Becoming Our Own Lovers

...end of the month reflections on solo sex plus a self love ritual

“I touch my own skin, and it tells me that before there was any harm, there was miracle.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

Haven’t they moved like rivers—
like Glory, like light—
over the seven days of your body?

-Natalie Diaz, “These Hands, If Not Gods”  

I’ve been thinking a lot about solo sex…and doing a lot more of it.

Even though I fell off the orgasm a day band wagon earlier in the spring, I’ve sort of inadvertently put myself back on it. Perhaps because starting to see someone has sparked a flood of desire in my body, and sometimes the only thing that has allowed me to shut off my fantasies and get some sleep has been to let myself have an orgasm, perhaps because all the masturbation education content I’m getting on Instagram for National Masturbation Month has put it more at the forefront of my subconscious, perhaps because of that carriage scene in Season 3 of Bridgerton or how Andrew Scott aka the Hot Priest in Fleabag voiced an erotic audio for Quinn, perhaps just because my body is feeling more sexual lately…regardless, I’ve been enjoying it, and as I wrote about last week, I’ve been having some profound experiences with my body and pleasure. 

Something I’ve struggled with, however, is to see solo sex as a form of sex. For most of my life, it’s been something shameful, something I only do when I’m single or away from my partner. Until these past few years, I didn’t even count it as a form of sex — unless I was doing it to put on a show for my partner, of course.

Over these past few years as I’ve been traveling and healing, my relationship to it has certainly shifted. I’ve spent a lot of time alone and in digital nomad communities and have been largely celibate. This was something that for a while I felt shame about because I felt like I should have been having sex while I was going on all those adventures, especially as someone who was teaching and writing about sex.

But at some point over the past year, I realized that I was still indeed having sex – but that it was just with myself.

While it didn’t fulfill exactly the same needs that partnered sex did, being my own sex partner did fulfill many other needs, such as pleasure, creativity, power, love, acceptance, authenticity, and growth. Like partnered sex, it wasn’t always mind blowing, but there were times where it absolutely was.

Since having this realization, I’ve been trying to shift the way that I conceptualize solo sex. I’ve been thinking about solo sex being just what its name suggests — a form of sex.

I know it seems odd to think of it that way. We’re so conditioned to think that sex with a partner is the only real form of sex. That sex with ourselves is only done when we don’t have a partner, that we only do it because it’s our only option for sexual release, that it’s a less valid way to access pleasure.

But what if it’s not?

While writing this newsletter, I re-read one of my favorite poems, “These Hands, If Not Gods” by poet Natalie Diaz. I’ve always read it as being about the sex that someone is having with another person, but this time, I read it as if the speaker is talking about herself and her own hands, and I don’t know, there was something really beautiful about that. Seeing ourselves with reverence, seeing our pleasure as transformative, seeing our bodies as divine – what an extraordinary state to embody.  

So what if we could be our own lovers? What if we treated solo sex the way that we treated our lovers in the midst of new relationship energy – with passion, care, and adoration? What if we spent time touching and exploring our bodies and cultivated that relationship with tenderness and awe? While that is certainly not the standard we could meet every time, given the rest of our lives and our capacity, what if it was something we brought more frequently to our solo pleasure practices?

What if we could, as Diaz describes in her poem, slip a thumb into our own mouths and taste it all, learn how to take both the apple and the rib?

Without further ado, here is a ritual and meditation I’ve created to explore this idea of being your own lover: