How I got over my lifelong fear of intimacy...
by taking sex lessons in a room full of strangers By Marianne Power Published: 02:06, 12 August 2024 | Updated: 02:06, 12 August 2024 e-mail I've always had hang-ups around sex. I'm a Catholic school girl, and not the fun, naughty kind, the 'everything is a sin kind'. At 40 I was pretty much living out my mum's premonition that I'd suit being a nun.
For most of my life I'd been single. In my teens and 20s I thought the problem was that I was unattractive and nobody wanted me..
. I was too ginger, too fat, too whatever. In my 30s, much to my surprise, I found that some guys did like me but I struggled to stay with them for more than a few months.
Something about being in a couple made me feel trapped, like I stopped being me. I realised that I was happy being single – but that didn't mean I wanted to be celibate. I wanted to have sexy underwear that actually got worn in sexy situations.
I wanted beautiful sex. Transcendent, earth-moving sex. And I wanted to be good at it.
.. because the truth was, I worried I wasn't.
Everyone else had years of practice and knew what they were doing. I didn't. When it came to sex, I was still an awkward teenager.
Marianne Power says she now understands that sex is not a performance, it's an experience to be shared or enjoyed alone. And it's for all of us who want it And so when I was asked to write about a tantra retreat for a magazine, I did something that made me feel sick to my stomach: I said y.