How to Initiate: Embracing Your Cringe
By Taylor Neal
Initiating sex is one of the most common challenges I hear from clients in session.
Before we can explore more pleasure and connection during sex, we first have to be able to get it going somehow, and this always means someone has to initiate.
What comes un a lot for clients when it comes to initiating it seems, is the inherent vulnerability wrapped up in initiating. To initiate sex is to let your partner(s) in on your desire, to make them aware of what you're thinking. In a world where we've for so long prioritised and praised a deliberate lack of vulnerability, to deliberately express and share our desires can feel completely overwhelming, exposing, and disregulating.
What if they think I'm weird?
What if I say the wrong thing?
What if they don't want me back?
What if I initiate, and then I can't get hard? Why would I start something I can't complete? How embarrassing!
All the "what if's" that come with initiating are often reason enough to just get on with life and bypass yet another opportunity for pleasure and connection. Often, it just feels too hard!
The trouble that comes with the fear of initiating however, is that when we find ourselves unable to initiate we either unintentionally put all the responsibility for sex in our partner(s)'s hands, and this can feel like a heavy load to carry. Or, unsurprisingly, we end up having a lot less sex.
The fear of initiating then, when experienced over a long period of time, can cause frustration, disconnection, and feelings of rejection or perceived low desire in relationships. If we're not initiating, our partners can often feel like we might not want them, or like we're uninterested in sex. Or if we've designated the responsibility to our partners without a clear discussion, we can grow to resent them if we're not having the amount of sex we'd like to be having because maybe they don't always have to capacity to initiate that we'd actually like.
Though it may be incredibly cheesy, when it comes to the fear of initiating I often reveal to clients my extreme Canadian-ness and quote Wayne Gretzky:
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
There is no "perfect" way to initiate. Initiating can be clunky, awkward, silly, adorable, and down-right cringe. And this is what makes it such a beautifully human experience.
As our world becomes so much more automated, robotic and efficient thanks to AI and so much therapy jargon circulating in mainstream discourse, initiating sex can feel like the one place where we really just have to own our humanity. We have to embrace our cringe!
The inner-spiral of not initiating
A clunky attempt at initiating sex will bring you a lot closer to actually having sex than doing nothing ever will.
But, if we've had past experiences where we tried to initiate that were unpleasant or harmful, or if our fear of initiating comes more from performance anxiety (such as fear of not getting an erection, fear of pain, fear of dissociation etc), then it often feels safer not to. Though we might want to initiate, we know that if we don't we at least won't have to face the rejection, shame, or disappointment that might follow our initiation.
The option to bypass these uncomfortable feelings that could potentially come with initiating is what most often keeps us from sharing our desire and making ourselves more vulnerable, and then we might swallow our desire with somewhat of an internal sense of defeat our partner might have no idea we're processing. Whether over the course of 30 seconds or 3 hours, the internal process and dialogue that comes with feeling an urge to initiate, weighing the pros and cons, remembering the shame, rejection, discomfort or disappointment, and then ultimately deciding not to, can leave us feeling completely drained, defeated, and frustrated by the whole ordeal without our partners even having any idea what's happening for us.
We might also feel this inner sense of defeat of we're too nervous to initiate and hoping our partner will, and then they don't. Ever find yourself just sitting there praying they'll make the first move so you don't have to?
When they do, it can bring feelings of connection that border on "they can read my mind, they must be the one." But when they don't, it can feel even more isolating - more like "how could they not know I wanted to?"
The bottom line is that our partners are neither responsible for reading our minds, nor are they responsible for the entirety of our sex lives. Though it might be scary, we have to take responsibility for our sexuality if we want to be having more frequent, fulfilling sex. If we want to feel more agency and confidence in our sex lives, we have to relieve ourselves of the control that our fear of initiating has over our pleasure.
Perfection & Initiating
The fear of initiating is most often actually the fear of rejection coupled with the fear of being imperfect or clunky. And actually, the fear of rejection usually comes as the by-product of the fear of being clunky.
The fear of rejection might be derived from past experiences of rejection or lack of confidence in our own desirability, but it's almost always a fear of not being "enough" - perfect enough, hot enough, cool enough, smooth enough, skilled enough, etc. When it comes to sex and desirability, our sense of enough-ness is more and more linked to our ability to give a flawless performance in the bedroom, from the moment we initiate until we're all on our backs with flushed cheeks, out of breath and thoroughly satisfied. A job well done.
We believe that being a desirable, worthy lover is congruent with being a perfect one. To know what they want, how they want it, how they want us to initiate, and when, and where, and to hit the right spot every time without fail.
But sex is one of the very few areas of our lives where we simply don't get to be perfect.
Yes, you read that right. Not "can't always be" or "don't have to be," but we don't get to be perfect. Sex is messy.
There is simply no way to always know how our partner feels, what they might want, or whether or not it's the right time to initiate, because not only are we always changing and evolving, but so are they. And further, whether or not sex might be on the table very often actually has nothing to do with how we initiate, so thinking that getting it right or having the best tactic will solve our fear of initiating is also not a luxury we get to experience in this arena.
Unlike learning to change a tire or cook rice, learning one particular skill for initiating and relying on that to work doesn't take into account the multitude of other contextual factors that contribute to whether or not our partner might be open to sex, and this can still mean we did everything right.
Unlike cooking rice, which requires the right water-to-rice ratio, a pot, and a certain amount of heat, and that's it, desire for sex requires the right time of day, the right amount of energy, the right time in a menstrual cycle, the kids not being home, a level of non-sexual felt connection, maybe a shower, maybe some music, less stress, more time, sexting or teasing, and infinite other factors that differ for each human in each situation. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to initiating, even if we're referring to initiating over time with the same person(s).
Similarly, even if we're the ones initiating sex, all of these varying factors apply to us, so even if we do initiate, we cannot hold ourselves to this idea of perfection in tact or execution, because we also have a constantly fluctuating sexual body that responds as much to our partners or sexual stimuli as it does to our non-sexual environment.
We can be "perfect" at initiating and it still might not bring the results we were after. And by definition then, this means initiating can never be perfect, there is no 100% guaranteed success rate. Because of the complexities that come with sex, we have to release the pressure to be perfect we hold around initiating, and we have to let ourselves do it anyway.
We have to allow ourselves to be clunky and still initiate, if we want the sex we crave to have even a chance of happening.
Which is a very important point I must emphasise: initiating of course doesn't guarantee sex to happen. What initiating does it offer it the chance.
Clunky Initiating
The first time we cooked rice we might have gotten the ration wrong. We might have left it too long or not long enough. We might have ruined the pot.
But we most likely learned from this experience, took note, and did something different the next time. Our ability to cook rice doesn't (often) become linked to our value as a human, and one bad rice attempt (usually) doesn't deter us from ever making rice again.
We're clunky when we first start making rice because it's new, and when something is new it's always going to be clunky.
As I say to my yoga students when holding a pose: "your body shaking is evidence of your body changing."
When we get the shakes, it doesn't mean we're doing anything wrong or bad, actually, being clunky and shaky is often a good sign of growth and change. So when we want to overcome our fear of initiating, we have to embrace the wobbles as learning and growing, as a sign of our humanity, and continue forth.
Clunkiness when initiating might look like:
- Fumbling your words
- Not having a clear idea of what you want
- Sweating
- Feeling your heart rate increase
- Movements/touches that feel awkward
- Going for it at an inconvenient time
- Freezing
- Saying something that feels cringe
- Rehearsing what to do/say
- Being in-direct or vague
- Giggling or being silly
- Sending a risky text and then seeing their "typing" icon appear and disappear
- Typing a sexy text and then deleting it, instead saying "hey"
- Blushing
And what beautiful experiences these are!
You might have read that and thought "oh god so cringe," or "that sounds horrible," or maybe "oh god that's so me."
The thing about cringe is that, as we say on Full Bloom Podcast, cringe is truth.
When we're being cringe, or feel like we are, we're always doing or saying something that is a lot closer to our truth than we usually share with others. Cringey things feel cringey because we're not used to sharing our vulnerability, so we opt for covering our actual truth, our cringe, with a more palatable, neutral, watered-down version. Maybe this works in other contexts. But when it comes to initiating sex, it's our truth that gets us where we want to be, not our indifference.
Getting more comfortable with initiating comes part-in-parcel with getting more comfortable with our cringe. Your cringe is where your true resides.
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