In marriage, as with eating, it’s dangerous to assume that the forbidden fruit is unattainable or reserved for those lascivious sinners out there in the world, sometimes referred to as “happy people.” Everyone wants to have sex like a rock star and be the proverbial Wonder Woman to Superman’s personal issues, religious or 
comic book preferences aside. These sentiments are universally intrinsic to humanity.
Since the dawning of communal living, it’s been in our blood to help out not only our closest kin, but the people who help us grow strong roots in the promotion of our own flowering offspring, as well. It makes sense to be there for our life partners on a level that our ancestors would understand, living in their caves and surviving off of roasted snake meat. Life has categorically progressed for everyone since we stood up on two legs, and though the majority of the world lives on less than ten dollars a day, the biggest contributors to happiness are still bound in our social interactions.
Psychologists agree that when you’re more open and honest with people, even about the things you deem categorically unrelatable, you’ll have more friends and feel better overall. Best of all, if you’re one of the brave ones in a long-term relationship, you’re also lucky enough to enjoy much better sex than if you were wholly independent. This isn’t to say that singles don’t have plenty of amazing sex, but it doesn’t take much effort, on either end, to find the craziest sex of your life with a stranger half a planet away.
What’s more difficult is disinhibiting the sexual restraints imposed by our societal strata, to which we all conform for security purposes (like women’s rights and street lights), so that we can have a lot more fun once we park our cars at home.
Reasons to Expand Your Sexual Horizon
Aside from giving a time warp high five to your great, great…great grandparents, being sexually diverse is also fun and motivating in other aspects of living. Ever heard of the inverse relationship between the number of years married and the quality of sex?
It’s true beyond a certain point–namely, during the post-menopausal stage of life–but otherwise, it’s a myth that singletons and embittered divorcees perpetuate to vindicate promiscuity. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t validate the myth that putting on a wedding band cinches off blood flow down below. Sex isn’t just a monolithically important part of any committed relationship, it’s the reference point itself for what defines a romantic relationship.
Institutions from the very top down have been weakened or altogether destroyed by sexual relationships between two people. Sex is absurdly powerful, and those who know the language implicitly can best wield its advantages. Tapping into sex with a partner you love is like going to a specialty school and finding one perfect professor whose passion inspires yours.
Nobody is saying you must be better at sex or you must learn how to better satisfy your lover, but there’s a whole world of beauty and splendor in which the sexually informed hang out and share secrets. Ask anyone who inhabits that world if they’re having a good time in life; they’ll probably be having too much fun to answer you seriously.
Chances are, if you’re having a lot of great sex, other facets of life are rather great, too. Challenging the horizon of your sexuality will bolster your ability to go after what you want in life, communicate with people, and be confident in any situation. Knowing that you’re a tiger in bed, and not just hoping to find one, is powerful far beyond the immediate advantages to having great sex.
Find Out What Works for You
Superficial sex can be satisfying, but it doesn’t take you to another place, by definition. In this day and age, with websites catering to the most hermetic of sex-inclined recluses, anybody can get laid. Literally, anybody. The plea that “nobody will have sex with me!” has been quelled by the collusive power of the internet.
Comedian David Cross broadly explains sexual fascinations thusly: if you can dream up a fetish or otherwise crazy sex-related idea, the odds are incredibly high that there’s already been a magazine around for ten years dedicated to just that, staffed by hardworking folk trying to put their kids through college.
It’s probably true, but broadening your sexual boundaries does not mean doing things that make you or your partner uncomfortable, no matter how commonplace it is for others. You don’t have to have sex with strangers in crazy positions every day of the week to become freaky; oftentimes, just watching niche sex tapes or even reading Savage Love is way more information that most people can stomach.
Finding out what works for you in the bedroom is a fundamental abstract of your personality at large, and knowing who you are is the best way to get what you want out of life. Are you adventurous? Are you attracted to those of the same gender? Are you bored of being in a power position all the time?
It’s vitally important to ask yourself these sort of potentially incommodious questions, because leaving your sexual preferences in limbo is an open invitation to have someone else make up your mind for you. What’s the point of having regular sex if not to turn into something better by the end of it?
Find Out What Works for Your Partner
If you’ve already got a partner that loves and trusts you, odds are you’ve already tried plenty of things together for the first time that left you feeling like a couple of goobers, anyway. You don’t have to be a stallion right out of the gate, and you don’t have to be sure that what you’re doing is going to end in the most unfathomably brilliant simultaneous orgasm of all time. You just have to know what pleases you so that you can give it a go with someone who cares deeply about your well-being.
This thought process is the foundation of all strong relationships (which become grounds for infidelity when communication stops). Perhaps this goes without saying, 
but most couples in functional, committed relationships are already rather open with each other regarding their bedroom practices. Sex reiterates in the memory tapes of our minds as much as anything else for which we’re compelled to wake up in the morning. While most long-term sexual relationships don’t break ground on the fetish front, plenty are instigated sheerly out of extraneous sexual desires. As is always the case with sex, it’s more than helpful to know where the other person is coming from, regardless of what’s natural for you.
Meet Up Online
During every single moment of every day, almost since the beginning of life itself, animals all over the planet have been pursuing, thinking about, or actively engaging in sex. It is literally going on all around us at all times.
I can remember a point early on in life when it amazed me to behold the concept of sharing a planet with six billion other people. Now, less than twenty years on, another billion people have been added to the roster, with a projected two billion more people to join Team Earth within the next fifty years. No one could ever come close to meeting enough people that they could be even remotely aware of everybody else on the planet.
Clearly, some filtering processes are needed to find the ones that will become ingratiated in our lives. Such filters are given to us at birth, as with our small family units, our neighborhoods, our schools and office buildings, common languages, and collective virtues. As we grow older, though, and our interests dart out like paint droplets in spin art machines, it becomes exceedingly difficult to find even a handful of people who will fit our criteria for desirable friends and lovers.
This is where the internet comes in, once again. To rely entirely on the “blogosphere” to find your life partner isn’t exactly a recipe for successful living, but it is one way to meet people accordant with your lifestyle. Whether your thing is older women, men with panty fetishes, or all kinds of people in high heels, there is an internet community for you, brimming with other people eager to share your desires. There are even websites for extramarital dating, like international superplatform Gleeden.com, where you can have an affair outside your marriage or meet married women who want to flick their sexometers into overdrive, even while they choose to stay with their spouses. Whatever community’s forums you find yourself perusing, you can be sure that intimate honesty and easygoing curiosity will be your full pass to Pleasuretown.
Meet Up in Person
There is a huge disconnect between what most pornography users watch online and what they practice in the real world with other people. Without condemning any such online perusals, it’s fairly remarkable that some of the most sexually repressed women on the planet are hounded by men with irrepressible desires to bend them to their pornographic, misogynistic fantasies.
It is of paramount importance that the people with whom you expand your sexual horizons are into what you’re doing. Otherwise, the discussion turns into something wholly different from endless fun via ecstatic sex. In the case that you and your fellow sex revelers are all on the same page, though, it helps to reinforce those sexual fantasies with interpersonal action. Online fun can only go so far, and even when 3D projections of naked women eventually come pouring out of our computer screens, it still won’t equate to the real thing in real time.
People didn’t place mind-blowing sex on a pedestal; it got there all on its own, and doesn’t seem to be coming down anytime before the inexorable destruction of 
humankind. Having sex online is a great way to purge the day’s stress or just engage in some much needed autolove, but it doesn’t hold a candle to lighting the fire of a real, responsive human being. And while pornography use is more widely accepted amongst women in dating relationships, it seems to be more of a by-product of increased sexuality than a driving force behind the relationship itself.
Starting a relationship online allows people to drop their guards and get to know someone on their own terms before agreeing on furthering the affair, but pursuing that relationship in the real world can emancipate quarantined perspectives and open up the universe to limitless potential. If nothing else, meeting new people in person can brighten your day and leave you feeling happier that you shared time with a lovely person, or relieved that you’ll never have to see them again. There are seven billion people on the planet–you’ll find someone that suits you if you make an effort.
Make Your Experiences Worthwhile
There are a lot of bodybuilders with ostensible musculoskeletal temples of biology who, in reality, have destroyed their joints and bones from repeating the same up-and-down routine, over and over, for years on end. In the weight room, as with the bedroom, it’s profoundly important to switch things up in order to avoid damaging your most highly functioning organs.
Sex addicts are akin to such bodybuilders, plummeting into flesh at the expense of their health. On the other side of the spectrum, there are those who are intimidated or downright frightened by anything sexual that doesn’t involve methods tried and true, and that fear, if not perpetrated by religion, is a direct result of not wanting to open oneself up completely to another person. Beyond the literal connectivity of two fused bodies, sex ties you to your partner(s) in ways that are orders of magnitude above other methods of direct communication.
Answers to the question, “what works for me, sexually?” are therefore as boundless as your morals and proclivities will allow you to take them, without damaging yourself or others. The information is out there for you to consider, and there’s nothing wrong with contemplating something new in the bedroom if you think it’ll benefit your life. Don’t be nervous about something not working out physically or emotionally; if you’re brutally honest up front with your significant other about your sex life, it ought to boost your self-worth and increase your personal appeal.
Everybody has different predilections for sex, and the only way to find out whose are in line with yours is to open up and talk about them in a secure setting. Displaying confidence and assuredness is sexy, regardless of how you brandish that peace of mind. It’s matters not what you want, but it is immensely important why you want it.
Lauren Allende is a Los Angeles based blogger/journalist, writing for Gleeden about all things relationships for men and women alike. Please contact Lauren at usmedia@gleeden.com to request articles about marriage, sex, love, dating, infidelity, relationships, and good times.