Kalampedia

If you feel that when it comes to sex, you are a bit weird, have some strange fetishes, or, the entire sexual part of your relationship is slightly odd (perhaps not perfect), then you are not alone. In fact, you are pretty much like everybody else.

This is a problem that Alain de Botton tries to solve in his book titled How to Think More About Sex. He argues, “Most of us are haunted by guilt and neuroses, by phobias and disruptive desires, by indifference and disgust. None of us approaches sex as we are meant to, with the cheerful, sporting, non-obsessive, constant, well-adjusted outlook that we torture ourselves by believing that other people are endowed with.”

And this is what he tries to teach us through this book. That is, to approach our sexual relationships in a fresh way. By not avoiding the subject, as it is often deemed taboo in our society, and exploring it carefully.

Below are the lessons which we can extract from the book and apply in our lives.

• Start with accepting that Sex is inherently weird and there is nothing wrong in feeling uncomfortable about even the prospects of discussing it.
• People might tell you that we are a society obsessed with sex. This could be true, but at the same time, we don’t give it as much time as it deserves. In other words, we don’t know how to think enough about sex.
• What is required of us is to explore the subject of sex. Not through porn but by exploring our relationships; the person we love.
• We live in a romantic age. We feel extremely guilty when love and lust don’t go together for us. We need to accept it and try to kindle the fire which we find missing. We don’t acknowledge this but the fact remains that both romantic love and sexual intercourse are great skills. And we can work on this game.
• To have a truly wonderful sexual experience, we need to understand sex. When we do that, we realise that sex is much more than merely an act in bed. It is an expression of our loneliness, of our desire to know and explore someone intimately, to be vulnerable and want someone to be vulnerable with us, to rise above our inadequacies, to find pleasure in our messed up lives, to find joy.

How do we bring all of this into our lives? Well, for starters, you will have to read the damn book.