As we enter the holiday season of busy travel and social engagements, I want to say a few things about travel and sex. It’s way too easy to put your sex life on hold. For “I’ll deal with that next year,” to become your mantra. Then you look back years later wondering what happened. You’re running away from your sex life.
Travel is awesome and it’s one of my biggest values in life. But a fancy, romantic vacation won’t save your sex life. Many women say they couldn’t do a program or make an investment that would vastly improve their sexual life because they were going to Paris or the Philippines instead. Or some other location that would bring the magic back.
How vacations can be used as a band-aid
Personally, I’ve experienced at least three breakups that I can remember on vacations. You get away from your everyday life and you start to reflect. You notice the things that irritate you to high hell about your partner, and some things unravel. Travel is hectic and stressful and can trigger old patterns that everyday life just keeps moving over, obscuring from sight.
Vacations are not a band-aid for doing the real work on your relationship. Neither is a new car, a boob job, or a shopping spree. Neither is taking care of the kids or any other important part of your life that you see as competing with your sex life. Sometimes you need a getaway, you need to change it up, get yourself in a new environment. However, if you don’t work on the underlying problems then they will show up on your vacation. And then you end up in a break-up. Or trapped in a beautiful tropical place with someone you don’t want to be around. Not to mention, too many vacations are sexless. NOooo!
How vacations can be better and juicier
So what do you most need to give yourself in the way of sexual investment besides a good vacation from everyday reality? Is it investing in your own pleasure? Take a field trip alone, with a lover or friend to your local feminist, sex-positive sex toy shop and juice up your collection. Do you need to learn to have orgasms? Work with a coach, or go see the Godmother, herself, Betty Dodson (if you can get in with her) and work this out! Are you sexually unfulfilled in your relationship? Time to get on the same page with each other and see a sex therapist, a sex and relationship coach, or go to a weekend workshop and do something about it!
The point is to do something about your sexual life as you would do something about other parts of your life that are not working. You have to take action, learn new skills, get out of your own way, do something different and believe you can actually have more. Because the everyday way it’s been going will keep going until you interrupt the patterns and stop being passive about it.
Do something different
And you have to be able to receive the things you really want. Most people act like they know this, yet, their behavior says different. If you are a complainer, you are blocking what you want because complaining prevents you from receiving. Every time you complain you get in the way of actually taking in what is here for you. You take the trip, but you complain about how wrong everything is: the airlines, the hotel staff, the room, the food, it can go on and on. Killjoy. The other day someone wrote to me, “Thank you, but…” and went on a long diatribe about how wrong I had done the thing I did for them. Couldn’t even take in the goodness I had done.
How do you do that in your sex life? What are you covering up your sexual issues with? Vacations? New Car? Dramas? Kids? Complaining? Whatever it is, take some time to give some energy to your sexual life for real, and if you are traveling this week, bring all of you; don’t put your sexuality away until the holiday is over. And know that whatever is going on will still be there wanting your attention when you return.
