What Does Your Body Want?

[Heather]

I was remarking to my partner the other day about how my body just does not do well without a lot of movement: how that creates more pain for me with pain conditions, and how it just feels and responds if I don't love around a lot.

This reminded me of how many users we've heard voice what sounds a lot like not being in touch with your body -- separate from emotions or interpersonal wants -- and what it, all by itself, seems to want, and thus aware of various kinds of what's often called "body hunger" (including the body's typical hunger for the physical parts/ways of being sexual), or having basically unlearned those wants, or learned to ignore or dismiss them. We also hear a lot of users seem to have a hard time figuring out what they really like with sex with partners, and I think one piece of that can often be people being so focused on what they're supposed to want, what they feel like they should be doing, what they want emotionally, and so on, but being focused very little, or with as much acknowledgement and room made for, on what their bodies, in a very physical way, really respond to and really feel like they're truly hungry for.

As an example of the latter, for many years, my circumstances were such that I had to learn how not to feel hunger or a need for rest in order to just survive what I was going through without being able to eat or rest enough. My body has wants for both of those things, very strong ones, but since that time in my life (especially since it started when I was young), I've had to gradually teach myself to recognize those feelings, rather than staying in a sort of learned denial of them.

So, what does your body want? It can be about sexual wants, but it doesn't have to be. Heck, if we can't really allow ourselves to feel and acknowledge other kinds of things our bodies express a very physical desire for, we're not going to be very good at doing it with desires related to sex, either. And really being in our bodies has a whole lot to do with this, and sex life or not, all of us limit our experience in life as people if we're not doing that.

[Sunshine]

When it comes to sexuality, I just let my body lead, so to speak, and I don't think or fret that much about what it demands or rejects. I've noticed that my sex drive seems to be highly dependent on my hormonal cycle, which also explains why when I was taking the pill, I rarely wanted to sleep with my partner at all and after we switched to barrier-only contraception, our love life became a lot better. (Not that I'd ever advise anyone against taking the pill, though! I know plenty of girls and women whose libido didn't suffer at all while they were taking it and who also experienced benefits like less painful periods and better skin. It's just my own personal body that really didn't like extra hormones. I suffered side effects as well and after a while started feeling unreasonably angry and resentful that I had to spend a ton of money on medication that was impairing my health while boys only have to roll on a condom. My partner always used them anyway, so I could have probably stopped much sooner, but for a long time, I just needed the double security to feel safe enough to relax.)

My biggest problem body-wise is eating. When I was little, I was made to stick to a very restrictive diet, so my relationship with food was messed up from the start. My parents are not to blame for this, they followed the advice of a pediatrician they trusted and couldn't know that he was talking BS. When it finally became clear that I could in fact eat everything, I was already entering puberty and what with that and my body having been starved for years, I just ate and ate and ate anything I could lay my hands on. I didn't notice when I was full, I would eat until I threw up and then go on eating. Of course I became fat, and because at roughly the same time I realized I was madly in love with someone who didn't feel the same about me, I became self-conscious, then self-loathing and finally completely eating disordered. I've done everything, from calorie counting and extreme calorie reduction to bulimia to binge-eating and back again. Now I'm finally, after years of work and may relapses, at a point where I have some sense of when I am hungry, what my body wants to eat and when it has had enough, and where finally my body has learned to trust me again too and doesn't demand the entire contents of the refrigerator in the middle of the night because who knows when the next anorexic phase might kick in. My thoughts don't revolve around food 24/7 any more, which is new and amazing and wonderful. But boy, was this a long hard struggle. And it's not entirely over - I don't think it will ever be.

My body wants to be taken seriously. It is a fine-tuned system, the result of millions of years of evolution (or, if you'd rather believe that, the result of a divine being's will) and my little brain does not in fact know better what's good for it. When I ignore it, it goes crazy on me, so I've learned to listen and compromise. Sometimes, I think my relationship with my own body needs more work than my relationship with my partner!

[Heather]

Really appreciated your response here.

You know, it's probably a little to the side of the larger topic here, but I've always figured that our relationship with food can often play a very big part in our relationships with people and our relationship with sex and our sexualities. Goodness knows how common, particularly, it is for people raised as women to -- either by virtue of economic circumstance, by virtue of psychological issues and social conditioning or both -- have a relationship with food that's all about either restricting, or by going overboard and then piling on the guilt and shame. Lo and behold, those dynamics are also part and parcel of many women's struggles with their sexual lives, sexualities and intimate relationships.

(Rock on you with your EC recovery, btw!)