Okay. I can’t believe that I am going to share this, but here goes nothing: I suffer from what I would call “Sexual Awkwardness”. I’m not comfortable with other people seeing me naked, which I know is quite common, but mine goes beyond just that. I have serious anxiety when I find myself in sexual situations, and anything negative that I experience during this time will cause me to unconsciously repress any sexual desire I feel for that person unless it is addressed. My mind will literally hang on to that one negative occurrence and force the thought upon me when I am intimate with that person, thus killing any would-be pleasure that I could possibly have.
I honestly don’t know exactly how it all started because I can remember feeling anxious and guilty about sexual thoughts from a very early age. If I were to witness anyone in the act, even on television, I would get an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Of course, it didn’t help that several boys in my neighborhood and at school would call me ugly or make fun of my height because I have always been taller than a lot of them.
My first sexual interactions were awkward and unpleasant, which just helped to exacerbate how I already felt about sex. My partners would either make me feel bad about wanting it too much, or they would try to get me to do things that I wasn’t comfortable with, which would cause me to become more or less frigid with them. The whole act became mechanical and meaningless to me.
No one that I had a relationship with cared enough to talk to me about what I was going through or try to help me until I met my late husband. Unfortunately, we didn’t start addressing my problems until we found out that his brain cancer had returned. He felt an urgent need to correct all the wrongs and start living a fuller life, but that urgency didn’t start soon enough because he died shortly after we began talking about everything, and no action was ever taken, which he deeply regretted at the end of his life.
After living through all of that, I am now bound and determined to live the happiest, healthiest life possible, which means tackling all the mental challenges I have had, including this particular one. Of course, trying to once again jump back into the dating game after being out of it for 10 years has proven to be quite difficult.
The extremely connected yet woefully disconnected cyberworld of today is really not my cup of tea. I prefer something a bit more traditional. In other words, sending me a dick pic right off the bat is not going to fly with me. One situation that I recently experienced put a bad taste in my mouth surrounding that whole “trend”.
Although that debacle almost sent me back into my shell, I am forcing myself to remain out in the open. I never want to regress to the way that I was and undo all the progress that I have made so far. I want to move forward, keep trying, face rejection, if need be, speak up whenever I have a serious problem such as this one and never settle for something that is pitifully lacking compared to what I had in mind.
Beth Melton, Writer And Poet 
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