I have a new piece up on the Blowfish Blog. Titled Acting Out, it’s on the differences between acting out a sex fantasy and just, you know, having one. Here’s the teaser:
Sex advice writers — including me — are always telling people to spice up their sex lives by trying to act out their fantasies.
And when they do, these sex advice writers — again, including me — generally warn people of some issues and pitfalls that can come with trying to act out fantasies. Like: Your partner may freak out when they hear what you have in mind. Your partner may try it, but not really like it and not want to try again. Your partner may like it more than you imagined, and want to go further with it than you want. You may like it more than you imagined, and want to go farther with it than you’d thought you would. (How many people have “tried out the fantasy†of same-sex sex, and had the results of their “experiment†turn out to be, “Okay, I guess I’m gay�)
But there’s one potential fantasy-acting pitfall that doesn’t get talked about as much, so I want to talk about it now:
It may be disappointing.
Even if your partner is totally game and everything goes according to plan — it may be disappointing.
To find out more, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!
That was a good piece.
Oddly, partway through, my brain shifted from reading it as being about sexual fantasies to being about roleplaying.
I experience a lot of the same feelings when I do that – but again (like sex, I guess) the opportunities tend to diminish a lot once you have kids.
Damn, I always forget that html doesn’t come out here, so the link didn’t work.
By “roleplaying” I mean
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_game
not
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_roleplaying
efriqe, don’t let the kids get in the way of your Gaming! Thats what dog kennels are for….
It’s interesting–the whole concept. My girlfriend and I met ages ago, when we were too young and silly to know better, in a rpg for a then-favourite author. We became friends (actually, five of us did) and when the rpg sort of crashed and burned from disinterest, we remained friends; I can comfortably say I’m still friends with her and two of the others–one I’ve had a falling out with in the last year. Anyway. Right. Point. So though the rpg itself fell apart, we continued doing text-based roleplaying as a group and in pairs, and it was a pretty integral part of my coming out and relationship creation with my girlfriend. Since we’ve been together, we’ve progressively narrowed it down to the point that we really only do rp scenes with each other and have many, many generations of characters to call upon.
It seemed a natural progression to create voices and act out mannerisms for favoured characters, and that moved to actually acting things out, which led, as such things do, to sex-as-characters. We have het and gay couples, a few with transpeople involved, a few that are not couples at all, but poly relationships (these tend not to be played in bed for logistical reasons), and a whole variety of fetishes and preferences represented. I can ask her to fuck me as Ceir, and she knows I want to be teased and tormented and bent over, a strap-on used; if she asks for Merit, I know she wants me to suck her clit. It feels, sometimes, vaguely poly–just the two of us, in bed, plus the literally dozens of people we can call upon mentally to become.
And sometimes? It just doesn’t work. I’ll have on the feeldoe and get the very un-manly giggles. It’s a personal goal to get her so worked up and coming so hard she forgets who she’s supposed to be at all. And we laugh it off. Which, I think, was the point of your article. And it’s certainly not bad or indicative of our relationship. I think that we can take it in stride and be amused says only good things for us.
Great piece, and you are absolutely right. My partner and I acted out a fantasy a while ago and found it completely underwhelming. Everything went exactly the way it was supposed to, but it still just wasn’t as great at it was in fantasy. Worse yet, after acting out this fantasy and having it less than stellar, I could no longer fantasize about it. Every time I tried to think about it, all I could bring to mind was our enactment. So not only did I have an unsatisfying time, but I lost what, until then, had been a very satisfying fantasy.