There’s a freedom in erotic pleasure that can take you to places in yourself of enhanced awareness, that seem private and inaccessible in other areas of life: places of courage, neediness, vulnerability, expansion and longing. A doorway into the self that can feel violating and liberating, a breakthrough not to go back from. Yet who can we tell of this discovery, when the weight of glimpsed delight or depth of suffering is hard to bear alone? If sex is unspoken, desire seeps out sideways, sublimated into quiet despair, bad flirting, secret liaisons, and disappointment. There’s a force to longing that may be unrecognisable at first, and it’s driving more than sex. The more we meet our longing and find skills to intimately connect, the greater chance and charge we have of living fully, of enjoyment without shame, guilt and pent-up conformity.

Feeling like there’s more than you’ve experienced in sex is natural. Of course, there is more: healing, fun, eroticism, better touch, better relationships, better communication and understanding. Rather than complaining about where you’re at, the decision is only whether you’re going to take the time to explore what that ‘more’ could be. The decision is the sliding door.