Bringing old tricks into a new relationship

Not for the virgins!
Back in the day, the girls and I used to share advice on how to handle relationships. This was before we all grew up, grew apart, grew discreet and grew cynical – having realised belatedly that these “love” things really have no formula.
We tried to work out the kinks in every new relationship by anticipating trouble and moving quickly to avert it. The kind of trouble that comes with a new relationship like when to sleep with the guy without him thinking you’re easy and more importantly, the do’s and don’ts of having sex with him for the first time.

The prevailing school of thought around dating and sleeping with the new guy for the first time held that it was unwise to show off any sexual acrobatic skills you possessed as he might get turned off wondering how you acquired them.

“Don’t get carried away and start doing it like you’re auditioning for a porn movie,” the girls would chide, “otherwise he will wonder where exactly you learnt all those moves.”

The popular view back then was that one had no business giving a sterling performance in bed the first few times unless they wanted to be regarded as a slut who had really been around.

The problem with this advice was that it was never spelt out how long you had to pretend to not know what you were doing in bed and keep up the pretence of being relatively “new” at “these things”.

What I recall was that the most recommended sexual position for a first time encounter with a new guy in a brand spanking new relationship was the “frozen chicken”, and no, you didn’t skip a page in the Kama sutra, this position was something we invented in college.

While we might prefer to not dwell much on it – a lot of sex happens in colleges, a lot of sexual inventions happen too and a lot of infections spread in college. But that’s an article for another day. Back to the “frozen chicken” issue at hand.

The “frozen chicken” position, as you might have guessed, involved a degree of stiffness, a certain measure of rigidity in the limbs and taking as little initiative as possible in bed.

All you were meant to do was lie there and let him take the lead, move just a tiny bit if you had to, but otherwise your role was to feign as much ignorance as possible so that this new guy wouldn’t think you had a wild sexual past.

Inevitably the feedback after following this advice was that the first time with the new guy usually went rather unsatisfactorily as what was meant to be a passionate encounter sometimes degenerated into some kind of drill exercise.

“Lift your leg, no, not that one. Put your arm there, no, I meant on that side. Turn around, no, not that way. Face the side, no, not like that. Bend your knee, no, not that way.”

Let’s face it. Some men like directing the action in bed with the terse precision of a driving instructor trying to teach you bringing old tricks into a new relationship how to do parallel parking. Total mood killer.

It’s a turn off but when one assumes the ‘frozen chicken’ position and decides to lie like a log in bed, they don’t really leave the other person much choice, do they?

Now that we’re older, me and the girls know that it is important to communicate with our partners – usually before we engage in the sex because any preferences one reveals after the sex usually seem like an indication that it was done poorly in the first place.

Ehe, tact is important and sensitivity too, so as to not bruise Mr Man’s ego.
In retrospect of course, the whole concept of the ‘frozen chicken’ was premised on the desire to deceive which is not a good premise for anything particularly in an intimate relationship. But the underlying reasons given for this deception also merit some scrutiny. So here goes.

Sometimes men are very insecure about their ability to perform to the satisfaction of their partner and so a lot of awkward moments can happen which could have been avoided with some frank and open talk prior to the lovemaking session.

You have those guys who will randomly ask in the middle of the sex session, “so am I better than Mike?” – Mike being your ex-boyfriend who you made the tragic mistake of mentioning in a random, unrelated, distant and half-forgotten conversation. Some guys have the grace to wait until after the sex session to pelt you with such questions in which you are asked to compare their performance to that of a past lover. Like what exactly are they expecting you to say?

No woman is going to admit to a man she still wants to be with that he is not as good as her previous lover or indeed that he is not as well endowed as her former lover might have been. Such inquisitions invite deception, the kind of deception that makes women invent things like the ‘frozen chicken’ position.

Then there are those men who don’t appreciate being informed of what their woman likes in bed because they feel slighted and get suspicious. “Where did you learn that from,” they’ll ask, before getting totally worked up over the fact that their woman said she enjoys having her ear nibbled or some such thing.

Unless a man has a serious prophetic gift operating in his life or possesses the spirit of discernment (to borrow from Christian parlance); he will not know what ‘exactly’ his woman prefers in bed without asking her.

But having asked her what she likes in bed, a guy should not turn around and use this information against his woman talking about “you seem to know too many things”.

We all carry some things from a past relationship, and even sexual habits are carried over sometimes. Men do this with pride, carry over their sexual experiences and presumably these past experiences are an important part of their sexual CV, allowing them to claim prowess where they might have none.

Sleeping with many women does not make one a good lover if you never satisfied a single one of them but that too, is an article for another day.

Women on the other hand, are encouraged to play coy, to pretend to know less than they do about sex, about their sexuality and about their own bodies. Let’s all be “frozen chickens” and thaw only when we are wed but even then, we must be careful of what we request of our men because some requests will be met with the suspicious question, “And since when have you liked that? Where did you learn it and who taught you about it?”

For a woman, there are many old tricks you can’t bring into a new relationship and dexterity in the bedroom is one of them.