Permission To Be Bad in Bed

There is no shortage of advice on ways to have better sex: candles, massages, hotel rooms, certain kinds of cream. Yet, what is rarely considered are the particular benefits that can flow when two people candidly admit to one another that sex between them might be bad. That it might go really rather wrong, that one or other of them might have a dysfunction, or lose interest, or become debilitatingly shy or scared.

This seems, on the surface, like a direct route to disaster. We must surely do our best to convey an atmosphere of resoluteness, confidence and experience. We must lend our partner and ourselves courage by focusing on the upsides.  We must intimate that sex would be wonderful – so that it can stand any chance of actually being so. We cannot, evidently, talk of problems lest we bring them into being.

But this is to misunderstand the psychology behind any kind of achievement, sexual or otherwise. We are at our most free and resourceful not when we need to guarantee a successful outcome but when we are in the luxurious position that the stakes are low, when the price of failure is minimised, when we know that nothing important will be lost if the results are, at the beginning at least, mediocre. This is the psychological basis of sex without pressure, and of the freedom and inventiveness it can make possible.

The Freedom of Sex Without Pressure

The privileged state we call ‘play’ is a form of creativity in which, for a time, we are liberated from the pressure to impress. We played so well as children because people do not expect children to be anything other than flawed and clumsy. It’s a lack of expectations that sets the scene for our highest moments. Our best drawings may emerge when we aren’t hampered by any need to draw ‘well’. Our cleverest sentences can slip out when there isn’t any requirement to sound clever. We are at our funniest when we have no thought of amusing anyone.

Conversely, it is the very need for flawless outcomes that makes it less likely there will be some. We lose our hold on our genuine but fragile talents when we suspect that our witnesses will begin to shout, grow impatient or ridicule us for being something less than stellar.

Why Failure Is Often the Beginning

We need to optimise our chances of physical pleasure by making ourselves fully at home with the possibility of disastrous sex. It might indeed all go very wrong. They might not like what we’re doing. Our bodies may do something very uncalled for. There might be an odd atmosphere or mood. But we would survive. We don’t need to let the threat of disaster destroy the future. Terrible sex might occur and everyone would live.

It’s when we say we are total idiots that we may say or two intelligent things. It’s when we accept we’ve failed completely in our career that we have the expansiveness to consider just one more entrepreneurial scheme. And it’s when we are wholly reconciled to collapse in the bedroom that we may grow into more or less successful (or at least kind and entertaining) lovers.

Therefore, one of the paradoxically most sexy things – sexy defined as pertaining to the achievement of good sex – to say to a potential partner on an early dinner date, when it’s clear where things are headed, would be: there is one thing I should mention. Sex with me may really be quite bad.

To say this winningly, with a smile, with self-possession and a sound sense of the tragic-comic nature of being a human on a spinning rock in a quiet corner of the universe, can suggest to the other that what they have on their hands is someone uncommonly honest, brave and worth sticking around with. Sex might indeed not be brilliant at first, though it might well be – but something as important will be guaranteed. In allowing sex without pressure, they will know we aren’t prideful, defensive, or ignorant of our flaws; that we might be someone worth staying with. It can be the greatest gift to lend someone we like permission to be bad in bed.