Fast Love Transcript

Rhea: What’s crazy about sex specifically is that it’s a very private act that’s being judged so fucking publicly.

Liz: The fact that we have so much wrapped up of our identity in sex and who we give it to and how we treat it, we do find ourselves even now in 2019, thinking it’s okay that I don’t love him. It’s okay that I don’t imagine a future with him, and yet I’m still having hang-ups. There’s so much to the experience of sex, and we know that there are so many layers. The fact that we have equated virtue with sex to me is already what diminishes sex itself. It’s been shoved down our throats so often—you are not a good person, you are not a virtuous person, you are a slut. Men have tended to be patted on the back for their conquests. I do think that there is a level of suffering that occurs as well. 

Rhea: Around the Victorian times in the UK, I don’t know about the States but I know about the UK, with the rise of the middle class, there was this rise of Evangelical Christianity which really cemented this idea of women in the home, men cannot be controlled, all the really extreme stuff that we have almost internalized now nearly 200 years later. It was stuff that was really introduced then. You were not allowed to have sexual desires as a woman. That “Madonna-whore” kind of thing. You are either a whore, or you are a virgin. You are either chaste or you are a slut. There is no in-between, but it’s funny because I’m sitting here now and I’m seeing myself, repeating all these societal constructs to myself in order to justify the fact that I don’t love this person, but I’m attracted to them anyway. I hate that society constricts me in a way but I internalize it, so what ends up happening is I end up hating myself.

Liz: As long as we hold on to the belief system that who we are is defined by our sexual acts, but in such a way that by denying ourselves or by delaying gratification, it speaks to our goodness, then I’ve got issues, because then judgement will remain. From the spiritual perspective of the suppression of women, women have been so repressed and forced to suppress their desires, and that has to do with our creative energy because we possess a level of life force, and by narrowly defining how women can use that life force has been a way to control women’s power.

Rhea: When you say life force, what do you mean?

Liz: Life force is our ability to give life.

Rhea: Isn’t it both men and women together that give life? Biologically? I’m not talking like now in this day and age

Liz: Yes, but the feminine specifically holds that kind of power because it resides in their second chakra.

Rhea: Is it the second chakra or the third?

Liz: No.

Rhea: Oh, it works downwards.

Liz: Yes, exactly.

Rhea: Oh! So sacral is the second?

Liz: Precisely.

Rhea: Okay, fine because we hold the ability to grow life, create life, we have life force.

Liz: Yes.

Rhea: I guess that’s also quite interesting because what just popped into my head is this idea that if you control who a woman sleeps with, you know who the ‘baby daddy’ is, because there’s never a question as to who the mother is, but there can always be a question who the father is. So maybe one of the reasons why society tries to really restrict how and when a woman can have sex was the paternity. It was almost a kind of ownership. It’s another way to ownership.

Liz: Absolutely, and it all comes down to ownership. But we have been complicit in that story. How many women go around judging other women? I remember being judged as well.

Rhea: I remember being judged . . . and judging. I have to say—and this is going to sound funny, but it’s just part of owning your shadows stuff—when I was judging other women, there was a big part of me that was jealous that they could and I couldn’t be free.

Liz: Because they were in their power. They were exercising their choice. When we are reserving our sexuality, when we are sort of boxing it up and we are saying “well, I’m only going to do it with one person my entire life, and that’s going to be so special”, we’re limiting that experience and so our ability to know ourselves and connect to ourselves is limited to that experience with that one person, so our growth and our maturity then gets wrapped up in that one relationship and we can’t distinguish what are our desires and our needs, in relationship to the other person.

Rhea: We don’t give ourselves the opportunity to grow and learn from other people by new experiences.

Liz: Exactly, which teaches us about ourselves. Not just our sexual limits or boundaries or not, if you choose to not have them, but about who we are in relationship to another person.

Rhea: Yeah. For a long time, sex for me was definitely about pleasing the other person. My body was just another mirror of my self-worth really, and even though I enjoyed it, the enjoyment I got was that someone else was enjoying me, if that made sense. As my maturity has grown, definitely the next step was it being actually the other way around. One of my best friends was like, “It’s not all about you. I’m actually getting a little bit concerned for this dude” kind of thing, and I was like, “Don’t worry. he’s going to end up ghosting me. We’ll be fine.”

Liz: We’ll call it even.

Rhea: Yeah, we’ll be even somewhere. To be in my own body with someone else, but really it was quite a selfish experience. More recently, it’s definitely been about two people enjoying each other, so I can definitely see a parallel growth between how I am seeing the world and how I am treating my body and how I am treating . . .

Liz: And it’s also so natural to feel desire, to want to have sex, to want to connect to somebody else, to want to experience satisfaction gratification, and mind-blowing orgasms.

Rhea: And that’s why orgasms feel good, because you are meant to be doing it

Liz: There is something definitely sublime about the orgasmic experience. It’s like that Nine-Inch Nails song, “you bring me closer to God”. It’s all about that, and you could elevate it to something sacred, but it doesn’t have to be that way and when we start to bring God into the discussion, we start bringing religion and codes and commandments, it messes it up. It distorts it and that’s what creates that dysfunction.

Rhea: It connects you to your own body, because I remember you were telling me about how for a lot of people—mind, body, spirit, all your different bodies—can be quite disconnected.

Liz: Yeah, very much.

Rhea: Sex is one of those things, and orgasm, that brings them all together. 

Liz: Right. Very much.

Rhea: So actually, it reconnects you to you.

Liz: Completely

Rhea: And what’s funny is that reconnection to you weirdly disconnects you from society. You become ostracized for reconnecting to yourself. 

Liz: Isn’t that ironic, and in order to be a part of society, in order to belong, you must deny yourself.

Rhea: Going back to one of our previous podcasts where we were talking about love being suffering, where we are taught that in order to love, in order to show love, in order to be good to other people, you sacrifice yourself, and sex is just another one of those things. 

Liz: Very much, and denying our sex completely is denying our connection.

Rhea: All the words we use to describe sex are words to chastise you

Liz: Absolutely

Rhea: You’re naughty.

Liz: Sex is dirty.

Rhea: Sex is dirty, sex is naughty, sex is bad. You’ve been a bad boy. You’ve been a bad girl. I need to be punished. To have sex, you need to be fallen and no one wants to be fallen; they want to be virginal. 

Liz: And that’s why I struggle with virginity and virgin stories. While it is our first time in this lifetime, certainly not our first time ever if we consider all of our past lifetimes. 

Rhea: And also I don’t remember having . . .I don’t tell the romantic story of having my first date food or when I took my first nap, you know what I mean? The only difference between losing your virginity is that you do it a bit older, but actually it’s just the first of one hopes many instances of something very normal that you will continue doing.

Liz: Yes, absolutely because it’s become so built up and because it’s become so built up, emotionally for many, it becomes this damaging story because you feel like you have got to really love this person, and when you are a teenager for those of us who went there, you are not necessarily thinking, I’m going to be with this person forever. I knew it wasn’t the case, and I think I just wanted to convince myself though that I did love him to justify it. I also had friends who had had sex with their high school boyfriends. The fallout from those relationships was so undesirable that their sexual connection to them made the heartbreak even worse.

Rhea: We’re having an opposite dysfunction as well, where sex has become just as meaningless as taking the Tube, and that is just as toxic. It has become so cheap that it has become meaningless, and I feel like that’s what we’re really struggling with at the moment is this balance.

Liz: I think it’s whatever it has for you. As long as you recognise that it’s just an expression of where you are at . . . 

Rhea: Okay. Explain

Liz: And your maturity, your consciousness. So when we say that, how we are and what we say, what we do is an expression of our own consciousness. Our sexual behaviour is very much an expression of our pain, our trauma . . .

Rhea: I definitely get that.

Liz: I think what makes sex special is the power that connection brings. It’s connecting to life force and that’s what makes it really special.

Rhea: Because it’s connecting to you and it’s connecting to the other person

 Liz: But I’m also talking about your power as a spiritual being.

Rhea: Okay

Liz: When you connect to your desires that powerfully, that strongly and you connect to life force, you connect to manifestation because that’s co-creative power. So when you are fully in your body and you are having great sex, may not be satisfying every time . . .

Rhea: So what you are saying basically is that desire, connecting to that desire, connecting to someone else, it makes you feel alive?

Liz: Exactly. That’s why sometimes we often confuse love for that dopamine brain response when we have sex, and that’s why when you asked before about how long does one wait to have sex, I said three months is not a hard and fast rule. It’s just a guideline. But part of that is you really want to make sure that when you say goodbye later that evening or in the morning—or two days later—that you are very clear about what your and the other’s intentions were. Is it just lust or is it something else, because it’s often the disappointment people experience. I knew I was so clear that I really wanted to have sex because I was ready for that. I was ready to own my body. I really wanted to take all that to the next level for myself, so that whatever happened, it was all my decision as opposed to I’m doing this because I want to show this person how I’m feeling and this is an expression of what I think of them.

Rhea: I don’t want to take away from the other side of it. It is an exercise in vulnerability.

Liz: It holds a lot of meaning, but it’s how much it’s your choice and what meaning you ascribe to it. It’s not to say that it should always be meaningless. I think that sex is one of the most meaningful things we can do, but I think that right now as an earlier episode our goal is to untangle sex from judgement, but then we also did call this love and sex.

Rhea: I think the reason why we called it love and sex is because that is the judgement. The love is the judgement of the sex—it needs to be that, what it looks like, how they feel, how you feel—and then obviously, the absence of that love is the absence of self-love. I love my body. This is just something fun. I am attracted to this person. I have a connection to this person. I am not sleeping with them to numb. I am not sleeping with them for them. I am not sleeping with them for any reason whatsoever. I’m doing it because I want to and it’s fun. I like this, then that’s okay because I’m not going to be on my deathbed going, oh I wish I had less sex. I’m pretty sure that’s not a thing. The point of this, and I think it’s really important, is to say sex is so much tied up in judgement. Yes, we’ve kind of explained why. We’ve kind of explained why it’s to our detriment that it’s tied up in judgement. Have we talked about how to untie it?

Liz: Oh. Have compassion. It sounds easier and simpler than it really is. What is lacking in most of our thoughts and our hearts is compassion, and understanding where that person is, why they do what they do and then respecting and honouring that choice comes from a place of pain or a place of joy. I certainly started my sexual life from a place of joy. I was very happy, I don’t know why. I just felt ready, but the more hurt I became, the more I used sex to hide or for validation.

Rhea: And it’s funny, because I started my relationship with sex from a place of more pain, and it has certainly gone into joy.

Liz: Yeah

Rhea:  It’s definitely gone the other way, but I think you’re right. I think the worst thing you want to be doing if you are going to be having sex is to be judging yourself at the time for having sex, and then being scared of judgement from other people afterwards, but plenty of people do it and it’s not very fun. It’s good to be in a place where you can enjoy it for what it is, and that’s what you mean by compassion. It’s just it is what it is, and it’s okay and it’s good, and I guess that’s how you start having a healthy relationship with sex, because effectively a healthy relationship is a healthy relationship with yourself, because sex is sharing yourself so you have to have a good relationship to yourself before you are able to share it. 

Liz: And it’s key that you are saying you share it. You don’t give it away. You are not giving it up. You are not surrendering it, which as we know religion is all about that. You’re giving up your virginity. 

Rhea: Yeah, it’s tit for tat.

Liz: You’re giving it up. It does vary

R; It’s just two people having fun with each other, enjoying each other either as an expression of love, an expression of lust, an expression of pleasure.

Liz: Mutual desire

Rhea: That’s what it should be about, so if you want to have a positive experience in that way, and you’re both sharing a part of yourself with that other person, then you kind of need to be okay with yourself and they need to be okay with themselves then too, because if not you will find it to be dysfunctional

Liz: Or greatly dysfunctional

Rhea: They are dysfunctional experiences and I’ve had greatly dysfunctional experiences. I wasn’t great and we know relationships are a mirror, so you know the other person wasn’t great as well but you know when we came together, it was even more toxic and we both were trying to fix something by coming together but in fact, it was just driving us further apart. So I do think if you want to have sex, just do it.

Liz: Please

Rhea: Yeah

Liz: The world will be a much more joyful place if there were more people having sex, healthy sex and not feeling guilty or shame around it.

Rhea: When you are in that moment and you are enjoying it and your body is connected to your mind and your senses, you can’t really replicate that. Why should I allow some societal constructs of my gender to take that away from me? As long as it’s safe, as long as I’m respecting myself and the other person, what’s the big fucking deal?