Learning how to have sex at forty

+ Online tickets for SOLD OUT Vagina Museum event 8th July

The first time I was asked to write about a tantra retreat for a magazine, my response was an instant: ‘No, thank you.’ I sent the reply before I’d even thought about it. Just the word ‘tantra’ made me want to be sick in my mouth for reasons I didn’t properly understand. Writing about sex - well, that was also a hard no. No, no, no, no, no.

Just no. I didn’t know what happened at a tantra retreat and I didn’t want to know. End of.

But for the rest of the day I kept thinking about how quick the no had been.

If I had learned anything through my experience of living self-help books for a year, it was that the more I didn’t want to do something (say, like Rejection Therapy, or money stuff) the more I needed to do it.

I thought about what a gift it could be for a middle-aged Catholic school girl like me to be paid - literally paid - to get rid of some of her hang ups.

I looked up the teacher and read an article on the website about how the retreat taught a writer to love her body and to have boundaries. I liked the sound of boundaries, they sounded fully clothed. Safe. Maybe it would be OK?

I replied to my editor asking if it was too late to change my mind and spent the next few weeks pretending it wasn’t happening.

The only thing I knew about tantra was that Sting did it and had eight hour sex marathons. My life was very far from eight hour sex marathons.

I was a Catholic school girl and not the fun naughty kind, the everything is a sin kind.

My only memory of sex education at our convent school (which I attended from 4-17) was our religion teacher telling us that if we got pregnant from rape we had to keep the baby, because that’s what God wanted. I grew up with three sisters and went to an all girl’s school. Boys - and then men - were alien creatures. Even at forty.

While most of my friends racked up sexual experiences in their teens and twenties, I didn’t, except a few drunken encounters that did little more than help me feel like I wasn’t a complete weirdo.

Being single and sexually inexperienced was a secret shame I carried with me. I used to make excuses to leave the room when friends started talking about sex. I spent a lot of time listening to the ins and outs of other people’s relationships, while having none of my own.

Love and sex seemed to be something that others could do and I couldn’t.

When I arrived at the tantra retreat I expected everyone to be swinging from the rafters sexperts. I looked at the men for clues that they were perverts. I filed the men wearing necklaces as suspicious and put a huge red flag by the man who claimed to be able to have sex telepathically with his lover in India. Fortunately he left after just a day. A plumbing emergency.

Apart from a few hippy trouser, necklace wearers, most people there seemed strangely respectable. Doctors, lawyers, management consultants, soldiers, PHD students, yoga teachers… all there for different reasons. Sexless marriages, loneliness, body issues, history of sexual abuse.

I was unnerved by how often and how easily people used the word ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’. They talked about ‘my sexuality’ like it was a normal part of them - like ‘my hair’. I had no clue what that really meant. I did not have a ‘my sexuality’. I had shame and fear and denial.

I told myself that they were all normal in ways that I wasn’t. That I was the most repressed one in the room.

At first the week was every bit as terrifying as I’d imagined. It was up there with jumping out of a plane and even scarier than doing stand up comedy. I had chest pains for most of it and spent a lot of time on the toilet. I could not eat and left the week half a stone lighter.

I also left the retreat having had some of the most beautiful moments of my life. Moments that I will be glad on my deathbed that I had. Moments that truly changed my idea of what was possible in life and love.

After that week I signed up to an 18 month training with the teacher Jan Day. It was the sex and relationship education that I never had. That most of us never had.

I am now an assistant on that training. A tantra assistant! Who the hell would have predicted that?! Love Me, the book I wrote about my experiences of tantra (and finding a way to build a life of love and sex as a single woman in my forties) was picked by Cosmo as one of the must-read books on sex and relationships. Sixteen year old me would have her mind blown by that.

I've been on radio shows telling the world my deepest shame: 'I don't know what to do with a penis!'. I've stood on stages announcing that I was bad in bed. Sometimes this feels like a bad dream - why the fuck are you doing this? I'll ask myself in the cab home.

Writing Love Me! and talking about this stuff publicly is the hardest thing I've ever done. I have spent months waking up at 3am in shame and shock at what I'm doing. I burned out. Got long covid. Got into debt. And yet I keep doing it.

While I went into tantra thinking that I was the only one with sexual hang ups I now realise that of course I am not. Far from it.

We live in a time of sex positivity - which means that we’re all supposed to be OK with sex, great about it in fact. We can get on Feeld, list our kinks, and explore whatever we want with whoever we want.

And this is all wonderful in theory but it also doesn’t acknowledge a lot of the pain, fear and shame that many of us carry in this area of life.

Esther Perel puts it this way:

“For a long time we said that sex was sinful. Every civilisation has tried to control sexuality, every religion . . .You need sex because without it you can’t have society continue to exist, but you can’t have too much of it or you can’t control the people once they are immersed in this lustful pleasure.

“So, we grew up with a lot of silence around sexuality and today we would like to be able to talk about it openly, but it’s very hard to talk suddenly openly as an adult about everything you’ve learned to be so silent about . . . We carry guilt, we carry silence and we don’t really know how to talk about it . . .

“For a long time, we said sex was sinful. Then when we tried to do away with religion, and we brought in the sexual revolution of the 60s, we replaced it with “sex is natural ’, which was a wonderful thing to say in light of how much it had been condemned, and vilified. But on the other end, it’s not natural. It’s an art. It’s cultivated, it’s learned. It’s an intelligence. It’s a lot of things but it’s not just something you know. And from that moment on, we have actually encouraged ignorance rather than the ability to learn about it, to talk about it from very early on.”

Jan Day’s workshops were a place I could learn to talk about sex and love for the first time. As one of my fellow participants put it “We’re changing our lives one awkward conversation at a time!”

They were a place where I learned that sex has nothing to do with More magazine Position of the Fortnight (no washing machines or swings need to be involved) or racy underwear. It was something completely different, something that comes from learning how to say yes and no - such basic things but so hard, especially for women.

For me sex education was not about learning new moves, more about unlearning all the toxic ideas I had about men, sex, my body, love and what is or isn’t allowed for as a woman. It was about learning that I deserved pleasure and that sex was not another thing to be ‘good at’ but something to experience and share. It was about learning to slow down and actually feel what is happening.

I was forty when I started to learn about sex but there are people who come to Jan in their seventies and even eighties. It’s never too late.

Jan says there is no such thing as 'I should know this by now' and there is no reason for any of us to feel ashamed. How can we feel ashamed about not knowing things that nobody taught us? That nobody talks about?

You only need to look at Andrew Tate stuff, and huge rates of loneliness and the disappointment of modern dating, to realise that we all need help with this stuff. As a friend put it - we can take lessons in almost everything, why not sex and relationships?

It’s made me very proud that people have signed up to Jan’s work because of Love Me!

I get messages from them telling me that it’s changing their life - as it did mine.

If any of you are curious to hear more, I’m doing an event with Jan and mega award winning author and activist Monique Roffey next Tuesday 8th July at the iconic Vagina Museum.

In person tickets sold out in 48 hours but we will be streaming it live, so that people around the world can join. Pls signs up if you are interested in a conversation about love, life, sex. You’ll be sent a recording after the event if you can’t attend on the night. No nakedness required! Though there may be some hippy necklaces - worn by me! I have my outfit planned already.

Love and thanks to all of you for reading this and for reading Love Me! Let’s change the world, one awkward sentence at a time.

Love xx

PS this is the link to the Red magazine article I wrote about tantra.

And this is another piece I wrote about learning how to love.

And Love Me! is available in paperback from July 15th.