Being met slowly

I came across a poem by Yomama Graves called Be careful who you let touch your body.

There were parts of it that resonated with me and parts that felt incomplete. Reading it brought me back to conversations I have had with women over the years, my own experience and to things I have observed in my work with men.

The poem begins:

"Some women have never actually been touched.

They have been consumed like cigarettes,

Like liquor

Like something men reach for when they are lonely enough to confuse hunger with intimacy."

And then:

"the way women slowly evacuate themselves from their own body

Just to survive being desired

By people who do not know how to hold anything gently."

I think many women will recognise something in them. I have certainly heard and lived versions of this story- women who found themselves disconnected from their bodies, performing rather than feeling, saying yes to intimacy while feeling strangely absent from the experience itself: present physically, yet somewhere else entirely.

One of the things my work has taught me is how little most of us are taught about intimacy. I believe most people have good intentions, genuinely wanting their partner to feel good, to feel cherished and desired, hoping for something connected and meaningful between them. Yet there is often a real gap between imagining an experience and actually creating it. Someone can believe they are offering something beautiful and pleasurable while the experience on the other side is something else entirely, and they may never know the difference unless it is spoken aloud. This conversation doesn't happen as often as it should, so people end up enduring rather than facing the discomfort of an honest exchange.

Many people learn about sexuality through pornography, and we know how unreal and often damaging that material can be, yet for many it became the closest thing to a curriculum on intimacy they ever received. A man watching that kind of performance for years can come to believe that confidence looks like speed, that good intimacy means following a script learned from watching bodies move through practiced motions, all leading toward a single goal.

A woman absorbing the same material can come to believe her role is to please, that her own pleasure sits somewhere secondary, that part of her job is to perform enjoyment convincingly enough that no one questions it. Yet the body rarely works that way, it tends to ask for time, for slowness, for a sense of safety before pleasure can really arrive, and so many women find themselves struggling to feel pleasure or to truly relax inside intimacy.

In porn, people perform. It becomes bodies moving through motions rather than two people listening to each other. Few of us are taught how to listen to our own bodies, how to voice desire honestly, how to slow down enough to notice what is actually happening inside ourselves. Pornography tends to create a particular relationship with intimacy, one where the focus becomes performance, stimulation and outcome. Desire becomes something fast, pleasure becomes something achieved, another sensation consumed and moved past quickly, like so much else in a day.

And if the reaction a man sees in front of him looks like enjoyment, he may reasonably believe he is doing something right. But a woman's pleasure is not always what it appears to be in that moment. She may smile, she may sound like she is enjoying herself, while underneath she feels very little. Sometimes this comes from wanting to please him. Sometimes from a quiet guilt at not feeling much, a worry that something is wrong with her rather than with the moment itself. Sometimes from wanting to look good in her own pleasure, as though even that has to be performed correctly. And sometimes simply because she does not know how to say she wants something different or has never been given the words or the permission to ask for it.

This gap, between what a man believes he is offering and what a woman is actually experiencing, is not always so innocent. I think it matters to name that some men are not simply unaware or working from a flawed script. Some take rather than relate, treating a woman's body as something to satisfy their own need rather than as a person to meet. This is a harder truth, and I do not believe it describes most men, but I think it deserves to be said plainly rather than softened into something more comfortable.

I am not a man, and there is a part of this I can only approach with curiosity rather than certainty. I cannot know what arousal feels like from inside a male body, how powerfully it can move through someone, how much it might narrow a person's attention down to a single point. It seems to be a primal force, one capable of overtaking awareness rather than simply accompanying it. We see something like it throughout the natural world, where many male animals become forceful, even aggressive in the act of mating, driven by something older than thought.

But we are not only our biology. We carry awareness alongside instinct, the capacity to pause, to reflect, to choose a different response even when a strong impulse is rising in us. We can learn about our own desire and about another person's experience of us, and that learning can change how we move through intimacy entirely. This, I think, is where real hope lives-  in letting awareness sit beside the primal force, so that desire can be felt fully without taking over completely.

This rush and disconnection mirror something about the wider culture we live in. We eat quickly and distracted, we scroll quickly and mindlessly, we reply quickly to people without trying to understand what they mean and what they need. We are constantly moving from one task to the next, carrying a constant sense that something else is always waiting. It would be surprising if intimacy remained untouched by that same pace, and often it seems to have joined the same long list as everything else, another experience to have, another need to satisfy, another box to check before moving on.

Yet our bodies often seem to want something quite different, and this longing is not only a woman's. Over the years I have worked with many men and one of the things that continues to surprise me is how often I witness the same response in them. When a man is met with softness, care and slow attentive touch, something begins to shift. His breathing deepens, the tension in his body softens. The urgency that was pulling him forward begins to dissolve, and his attention gradually returns to where he actually is rather than where the moment seemed to be heading. I often see men become more sensitive, more aware of subtle sensation, more aware of emotion moving through them, more aware of their own bodies than they perhaps expected to be.

Perhaps these experiences are not as different as they first appear. A woman's body often responds beautifully to slowness, gentleness, safety and genuine connection and what continues to surprise me is how often I witness the same thing in men. Given enough time, enough care and enough permission to stop performing, many people seem to move toward the same place, where pleasure is no longer something being chased and intimacy is no longer something being achieved, but simply something two people are present inside, together.

Reading the poem left me wondering whether this is what many of us are searching for beneath everything else. Perhaps what we are truly longing for is the feeling of being met slowly, in mind, body and soul, as though the person touching us remembers there is a whole human being living inside the body next to them.

''Real intimacy feels like being approached slowly enough

That the soul has time to arrive before the skin does.''

Love,

Rosie x