r/sex•
IanAbsentia

Is there a way to tell whether a new partner's sexual enthusiasm will be authentic and lasting or is just the stuff of "new relationship energy"?

This has for me (34M) become a very important question. I'm open to a new long-term relationship but want--no, practically *need/require*--the other person to have a comparable sex drive. (I desire it practically every day, sometimes multiple times a day.) And not just this--I'd prefer that their attitude about sex be more open, exploratory, and playful. (Just typing this, I feel almost as though I'm asking too much. I know of r/deadbedrooms, but, despite the horrors described there, have no interest in using that subreddit's lowered expectations as any sort of metric for my own relationships.) My last long-term relationship was somewhat asymmetrical in this regard. Without overly self-aggrandizing, I was the epitome of what Dan Savage means by GGG ("good, game, and giving") and basically would give my then girlfriend more orgasms than she could handle. I was *very* open to anything she could possibly want and would actively attempt to solicit feedback as to what could be better, but she, for her part, was sexually lazy, meaning she had precious little interest in reciprocating much less enhancing my efforts. Everything she'd do was rote, routine, and uninspired--just lazily mechanical while I (to her benefit) did all the work. I respectfully and appropriately expressed my desire for more in our sex life, but she treated the discussion itself as vulgar. In fact, her attitude toward any discussion of sex was itself so offputting that I began to harbor resentment for her, which, as one might imagine, can rapidly become the death knell for a relationship.

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Now that I've somehow made myself out to be a shallow, sex-crazed asshole, here's my question: how does one identify a long-term partner with whom one will share an enduring mutual enthusiasm toward sex--that is, assuming that all else is well in the relationship? There is such a thing as "new relationship energy"--i.e., that enthusiasm that exists in the early stages of a relationship when partners are still new to each other. But how does one see past that into whether, at least sexually, a partner is the genuine article (which, I guess, in my case, is to say, *a freak*)?

Posted Dec 16, 2018, 11:29 PM UTC

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