Sexless in Seattle: Erotic Grief
What if some of what we call frustration, resentment, or anger is actually grief?
This piece explores the often-overlooked experience of erotic grief—the losses, unrealized desires, and imagined futures we may carry within our intimate lives.
🌀 Erotic Grief
🌊 Beneath the Frustration
🖤 Tiny Practice for Erotic Grief
✨ A Little More Alive
🌀 Erotic Grief
When our relationships are marked by erotic mismatch, disconnection, unrealized erotic visions, or longing, we might feel frustrated, alone, deprived, rejected, resentful, angry, bitter.
Even desperate.
For affection.
Cuddling.
Caressing.
Foreplay.
Desire.
Sex.
Kink.
We might also feel grief.
Erotic Grief.
Grief isn’t only for the death of a loved one.
We can grieve identities, unrealized dreams, transitions, and other losses.
And we can experience Erotic Grief.
Not because grief itself is erotic.
But because grief can emerge around any loss.
Unmet desires.
Unrealized dreams.
Erotic mismatch.
Disconnection.
The relationship we imagined.
The version of partnership we thought we’d grow into.
The parts of ourselves that went dormant.
Hormonal changes.
Genitals that don’t work like they used to.
Loss of a sense of fiery aliveness.
The way things used to be.
We can grieve the loss of:
The pursuit.
The hunger.
The anticipation.
Being desired.
Being chosen.
Being kissed slowly.
Making out in public. Or at home.
A quick fuck in the back of the car.
Tantric dates.
Slow, deliberate lovemaking.
Hot and steamy sex in the shower.
Perhaps underneath the anger, resentment, and frustration is grief.
Erotic Grief.
🌊 Beneath the Frustration
When we don’t recognize grief, we often experience it as anger, resentment, frustration, blame, helplessness, or hopelessness.
Grief itself can dampen our sense of fiery aliveness.
It can feel like a heaviness.
Like we’re navigating treacherous, murky waters.
We might be pining for what was.
Or longing for what didn’t come to be.
Imagining what might have been.
But to be here.
In this moment.
Where we feel the grief of that…
Is its own kind of movement.
Its own kind of aliveness.
Before we can decide what comes next,
it may help to acknowledge what hurts.
🖤 Tiny Practice for Erotic Grief
If you feel called to explore grief, here is a tiny practice.
Place a hand on your chest, belly, or genitals and ask yourself:
🖤 What version of intimacy did I imagine I would have by now?
🖤 What part of my erotic life am I grieving?
🖤 What longing have I been minimizing, dismissing, intellectualizing, or trying to “get over”?
🖤 What have I lost?
🖤 What never arrived?
🖤 What still aches?
You could use these as journal prompts, discussion prompts, or contemplation prompts.
Then set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes.
Notice what arises.
Perhaps sadness.
Perhaps anger.
Perhaps longing.
Perhaps numbness.
Perhaps relief.
Perhaps grief.
You don’t need to fix it.
Or understand it.
Or decide what to do about it.
Simply allow yourself to be with whatever is here.
And if grief is present, let it know it has been seen.
✨ A Little More Alive
Erotic lives change.
Relationships change.
Bodies change.
Needs change.
Desires change.
Sometimes those changes bring excitement, renewal, and discovery.
Sometimes they bring loss.
And sometimes they bring both at the same time.
Grief isn’t evidence that something has gone wrong.
It may simply be evidence that something mattered.
And while grief cannot change the past or create the future we imagined, acknowledging it may help us meet this moment with a little more honesty, compassion, and presence.
Perhaps tending to erotic grief is one way we tend to our hearts.
And perhaps that creates space for our erotic selves to feel a little more alive.
Love,
Heidi
What part of your erotic life are you grieving?
If you feel open to sharing, I'd love to hear what this piece helped you name.
And if you'd like future essays, moon phase reflections, and other things I'm currently unraveling, you can join Field Notes here:
