I was celibate for 18 months, but it didn’t stop me people pleasing during sex
Surely celibacy stops you people pleasing during sex? After 18 months with no sex, Honey Wyatt discovered the truth is more complicated. She unpacks her experience trying to unravel a habit that is hard to break.
credit: Alexander Grey
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a people pleaser. So much so that a friend’s parent once ran over my foot with their car and I apologised to them. Once I started having sex, this propensity naturally extended into the bedroom. Among my friendship group, I’m notorious for sex stories that are so bad, they’re funny.
But from where I’m standing now, it’s not a good reputation to have. Like Taylor Swift in the Look What You Made Me Do video, I can look down at the pyramid of various iterations of myself from ages 18 to 22, smiling and nodding at moments during sex where I should have stood up and walked out.
There was the unexpected slap in the face; going back to theirs to ‘cuddle’ even though I was adamant I wasn’t going to sleep with them; the mid-thrust “You fucking bitch!” (yes, I am Charlotte York); the butt plug that got stuck; the countless times it’s ‘accidentally’ slipped into the wrong hole…need I go on?
This has happened more times than I care to admit, and I’m sure I’m not the only people-pleaser this is true of. A 2022 survey found that 56% of US women describe themselves as people pleasers, as compared with 42% of men.
Knowing that women are already less likely than their male partners to reach orgasm during sex, and are statistically more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted, it seems unpacking how people-pleasing plays out during sex is worth doing.
Why do we people-please?
Marriage and family therapist, Jason Powell, says that people-pleasing can have a variety of causes. “For some people, it’s a stress response and way to avoid conflict or escalation in a moment of distress, sexual or otherwise,” he explains. “It’s a survival strategy that tells them that if they do what their partner wants, the traumatic event or discomfort will end.”
“For others, it’s a bid for love and intimacy that is based in an insecure attachment style where the partner may believe that the only way to be desired, and perhaps even worthy of desire, is to please their partner.”
You might be wondering, isn’t wanting to please your partner, especially during sex, natural? Doesn’t it kind of come with the territory to want to give your partner pleasure? The answer is, of course, yes – but only up to a point.
How people pleasing affects sexual pleasure
“Wanting to please your partner sexually can be a beautiful way to show love, desire, and care in your erotic encounters,” says Powell. “When it becomes problematic, however, is when the pleasing is rarely, or never, reciprocated.”
“Crossing your own boundaries for the sake of pleasing a partner is also a warning sign that you are drifting from a place of pleasure and connection to a more people-pleasing-based interaction.”
On reflection, this was definitely the case for me. Often I’d go along with things that happened during sex “for the plot” or because I could tell my partner was into it, even if I wasn’t enjoying it. Eventually, enough terrible experiences culminated in me deciding to embark on an indefinite period of self-imposed celibacy.
Going boysober didn’t help
Convincing myself that I needed a break from sex and dating 20-something men who were terrible at respecting boundaries and female pleasure, I stopped having sex for 18 whole months.
For the past two years celibacy has been gaining popularity. And new to the scene is the boysober movement, a trend coined by American comedian Hope Woodard to describe the decision to give up on toxic dating and sex habits in your twenties.
I’ve been carefully monitoring these trends – not just to feel smug that I did it first, but to measure the varying results against my own to figure out what it really achieved. People report a whole host of benefits: feeling more clear-headed, like they have more mental energy to focus on other things in their life, as well as noticing an improvement of their friendships and mental health.
“Stopping having sex altogether didn’t help me set boundaries. It helped me to avoid it”
It’s now eight months since I ended my celibacy era, and the further away I get from it, the more I realise how little it did for me. While I admittedly raised my standards for what I wanted from a potential sexual or romantic partner, it had very little discernible impact on how I interact during sex.
While it was easy enough to blame the terrible state of dating, or how inconsiderate men are when it comes to sex, stopping myself from engaging with intimacy altogether didn’t help me improve my communication skills, or learn to confront my problem setting boundaries head-on. It helped me to avoid it – something I was already far too good at.
Having hosted a podcast about sex for nearly four years, I assume that people think of me as veering towards the opposite end of the spectrum to ‘prude’. I’ve spoken to experts about how to set boundaries and communicate with your partner – even how to introduce a smorgasbord of kinks and sex toys to the bedroom. But that’s all just theory.
Learning to prioritise pleasure in sex
I still struggle to express what it is I enjoy, or even to know for myself (not for lack of experimentation, it has to be said). Recently during sex I gave some very specific instructions for how to stimulate my clit, immediately followed with “or just whatever”. My partner burst out laughing: “That’s the funniest thing you’ve ever said,” they exclaimed.
This isn’t a rare phenomenon – often I’ll try to explain what I want, only to be left with a blank brain, not a thought in sight. And that didn’t stop with my celibacy.
“Boundaries and consent are both important pillars of any sexual relationship, as well as being fundamental to avoid people pleasing in the bedroom”
What I worry about with the celibacy and boysober trends is that they package not having sex as a fix-all for anyone experiencing difficulties in their dating lives. But as we all know, avoiding the problem does not make it go away. As a life-long people pleaser, I know better than anyone that if I don’t think I’ll be instantly perfect at something, I’m not going to even attempt to do it.
Overcoming people-pleasing tendencies in bed
But doing this with your sex life can come at the detriment of your pleasure once you start having sex again. “People pleasing can have a negative impact on your own sense of self-worth and esteem,” Powell explains. “We can be very hard on ourselves, and particularly critical, when we recognise that we are not showing up authentically because of insecurity or fear. It can often lead us down a path of shame that is damaging and quite painful.”
This isn’t to say that people should be shagging everything in sight to get over their shame, nor that going celibate for a while can’t help others. But confronting the root of the problem – how people-pleasing shows up in the rest of your life or your insecure attachment style – could ultimately end up being more fruitful than swearing off all potential partners and forfeiting your pleasure.
“Boundaries and consent are both important pillars of any sexual relationship, as well as being fundamental to avoid people pleasing in the bedroom,” Powell advises. “It’s critical that you know yourself erotically, in terms of what you are willing, and not willing to do.”
Listen: Saying No and Setting Boundaries
“Different contexts can change what we are willing to consent to at times, but the key is to have clear and honest communication about it. There should be mutual curiosity about pleasure and how to please one another in a variety of ways.”
As I learn more about what I want and how to voice that to a partner, it becomes evermore clear that putting it into practice is far more fruitful in the long run than pretending I’m going to spontaneously become a flawless communicator. I find it hot when people tell me what they want, so surely that’s the case when I do?
It might not be perfect, it might not even be a sentence. But I won’t be adding to the list of times I’ve let things happen and not spoken up. This is me trying to advocate for what gives me pleasure.