I need some advice on intimacy issues please...

[1Bella1]

Hi there everybody,

 

I've never posted in forums before but I am really desperate for some constructive advice on an intimacy problem I have with my boyfriend. Ok, here goes...

 

*I'm a 21 year old female, I have a fantastic relationship with my 22 year old boyfriend. We we're good friends before we got together some 8/9 months ago and we have an immensely close, loving, open and trusting relationship. He is one of my closest friends and I love him indescribably and I'm confident he feels the same.

I'm a friendly easy going person, with an awesome group of girlfriends to support me however I do have some body image issues and a low self esteem.

In the past four months our sex life and intimacy has done a nose-dive. We have just returned from a week's holiday which gave us the time to discuss the problem openly and in depth. It was very upsetting and draining for the both of us. We are keen to resolve the issue because we really want to make our relationship work and are willing to give it 110%.

 

Ok, so the problems that have contributed to this are -

*We started out on the wrong foot, the first time we slept together it was a drunken mess, we never got the opportunity to build up to it and/or make it special. It continued in this fashion.

*The sex for the first 3 months was amazing, but it was /just/ sex. It was more of a physical thing. It was almost like a dirty joke between the two of us and he mentioned that we've never taken it seriously enough.

*As feelings were introduced, i shied away. I became extremely body conscious although he didn't do anything to cause this. I found myself pointlessly comparing myself to other girls, dieting, flinching if he touched me, the thought of being naked in front of the man I love made me terrified. I hate that, I admit this is allof my fault and i feel very responsible and guilty for the part I played in this. It got to the point where we'd have sex maybe once on the weekend because it was just 'something to do'.

*My boyfriend has his own confidence issues and for that reason never pushed it. He considers himself to be 'too polite' sometimes.

*We left it untalked about although there was obviously something missing from our relationship and facing it really broke our hearts, or my heart at least.

*Although my boyfriend thinks I am beautiful and wants very much to be with me and work through this, he finds it difficult to think of us as being 'sexy' together now and his desire for me has decreased significantly. Largely because it has become awkward and an 'issue'. This however, is a more one-sided feeling as I still want him as much as ever.

 

Having talked out our problems we decided to take a week or so apart to think about things and then start again and work on our intimacy problem. Naturally the whole thing has made me feel very vulnerable and I dont think I feel ready to be with him again physically so we agreed to hold off and maybe try and start our physical relationship from scratch, this time taking a different attitude to it. Plus we are both resuming our studies at university and will have more active and diverse lives again so I am hoping this will help.

 

I would really love to get some opinions and some advice about how to go about rebuilding a sexual/intimate relationship and restoring the passion between us. We are private and reserved people so we would prefer not to see a therapist or counsellor. Where possible we'd like to work this out between the two of us.

 

Thankyou so much if you've taken the time to read through this and I'd appreciate your comments and advice.

[NJRon]

Welcome to ENA. I think that you two have taken a mature approach in recognizing this issue. You are both in agreement. I wish I had some good reference material for you, but I would think their must be a lot of information on the net about this aspect... "restoring passion"

 

I think you are taking a great approach to step back and try to rebuild slowly. However, it sounds like the core cause here were your individual self-esteem issues. That is what really needs to be addressed. you were probably much more open and comfortable with yourself when you two were not fully vested in the relationship. There wasn't as much to lose, so you weren't so self-conscious. As it became more important to you, *then* the self-consciousness started cropping up.

 

Do what you need to do in order to get your self-confidence in yourself back. Know that you appear to have a very supportive boyfriend who doesn't seem to have any issue with you... it's your issue. Work on improviong what you think you need to and accepting yourself in total.

 

Good luck...

[Beec]

I think NJRon is pretty on. It seems that you had issues that worked against your self-confidence, and these issues, i.e. when you pulled away, worked against his self-confidence. This kind of snowballed, and you ended up where you are now.

 

However, you both seem to love each other and want to be together. Can you take that information and draw some confidence from it, and have that snowball into something good.

 

I will note that misconnections are common in sex lives, and you need to really pay attention to what he tells you, esp. in his honest and open moments. Also, you need to tell him what you want to happen. You will need to accommodate each other. Do you want him to come over to you, throw you down and tear your clothes off, or take you fully clothed even? Do you want him to do whatever? Tell him how you want it, and hope he does it sometimes. And do what he wants sometimes.

 

Additionally, you need to stop pulling away. Is you lack of self confidence all there is to that? Is something else helping to cause it? Figure it out. Work on it. If you do pull away, then turn around and go get him right after.

[BellaDonna]

From what you described, it sounds like you 2 have a good relationship and very open communication. It seems that sensuality is lacking between the 2 of you. Sensuality is quite different from sexuality. It is more of a general awareness and connection to one another. This article explains it well link removed (there are other links on that page that might be helpful too)

 

 

BellaDonna