How to Share Your Sexual Interests with Your Partner?

**Note: This post is sponsored by Own Your Sex

A lot of people don’t feel comfortable sharing their sexual wants and needs with their partners. For example, when I surveyed more than 4,000 Americans about their sexual fantasies for my book Tell Me What You Want, I found that only about half of my respondents had ever shared their favorite fantasy of all time with a partner.

Why don’t more of us tell our partners what turns us on? In part, because many of us feel shame, embarrassment, and anxiety when it comes to talking about sex and sexual desire. Compounding this problem is the fact that most sex education programs don’t equip us with the skills needed to confidently navigate these kinds of conversations.

So how can we facilitate more productive conversations about sex and sexual desire in our relationships?

Enter Own Your Sex, a new app designed to take the stress away from communicating about your sexual interests with your lovers.

This is how the app works: both partners download the app and connect their accounts. Each of you will then be separately presented with a questionnaire featuring a wide range of sexual activities to complete on your own.

Sample questions include: Would you talk dirty to your partner? Send naughty pictures/videos to your partner? Let your partner blindfold you? Get tied up by your partner? Watch your partner masturbate? Let your partner wake you up with oral sex?

For each question, you have three response options: “no,” “if my partner wants to,” and “I’m into it!”

Once each of you have answered all questions in a given category, you can then view all of your matches. For the sexual interests you aren’t a match on (in other words, the cases where one of you expresses interest and the other doesn’t), this information isn’t revealed.

In this way, the app lets you specifically hone in on your mutual interests, without exposing you to the risk of sharing an interest that your partner isn’t into. Fear that your partner won’t have the same interest (and might judge you for that) is really what holds a lot of people back from talking about their desires in the first place, so the goal of this app is to eliminate that worry and make it less intimidating to share your interests.

After you’ve reviewed your matches, you can select the ones you actually want to try out in real life and turn it into an erotic game. Specifically, once you populate the list of activities you both want to try, the app will randomly select one or more and present it in the form of a “command”—for example, “Taylor, talk dirty to Sam.”

Own Your Sex was designed to be inclusive of persons of diverse genders and sexualities. In perusing the app, I got the impression that it was made for anyone, regardless of their sexual or gender identity. For example, instead of the very first question on the app asking people to identify as male or female, the options instead are “you were born with, or have a penis” or “you were born with, or have a vagina.” A parallel question is then asked for your partner.

The app isn’t just made for couples, either. It can also be used in a sexually open or polyamorous relationship, given that you have the ability to add in multiple partners. Singles can also find use of the app with a casual or dating partner.

The app is free to download and included with the free version are three categories of questions: “warming up,” “getting busy,” and “kinky.” An extended version of the app is available for purchase for $4.99 that unlocks four additional question categories that get even more adventuresome.

The free version includes about 100 activities, and the paid version adds in 150 more.

To learn more about Own Your Sex and download a copy of the app, visit their website here.

Want to learn more about Sex and Psychology ? Click here for previous articles or follow the blog on Facebook (facebook.com/psychologyofsex), Twitter (@JustinLehmiller), or Reddit (reddit.com/r/psychologyofsex) to receive updates. You can also follow Dr. Lehmiller on YouTube and Instagram.

Image Source: Photo by Manuel Del Moral on Unsplash

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