Jackie Summers with part three of his “Exquisite Lover” series. This time, he talks about intimacy and artistry.
“Kick me.”
(Student attempts kick)
“What was that? An exhibition?
We need emotional content.
Try again.”
~ Bruce Lee, Enter the Dragon.
Exquisite: from the latin “exquisitus,” meaning carefully sought out, consummate, delightful, excellent, extraordinarily fine, intense, of particular refinement or elegance.
Or as my best friend Morgan would say “fucking awesome.”
Who doesn’t want those adjectives applied to their sex lives, to their sexual prowess?
Show of hands…? Bueller? Bueller?
In The Exquisite Lover part 1 we compared sex without passion to food without spice: edible but unappetizing. Simply put, everybody should cook and fuck with passion, or don’t bother. In part 2 readers were admonished to master technique as a method of demonstrating expert execution of enthusiasm. “Learn technique; have full command to the extent of not being conscious of how it is done” said Sergei Bongart. “When craftsmanship has been developed, you are free to create… technique will give way to expression!”
The successful combination of unbridled passion and masterful technique is a feat achieved by too few. Passionate virtuosity, however laudable, is by no means the summit of sexual sapience. Enthusiastic proficiency devoid of emotional content is ultimately nothing more than (very) elegant posturing. Additionally, the flame of the brightest passion can dim, and eventually you will reach a ceiling on applicable technique. How does one transcend mastery into ascendance?
Resonance: the rainbow bridge between the realm of mortal sex and sexual Shangri-La.
Chemistry–as applied to human relations–could be defined as the reaction of one personality to another; some combinations are inert, others volatile. Great sexual chemistry is unpredictable, and rare as a blue rose, as libido, inhibitions, predilections and physiology vary wildly from person to person, and can vary wildly between the same people, relative to the immediate circumstances. For this reason, no matter how powerful your initial connection is, it can be improved by resonance: the science and art of bringing varying frequencies into synchronous harmony.
One of the reasons this is so difficult is: you can have sex without being intimate, and you can be intimate without having sex. The path to intimacy lies through vulnerability, and it’s both unwise and unsafe to be vulnerable to strangers. Herein lies the problem with an endless string of new sexual partners: the allure of constant conquest will (eventually) bow before the issue of quality control. No matter how skilled a lover is, single serving portions of sex rarely offer lasting satisfaction. They feed the ego but they do little (or nothing) to enhance sexual artistry.
This is why you learn far more about sex by sleeping with one person one hundred times than by sleeping with one hundred people once. Emotional content goes far beyond the base desire to satisfy your partner, and asks: why? If you remove ego from the equation and discover yourself bereft of motivation, your desire to please will plateau quickly. The reason you care about your partners pleasure is the difference between really good sex and great sex. While not making a case for monogamy, even if you’re with one person for years, the sex can continue to improve as long as your emotional connection continues to deepen.
Allowing synergy to grow osmotically creates the space for honest conversation, a key to exploring your partner’s depth as well as your own. I’m on record as saying “before a woman will be thoroughly indecent with you, she needs to determine that you are essentially decent.” It is only possible to fully explore the boundaries of danger from a place of (relative) safety. This means establishing trust, and trust takes time. In this context, a proper definition of an improper paramour would be: someone with whom you feel comfortable exploring your discomfort.
If combining passion and technique transforms a simple physical act from a square to a cube by adding depth, the additional dimensions of resonant frequencies and emotional content transform a cube into a sexual tesseract.
© J Summers 2012
Originally published on F*cking in Brooklyn
photo of a passionate couple caressing each other by Shutterstock.
About Jackie Summers
Right on as usual. I particularly like the comparison of sexual satisfaction from 100 times with the same person or 1 time with 100 people.
As a married man I am definitely more sexually satisfied having discovered the depth of emotional intimacy with my wife because that opens doors to longer lasting pleasure. I look back on my youth, on those conquests, on cycling through a different girl every month for a few years of awkward, usually drunken grope fests and none are truly memorable. Chalk it up to inexperience, on lack of confidence, or alcohol-related performance detraction and I can’t really say I ever enjoyed good sex. I enjoyed having sex and the feeling of the ego boost you get when a woman finds you attractive and you start to understand that you have something good going on. But it was definitely short-lived and cyclical in the pattern of being sexually attracted, casually involved, having sex, losing interest, looking elsewhere, repeat. The whole experience is superficial, like fast food. I can’t remember the last fast food I had which was probably within the last week, but I can recall every detail of the last really great fine dining experience I had and it was over a month ago.
Its the same recollection I have about how I was in college, I can’t remember any of the sex, most of the girls, or any sense of connection. But after 8 years of marriage, there is a long upward trend of sexual satisfaction, with minor blips of mini-recessions around the time we had our 2 kids, and its that realization that keeps me from looking for some short lived ego boost from another empty conquest.
I think there’s truth in both sides of the 100 with one or once with a 100 thing. Both are learning experiences. I certainly learned things with different women that showed me that was true of one was not at all true of another.
Thank you. A truly honest and balanced view of life.