Why We Resist Sexual Pleasure
I'm in a big comfortable bed with a beautiful man — the man I would eventually marry. We're in love and just beginning to live together. Sunshine is streaming 
through the slatted blinds, the French doors in front of us open on a small Spanish-style balcony with a view down the canyon of chaparral and trees. This sunny Sunday morning has a special quality of sweetness. We've made breakfast together — French toast, fruit, and coffee — and brought it back into bed with us. We've eaten side by side propped up on pillows and under the comforter, reading the Sunday papers, and hearing great music.
Later, with our breakfast dishes cleared from the bed, we lay in each other's arms listening to Beethoven's Choral Symphony. At a particularly lyrical coda, my lover turns toward me with a soft smile, looks deeply into my eyes, and kisses me with a gentleness that rocks me to my core. I swoon. My entire body spasms in waves of pleasure that ripple through every part of me.
Yet, instead of surrendering and letting myself be swept away, I feel a jolt of fear. I sit up and gasp for breath. He watches with concern as I recover myself. Then, when I have myself in tow, I swiftly cover it over and pull him back down to me with a veiling giggle and a kiss. He apparently thinks nothing more of it, and we resume lovemaking. But for me that jolt led to a startling revelation. It showed me that — to that intensity of feeling — I was afraid to let go. And as much as I liked to think of myself as a sexually liberated woman, I was not as free as I thought.
It doesn't have to be as obvious as a clutch back from the brink of nirvana to show you that you're afraid to surrender to sex. Perhaps just as you're getting really turned on, you suddenly flash on something you don't like about him or her, and you can't quite let go of that negative thought. Or maybe it isn't your mind that snaps you out of it but your body — a leg cramp, a stomach ache, or a heart flutter that worries you. Or out of the blue, you suddenly feel ticklish, and wherever your lover touches you, you act skittish and silly.
It can be as seemingly insignificant as that and still be significant. Anything that distracts you from your sexual focus and pulls your attention elsewhere is a sign of the number one limitation in enjoying sexual pleasure: pleasure-anxiety in sex. Sexual pleasure-anxiety is very likely nearly universal in our culture because, to some extent, we've all been trained in childhood to fear our sexual urges.
