Photo credit: sasint from pixabay
I originally wrote this post for abuse advocate Ashley Easter and you can find it on her blog. This post is long (5,500 words!) and that’s because I try to go beyond the basics. It’s aimed to help people work out what good consent might look like in their sex life together. Because when I first started having sex, I didn’t have much of a clue.
To this day, my husband and I are still unsure if some of our early sexual encounters with each other were consensual. Seriously. Make no mistake, we have a mutually fun and consensual sex life now and I believe we have loved each other deeply for as long as we’ve been sexually active with each other. But we didn’t always understand consent. Or sex. And I used to have some pretty messed up ideas about my place in the relationship.
How we got into that situation and how we got out of it are both stories for another time (though I have written about our experience of sex therapy as a Christian couple). Right now, I want to tell you about how we’ve come to understand consent. Continue reading Sex and Consent: How does that work in a long-term relationship?