Angel

After seeing the movie Book Club, Lauren has decided she’s going next level in her love life.
With help from the guardian angel that got her back on her feet last time.

I didn’t see this coming.
I mean, I knew that I left my long term relationship in 2006 to create a new love life.
Based on excitement, and the newness of being in love. On first times, new lovers and on conquering the fears that stood between me and the life I wanted.
And I succeeded.
It was actually really easy.
At least the conquering of the fears was.
Once I decided that I no longer wanted a life that was carefully crafted around things that scared the shit out of me, the hard work was already done.
Sure, I saw a sex therapist.
Once or twice, I can’t even remember.
But it was clear, to both the therapist and me, that I had made up my mind and nothing was going to stop me.
I might still freak out and have panic attacks. But I would never get knee deep into avoidance, consumed by fear, the way I had spent the two decades prior.
Yesterday I created the first video in my Sexual Mastership 40+ series.
It was just an introduction, on how the movie Book Club had inspired me to stand up for sex when you’re older.
That I was offended that the movie portraited elder women as barely sexual capable, and tied to limitations which may be valid when you’re young.
But that should have been dealt with long before menopause.
Mature women were not mentally unstable teenagers in aging bodies.
They were stronger, free, and daring.
And they could do anything they pleased.
That’s what Book Club could have, should have, emphasized.
That 50 Shades of Grey might have been a leap for virgin Anastasia Steele. But that there was an entire demographic ready to turn up the heat.
However.
Now that this opportunity had obviously been missed, I would take it from here. So I started a video series on YouTube, Sexual Mastership 40+.
Where the first video immediately received a lot of clicks.
I felt guilty for using the words “mature sex” in the title. Even though it was tied to Book Club as well!
So I don’t think I took advantage of people looking for porn, but still…
It was strange to have a video immediately doing so well.
And I felt strong in my new role, as an inspirator on this subject.
Until I started reading a sex diary from a well-known Dutch author, where she documents her love life with her young lover with whom she lives.
That was when I realized, that simply choosing 40+, did not mean I actually had something in common with other women.
If the most sexually advanced author of the Netherlands, lives together with her boyfriend, then who am I going to sell on the idea that if you make sex a priority, the first thing you should do is NOT live together?
That even allowing for garden variety sex, is the absolute death to your sex life.
Garden variety sex means any sex where you don’t have a MASSIVE build up of sexual tension.
And this tension can come from anything.
For example:
Not knowing him.
Being in love.
Not seeing each other.
Having an argument.
Danger.
BDSM.
Role playing and powerplay.
And this type of sexual tension was indeed fully absent on the first twenty pages of the sex diary. It was all garden variety sex. And this was the book that was supposed to liberate women, and teach them how to ask for sex.
Give them an example of how a sex life in a relationship could look like.
The author did acknowledge that there was a big difference in the way people talk about their sex lives when they were dating, as opposed to when they were in a real relationship.
But she didn’t seem to share my conclusion that this was a strong indicator there was something inherently wrong with being a relationship.
If you are a hundred percent serious about having a great sex life, you have to be willing to sacrifice your relationship if necessary.
But if the majority of women were apparently looking for a way to spice up sex with a guy with whom they were living?
Then I was out.
You go figure that one out by yourself.
So that was how my day started!
Not particularly motivating, to realize that my new passion project Sexual Mastership 40+ should probably have said for solitary women.
Or men.
Or gender neutral as long as they live alone.
In fact, I m going to add that right now.
( the project is now renamed to Sexual Mastership 40+ and Solitary )
So after I had gotten all reactive, witnessing my new calling to serve the masses, being marginalized to perhaps being of some use to the one percent within the one percent, I got back to my initial plans.
Thursday August 30?
What’s up?
And I realized I still had my “little” challenge waiting for me.
In order to kickstart Sexual Mastership 40+, I had decided I was going to rebuild my love life.
Not so much the same way I had done twelve years ago!
Ha ha ha ha.
Nooo…. because what I had found was that I could have done it so much quicker. I took the long, longer, longest road. Which was okay. I mean it’s always okay, we travel the way that suits us.
There were a couple of things I did do right. And the first was also the most important element to success.
I DECIDED.
That’s really all you need.
Once you decide that you’re going to redesign your love life, everything else will follow from there. The right navigation tool will take you there faster.
But any road will get you there as long as you know the destination, and keep asking for directions.
The decision is the destination.
Twelve years ago I didn’t have the right navigation tool, but I did choose the right destination; A sex life that was based on what I valued.
First time experiences.
Being in love.
New men.
And it was no longer going to be based on my phobia that I would get hiv, or another std. That had been the big thing that had kept me tied to safe and long term relationships for as long as I could remember.
I wasn’t bad at long-term relationships. Quite the opposite, I was good at them.
But I was unsure if I would have had them, if it hadn’t been for the fear surrounding having a love life as a single.
Fear is the wrong reason to do anything.
Let alone build an entire life around it.
So I decided I was leaving the relationship.
One very important person during this time, was Benjamin.
Benjamin was someone who I had met when I was still a teenager, at a moment when I was in a relationship. But even though I was still very young, I was aware that I was in the relationship because my aids phobia simply didn’t allow for a normal love life as a single.
And Benjamin was everything I had been looking for.
Charismatic. Intelligent. And some thought he was arrogant, but I felt safe with him. He was very refined.
I felt loud compared to him, and I probably was.
I could have “had” Benjamin, if I had conquered my fears right then and there. But I didn’t.
And it would take me fifteen years before I did.
I thought about him a lot, in the months that surrounded my breakup from my partner, but also the breakup with my own, fearful self.
Eventually, I mustered the courage to contact him. He wrote that he had gotten married. It had been the same month my boyfriend and me had broken up.
He had basically been single up to the moment he met his wife.
I saw the bigger meaning. Obviously, he was not the man who would save me. Not back in the days, when I had been too fearful. And not now, since he had settled just as I was ready to start my adventure.
Although I saw that it was almost divinely orchestrated, how our lives had made it impossible to be together, what I failed to realize was that it wasn’t just him, who was not coming to save me.
NO ONE WAS.
That is one of the many, many things that I am going to do differently this second time around.
Creating the love life of your dreams is a two step process.
Step one, I already mentioned: Decide.
But step two is: YOU have to BE the new version of you.
Not “become the new version after being saved or helped by the right man”.
ALL you have to do after you decide, and this is the navigation system I was talking about, is to live from that place.
So in my case, it would have meant to start living as a responsible adult, who is aware of the dangers of sex, but who is also able to carry herself and take risks in order to express herself sexually.
Someone who will use condoms, but who will never dramatize the danger that she knows that is still present regardless.
Someone who understands that you can stay a hundred percent safe, but not if you also want to live your life.
Or at least HER life.
That was all I had to do.
But instead I was so focused on how my sexual experiences were going to be, and especially focused on getting the right partner, who could guide me through it.
What a waste of time.
To step into that role, that was all I had to do.
I could have cured my aids phobia without even seeing another man in my life. That fear lived inside of me. It didn’t have anything to do with the existence of men, and this idea is basically something that I feel touches on something much broader;
Sex is an inside job.
I ve experienced this with partners as well;
The ones who are good at sex, will enjoy it with a variety of women. Sure they will give me compliments, but we both know that I’m not exactly the first woman he’s having a good time with.
And the same with the ones who are having difficulties.
The experience of sex is for 80% the result of you being comfortable with it.
And 20% at most, what your partner brings to the bed.
So, anyway, I didn’t realize that twelve years ago.
That I shouldn’t make such a big deal of finding the man right for the job to sweep me off my feet, stand by my side or even magically heal me of my fears.
I never met an ideal man like Benjamin, and yet after eight years I did consider myself healed.
When I met my current lover Mr.Big, who was by far the riskiest of any of the men I met, I did say yes. And I did work through the residu of fears that I was still carrying around.
Although in a way conquering this fear is a lifelong thing.
But with Mr.Big, I didn’t make the mistake I had made with Benjamin.
And I never regretted it.
So when I say that I never expected “to do this again”, what I mean is that I never expected to set out on the same quest, as I had done twelve years ago. To rise above my fears.
First of all, because I considered myself healed.
And I now had the perfect lover Mr.Big.
And secondly, because I thought I would now “do” something else, and my next quest would be one to become famous and/or earn a lot of money.
I found it fascinating that people who had prioritized that, instead of their sex lives, had materialized that.
I had the great sex, because that’s what I had focused on.
They had the great income, because that had been their priority.
And now we were all in our forties, and I imagined we would all swap sides and get on to the next thing. They would go through their “but what about me phase” and I would get my shit together.
But then things with Mr.Big started to get a bit wobbly.
And suddenly I wasn’t convinced that I “had” the ideal lover.
I didn’t even know if we would ever get back to our lovely long dates and groundbreaking sex. It had been so long that he had given me a whole night..
And I started thinking of getting a second lover, more and more frequently.
So that I wouldn’t start obsessing over Mr.Big.
But also, as my creativity coach explained, to ensure that there would always be some sort of tension going on, so that I could write.
And there was a third reason why having two lovers, or a second lover, was appealing:
It meant that I would up my game.
One of the reasons I kept dismissing the idea of a second lover was that it completely freaked me out that I could then possibly transmit an std from one partner to another.
Even with condoms: I m phobic enough to know that unless you treat each other’s genitals like they’re radioactive material, there are viruses that you can transmit.
Mr.Big was my reward, my prize, for having conquered my own fears of getting an std. But pretty soon I realized that the phobia had been a two-headed dragon.
Not only could it shape shift from a fear of hiv to being scared of all life-long std’s; but the two heads also meant that there were two sides.
What I had been focusing on all those years was overcoming my fear to contract something.
But I was still phobic of transmitting something to a lover.
Especially if it was someone who would go home to his wife after.
I was nowhere near taking that responsibility!
I was miles from standing in my power, and being okay with the risks of being the villain here. The bad woman.
So twelve years after I have left my boyfriend and reinvented my love life, because I knew that long-term relationships based on fear were not a good thing, I will now work on this.
Not having two lovers because I’m scared, can never be a good thing.
I want to overcome this and reach the level where I am comfortable with it.
So no business goals or money goals for me.
Twelve years since I started my journey, and I m right back at the beginning.
With a decision:
I will get two lovers.
And by being that person, who already has that solved.
Everything in my life- the language I use, the ideas I express, the way I dress, everything – will now have to align with Me Having Two Lovers.
That was the secret I wish I had known twelve years ago.
You conquer your fears by living like it is already done.
You get two lovers by living like they’re already there.
You achieve Sexual Mastership, by acting like you own the part.
And then there is Benjamin.
Years before I broke up with my boyfriend (years!!), I cut a picture of a dark young man from a magazine, and pasted it into my notebook.
He reminded me of Benjamin.
That was the first time I thought of him since it all happened.
Shortly after my breakup I started writing about Benjamin.
And two years after my breakup I met a new young men, who reminded me so much about Benjamin, and I started writing about him too.
I ve looked up that initial picture many times.
Did I really cut that out, and manifested him?
Manifested that he would become so important to me on a spiritual level, as well as calling in a doppelganger into my life?
I think I did.
For the past twelve years, I dreamed about Benjamin, prayed to him.
Let him spoon up against him, an imaginary man lying behind me in bed. Giving me advice.
Lately I ve called onto him on several occasions.
When someone emailed me, and I was afraid to open it. Or when I had to do something scary.
“We can do this, ” I told the spirit of Benjamin.
He was my ally.
Maybe that was the real gift, over 25 years ago. That he was indeed never meant to be my real lover. Firstly because I was still phobic when I met him.
And then because he had gotten married, by the time I was ready.
I had met him so that I would have him in spirit, throughout my entire life.
Like a guardian angel.

<3LSH
An unexamined life is not worth living

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Angel is the fifteenth chapter from Project M.
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tenth anniversary of the book that changed my life!

Summer 2008 I started writing in English.
Dutch American Diary
Just like now, I was in love with two men. And just like now, they were both taken.
And – yes, just like now – I had no idea where life would take me.
This 2008 diary became the only thing that offered stability during a time where I had just left my partner after fourteen years and the two new men were driving me crazy.
A book about starting over in your mid-thirties and reinventing yourself as a lover;
As a woman;
And as a vengeful fury from hell.