Peak Erotic Experiences
What Your Best Sex Is Telling You
Is there a saucy encounter from your past that you still think about from time to time?
It was probably years ago. May have been with someone you weren’t supposed to be with, which is possibly why you’ve never mentioned it to anyone. It might not have even been the best sex in any technical sense. But it’s stayed with you, while a thousand other sexy evenings have kind of blurred into one.
It probably makes you feel a bit wistful. Bit turned on.
Well, hold that thought. Because this peak erotic experience could be some of the most useful information you own about your sexuality.
We’ve been focusing on the wrong thing
Men tell me about the difficulties in their sex lives in forensic detail. The focus is what’s not working, when the issues started, and how to fix it.
They know the dates, patterns, and theories, and have spent a whole bunch of time thinking about it.
So, when I ask them to recall the best sex of their lives and what made it so… there’s often a long silence.
Nobody’s ever asked that. They’ve never asked themselves. And that’s a goldmine of information to explore.
Somebody did ask, though
Jack Morin is a sex therapist who got curious about this back in the eighties, and he did the opposite of what everyone else was doing. Instead of studying dysfunction, he asked hundreds of people to describe their peak erotic experiences, the ones still vivid decades on, and went looking for what they had in common.
I’ve been rereading the first few chapters of his book The Erotic Mind this month.
Here’s the bit that got me thinking. Those exciting memories you hold aren’t random or sentimental. They stuck with you for a reason.
Taking the time to consider that reason could unlock a whole lot of pleasure.
Let me explain. Imagine two men describing the same sexual experience as their peak memory. Sex in a hotel room on a work trip, say.
The interesting thing is not what happened; it’s what made the memory stick for them. For one, the charge could be that she couldn’t keep her hands off him. For the other, it was that nobody knew where he was, nobody could reach him, and for a few hours he wasn’t anyone’s anything.
They’re the same experience on paper. But completely different arousal patterns underneath.
Arousal is fascinating and delightfully complex. Your own sexual history turns out to be a great guide to what turns you on, more than anything you could read.
Alright, mine
One that’s stayed with me happened in a hotel room. Completely unplanned encounter, wildly spontaneous, and one of the funniest nights of my life. We laughed the whole way through. Nothing about it was reverent or choreographed, and at one point something went so spectacularly wrong we had to stop for a good few minutes to recover.
For years I filed it under a fun, unexpected night.
But when I finally sat down and picked it apart, the fun wasn’t the whole point. The fun was what happened once the actual ingredient was in the room.
I was being watched. I was being encouraged. And it was properly, deliciously out of bounds.
That’s mine. Being wanted that openly, somewhere I had no business being… and no, that’s as much as you’re getting.
Now, here’s where you’ll get it wrong
When you try to pinpoint what made your chosen memory a peak sexual experience, you’ll probably be too literal at first.
You’ll decide it was her. Or the hotel. Or that you were thirty-one and could go three times in a night. And then quite reasonably you’ll conclude that whatever it was isn’t available any more. And back that old fantasy goes into the depths of your mind where it’s been sitting comfortably for two decades.
The scene isn’t the point, though.
The scene is just where the erotic ingredient happened to turn up that night.
Look at mine. Read literally, the lesson is that I need more unplanned hotel rooms, which is a delightful conclusion and completely useless. What it actually told me was that I come alive when I’m being witnessed and I’ve stepped outside the lines a bit.
And that’s still true, in a life that looks nothing like it did then.
Yours will work the same way. It sits underneath the story rather than in it.
So what do you do
Start by taking half an hour when nobody wants anything from you.
What people tend to find
It’s hardly ever about a model partner or fancy technique.
Being watched.
Being unobserved.
Letting yourself go out of control.
Being somewhere you weren’t supposed to be.
Having nothing to prove.
Being wanted so obviously there was no doubt about it.
And the moment you can name yours, the question changes.
A tool to help you start
Before you can read what your body remembers, it helps to be back in it. My free audio is a short, private practice in noticing sensation. Give it a try and see what comes up.