and enthusiasm of your partner. 

When I wrote this piece, Michael and I were still in a long distance relationship. He was in the USA and I was here. Later that month he would get his VISA and move here and 18 months of mainly being apart would finally come to an end. We used to sleep together on Skype but because of the time difference he would get to watch me sleep during his evening and I would do the same during my morning. I wrote this whilst watching him sleep.

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There’s never a bad time to hear this, right? You deserve to be loved. I don’t mean, in a basic way, that you as an individual are entitled to romantic love, or sex or companionship or whatever: those things can only be given freely, if other individuals choose. I mean that you deserve to be treated with love, by those who say they feel it. You deserve to be loved by them in practice, not just words.

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Some men have worried in the past that they’re not able to dispense exactly the kind of love that I crave – i.e. relentless praise, on an almost minute-by-minute basis, lest I wilt like a houseplant you’ve forgotten to water. To be honest, I often find myself worrying about this too. In an ideal world I’d be the recipient of an almost constant stream of written, physical and verbal encouragement – reminders that I’m sexy, fun, valid, wanted, loved. A good girl. I need this kind of thing so much that those I rely on to help me feel loved might think it borderline sarcastic to plough on even during the (frequent) periods when I’m not doing much to deserve it. I understand this. But there are other ways to make me feel loved, and one of the ways I practice love in return is by noticing and mentioning them…

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