Fantasising About Someone Else During Sex
What It Means
I was on 702 with Clement Manyathela this morning, talking about fantasising about someone else during sex.
The lines lit up straight away. Calls, WhatsApp voice notes, texts, one after another for the best part of an hour, which really says something… This is a mainstream morning talk show, and men were queuing up to confess.
But it wasn’t the fantasies that got me. It was how many of these men talked about their own thoughts as though they’d committed a crime.
One caller said it was mental cheating. Another said it’s not good for the human mind, and that we need to be gatekeepers of our own thoughts. And one man had spent years fighting it, that was his word, fighting, until he’d finally trained himself out of it. He phoned in to tell us he’d stopped, and he was proud of it.
He didn’t look at it, he got rid of it
I keep coming back to that last caller.
Here’s a man with years of information about his own arousal, and instead of looking at any of it, he waged a war on it until it went quiet. And he won! The fantasies stopped, and so did everything they could have told him about his erotic mind.
You might be doing a version of the same thing in your own head. An erotic thought arrives, and the guilt follows about half a second later. But you never stop to look any closer. So years go by and you never actually examine the fantasy.
You made a promise about your behaviour
Within about twenty minutes on air we had the whole spread of opinion.
One caller said it happens to nearly every guy he knows, it’s just part of sex, and he doesn’t feel guilty about it at all. Another was absolutely clear that it’s incompatible with respect and commitment, end of story. A woman phoned in about an ex who’d told her he could only get there by thinking about her, and she was disgusted that he’d said it to her face. Someone else asked whether you’d trust Dracula with your blood.
And I get it, I really do. Trust is a massive part of this, and hearing that your partner is thinking about the guy next door does not feel good.
But here’s what I said on air, and I’ll say it again here. When you make a promise to a partner, you’re promising to behave in a certain way. You are not promising to think in a certain way. Nobody vowed to have a monogamous mind, and honestly, are we going to police that? How would you even do it?
The other thing worth knowing is that a fantasy isn’t evidence of a wish. We can be sure about this because non-consent fantasies are very common, and (the vast majority of) the people having them don’t want to be assaulted. So the thing you’re picturing is not always the same as the thing you want. Sometimes it is, and that’s fine too. But mostly your mind is just reaching for whatever gets you there efficiently.
The best call of the morning
Right near the end, a man phoned in, super chirpy, to say he has a beautiful girlfriend. Absolutely gorgeous. And he would not be telling her that he fantasises about her mother.
Clement got goosebumps. I laughed… and then I said the thing that’s actually true, which is that of course he does!
It’s one of the most common genres on pornhub!
That formula… an attractive person, plus an obstacle is almost irresitable to our erotic mind. It’s forbidden, it’s out of reach, it’s pretty bloody shocking, and it’s never going to happen, which makes it perfect fuel. A few weeks ago I wrote about Jack Morin and peak erotic experiences, and here was his whole argument turning up live on Johannesburg radio from a man who had no idea he was proving it.
So the obstacle isn’t the flaw in the fantasy. Quite often the obstacle is the engine, and for some people the forbiddenness is the entire point, the wrongness of it is what’s generating the charge in the first place.
Two men, same fantasy, completely different thing
Two callers told us about fantasising about an ex, and they could not have been more different.
The first talked about it warmly. Great sex, years ago, a memory that still turns him on, and he reaches for it when he wants that final push. The second described the same thing as a habit that had got away from him. Unwanted, intrusive, spreading until he was thinking about every woman he’d walked past that day.
Same surface fantasy, completely different dynamics underneath.
Which is why the content of a fantasy tells you almost nothing by itself. What’s useful is whatever is running behind it. What is the erotic ingredient that is doing it for you? Being wanted that badly, or being out of reach, or being taken, or being watched, or getting to be nobody’s anything for an hour. Two men can be picturing an identical scene for reasons that have nothing to do with each other.
Of course, sometimes the ingredient is hard to decipher. Fantasies are notoriously illogical.
When fantasising about someone else becomes a problem
I did draw a line on air, and I don’t want it lost in everything else.
If a fantasy brings arousal into the room, it’s fuel. Light the passion with it like a match, then open your eyes and come back to the body you’re in and the person you’re with.
But if the fantasy is how you leave the room, that’s a different thing entirely.
If it’s become an escape from the person you’re with, or it’s mandatory before you can get anywhere, or it’s chronic, or it’s causing you real distress, then it’s worth addressing properly rather than just feeling bad about it. Be honest with yourself about which one you’re dealing with. And if it needs professional support, that exists and it works.
I’ll be straight with you, it’s so much easier to feel guilty about a fantasy than to ask what it’s helping you avoid. And I’d love you to put the guilt down, because it’s not doing a single useful thing for you. The question underneath it might.
The full conversation, callers and all, is here.
So what do you do with all this
None of it requires a partner, a conversation, or anybody knowing.
Take a moment to bring up the two or three fantasies that keep coming up for you. Especially the ones you’d rather not admit to, or the one you’ve been fighting.
Then look at what’s actually in them. What position are you in? Is something being done to you, or by you? What’s forbidden about it, and what exactly makes it forbidden? And what do you feel about yourself inside it, powerful, wanted, taken, invisible, free?
Then put them next to each other and ask if one thread runs through them, because it’s usually the thread rather than the scene that’s telling you something.
Some of this might feel uncomfortable, and mild discomfort usually means you’re near something worth identifying. But there’s a difference between uncomfortable and distressing, and you’ll know which one you’ve hit. If something comes up that frightens you, or floods you, or takes you somewhere you didn’t expect to go, then stop. That’s not a sign to push harder. Some of this belongs with a therapist rather than with you alone in a room, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that.
Our erotic minds get built long before we’re old enough to understand what’s being built, which is why fantasies so often don’t make sense and don’t need to. They can be bizarre, contradictory, nothing like the life you’ve chosen or the person you are. And they’re yours. I think they’re one of the more fascinating things a human mind does.
Whatever you find, you don’t have to act on any of it. You don’t have to tell anyone. You don’t even have to like what you find. But it’s worth a look.
Try it tonight
Before you can read what your mind is doing, it helps to be back in your body. My free audio is a short, private practice in noticing sensation. Nothing to achieve, nobody watching.
Free · For adults 18+