I remember when my dear friend, Kime asked me about intimacy outside committed relationships. Paraphrased, he had asked me if it was possible to create and sustain deep meaningful connections that were purely platonic and not a threat to a committed relationship. I thought and answered confidently that I felt that it was. Why? Because you see, I had to teach it to myself through changed choices and changed perspectives on interpersonal relationships, sex and my body.
When I was growing up, I was not the beautiful one. And if you are a person that knows me and loves me, don’t try to make me feel good by saying that I was. I try not to lie to myself so don’t do the same. I was not the pretty one. My features were all over the place - Big ears, big teeth, big ass forehead, scrawny body and I did not have much of a sense of style. I did not like myself. I hated my first name so much that when I moved to Ghana for my first degree, I changed it from Adanze to Amanda (They are both my legal names, btw. I am Alice too).
In University, I began to get attention from people, sexual attention. People found me desirable. People wanted me. Imagine what that did to my self-esteem. TONS! I wanted to be desired. We all want to be desired. There is nothing wrong with it. However, for me, it became a problem because I was not wise enough to understand and manage that feeling, especially my sexuality. So, whenever I could, I played up my sexuality. It made me feel powerful. Being able to seduce people made me feel desirable and made me feel good about myself. I was a bad bitch, a desired seductress. Somewhere along the way, a bit of my sense of self-worth was tied to this and even the relationships I built with other people was centred around some kind of physically intimate connection. I cringe as I say this but in the past, when I met someone new that I found attractive, I was not interested in knowing who they were as beings, I was asking myself if we would be compatible as sexual partners. I had my friendships but even some of those had transformed into friendships from sexual relationships. Plus, being young and in my early twenties, having multiple sexual relationships was the norm. It was not a shameful thing and for women, it was the hot era of “if men could fuck around without catching feelings, so could women”
A few years later, during a conversation with another dear friend, Kanksh, where I was intimating to her the details of a new relationship I was about to embark on, she said to me:
“Amanda, you don’t have to fuck everyone”
I paused. What did she mean by that? There was truth in it but my ego was bruised. Did she mean that I was not attractive enough to be with whoever I wanted or as many people as I wanted to?
Pfft!
I responded to her:
“Challenge accepted”
A few months down the line, it all ended in tears and this time as I was crying from heart-wrenching news I had heard about past lovers of mine, I listened to another set of friends tell me the same thing about my sexual relationships. I was not running through people every day with no care but upon reflection, I should have been more thoughtful about who I chose to have access to my body. I went home that night and proceeded to cut off all the sexual and romantic relationships that I had formed to start all over again. There was a need for me to redefine the understanding that I had of sex and my sexuality.
Working with this goal in mind, I began to realise how limited my knowledge of sex and my sexuality was. I found myself asking and studying the basics of sex.
“What is sex?”
“What is the purpose of sex?”
“Why do I have sex?”
“Can I see people as people first before I begin to nurse the idea of being physically intimate with them?”
“Why was that even my first thought when I found someone attractive?”
Answering these questions and getting to where I am today was not a one-month journey and it took more events to shape and change my relationship with sex, intimacy and my body.
As my knowledge of myself grew, I realised how much I regretted some of the sexual encounters that I had had in the past. There was no need for me to have allowed some of these people access to my body without taking out the time to know who they were and if they were worthy of sharing my body and space with me. I regretted some of the relationships that I lost because we had been physically intimate in the past and that complicated our ability to grow beyond that.
I began to actively work on changing the way that I perceived people that I found attractive. One of the key things that I learnt was from admiring the sun and flowers: They are beautiful and can be admired and left alone. I do not need to explore every attraction. Not every desire I have must be entertained and judging from my past experiences, there is not much to be desired after a nut has been busted, apart from more nut-busting and even that gets tiring when it is within an empty relationship.
This year, I learnt another significant lesson from events that happened during the early months of the year. With a healthier sense of self and self-esteem, I reflected on my sexual journey since I became sexually active and I realised that I did not understand what it meant to value my own body. The idea of your body being sacred was always shared from a Christian perspective which I found to be restrictive and a cause to rebel against. However, now that I am older, I see the value in that statement outside of the umbrella of Christianity. I did not treat my body as a sacred, valued and respected part of existence which was why I allowed anyone who tickled my fancy or made me feel special access to it. Even those that did not deserve to even kiss my feet. I had non-existent to poor boundaries around my body and devalued the act and purpose of sex in my life. It was just knacks but truthfully, upon meditation, every single one of those sexual encounters that I had embarked on affected my being.
Now that I am older, my usual sexual behaviour would have been to fill up the quiet moments of my life with bodies to make myself feel good - go through another hoe phase, but I have chosen to practice choosing only to share my space, my emotions and my body with people who over time have shown themselves to be worthy. And by worthy, I mean people who love themselves, that are happy, that take care of themselves, and that bring light into the lives of others. People who have shown me respect and have shown that they respect themselves, and value the intimate connection that sex creates. I have decided to be clear with myself about the purpose of every sexual encounter that I embark on, taking the time to ask and answer the questions of why am I doing this, why is it with this person and are the conditions surrounding this sexual encounter safe and clear, i.e. am I compromising on my values or hurting anyone by engaging in coitus with this person? The first time I turned down a sexual advance, it felt like I fed my soul something good and powerful - self-respect. I recall telling them that even though I too was attracted to them, from our conversations and time spent together, I preferred them to be in my life long term and would prefer a friendship. I recognised that with time sexual desires unattended fade and sexual energy can be redirected into other things - exercise, meditation, reading, having a good conversation, creating, nurturing, dancing, cooking etc.
I stopped watching porn this year. This helped a lot too because porn had warped my idea of what a healthy sexual relationship could be. And the shitty things about porn are that it sexualises situations that should be innocent and the more you watch, the darker and twisted your choice of porn becomes. It affected my connection to my body that I could not properly articulate and visualise what aroused me. It was a get-hard quick drug and that was not good. Answering the question of who I was as a sexual being was difficult at first because porn warped that space. How? It presented to me what I thought I should be as a sexual person. Even the media (American media specifically) contributed to the distortion of what realistic human sexual relationships were like.
With all these changes, I feel a lot calmer when I socialise with others. Even though I know I am not celibate, I do not feel the pressure to perform so that I can be desired sexually by someone else. I no longer need to make sex jokes or innuendos to be seen as cool, fun, attractive and flirty. I take my time to get to know the people in my life as human beings, exploring the possibility of a friendship first before I entertain a romantic or sexual connection. This way I do not miss out on meaningful, deep intimate connections that could last a lifetime and be transformative because truly, sex does complicate things.
Because I am no longer trying to fuck everyone and I no longer have the desire to indulge every connection that arouses fire in my loins, I have learnt how to actively create and sustain healthy interpersonal relationships. During one of my relationships, I took two months to be celibate and in the absence of sex, I learnt how to reconnect with my partner after a misunderstanding through open, gentle and honest communication rather than make-up sex. I learnt to practice acts of non-sexual physical intimacy, to communicate my desire for them even though I could not engage in sexual relations with them. I took a long break from self-pleasuring and learnt ways to calm down konji, to de-stress, relax, and sleep better. Self-pleasure is still an option but it is no longer in the top five on my list of self-soothing acts/things that make my body feel good.
I can freely explore deep, honest connections with other people even though I find them attractive without the fear of or concern about “what if we end up fucking?”
I must admit, I am quite proud of myself.
With love,
A
you don't have to sleep with everyone
Thanks for being this open. I am also addicted to porn but I am finding others ways to de-stress.
I always look forward to your newsletter, this was a great read, thank you. I have learned new things.