How to be more present during intimacy

Hello, beautiful community!

We are happy to share this week’s highlights on pleasure and intimacy. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did. Have a great Tuesday.

With love, the Liminal team.

Worth listening to

The Pleasure of Planned Intimacy, Sarah Rose Bright

Many couples treat unplanned sex as the only honest kind. Sarah makes the case for the opposite: setting a time, moving from go-mode into slow-mode, and letting desire arrive because you made room for it, not because it struck like lightning. Responsive desire is not a defect. It is how a lot of bodies work.

Attachment & Conflict (Part 4): Repairing After Relationship Rupture, Stephanie Rigg

What happens after the fight is the relationship. Stephanie’s three moves: start with connection, not combat; separate what you meant from what landed; come back. Short, specific, and usable the same evening.

For The Lonely, Suffocated, or Overextended, Nedra Glover Tawwab

Silent agreements, attachment as information rather than destiny, and why taking care of everyone else’s needs first eventually empties the room. For anyone reading this without a partner in the next chair, this one is about how you stand in your own life.

Worth reading

Giving: how to do it well, School of Consent

If you did not ask what they wanted, you were not giving. You were acting out your own idea of generosity. A short note from Betty Martin’s lineage, and the clearest recent writing on a distinction our rituals are built around.

Love on a Tuesday Afternoon, Laura Silverstein

Love rarely leaves in a slammed door. It thins out on the ordinary Tuesdays nobody photographs: the greeting, the six-second kiss, looking up when they start talking. Laura has been sitting with couples for thirty years. This is what has not changed.

From Liminal

How to be more present during intimacy

When your body is in the bed and your mind is in tomorrow. Presence is not concentration. It is return: one sensory anchor, and coming back without commentary when attention leaves, which it will. Works when you are two, and when you are one.

A solo intimacy practice for beginners

Fifteen minutes, alone, phone in another room. What a solo practice is, what it is not, and a complete first session you can repeat for a couple of weeks before adding anything.