I’ll admit when I first started doing intimate things I was a very selfish lover, I thought my guy got his pleasure from pleasing me and it was also all I knew from porn. I didn’t stop to think he wanted to be pleased too and honestly avoided it (mostly due to anxiety and insecurities) until he expressed to me that I made him feel unattractive. Since that moment pleasing him took on a whole new meaning and as I gained confidence and experience I started enjoying it a lot more. Honestly I’ve always felt anxiety and fear around intimacy, it’s hard for me to be so vulnerable and even harder to feel “worthy” in bed. I always feel like there’s this standard I need to reach and that I need to think and feel and perform a certain way. Honestly, I don’t need sex in my relationship to be happy but it’s still something I really want to share with my partner and I really want to be that comfortable around each other and grow that passion. I feel like my rough start and trauma around sex means I’m doomed to ever have good sex with a man because my soocd makes me hyper focus on the overly-sexualized female erotica and porn and “male gaze” I grew up wanting to be. Girls is pure aesthetic , I find it attractive because I want to look like that. But with guys it’s about their smell, the shape and warmth of their body, their personality and energy. I feel like girls are more “aesthetic” but I’d much rather be with a decent guy with an amazing personality than say the most beautiful girl in the world. I hate my mind😒 last night I cried while listening to my playlist I made my boyfriend because I miss everything about feeling confident in my attraction and love to him.

My boyfriend and I started dating a little over a month ago. We’ve now started discussing the next step in our relationship: intimacy. It feels quick, but we’ve known each other well over a year and we were really close friends before dating. I don’t feel ready for sex yet but we’ve started with baby steps. While kissing, my mind started to wander and he started kissing my chest (he asked first, I gave consent, and I was comfortable with him), but frankly I was bored. There were parts that were good and parts that could use some work. I didn’t tell him what felt good and what didn’t like I should have and when he asked my mind went blank. The other night he came over for dinner and we began to talk about it. He started crying and saying how he didn’t want to disappoint me. I felt so shut down because I felt like I was the one in a vulnerable situation and I was the one that wanted to talk but there I was, taking care of him. I ended up communicating what I wanted and I appreciated that he cared enough to ask and listen but at the same time he didn’t really listen because he was caught up in his own emotions. All day long I cannot get it off my mind, seriously. I looked down midway through the day to see I had dug my fingernails into the pad of my pointer finger to the point where there was a deep mark. I have felt extremely anxious and like an awful girlfriend. I do not want to have sex with him if the thought of not doing well kissing my chest upsets him to the point of tears. I just felt bad for not enjoying myself and not telling him that, but I got frustrated that he almost… victimized himself? I feel like I’m manipulating him someway and I just don’t know how. I also feel bad for not being attracted to what he was doing and I’m scared it will lead to losing all attraction. Please help, am I awful for feeling frustrated that he cried?

In lack of better wording, Sometimes I really just feel like I don’t understand myself and I want to. So I can fix it. I’m looking in the mirror and I’m body dysmorphic, I want to see myself when I was younger and physically healthier but cant. I used to be on birthcontrol, and it made me gain 70lbs and I haven’t been able to feel the same about my body ever since then. Somehow since allowing my ex to semi control everything about our sexual relationship, I have developed a complexity of desired intimacy with myself constantly alone. Because I feel like I want to be in more control with how my sexual feelings affect me. I can’t get sexual gratification from my self sometimes even though, and then I turn to peopke. And then it turns to; I can’t be satisfied by anyone, and I haven’t had sex within a loving relationship for a long time. Because well I have been going through a lot recently. And most of the encounters sexually were in fact not in relationships, but I didn’t feel the satisfaction I was looking for and it just didn’t make sense. I have to have all the right emotions or else the moment gets ruined. If I don’t feel love for them, if I don’t think they are attractive, if I don’t like how they react to seeing my body, if I don’t like how they interact with me during the sexual encounters. And since this is so difficult I All together just don’t desire to have sex with anyone most times I feel mentally aroused. Speaking of just mentally aroused, it confuses me that my body will be physically aroused all the time and beg for satisfaction and it’s a cold burning sensation pleading for constant attention. I hate it. I can’t help but wonder why that exists when I haven’t been mentally aroused. But when it happens I can’t seem to satisfy it and neither can other people. And that somewhat altogether made a plethora of issues in my last relationship because my ex dealt with feelings of guilt and or resentment towards themselves for not being able to satisfy me.. and I would be crying from days on end recently in fact from trying MYSELF to release that feeling, but I’d try to the point my body grew sore. .. I hate it. Genuinely I feel disgusted and want to get help on how to stop this. It’s going to ruin the much healthier relationship I have now just gotten into down the line and I don’t think I can handle that. Not again.

Does anybody else struggle with the fact, knowing that their boyfriend used to watch porn and makes it you feel jealous or super insecure about yourself? It’s weird because I knew my first boyfriend watched porn before we met and it never really bothered me and now I’m on my second boyfriend and he told me he watched porn and had an addiction about two years ago and is clean but for some reason, this just bothers me and makes me super insecure Way more than my first boyfriend. And I understand that he did two years ago, but the fact imagining him pleasuring himself to another girl and the fact that it’s a girl that has stuff that I don’t have just makes me feel super insecure about my own body, even though this was almost 3 years ago. I just don’t understand why all of a sudden I feel this way because anytime he mentions something like a girl popped up on Instagram. I automatically think oh like this is something he likes like he probably wishes I look like her or just the simple fact of knowing that it accidentally pops up and he sees it and then I hear about it and I just automatically like shut down and I get super insecure and have the time I don’t even want him to like, touch my body because I feel so insecure, knowing the fact that I don’t look like these Instagram girls that randomly just pop up. And it’s crazy because I never cared or thought this way but once I started dating my current boyfriend, I just can’t stop thinking about not being good enough because I don’t look like an Instagram model.