Your sexual choices are your own
It is one of the big dilemmas: one partner wants to try something different. So how do you respond?
Anne Sexton, 24 Jul 2008
My mother taught me two important lessons about sex. 1) Use contraception; and 2) Make your own sexual choices.
One Sunday afternoon, over roast beef and spuds, my older sister announced that she, at the tender age of 19, was expecting her first child. Sally’s timing couldn’t have been worse. My dear old dad, normally a mild-mannered man, turned all Jekyll and Hyde and chased her around the dining room with the carving knife.
Luckily, a thirty-a-day cigarette habit meant that he was not as quick as he used to be, and Sally, not letting impending motherhood slow her down, managed to sprint away. Our screams must have brought my father to his senses. He stopped, realised what he was doing and promptly burst into tears, offering to do whatever she wanted.
What she wanted was to get married and a few months later she was living in a small town with her new husband and an expanding waistline. After this, I never forgot my mother’s first lesson – pregnancy meant death or the suburbs. Neither appealed.
My mother’s second lesson was just as important, perhaps more so, but at times it’s been a little harder to follow. Your sexual choices are not just up to you – there are at least two people in a sexual relationship, and unfortunately etiquette demands that your partner gets an equal say in what goes on between the sheets, on top of them or on the kitchen counter – unless you are in dom/sub relationship of course, but that’s a different kettle of whips.
Squaring what you want with what your partner wants isn’t always easy. You may wish to shag in Stephen’s Green and frighten the ducks; he or she may think that a Saturday evening covered in liquid latex having sex to the warbles of Celine Dion is time well spent, but unless you both agree, it ain’t gonna happen, and therein lies the rub.
On Thursday evenings I do a radio spot called Sexual Speaking with Victor Barry on Cork’s Red FM. Almost every week, somebody calls or texts in a variation on the one question that it’s always difficult to answer – what do you do when you and your partner want different things sexually?
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