Something that has been coming up for me a lot in my work with couples are expectations. Specifically, expectations around sex. Expectations of self, expectations of a partner and expectations of what sex is supposed to be and look like. Throughout your life, you have received pieces of information from family, culture, media, school, friends, sex ed class, sexually explicit material and your past relationships and you have put it all together to create a picture of sex and sexuality. This has formed your idea of how sex works, what it means, and how you feel about it.
Expectations are ideas in your head that can over shadow your experience when those ideas don’t match up with reality. Holding yourself or others to a standard that isn’t happening is challenging, and unmet expectations lead to disappointment. Disappointment can then lead to avoidance, sexual difficulties, disconnect, and desire discrepancies. Furthermore, when you don’t let your partner know the expectations you have of them or the sex you’re having, you are setting yourself up to feel unfulfilled by the experience and your partner.
Having specific expectations about sex can put you in a mindset where you become performance focussed. Performance focussed sex is where you want sex to be a certain way and for things to happen a certain way. Sex stops being about the experience and pleasure. In this headspace, you leave the present moment and can start judging yourself, your partner and the sexual interaction. That doesn’t sound very fun does it?!
Where your expectations come from might not be clear to you, or maybe they are. But over time, you have developed ideas about how sex is “supposed” to be or what it “should” look like, and those ideas might not be serving a purpose anymore. So, maybe it’s time to reflect on your sexpectations and see where they can shift, and if they aren’t serving a purpose anymore, it might be time to let them go!
Things to remember:
1. Take some time to recognize what your expectations are of sex -for yourself, a partner, and the situation.
2. Take some time to think about where your expectations come from and what purpose they are serving you now.
3. Acknowledge the disappointment you have felt, and do what you need to do to move through those feelings.
4. Communicate with your partner! They are not a mind reader, and so it is up to you to let them know what you want, what you need, and what you want to try in sex. Give them a chance to figure out if they are down for it.
5. Move away from performance focussed sex to experience focussed sex.
6. Let go of the “supposed tos” and the “shoulds.” They most likely aren’t getting you anywhere good!
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