Experience 56
Talking About It
What you need
Nothing.
How to approach it
With a partner
Before physical activity begins, spend ten to fifteen minutes describing to your partner exactly what you're going to do — not as negotiation, not as question-and-answer, but as deliberate description. Then do what you described. Alternatively: after an experience, describe it back to each other in specific detail. Or use description as the primary mode for a period before any contact begins — words first, contact later. The variable being tested is what sustained verbal description of intention, of memory, or of what's being noticed does to desire on its own. This is distinct from Dirty Talk (#21), which is narrating during the act. This experience is about description as foreplay — words that precede, or follow, rather than accompany.
Things to explore
- Does describing what you're going to do change your experience of doing it?
- As receiver of description: does hearing an explicit account of what's coming change how you anticipate it?
- Is it easier to describe future intentions or past experiences — and does that asymmetry tell you anything?
- Does sustained verbal description without physical contact produce any arousal on its own?
Why people love this
Language about sex can precede, accompany, or follow the physical experience, and the timing changes what it does. Describing what's going to happen builds a mental image that the body then arrives to meet; describing what happened afterwards consolidates it in a way that can make the experience feel like it continues. Many people find the description phase produces as much arousal as what follows it. Some people also discover that they communicate desire much more naturally in the future or past tense — in intention and memory — than in the present-tense narration of dirty talk.
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