Reading Room

Excerpt from Ten Keys for Successful Sexual Partnering
by Barnaby B. Barratt

Published by Xlibris, 2004. To order copies:

A happy and fulfilling sexual life is a wonderful antidote to the miseries that drag down so much of our everyday existence. After all,

Sexuality is a celebration of life!

And surely we all deserve to experience life as a celebration. Our lives invariably involve suffering. We regularly experience physical and emotional challenges. Our ambitions falter. Our dreams fade. We suffer losses, hardships, disease, and death. Yet our sexuality is with us all our life, and it is the wellspring of our sensuality our potential to enjoy living. It is our capacity to experience pleasure, and even joy, ecstasy, and bliss. Whatever our age, whatever our physical condition, we all have the potential for erotic pleasure. After all,

Sexuality is the flow of the lifeforce within us,
through us, and all around us.

So life offers us a choice:

We can choose to enjoy our capacity to be sexually and sensually alive
– we can choose to realize our erotic potential –
or we can choose to succumb to the deadening forces
of sexual suppression and repression.

We can choose to live life as a celebration of life itself and, if this is our choice, how we honor the lifeforce of our sexuality is vitally significant. The choice is ours at every moment of our lives.

A happy and fulfilling sexual life is an immense blessing that uplifts us physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Yet many of us find it very difficult to achieve a happy and fulfilling sexual life. We are weighed down by conflicts about our sexuality – shame and guilt impact our lives in ways we sometimes do not even consciously understand. We are anxious and conflicted about our sexuality in general – as well as anxious and conflicted about how our desires will be experienced by those who are our partners, or by those whom we wish would become our sexual partners.

If sexuality is such a blessing – and I believe it is – it becomes fundamentally important to consider how we are going to relate better to those who are our actual or potential partners in sexual sharing.

There is a paradox here. Thousands of books have been written about how to improve our relationships. For example, telling us how to find a lover, how to make a marriage work, how to get along with awkward friends, difficult coworkers, rambunctious children, and impossible family members! And all sorts of books have been written about sex. For example, telling us how – once we have found our “lover for life” – to practice this or that sort of sexual activity and how to make our sex life more romantic. But very little has been written about the basics of successful sexual partnering. This book is meant as a primer on this topic.

This book will recommend precisely how to interact with a partner
in order to achieve a more successful sexual connection.

What is written in this little booklet expands and modifies Chapter Sixteen of my longer work titled Sexual Health and Erotic Freedom. What is offered here are ten simple but challenging practices – ten commitments by which we can enjoy happier and more fulfilling sexual partnerships.

What do I mean by a “sexual partnership”? The principles on which these recommendations are based apply to all modes of healthy sexual connection. They apply whatever age we are. They apply whether we consider ourselves to be “straight,” gay, lesbian or bisexual. They apply both to dyadic sexual experiences and to situations of multiple partnering. And they apply whether our sexual partnership is a onetime quick encounter or a longterm relationship.
The principles on which these recommendations are based are intended to safeguard the health of any sexual connection, as well as to promote the likelihood that the connection will be erotically happy and fulfilling. The book, Sexual Health and Erotic Freedom, of course discusses the notion of sexual health at some length, and makes the argument that health is not a matter of who our partners are; it is not a matter of how many, or how few, partners we have; and it is not a matter of what sort of sex we share with them (oral, anal, penile, vaginal, “kinky,” and so forth). Rather, sexual health is a matter of how we engage in sexual expression.

Sexual health concerns how we treat our selves and our partners
as we engage in sensual and sexual expression.
Healthy sexuality is always safe, sane, and consensual.

Let me briefly indicate what each of these three crucial criteria implies:

• Safe means that whatever sex we engage in, whether by ourselves or with partners, the activity will be without undue risk of physical or emotional harm, either to our selves or to our partners. Every human activity involves a certain amount of risk even breathing! – so the notion of “without undue risk” implies that we bring a certain awareness and honest effort to the task of reducing the risks we undertake to an acceptable level.
• Sane means that whatever sex we engage in, whether by ourselves or with partners, the connection it involves will be life enhancing, enjoyable to all participants, and without destructive emotional or relational consequences. This means that our sexual connections will not exploit passions, will not be compulsive, and will not be engaged for reasons other than enjoyment. For example, healthy sex is not engaged as a power play, or for reasons of gaining some sort of advantage over another person. Sane sex would also imply that we enjoy our sexual pleasures under conditions of clear awareness, and not when inebriated or otherwise cognitively impaired. Sexuality is for enjoyment – that is, it is for “finding the joy in” life – and this is the sane approach to its blessings. Keeping sexuality sane is usually a matter that involves only the participants in the particular act, so long as the individuals concerned are capable of exercising responsibility for their own sanity. However, there is one situation in which a possible third party must be taken into consideration, for under no circumstances is it sane to produce a child that is not wanted – so those who enjoy penile vaginal intercourse can only do so sanely if they attend to contraception, and are mindful of the risks of unwanted pregnancy.
• Consensual means that whatever sex we engage in, whether by ourselves or with partners, the activity will be freely and mutually chosen by all involved. With solo self pleasuring, this means that sexual activity integrates all aspects of our personhood – that is, it is not compulsively driven. With partnered sexual connections, the criterion of consensuality implies that the activity is freely and mutually chosen between individuals who are fully capable of making such a choice, and entirely empowered to say “No” if they wish. This criterion rules out sexual engagement between a minor and an adult, and also makes highly problematic – and perhaps invariably impossible any hint of sexual involvement between a boss and worker, teacher and student, doctor and patient, and so forth.

Sexuality is a spiritual matter – and an entire Section of Sexual Health and Erotic Freedom is devoted to the truthfulness of this proposition. Our sexual lives are meant to sustain us, to empower us, and to free us from the suffering of our egotism. They are meant to align us with the divine – whether we name this divinity Holy Spirit, Source, the Sacred Unity of Love, Yahweh, Allah, or God. Sexuality not only has the potential to uplift us emotionally and physically. It also has the potential to bring us into a state of appreciation, compassion, and grace. Our sexuality has the potential to bring us into our Godliness.

Our sexual activities
if conducted safely, sanely, and consensually –
are inherently healthy, life affirming,
and sacred.

This applies not only to sexual activity engaged in the context of a longterm relationship. It applies to self pleasuring. It applies to the casual or transient liaisons that are found by cruising. It applies in the context of multiple partnerships.

In any of these arrangements, “sex” can, of course, be conducted in an unhealthy manner. For example: risk reductive practices may be abandoned; physical or emotional interaction may become nonconsensual; sensual or sexual activity may become compulsive; “sex” may be aggressivized and recruited by our egotism to non sexual ends. By these means, the emotional, existential, and spiritual momentum of our erotic potential may be dishonored.

Our socialization and acculturation does not support our learning to engage in sexual partnerships in ways that ensure their health in ways that ensure that they are healing experiences, promoting our happiness. On the contrary, we are raised fearful and anxious, wracked with shame and guilt about our erotic desires, and we are not helped to learn how to make our sexual partnering healthy.

So in this book, I offer ten “Keys” to successful – that is, healthy, healing, and happy – sexual partnering. These are actually very simple suggestions, but for most of us, our upbringing makes them quite challenging to implement.

To fulfill our potential for healthy, healing, and happy sexual partnering,
we need to make ten commitments.
These are the ten “Keys” to successful sexual partnering,
whether in a transient connection or a longterm relationship,
whether with one or more partners,
whether heterosexually, homosexually, or bisexually oriented.

Although some of these ten “Keys” are more applicable to certain styles of partnering, most of them apply to all situations, and all of them apply to all manner of sexual activities – that is, they apply to all lifestyles, orientations, and preferences.

Sexuality is a life enhancing blessing, we are well advised to enjoy this blessing as much as we are able – safely, sanely, and consensually. Hopefully, these ten Keys will empower all of us to expand and deepen our sexual partnering.

Excerpt from Ten Keys for Successful Sexual Partnering
by Barnaby B. Barratt

Published by Xlibris, 2004. To order copies, contact Xlibris:

• Email
• Call 1-888-795-4274