Emily Nagoski

It doesn’t help either you or your Feels if you shove them in your partner’s face and say, “ACCEPT THIS!” How would you respond if your partner did that to you? Unless you’re a saint of unrivaled patience and tolerance, you would get defensive—and fair enough. Shoving your Feels in your partner’s face is using your feelings as a weapon, and that’s never okay

Sexual boredom can happen only if you’re no longer curious.

Just as all vulvas are normal and healthy just as they are, so all orgasms are normal and healthy, regardless of what kind of stimulation generated them or how they feel. Their value comes not from how it came to be or whether it meets some arbitrary criteria but from whether you liked it and wanted it.

Sex is a crucial attachment behavior for human adults, so the two states—separation anxiety plus sexual stimulation—reinforced each other, to give rise to a sexual experience that was intense but ultimately unsafe and unhealthy.

The body of research specifically measuring nonjudging in relation to sexual functioning is small but growing. In a tiny study of sensorimotor sex therapy, women in the treatment group reported that the therapy helped them to feel less like they “should” be experiencing something in particular and more able to be gentle and forgiving with themselves.7 (Sound like anything from, oh, say, chapter 5? Remember self-compassion?) Though the study was too small to find statistically significant results, the qualitative findings are encouraging, and they reinforce the idea that it’s not awareness of your sexuality that matters, it’s how you feel about what you are aware of.

In Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child, psychologist John Gottman describes four different approaches a parent can take in responding to a child’s feelings: emotion coaching, dismissing, disapproving, and laissez-faire. I’ll refer to the last three (less supportive) approaches together as emotion dismissing.8
Emotion coaching teaches you that
• You can recognize lower-intensity emotions so that you can manage them before they escalate.
• Negative emotions are a natural response to negative life events. Because negative life events are sometimes inevitable, so are negative emotions.
• Because negative emotions are a normal part of life, they are discussed, given names, and empathized with.
• “It’s normal that sometimes it feels hard,” “When you feel bad, we love you just as much as when you feel good,” and “You cry all you need to, honey.”
• Your sadness, anger, and fear are signs of being human.
Emotion dismissing, on the other hand, teaches you that
• You should ignore subtle or lower-intensity emotions—they’re irrelevant.
• Negative emotions are toxic, dangerous to yourself and the people around you.
• Negative feelings are a choice, something you could select in the morning like part of your outfit. Because they’re a choice, negative emotions may be punished—even if there is no overt misbehavior.
• “Get over it,” “Be grateful for all the good things,” or “C’mon, give me a smile, honey!”
• Your sadness, anger, and fear are signs of failure—either your own or your family’s.

• Remember that feelings are biological cycles with a beginning, a middle, and an end, built in. You believed me when I said it earlier, right? When we got chased by a lion? And the kid came out from under anesthesia? Feeling an emotion won’t get you trapped forever in that emotion; on the contrary, it will allow you to move through it, like a tunnel. It might not be fun, but it’s not dangerous. Your body knows how to do it. All you have to do is allow it.

There are excellent books about how to listen to your partner and how to manage feelings in a relationship. In chapter 4, I recommended Love Sense by Sue Johnson, and to that recommendation I’ll add What Makes Love Last? How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal by John Gottman and Nan Silver.

When people ask me, “Am I normal?” they’re asking, “Do I belong?”
The answer is yes. You belong in your body. You belong in the world. You’ve belonged since the day you were born, this is your home. You don’t have to earn it by conforming to some externally imposed sexual standard.

That’s the true story. We are all the same. We are all different. We are all normal.