Does Your Relationship Have Sexual Versatility?

There are many things that heterosexual couples can learn from gay couples. This includes the "top" and "bottom" effect, where you can switch roles. As with couples, Jacsman explores in-depth the affect of sexual versatility on your relationships. How can you learn to be a better couple through sexual versatility? Read on!

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At GetLusty for Couples, we strive to provide all couples with a stronger sense of partnered power and promote the sexual possibilities that can be developed in coupledom. If there’s anything we want you to get from reading GetLusty, it’s a sense that there are infinite possibilities in coupledom. By acknowledging and honouring your personal limits, you can get to explore the boundless territory that lies within your partnership. Sound paradoxical? In partnership, by building on a foundation of personal safety and mutual concern, a couple constructs a pathway that can carry them ever farther forward in love, and toward each other in lustful intimacy.

Conscientious partnership can be a safe space for personal exploration, growth and healing for “top” and “bottom” alike. Defining what we actually mean by terms like “top” and “bottom” gets very tricky. The power play of these two terms are Daedalian. For the purposes of this article I am going to define “bottom” as someone who has the ability to eroticise or otherwise enjoy the sensations and emotions that accompany being submissive and/or being penetrated during sex play. To keep it simple, I’ll define “bottoming” as “acting like a bottom”. . . or “submissive”, because not everyone who bottoms is a bottom. Likewise, a “top” can eroticise or otherwise enjoy penetrating and/or dominating their partner during sexual play, and not everyone who “acts like a top” . . . or “dominant” is categorically a top.

Personally, I remember the realisation that made it possible for me to begin exploring my bottom space. For the first five or so years of my sexual play, I’d been exclusively top. I was conscious that part of what I got from topping was the satisfaction of being a giver, tutor and healer for my bottom in any given sexual play – an intense sense of nurturing and mutual discovery and growth which was instilled in me by my first sexual relationship. The first time I bottomed I felt great trepidation. However, afterwards, we were lying in each other’s arms, and he drifted off to sleep. I lay there admiring his open, vulnerable face, and I realised that I was just as much a giver, tutor and healer (also beneficiary, tutee and healed) when I bottomed as when I topped. I was transformed by my versatility.

In partnership, the couple is a crucible. A crucible is the container used by a metal worker to melt together ores – “a receptacle for strong metals and high heat, transforming two lesser things into a greater thing, the alchemist’s cauldron where lead becomes gold”. In the security and safety of coupledom, with the heat of loving, lustful spirit and sex, your partner’s energy combines together with your own energy, and turns into something stronger, brighter, and more powerful than either of you could generate alone.

Partnership is the locus for the creation of a newly minted reality. A reality with all the power and wisdom that a top and bottom can together bring to the spirit of their unique coupledom. The thing is, committing to a partnership is a relationship. And relating is something that happens in real time. It’s a process, a co-exploration, and a way of being with each other as stuff comes up. Self-defining, like, “I’m a top” or “I’m a bottom”, as though it were a favourite colour, and sticking to it for life, makes no sense. Experiencing life together with a partner is an alchemical process. You both develop. You grow. You become more, together. Your relationship necessarily needs to develop and grow accordingly or it will bust apart. What does that process look like? Conversations. Check-ins. Trying things and seeing how it goes. Being willing to back-track. Reassurance. More conversations.

Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. There’s a reason your mother told you commitment is not for the faint hearted. The good news? This process, done with patience, mutual support and love, leads to incredible intimacy, and ultimately, can lead to satisfaction reaching way beyond just your relationship. Every couple’s alchemical story is as unique as the individuals in the partnership, and each couple’s definition of “success” is different.

One lesbian couple I worked with had been together since their late teens. They were madly in love, adopted 2 kids, established careers, and could boast 14 years of commitment under their belts. They had absolutely no intention of opening their relationship up. Yet, both felt there were sexual experiences, “in the other role” they had come to need for their personal sense of fulfillment. Each, though, feared that their partner would be unable to consummate. Through our work together, we found “versatile” space for each partner to explore her sexuality in ways that felt safe emotionally and physically within their relationship.

Another couple, Mark* and Thomas*, came to me because they had hit an unexpected snag. Thomas had wanted to open up to expand his repertoire as a “top” by exploring his bisexuality and was interested in forming a long-term relationship with a woman, without taking anything away from his life-partner. Mark was supportive of this idea, and they decided to keep the playing field even, and they would both try dating to see what it was like. Neither of them was prepared when Thomas was blindsided with mind-numbing jealousy when Mark was bottoming for another man.

It turned out that they had different motivations. Thomas wanted a female bottom who could be a potential addition to their relationship, whereas Mark wanted a sexy friend who was outside of the relationship that he could top. In Mark’s desire to explore topping for himself, autonomously and as an “extra” outside of their relationship, Thomas perceived his beloved as wanting him out of the way. But in his view, Mark wanted to keep stable the sexual dynamic he had with his lover Thomas, considering it as central and special to their relationship. Once they both understood their different motivations, they were able to make decisions about who and how to pursue their desires to explore topping in a way that had them both feel loved and cared for.

A third couple came to me when they had just moved to “the big city”. These two men, Dale* gay and Harry* bisexual, had been together for three years. Harry was the top in their relationship, but really enjoyed bottoming for women. They had dabbled in the swinging scene in their previous town, but the scene there was very small and they both felt vulnerable to judgment and drama there. Despite being supportive of each other, neither man felt comfortable doing too much outside of their relationship. Now that they were in a bigger city, they wanted help in finding a gay-oriented scene where Harry wouldn’t be criticized if he also dated or hooked up with women to bottom for them. Through our work together, we were able to process their different fears of judgment and they found a community of poly-friendly, sex-positive friends who were supportive of both men’s sexual expressions and their committed relationship.

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing many individuals and couples like this. Each story is unique, but there are three things that consistently contribute to couples successfully developing versatility in their sexual relationships.

• Both partners have the same understanding of their own relationship. When you talk to one partner, they will say the same things about the relationship as the other partner does. It appears to matter less “what page you’re on” than “that you’re on the same page”.

• They are doing this as a team. Even if one person is more “into it” than the other, no one is pressuring the other to go along with it. Couples who develop versatility as a team are listening to one another and paying attention to what works for both of them. They are looking for win/win solutions to sexual role challenges. They listen to each other’s fears and concerns. They are committed to finding ways to put both of their needs and desires on the table, collaboratively.

• They treat one another with kindness and respect. This is perhaps the most important requirement for success in any relationship. Even when one partner says something that is difficult for the other partner to hear, they listen with compassion and are gentle with each other’s vulnerabilities.

You might notice that these three things are helpful, and perhaps necessary, for relationships of any kind, and that is true. As a bottom you are a top-maker and vice versa. You also give your top the all-important permission to not be a top – to express the fears, concerns and vulnerabilities that we all, as human beings, must have. We need each other to be who we are. We need to explore and develop ourselves, as tops, and as bottoms, to get the acceptance we crave for our sexiest, lustiest needs and wants. We need each other to become the most that we can possibly be. Even with all those wonderful intentions, the most loving, happy couple might still stumble. GetLusty for Couples endeavours to get couples there, whether straight or gay. Develop and understand your relationship better; be a gay couple to turn the lust up for one another.

In a future GetLusty post, I will provide practical conversation guides to help you towards falling more deeply in love with each other as you create the kind of relationship most people only dream of. I’ll do near well anything to help you get your lust on for your lover, and share the joy and learning from it with the lovers of the world.

Do It well; do It safe.

Jacsman
*For ethical privacy all person names are given as nom de guerre.


He studies and writes about men and masculinity in MSM relationships, and gay couples getting lusty is JacoPhillip’s cup of tea. Our resident advisor on gay long-term relationships, JacoPhillip Crous is also known as Jacsman. A sex life educator, Jacsman consults in-person, on Skype, and by telephonic private sessions with couples and solo clients on ecstatic and intimate psycho-sexual lifestyle and development.

Jacsman promotes male2male dialogue that furthers understanding of masculine sexuality and MSM relationships. A research psychologist, he explores and investigates male psycho-sexual self-development phenomena, behaviours, experiences and knowledgeability. Find out more about JacoPhillip at: http://about.me/Jacsman.

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