A few weeks ago, I had a ticket to a festival. It started two days after the one I had just come back from, three hours away, and the weekend looked fucking dreamy.

If you read my story about Dancing Naked on Acid with all my New Friends, you probably know what I am refering to.

About 3000 people camping reuniting in the middle of stunning natural landscapes, electronic music, community, and holistic wellness experiences. Exactly the thing I would normally go to. I had about 20% FOMO when I thought about not going.

I sold the ticket.

Then I took a Uber home and slept for 11 hours.

The succession of earthquakes

I was on the phone with a friend last week and what he said something that got me thinking. That friend had been in what he called a healing phase for years. Attending retreats, workshops, medicine ceremonies, conscious gatherings, one transformative container after another, and he had just come out the other side of it feeling somehow more depleted than when he started. It’s not that nothing had worked: it’s that everything had worked, briefly, and then the next thing had come along.

He had been learning sooo much. About himself, his patterns, his shadows, his dreams, his aspirations. He was also constantly exhausted. And months in, looking back at the succession of openings and breakthroughs, he couldn’t exactly locate what had really changed in his ordinary life.

I think a lot of people in conscious circles will resonate with this.

Communities, retreats and festivals are usually spaces where transformation is the point. And when we look at some of the people that keep coming back, there is often a pattern where seeking the transformation has become their thing. People who are, for lack of a kinder phrase, addicted to healing.

I think I understood why.

Moving from peak experience to peak experience gives you the feeling of growth. It creates a sudden crack. An opening, like an earthquake. Those who have experienced the aha moment during a ceremony or breathwork will probably understand what I’m referring to. That feeling can become addictive.

But a succession of earthquakes is still just earthquakes.

The seekers and the outsourcers

I work with a framework I call the Intimacy Ecosystem, and at its center is the SELF pillar: the relationship you have with yourself independently from anyone or anything else. And what I’ve come to understand is that you can outsource your growth the same way you can outsource your intimacy. How, you ask? By looking for something outside yourself to do the big work for you. Aka another retreat, another ceremony, another peak, another breakthrough…. Always in contact with something that promises to change you, and never quite present enough with yourself to let the change fully take place.

Seeking, when it becomes continuous, is another way of not staying home.

Another distraction disguised as depth.

The snowglobe theory of healing: why putting it down is harder than shaking it

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know I like to speak in metaphors. The ones that have stuck the longest are: “self-love is like taking the metro” and “intimacy is like a garden”. I find images incredibly helpful to explain concepts that can be hard to grasp.

So here it is: imagine a snowglobe. When you shake it, everything moves at once, right? All that swirling snow, all that beautiful chaos, so much to look at. That’s what a peak experience does: it shakes everything up. It’s real, it’s beautiful, it’s overwhelming at times, and most importantly: it’s moving. But notice this: while the snow is swirling, you can’t really see what’s standing in the center. The figure inside the globe (basically the thing the whole thing is built around) remains hard to look at, because there is too much movement.

Integration is what happens when you put the globe down and let the snow settle.

No, it’s not passive. No, it’s not doing nothing. It’s staying still long enough to see what the chaos was trying to show you. And it requires time that another retreat cannot give you… because another retreat just picks the globe up and shakes it again.

While my friends were attending that festival I didn’t go to, after I got home and slept for 11 hours, I sat with a globe full of swirling snow. There was a shedding ceremony I had designed and led. There was a naked acid party where I learned how much sexual shame I still held. There was a moment of finally expressing a desire I had been ashamed of for days, and watching it get met without drama. There were conversations with parts of myself I usually keep at a distance. And underneath all of it, a sudden confusion about my business, my direction, the shape of what I’m building — some things that had been hiding underneath the surface for months and only became visible once I moved the right things around.

I put the globe down and sat with all of that.

Three weeks later, the snow has mostly settled. The business confusion has too, all on its own. Something else has settled as well: a sense of being slightly more myself than I was before that experience.

That didn’t happen at the festival. It happened after.

Some things need more than a weekend to become what they are.

The most significant integrations of my life have happened in the weeks after the thing itself, usually in very ordinary moments. Hit by the most logical truth while I was making my morning tea or going on a hike. Found perfect clarity when I was moving my body, staying with what was there, journalling, or simply relaxing. In moments where my nervous system was regulated enough to invite inspiration, creativity, and… well, healing.

It’s like watching two pieces of Tetris collide and fit perfectly into a new shape. I notice I express stricter boundaries with a man I used to shut down with. I notice a sudden clarity in the next step I have to take in my business. I notice the way the relationship to my body changes.

The shift is always much more subtle than the experience that caused it. And it requires a kind of stillness that can feel almost almost lazy. It’s so easy to miss, because it’s almost indulgent. Letting things come to you could look like falling behind.

I’d argue the opposite. Sitting with the broken ground, resisting the pull to shake the globe again… that’s tough work. But that’s absolutely essential work.

Healed enough to know exactly why we are disregulated. Not yet healed enough to not be disregulated.

My generation does not seem to struggle with understanding themselves. We seem to struggle with integrating what we learn into living differently.

Therapy has taught us to watch the pattern as it’s happening. Shadow work has helped us name the wound, trace it back, and explain it with as much fluency as a Jungian psychotherapist. Somatic healing has shown us where the emotion gets stored when we get triggered. Those tools have become so accessible they have become the center of our conversations. Yet, we still find ourselves making the same choices. Choosing the familiar thing over the grown thing.

And instead of the original pain, we add a second layer: guilt.

Why isn’t this changing? I should know better. What is wrong with me that I understand all of this and I can't seem to do anything about it?

We have lost the excuse of not knowing. And that generates a particular kind of loneliness. The modern loneliness of knowing yourself too well… and still feeling like a stranger to the life you're supposed to be building. Of having all the maps and still getting lost.

Because the map is not the territory. Understanding how you work, and feeling safe enough in your body to actually get to the version of you who behaves differently, those are two different things.

I’ve been thinking about that loneliness a lot lately. And I think it deserve its own piece. But before that, I am curious: where are you in this right now — in the shaking, or in the settling of the snowglobe?

Both answers are worth their own integration.

xoxo,

Valentine Blue

Your Solo Sex Coach and Playful Guide to Erotic Freedom

I spent the weekend at a villa with a pool, celebrating a friend’s birthday with a group of people I love. Good food, swimming, dancing, ridiculous conversations, cuddles, a lot of laughter. This was the kind of weekend where nobody is trying to make anything happen. We were just together, playing, being ourselves, and it was enough. More than enough actually.

My cup feels very full.

Also, because apparently I cannot have a wholesome weekend without a little spice:

• I made out on a trampoline under the stars.

• Had several cuddle puddles, with people I knew, and people I had just met.

• Organised a collective dishwashing situation that turned into a sensual shower situation that I’m still not entirely sure how to categorise.

• Got lovingly soaped up by two beautiful men.

• Did a spontaneous photoshoot in a blue bathtub, fully clothed.

• Got tied up to Brazilian funk.

• Received a foot rub so good it sent me straight to bed.

And not once, in any of it, did I have sex.

Or even thought about turning things into a sexual scenario.

And I think this is worth saying out loud.

Because I notice we have such a narrow definition of what intimacy or sensual exploration is supposed to look like. As if every touch needs to escalate somewhere, every connection needs a neat label, every soft moment needs to become a sexual interaction to count as “real”.

This weekend was full of sensuality, affection, playfulness, tenderness and connection. I felt desired, I felt cared for, I felt completely at home in my body and in that space.

This is what intimacy looks like to me.

It doesn’t have to end in sex to count. It doesn’t even have to be sexual.

Sometimes it’s a kiss. Sometimes it’s being held. Sometimes it’s letting someone take care of you for five minutes. Sometimes it’s dancing in the kitchen in your PJs without worrying that you’re not wearing any make-up. Sometimes it’s jumping on a trampoline with people who make you feel completely at home.

I’m not interested in building a life where I don’t need anyone.

I’m interested in building one where I don’t disappear when I need or love other people.

The scene of the crime: when I turned dishwashing into a sensual collective experience

A lot of people read “self-intimacy” and think that I promote selfishness and isolation. But self-intimacy has nothing to do with isolation. It has nothing to do with becoming so whole and self-sufficient that you stop needing people. It has nothing to do with building walls. And it is definitely not “I don’t need anyone”.

Fuck that. We need people. We need touch and friendship and affection and community and desire and tenderness and play. We are wired for it and pretending otherwise is just loneliness that looks cool.

Community doesn’t have to threaten individuality.

The right community can actually give you more space to be yourself.

Self-intimacy is knowing yourself well enough to enter connection without abandoning yourself inside it. This is what I’ve been building in myself for the past few years, and what has become the core of my work.

To let people love me without turning myself into whatever I think they need. To be held without losing the thread back to myself.

Can you belong with other people without abandoning yourself?

Can you be deeply connected and still hear your own voice underneath it all?

Can community actually make you more yourself?

This weekend reminded me that the answer can be yes. That the right people, in the right space, with the right amount of trust, don’t threaten your sense of self: they give you more room to be it.

That is what I want more of.

And you can have that too.

If you want to see what that looks like in practice, sign up for my free masterclass on August 26. If the gap between the intimacy you have and the intimacy you actually want feels familiar… you don’t need more. You need a reset.

You’re not alone in this. I’ve got you.

xoxo,

Valentine Blue

Your Solo Sex Coach and Playful Guide to Erotic Freedom

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But didn’t you say you were sex positive? And you’re a sex coach. We’ve been talking about sex, you go to sex parties, aren’t you polyamorous? So what… I’m confused?

I have to say it.

Don’t get me wrong. Having lots of sex, or wanting to, is great.

You’re comfortable with your sexuality? Great.

You can talk about your kinks openly? Great.

You don’t mind casual sex? Great.

You’ve been to sex parties? Also fucking great.

None of that though, on its own, makes you sex positive.

The term “sex positive” has become a bit of a buzzword. A key to certain spaces, certain communities, certain conversations… and sometimes certain people’s beds. It got mainstream enough that it lost some of its flavour. Now that anyone can say it (and plenty do), the paradox is that no one can clearly define it. Which means the definition matters more now than it ever did.

So. What does it really mean to be sex positive?

What is sex positivity about?

Most people think sex positivity like a score, a measure of how open you are. They’re wrong. Sex positivity doesn’t come with a particular look, a certain number of sexual partners, or an active membership to a specific community.

Sex positivity is much less about your behaviour and much more about your values.

It’s when you treat sexuality as a normal, healthy part of human experience — not something shameful, dangerous, or in need of suppression. At its core it’s built on three things: consent, curiosity, and the refusal to shame — yourself and others, whether you understand the desires in question or not.

It’s a set of values. And you can hold those values whether you’re having a lot of sex, a little sex, or none at all.

What does sex positivity include?

As the term has gone more and more mainstream, the interpretation of it has been narrowed down. So here is a list of things I wish someone had said clearly when I was first finding my way into this world.

Sex positive means you can be asexual. And nope, that’s not a contradiction. Sex positivity is not a requirement to experience or want sexual attraction — it’s a framework that says however you experience (or don’t experience) sexuality is valid and deserving of respect.

Sex positive means you can choose celibacy. A deliberate, chosen period without sex — whether for a week or eight months or indefinitely — is entirely compatible with being sex positive. Choosing when and whether you have sex is the whole point.

Sex positive means you can have exactly one partner, for your whole life, by genuine choice. Monogamy isn’t the opposite of sex positivity. Unchosen, shamed, or coerced monogamy is. The distinction is always in the choosing.

Sex positive means you never have to go to a sex party, a kink event, or a polyamory meetup. These are expressions of sexuality and relating, not requirements to fit the mold. Your relationship to your own desire doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s to be valid.

Sex positive means saying no: cleanly, without over-explaining, at any point, for any reason. A no is not a failure of openness: it is consent in action, which is the foundation of sex positivity. If I can trust your no, I can trust your yes. A clean no makes everyone safer.

Sex positive means not yucking anyone’s yum — which means not shaming, judging, or dismissing other people’s consensual sexual interests, even the ones that aren’t your jam. That includes the vanilla (= more conventional) ones, and the very kinky (= less conventional) ones.

Sex positive = curiosity over judgment — about other people, yes, but also about yourself. Sex positivity means getting curious about what you want and like when the pressure lifts, when no one’s watching, and no one is influencing you.

Calling out the “no solo wankers” policy

I’m going to get a little bit personal and a little bit political here, because this conversation deeply matters to me and my work.

The sex positivity conversation is almost entirely focused on partnered sex. It highlights experiences between people — who you do them with, in what configurations, under what agreements, in what kinds of spaces... And don’t get me wrong, that conversation is important. But it leaves out the most consistent, most available, most empowering form of sexual expression any of us has access to.

The one with yourself.

Solo sex is still gravely stigmatised. In mainstream cultures (where that’s almost expected) but also, within sex-positive spaces themselves. Self-pleasure gets mentioned occasionally, usually briefly, usually as an accessory or an addition to “the real thing”. And the attitude underneath it is often something like: why would you learn to touch yourself when you’ve been doing it by default your whole life? It’s much better with a partner anyway. That’s where the real exploration and the real fun comes in.

I’ve heard versions of that so many times I’ve stopped being surprised by it. And every time I do, I think: this is EXACTLY the problem. This is exactly where the gap is.

Because a movement built on the premise that all consensual sexuality deserves to be free from shame — and then turns around and treats the most private, most personal, most fundamental form of sexual experience as a lesser substitute for the “real thing” — is not a complete movement. It’s a fucking contradiction.

The people I work with who feel most disconnected from their own sexuality are almost never the people who haven’t had enough experiences with others: they’re the people who have been learning to express their sexuality outward — toward other bodies, other dynamics, other spaces — without ever building a real relationship with their own desire first. Without understanding what it feels like when it belongs entirely to them, with no audience and no performance and nowhere to aim it.

That is a gap that sex positivity created.

And it’s the reason so many people who have done all the right things (the workshops, the events, the conversations) still feel like something is missing.

If we’re going to talk about freedom from shame, that has to include shame about self-pleasure. But also: shame about desire that has no current object. Shame about not wanting sex when you’re surrounded by people who seem to want it. Shame about wanting it intensely when you’re alone and not knowing what to do with that. Shame about the particular texture of your sexual fantasies that you’ve never said out loud to anyone.

That shame is real. And sex positivity should be reaching it.

Sex posivity as a whole

Sex posivity as a whole looks like:

• knowing what you want because you’ve taken the time to sit with it rather than pretend you’re into something to please someone, or because you’re afraid of being seen as closed.

• saying yes from genuine wish and no from genuine preference, and noticing the difference in your body before your mouth opens.

• not shaming yourself for your desires (or lack of) and understanding that the shame you carry about them is the exact same muscle you use to judge other people’s. You can’t fully release one while holding the other.

• accepting that your desires are fluid and might evolve over time.

• building a relationship with your own sexuality that doesn’t need a partner to exist or a space to activate it

• accepting that you don’t have to know everything, understand everything or accept everything, and cultivating a mindset of curiosity rather than judgment — about yourself, about others, about the enormous range of what it means to be a human being with a body that wants things.

You might think: that sounds like a lot. Darling, this is not a checklist. This is an overview. If you have the willingness to get there, you are already further than most people are.

And if you’re reading this as someone who has always felt slightly outside the version of sex positivity that gets promoted: too vanilla for one crowd, too unconventional for another, too solo, too celibate, too peculiar, too much or not enough of something… I want to tell you:

The version that excluded you was incomplete.

You were always supposed to be included.

People call me the Solo Sex Coach for a reason: because my work lives at the intersection of sex positivity, education, and self-intimacy. If you’re curious what that looks like in practice, join me on The Intimacy Reset - Live on August 26. The best 90 minutes you’ll spend this month, totally free.

xoxo,

Valentine Blue

Your Solo Sex Coach and Playful Guide to Erotic Freedom

“Kimon-off”, we called it.

We had spent forty minutes building up to that moment — through a ritual I had built around the myth of Inanna, the goddess who descends to the underworld and must pass through seven gates, surrendering something at each one, arriving at the bottom stripped of everything she came in wearing. Except that at this ceremony, the gates were people. Everyone witnessing, everyone shedding layers of conditioning on top of layers of silk and cotton.

Kimon-off, we called it.

I had led it well. I could feel that in the air. Like a collective release. I could almost feel the 70 hearts beating in unison, the breaths lengthening, as everyone simultaneously exhaled and dropped into presence. The music started low and then fuller and the ceremony became a celebration of authentic self-expression, all of us dancing in the sun on that deck by the lake, a little looser, a little closer to ourselves and each other.

Three hours later, considerably higher than any of us had been at 3pm, I was impossibly horny and completely frozen.

Hit by the horniness train

One moment I was dancing — one moment I was impossibly, embarrassingly horny. Like my brain switched the lights on in a split of a second.

This wasn't the tickle in your belly you can politely ignore. It was the kind of horniness that overtakes everything. The deep music, the warm air, the feeling of my tongue against my lips, the sweaty glow of the skin of the person dancing in front of me, all screaming sex, sex, sex. And without warning, everything around me became ridiculously, obsessively erotic. The force of it was something I hadn’t encountered in myself like this before.

I mean, it made sense my body went there. We were in the middle of a naked acid party after all. The most what-the-fuck party I had ever attended. 70 people who took a full dose of LSD at the same time. Naked, covered in oil, sweat and glitter, dancing in an open space under the sky. Bodies rubbing against each other, painted genitals, platters of freshly cut fruits and candy passed around.

the last layer dropped

I had spent four days sleeping near these people, crying near these people, building something with these people — I had literally guided them to get naked. The container had PERMISSION written all over it. Every element was in place.

And I froze.

“Hello, I’m shame!”

Shame doesn’t arrive saying “hello, I’m shame! I’ll make you feel bad about yourself today!”.

No, what I felt first was the overwhelm of the horniness itself. The strength alone was the first thing that scared me before anything else had time to arrive. Something that big, so urgent, my body was already frozen around it before my mind could even put words to it.

Then the inner critic came. What is wrong with me? What will people think? Is it okay to feel like this? That’s the bitter flavor of self-judgement that sounds like a question but functions like a verdict, that positions itself as reasonable concern and is actually pure terror. I assessed what I was feeling, found it too frightening to move toward fully, and made a decision (not consciously exactly, but the decision happened) to stay small. Do the safe version.

I danced closer to a man I felt already connected to. Our eyes caught, and he playfully rubbed his body on mine. I bathed in the lake and moved my body like a sexy mermaid. I passionately kissed someone I had already kissed the night before. I stayed close to the edge of what I wanted without crossing it — not even halfway. The gap between what was moving through me and what I was willing to show was so wide it became frustrating: a desire that strong, with nowhere to go, because I couldn’t trust what would happen if I let it out all the way.

It felt lonely. It felt even more shameful.

What I didn’t understand yet was that the permission I was waiting for was not “out there”. It had never been out there. It was inside me, in a dusty room I apparently hadn’t managed to unlock, behind a door I had been walking past my whole life without realizing I already held the key.

Read more

I posted it on Instagram with the hook: normal people in their 30s: getting married and having kids. Me, on a random Monday.

I was a bit confused to see this reel performing so well when the ones I spend the most time on usually end up with 3000 views at best.

35 000 people watched it and the views keep growing. I don’t think that’s because people find grape-throwing competitions particularly compelling. I think the reason the algorithm shared that video is because something in it named a feeling a lot of people are living with: the feeling of being consistently slightly out of step with society’s expectations and not entirely sure what to do with that.

I know that feeling all too well. I lived it for a long time without even realising it. Lately I’ve been living it consciously.

Once upon a time… a story we all know

By my mid-thirties I was supposed to have made certain decisions. To be in a stable monogamous relationship. To settle in one place and buy my own house where I can raise a family. To have a life that looks (from the outside at least) like the life of someone who has everything figured out.

I made some of those decisions. I unmade most of them. And I didn’t unmake them because I am wreckless or lost or I didn’t want connection or stability… but because following the expected sequence caused me to disappear in it. And at some point, that evidence became impossible to ignore.

There is a story most of us inherit without realising it. I’ve already talked about the relationship escalator, and it’s part of it, but what I’m talking about here is the bigger story of who you’re supposed to be in your thirties. It’s like your 30th birthday is a threshold that teleports you from “figuring yourself out” to “responsible adult who has their shit together”. And you’ve gotta play the part. Make yourself legible. Make yourself the kind of person people can understand, approve of, feel comfortable around at a dinner table or a networking event.

There were many ways I played the part. And there were many ways I was miserable. Although it didn’t look like misery: it looked like function. Which made it invisible to everyone, including myself.

I didn’t plan the Monday night with the cross and the grapes like an influencer plans the right content for their audience. It was just a Monday where I was with people I love, in a space that felt safe for me to be exactly myself, doing something absurd and joyful and spontaneous. But the reason it touched something in 35 000 people is because it was not designed for approval or fame. It was just me loving my weird, unconventional, unique life, and sharing it regardless of what people may think. Just what my Monday evenings look like when I stop making them legible to people who wouldn’t understand anyway.

No grapes were warmed in this video

Is somebody gonna match my freak?

I’ve come to understand that performing a more conventional version of yourself doesn’t make you more loveable. It just makes you more acceptable. Accepting a life that’s acceptable when what you wanted was something different is one of the deepest forms of self-abandonment there is.

When you perform a version of yourself (even a “good” version, especially a good version) you can only ever attract people who want that version. Which means every connection you make from that place is built on something slightly fake. And you spend your time managing the gap between who you presented yourself as and who you actually are underneath that.

When you stop performing (basically when you let the actual texture of your life be visible, the grapes and the cross and the 3am conversations and the sex parties and the ecstatic dancing and whatever else makes up the specific strange fabric of your days) you create a completely different kind of invitation. Not everyone will respond to it. Actually, most people won’t. But the ones who do are responding to something real. And being chosen by someone who sees what is actually there and moves toward it anyway is a very different experience than being chosen by someone who liked the publicly acceptable version of you.

Most of the 35k-something people who saw that video pop on their feed will scroll on, but some of them will recognise themselves in it. Some of them will feel, even for a second, less alone in their particular flavor of weirdness. Some of them will find their way to this little corner of the internet because something in them needed to know that a life lived off the standard path is not only possible but it is worth something.

It’s for those people that I keep writing. I wouldn’t call that reach: I’d call it resonance. Resonance only happens when what you’re putting out is what makes you, you.

What it takes to live this way

Okay, so this is the part where I get brutally honest. The “just be yourself” mantra tends to sound like bullshit because it’s incomplete.

Owning your weird (and I mean owning it for real, not just pretending you’re a rebel just to be seen as such — that’s performing, all over again) requires enough of a relationship with yourself that you can tell the difference between what you really want and what you have been taught to want. And that doesn’t come overnight: it takes practice. It comes from having sat with yourself long enough to unpack the layers of conditioning with honesty and grace. It comes from calling yourself out on your bullshit when you fall back into a familiar pattern, and decide to do one tiny little step differently next time, so you can break the wheel even if it feels scary and uncomfortable. It comes from questioning why you seek this person’s approval more than that person’s approval and noticing how you feel when that approval isn’t there.

Jung called this individuation: the lifelong process of uncovering the layers of who the world shaped you to be in order to become who you are. It sounds simple… but it’s one of the harder things a person can do.

Owning your weird isn’t easy when you don’t do it to please a crowd. There is a difference between tied to a cross on a Monday catching grapes with your mouth because it makes a good story and doing it because it’s joyful and strange and it makes your life genuinely exciting and weirdly aligned.

For all the other weirdos out there

If this article generates an uncomfortable feeling within you, if you’re feeling called out, emotional, angry, or confused, it’s probably because it touched a nerve. The nerve of making yourself acceptable at the expense of being real.

You don’t have to blow up your life to live differently (although that’s what I did, I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone). You don’t have to do anything dramatic. You just have to start paying attention to the moments where you water yourself down: the moments where you make yourself smaller or more conventional or easier to understand, and ask yourself: for whom am I doing this?

Not all masks we wear are self-betrayal: some are just contextual. But some of them do cost something: the specific texture that makes you, you. And they make it very hard for the right people to find you, because you’ve made yourself look like everyone else.

The grapes on a Monday were just grapes on a Monday. But they were also a reminder that the life I built on the other side of following other people’s rules — strange, specific, hard to explain, and absolutely unique — is the only one I’m interested in living.

You’re allowed to want that too.

This is what I call the Expression pillar: the fourth part of the Intimacy Ecosystem, the framework I created to help people navigate their intimate life from the inside out. The Expression pillar is about owning and living your sexuality, your voice, your actual self, out loud and without apology. It's the pillar most people have barely touched, because most of us were never given permission to. If you‘re curious to explore your pillars, check out my Intimacy Reset Toolkit.

xoxo,

Valentine Blue

Your Solo Sex Coach and Playful Guide to Erotic Freedom

We’ve heard that sentence, or a variant of it, countless times. In wellness magazines, in self-help books and podcast episodes, in the viral TikTok videos of super-fit influencers sipping margaritas on the beach, even in family gatherings (quote your great-aunt side-eyeing you at the dinner table).

“I love myself, I am worthy” — and then what?

At first, it sounds great. Logical, even. Of course you should love yourself first, duh. Although… after a while, that certainty starts sounding empty. So empty it annoys you to your core. You smile politely, pretending you “get it”, while thinking: “if it was that easy”. Before you even realise it, “Love yourself first” sounds like exactly what lonely people starving for approval need to hear. You’re not one of them… yet you don’t seem to quite get it.

And maybe that’s why the message caught on the way it did: because the diagnosis was correct even if the prescription wasn’t. What I mean by that is: something was wrong for real. People were disconnected from themselves, outsourcing their worth to external sources, waiting to feel okay until someone else confirmed they were. The wound was real.

But self-love, as it has been packaged and practiced, doesn’t fix it. We have been sold a version of healing that looks like perfumed candles, positive affirmations, a “clean girl” morning routine you post about, and a therapist you mention casually.

I‘m not hating on any of it — I love a birthday massage gift card as much as the next person.

I used to prescribe it, to myself and to the people I was trying to help. And I got to watch it not work in real time.

That woman who left a workshop glowing, after two hours of telling herself she was worthy, and went home to the relationship that made her feel like shit. That client who would do their morning breathwork religiously for months and still get slapped by anxiety when they had nothing scheduled and nobody to be helpful for. That friend who would reparent their inner child and still go completely blank when their partner asked what they needed.

What I eventually understood is that love, the way we’ve been taught it, is supposed to be unconditional. You need no evidence to feel and share love, right? That’s what makes it so beautiful, so precious, that’s why love might save the world someday. But you can’t ignore the fact that unconditional love is a strange thing to generate alone in your bathroom at 8am, looking at a face you’ve been criticising since your were fourteen.

That’s why the work doesn’t stick. You can love someone without truly knowing them. But you cannot be intimate with someone without feeling truly seen. And that implies seeing yourself, first.

Pressed against a stranger

Think about what it feels like to be pressed against a stranger on the metro.

There is technically contact between you. Your bodies are touching. But beyond that, there is no presence or recognition. You’re just two people sharing the same space.

Self-love is the same.

You are in contact with yourself: technically touching the surface, but not really present with what is underneath. You’re in the same space as your own interior life and somehow still a stranger to it. It‘s like the lights are on but there is no one home.

Self-love is contact. Self-intimacy is connection.

Self-intimacy is what happens when you come home.

When instead of touching your own experience, you start connecting to it: walking through the rooms with curiosity, opening the doors you’ve kept closed, noticing the decoration you never chose and the dusty corners you’ve been avoiding, and tending to your interior like someone who intends to live there permanently.

I didn't arrive at that distinction in a clever, step-by-step, organized way. I arrived at it the slow way, over several years, mostly by getting it wrong.

Sex was happening to me more than with me

I spent years in relationships where sex was happening to me more than with me — and that wasn‘t because I didn’t value myself but because I didn’t have real connection with my own desire beyond what I thought I should do. I had adapted to other people’s rhythms for so long that I had no clue what mine was.

The eight months I spent in celibacy a few years ago weren’t about discipline or healing in the way that word usually gets thrown around. They were about learning what my yes truly meant, distinct from what I had been trained to agree to. I learned to feel desire without immediately acting on it or suppressing it. I learned to stay with myself when things got uncomfortable instead of reaching for the next distraction.

That’s real connection.

That’s self-intimacy.

Esther Perel says something about desire that took me years to properly understand: desire needs someone to come from. It needs an interior: a perspective, an act of separation, a person standing on their side of the gap with something of their own to offer. Like fire needs air, desire needs friction, and wanting needs distance. If you’ve spent your life becoming whatever other people needed, there is no one standing there. Nothing to reach across to, and nothing reaching back. There is contact, but connection is impossible: and that’s the real cost of outsourcing your intimacy. Not just that you hand yourself over to other people, but that you hand yourself over to a surface-level version of you (aka the one self-love can slowly become if you’re not careful) and then wonder why being wanted by someone doesn’t feel as good as it‘s supposed to. It can’t land, because there is no one home to receive it.

Into-me-you-see

I work in the territory of sex, love and relationships because this is where the gap between self-love and self-intimacy becomes most visible and most costly.

It took me a long time to find language for what those years gave me. When I found it, I laughed uncontrollably for about 10 minutes. Because it had been sitting inside the word the whole time.

Intimacy = Into-me-you-see.

Intimacy is not about a specific person: it is the experience of being seen. And it requires two things: safety, because nothing authentic comes out when you’re bracing; and vulnerability, because nothing true comes out when you’re pretending. Being seen (not observed, not admired, not approved: seen) is the part that makes the depth rather than a mere exposure.

We understand this instinctively with other people. I’m sure you know the difference between someone who thinks you’re great and someone who actually knows you. You know that being adored by someone who has never seen you cry, panic, embarrassed or confused is a lovely but slightly empty experience.

Self-intimacy is that same thing, turned inward.

It’s seeing yourself: looking deep enough, staying long enough, and then (and this is the part that gets skipped) doing something about what you found.

Because (drum roll) we're very good at the first bit now. Self-improvement culture is essentially a machine for knowing more about yourself: you learn your attachment style, your patterns, your triggers, your love language, your birth chart, your trauma responses, the exact childhood mechanism that explains why you want to hide when someone raises their voice. All of it: super useful. None of it: intimacy. Knowing about yourself is a description. Being with yourself is a relationship. One happens mostly in the mind — the other happens in a whole ecosystem.

What self-intimacy gives you that self-love doesn’t

Self-love says: you are worthy of good things. Self-intimacy asks: what do you want when nobody is watching and you don’t have to pretend?

Self-love says: your body is beautiful as it is. Self-intimacy asks: what is your body feeling right now and have you been honest about that?

Self-love says: you deserve to be cherished. Self-intimacy asks: do you know what cherished feels like, distinct from what being needed feels like?

I hope you can understand that these are not the same questions. The first ones are affirmations we have been taught: statements about you, delivered to you, requiring nothing from you except agreement. The second ones require your presence. They can’t be answered in advance, they can’t be answered by someone else, and they don’t stay answered — which is exactly why they’re intimate. You can love someone without truly knowing them. You cannot be intimate with someone without feeling genuinely seen. Including when that someone is you.

Intimacy with yourself means being present with the discomfort and the joy, the confusion and the clarity, the light and the darkness, and the parts of you that are still figuring shit out alongside the parts that know exactly what they want and are afraid to say it out loud. It means staying long enough in your own company to hear what runs beneath the surface — not the acceptable version you would post about, but the version that shows up at 3am when you can’t sleep and you’re left alone with your thoughts.

And staying is the hard part, not the seeing. Discomfort is, well, uncomfortable. Being seen is vulnerable, even when the only witness is you. We’re taught to manage and soothe, keep going, and love ourselves enough to affirm that we are not perfect — which sounds like care and functions like avoidance. Chosen avoidance with loving intentions.

Of course, that’s much less Instagrammable and considerably harder to put on a t-shirt.

What self-intimacy looks like in practice

If you haven’t caught that already, self-intimacy isn’t a practice in the way a morning routine is a practice. It’s not something you do at a specific time with a specific tool and then put away. It’s more like a quality of attention and presence that you bring (or don’t) to your own experience throughout a given day. Consistently. Which is the least sexy word in this entire article and the one doing all the work.

The version I work through with clients tends to look like this:

• Self-love buys the good lingerie. Self-intimacy notices you only ever wear it when someone else is coming over, and asks what that's about.

• Self-love says “take a rest day, you've earned it”. Self-intimacy asks whether you're resting, hiding, or if something needs to change in the way you invest yourself to avoid burn-out.

• Self-love says “you deserve better than this” and deletes Hinge. Self-intimacy asks what kept you there for four months, what you were getting from those matches, and what you'd have to feel if you stopped getting it.

• Self-love schedules the self-pleasure like a wellness appointment, candle and all. Self-intimacy notices that you rush to the finish, every time, and gets curious about what's uncomfortable about the middle.

• Self-love says “I have boundaries now”. Self-intimacy notices that the boundary you announce first is usually the one you’re least sure of.

You'll notice those aren't all about sex. They're about the body, and about other people, and about what you're curious enough to go and try, and about what you're willing to say out loud, which is roughly how I map intimacy in my work. Intimacy as an ecosystem, living in all four of those rooms and most of us have furnished one beautifully and left the others empty.

It doesn’t always feel good. It slaps you in the face with the pattern you’ve been running, the desire you’ve been suppressing, the mask you’ve been wearing for years to fit a certain mold. Seeing is uncomfortable, staying is worse. And then, eventually, it's the only place you actually want to live.

Why I built my work around this

I bet you can guess that I didn’t start here. Like most people on a self-development journey, I started learning the language everyone was already speaking: self-worth, boundaries, consent, the whole vocabulary. I went on a fairly blind journey of self-discovery, learning from mistakes and frustrations and a number of things I would not repeat, until I realised that what I had learned wasn’t wrong, it was just incomplete. It addressed the symptoms without touching the root.

The root, as I understand it now, is that most people are not in true, constant connection with themselves. They know so much about themselves and yet most of the time, they are still strangers to their own interior life. Because knowing about yourself is not the same as staying with yourself.

That’s the core of my work. I don’t teach people to love themselves more (although that’s often a consequence of the work we do): I teach people to let themselves be seen — starting with, by themselves. Because the intimacy you’re capable of with anyone else will only ever go as deep as the intimacy you’re willing to have with yourself.

If you need support to map where your intimacy comes from, where it leaks, and how to strenghten it from the inside out, my Intimacy Reset Toolkit is a good place to start. And if you resonated with this article, I want to hear from you. Let me know in the comments: what will you do today to create deeper self-intimacy?

xoxo,

Valentine Blue

Your Solo Sex Coach and Playful Guide to Erotic Freedom

1. Performance doesn’t last

There is something specific that happens in sex-positive environments that doesn’t happen in most other social contexts — and no, it’s not the nudity or the openness or the fact that people are doing things in public that are usually private. It’s that the usual social scaffolding (the small talk, the neatly packaged performance of having your life together, the version of yourself you would take to a networking event or a dinner party with your neighbours) falls away very quickly in these spaces… because it has nowhere to go.

When people around you are being viscerally human in their desire and their vulnerability and their awkwardness, the everyday, proper (and sometimes, fake) version of you becomes very hard to maintain. And at some point (usually earlier than you would expect) you stop maintaining it.

Because if you do, you keep feeling like you’re watching a scene happen from behind glass: close enough so you can see what’s happening, but too far to be part of it.

It might take a while to drop the mask depending on how thick it is. Conditioning, shame, guilt, and self-awareness play an important role here. But the truth is, what is left underneath the mask is far more interesting than most people are prepared for on a first visit. The first few times I went, what I found was anxiety about what I was supposed to be doing, scanning the room for signals about whether I was doing it right, trying to figure out the rules of a game I had never played before. It took a while before I could hear what was really there, and felt safe enough to let those parts of me be seen.

2. Mirrors, patterns, projections

After enough time in these spaces — going solo, which I would recommend to anyone for reasons I will come back to — I noticed a few things coming back over and over.

The kind of person I was drawn to, who I moved toward, who I found myself hoping would look at me. Or the complete opposite: the kind of person I was intimidated by, who stricked me as unapproachable, triggering even. It wasn’t always about physical type or gender, which is why it took a while to figure out. But once I did, I couldn't unsee it. Those people all had one thing in common: they seemed to hold something I didn't yet feel I had full access to in myself.

Women who had an outrageous, loud sexual energy. Men who had an incredibly direct communication. People taking up space without questioning whether they were allowed to.

This is something I’ve come to understand as projection: the way we locate in other people the parts of ourselves we haven’t yet claimed, and then call it attraction — or repulsion. I’m not saying those aren't real; they are, and the body knows things that the mind hasn’t caught up to yet. What I'm saying is that there is a layer underneath it that’s worth getting curious about, and sex-positive spaces made that layer visible to me in a way that ordinary social life never had, because the context was stripped of so much else that what remained was almost purely emotional and energetic. Who am I drawn to, and what does that tell me about where I’m still reaching outside myself for something I could be building from within?

That question, arriving slowly over years of going to these spaces alone and paying attention, changed how I understood myself in connection with other people. Not just in play spaces, but everywhere.

3. My body, my triggers

Triggers are interesting things. In sex-positive spaces, where the stimulation is high and the social permission is unusual, they surface faster and more clearly than they might in a more contained setting. I’ve had moments in those spaces where my body reacted in ways my mind couldn’t immediately explain: like feeling suddenly neutral in a situation that should have been exciting, feeling viscerally uncomfortable with a connection that I’d have no rational reason to avoid, or feeling the strong pull to leave a place two hours before I actually gave myself permission to go.

The easy interpretation of these moments is that something went wrong, or that the space was too much, or that you’re not as open-minded as you thought. The more useful interpretation (and the one I had to work to get to) is that the body is talking, and it’s usually saying something worth hearing. What it said to me, in those flat or uncomfortable or too-early-to-leave moments, was almost always something about alignment. Whether it was about a connection that had served its purpose and was now complete even if my mind hadn’t caught up yet, or about a version of myself I had outgrown that I was still, out of habit or fear or nostalgia, showing up as anyway.

One night in particular I arrived at a party and felt, within an hour, a specific kind of emptiness in my belly that isn’t sadness exactly but was my body’s way of saying “this isn’t for you tonight”. I stayed anyway. Because I had made the plan, because I had bought the ticket, because leaving felt like giving up, because my friends were there. By the time I finally left, I was more drained than when I had arrived. And when I got home and made tea and sat with what had just happened, what I understood was that I had been overriding a signal that had been completely clear from the beginning.

That night taught me more about the difference between productive discomfort and depletion — between staying because you’re growing and staying because you won’t listen to yourself — than any coaching session or book or framework ever had.

4. Going home alone isn't lame

If I’m honest, some of the most significant moments of self-knowledge I’ve had in relation to these spaces happened not inside them but after. Going home alone from an event where everything can be so loud and visible is its own particular experience, and it asks something specific of you: what do you do with everything that got stirred up when there is no one there?

For a long time I didn’t do much that was useful. But gradually, over years of these experiences and the integration that followed them, I started to develop a practice that wasn’t really a practice, but more like a habit of sitting with what was actually there. Journaling, sometimes. Voice notes to myself, sometimes. Going on a hike or an ecstatic dance to shake my emotions, sometimes. Often just the act of lying in the dark and letting the night wrap around me rather than immediately narrating it or evaluating it or turning it into a story I could tell someone.

And what I found in the aftermath was almost always more interesting than anything that had happened at the event itself — and I think a lot of people don't realise the power integration has. Because the days, sometimes weeks after, are where the questions live and your nervous system recalibrate. Who did I reach for tonight and why? What did I feel when I walked in, and did I honour that, or tried to forget about it? What version of me showed up, and is this version serving me? Integration is where you can choose which version you want to keep, which version you want to shut, and what you can do about it.

5. Growth isn't linear

Three years of going to sex-positive spaces, mostly solo, mostly with nothing resolved before I walked in and nothing neatly concluded when I walked out, and here’s what shifted: I stopped going to find something. I started going to find out something.

When you go to find something (connection, validation, proof of your own attractiveness, confirmation that you’re doing this liberation thing correctly, etc.) you tend to measure the night against what you were looking for and come home either satisfied or disappointed, neither of which teaches you much. When you go to find out something (about who you’re drawn to and why, about how your body reacts under particular conditions, about what you actually want vs what you're supposed to want, about how it feels to not be having sex in a place that's designed for it) the night becomes information. And over time, a lot of nights of information about yourself adds up to something that I can only describe as intimacy. The kind of intimacy Esther Perel points at when she talks about knowing someone’s inner world, except the someone in question is you.

I know myself better from three years of going to sex parties than I did from the decade of relationships that preceded them. And this is not because the parties replaced the relationships or taught me things the relationships couldn’t (there's a nuance here), but because going alone, in a space where sex was visible and social rules were lifted, meant there was nothing between me and whatever was actually there. Scripts and roles are rewritten. There is no one to perform for or manage or accommodate. Just me, watching myself, learning the shape of my own longing and my own limits and my own particular way of being in a place where everything is possible… but you don't have to do anything.

What this has to do with you, even if you’ve never been to one

You don’t have to go to a sex party to apply any of this, though I’ll always think the experience is worth having if you’re curious and the conditions feel right. What I’m pointing at underneath all of it is something more portable: the idea that the environments where we feel most activated, wherever they are, whatever they are for you, are also the environments where we’re most clearly visible to ourselves, if we’re paying attention.

And the question worth sitting with, whatever your version of these spaces is: what has the place where you feel most alive been trying to teach you about yourself?

This is the territory I work in: not the experiences themselves, but what they reflect back and what you do with that. If you’re navigating any version of this and finding it more complex than the empowerment narrative suggests, I am there for you. A DM or clarity call is a great place to start.

xoxo,

Valentine Blue

Your Solo Sex Coach and Playful Guide to Erotic Freedom

That period of time that can feel like relief and painful emptiness at the same time?

Where the absence of a dynamics, a person, or a direction to move toward feels like looking for a radio station?

I’m asking because I think that in-between is one of the most important and least examined experiences most of us have. It can last a few days, a few weeks, or a few months, like we are suspended in time and space, before the movement starts again.

You start reaching out. You dress differently. You get back on the apps. You convince your friends to go out on a Thursday night. And the way you do it says everything about what is happening underneath.

I’ve been in that space more than once.

And I’ve noticed (both in myself and in the people I work with) that the in-between almost never lasts as long as it should. And it has nothing to do with whether you are healed or confident or ready. It’s just that sometimes, being with someone feels easier. Getting back into a relationship, no matter what it looks like, is faster, more familiar, and more legible, than sitting with the emptiness that follows the end of something. And it is much easier to choose the noise of a new connection as a way to avoid our own discomfort.

Hey! I’m Valentine Blue, the self-intimacy coach for the curious & unconventional

Relationships are not the problem

You might drop in here and think that I’m one of those ultra-feminist men-haters who blame relationships for her own failures. So let me be crystal clear about something before going further.

First of all, this is about all kinds of relationships, for all kinds of people, and all kinds of genders and identities. Second, I’m not making an argument for being alone forever, for independence as an ideology, or for the idea that needing other people is a weakness you should work to eliminate.

Whether we want it or not, we are wired for connection. Bessel van der Kolk has spent decades documenting how deeply relational we are at the level of the nervous system - how being truly seen and met by another person does something that no amount of solitude or self-work can fully replicate. Human connection is not optional, and it’s not something you transcend.

What I’m pointing at is more specific than that, and more nuanced: there is a difference between moving toward connection because you genuinely want it, because you’re choosing it with some awareness of who you are and what you’re bringing… and moving toward connection because the alternative (which is being with yourself in the discomfort) is something you don’t know how to do. The issue is not relationships: it’s using connection as an escape route from yourself.

Both can look the same from the outside. But the difference is here: one leaves you fuller, while the other leaves you slightly more depleted each time.

What relationships show us

What I would call a conscious relationship - aka one where you're actually present rather than just going through the motions on autopilot, is not always comfortable - because it functions like a mirror. And a mirror can show you something really poetic and beautiful… or it can show you something really rude and confronting.

We always project onto people. We project our culture, our education, our conditioning, our wounds, our hopes, and our expectations. And we cannot get that full range in solitude. Some examples of things that pop up only through connection with other people are:

• the way you reorganise yourself around another person’s preferences without noticing you’re doing it.

• the way you stop saying certain things because you’ve learned, consciously or not, that they create friction.

• the way you are triggered when you don’t feel chosen, seen, or appreciated, despite the love you carry or the attention you give.

• the way you can be in a room with someone who loves you and still feel fundamentally alone, because some part of you is performing how things should look like rather than living in it authentically.

This is not a flaw, and this is not irreversible: it’s simply what happens when people who were never taught how to stay connected to themselves try to be connected to someone else. Which, in my experience, is most of us - because staying connected to yourself while in connection with another person is a skill, one that Esther Perel calls differentiation and that I call self-intimacy, and almost no one is taught it explicitly.

So I invite you to look at this with curiosity rather than self-blame. Because this shows you where you have been outsourcing yourself without realising it.

We are taught how to maintain, how to compromise… but we are not often taught how to stay fully present with what is true for us inside a dynamic that has its own momentum and its own pull.

That’s the realisation that changed everything for me. Not “this person is wrong for me.” But “I was using this person to feel something I don’t yet know how to feel on my own.”

Growth requires tension

The uncomfortable in-between phase is not a phase to move through as efficiently as possible: it’s information. It’s your system in a rare moment of clarity, without the noise of managing another person’s presence and expectations, showing you what is really there, underneath everything else.

It hurts, I know. But this is what growth requires.

The question isn’t how to get out of it: it’s what you’re going to do with what it shows you. Because what it usually shows, if you can tolerate the discomfort long enough to look, is where you’ve been outsourcing things that were always yours: like your sense of being wanted, your access to warmth and touch and closeness, or your ability to feel okay in your own body. And once you can see where the outsourcing is happening, you can start to do something about it that doesn’t involve immediately finding another person to hand it back to.

What this looks like in practice

I don’t want to leave this as a purely conceptual observation because I know how that goes: you read it, you think “that’s soooo true”… and then you check your phone, and forget about it. So a few things worth actually trying (not as a program, just as invitations):

1. Are you being honest?

What do you really want out of this? The next time you feel drawn toward a new connection (reaching for someone, text a person who is not enough but still okay enough for now, opening an app to feel less lonely) it is worth pausing for long enough to ask what you’re actually looking for. Do you want companionship? Touch? The feeling of being interesting to someone? The relief of not having to be alone with your thoughts for an evening? All of those are real needs. They’re just not all needs that require another person, and they don’t have to be hidden - from you and from others.

2. Expanding intimacy

We have been taught to concentrate intimacy all in one place (emotional closeness, physical touch, vulnerability, sexual desire, etc.) all of it directed at romantic relationships. And then we wonder why they feel so high-stakes and pressuring (and fail). Of course they do: they’re carrying everything.

What I’ve personally been building instead, slowly and without a roadmap, is something more distributed. Intimacy in friendships that go past the surface, in spaces where touch is allowed and uncomplicated, in communities where vulnerability is a shared practice, and in the way I relate to myself.

The more places intimacy can exist in your life, the less any one relationship has to be everything… and the more clearly you can see what you’re actually choosing when you choose someone.

The Million Dollar question

The shift I’m pointing at isn’t about being single or being partnered. It’s about how present you are with yourself inside whatever is happening. Whether you’re choosing what you’re in, or continuing it out of habit or duty. Whether the version of you that shows up in connection is recognisably you, or a version of you that has gradually accommodated itself to fit.

Self-intimacy is not a substitute for connection. It’s the capacity to remain yourself inside connection. To feel your own body while someone else is there, to not disappear into expectations or assumptions, to notice when something is a yes and when something is a no, and to actually say it.

It’s the difference between someone who shows up to a relationship full - with their own access to pleasure, their own sense of self, their own interior life - and someone who arrives with a list of things they need the relationship to provide.

The Million Dollar question is a simple one:

Are you present? Are you honest? Are you saying what’s true instead of what looks acceptable? Are you choosing this, consciously, or are you just continuing it because stopping would require a conversation you’re not ready to have - with yourself or with the other person?

That perspective changes how you enter relationships, how you leave them, and what you do in the in-between. It doesn’t resolve the complexity, because the complexity is part of it, and anyone who tells you there is a clean answer is probably selling something. But it’s a better question than “should I be with someone or not” And better questions, I’ve found, tend to lead to true, authentic, intimate liberation.

The work I do is exactly this: helping people understand what they’re actually looking for in connection, what they’ve been outsourcing that was always theirs, and what it feels like to choose intimacy from a full place instead of an empty one. If any of this resonated, a clarity call is where we start.

xoxo,

Valentine Blue

Your Solo Sex Coach and Playful Guide to Erotic Freedom

You go to a sex-positive event solo. You’re brave, you’re free, you’re sexy. You feel good in your body. People naturally come to you. You shine in conversations, in interactions. You may even have some kind of transcendent experience. You ride home glowing, slightly changed, maybe a little sore in the best way. You sleep deeply and wake up feeling fucking incredible. Open, energized, the world is your oyster and nothing can stop you.

And sometimes it is like that.

But sometimes you go home at 2am feeling like a failure. Sometimes, you find yourself standing in a room where everyone seems to be having fun and your body feels like a wall. Sometimes someone kisses you and that kiss is so magical and then three days later they just disappear back into their regular life. And you’re left holding something that had no substance to begin with.

Nobody really talks about that part. So I will.

If you don’t know me yet, I’m Valentine Blue (that’s me on the picture!)

I’m a certified sex coach who helps curious individuals live, love and fuck in a way that actually fulfills them. I believe self-intimacy is a foundation for every connection we build - whether we are single, solo, partnered, or anywhere in between. If you’re curious to shift your perception of intimacy and actually include yourself in the picture, start by my free online masterclass: The Intimacy Reset.

In this article, I will be talking about the emotional, physical, and psychological reality of solo attendance at sex-positive events… and what to do with all of it.

The physical: your body just went through something

The first thing to understand is that your nervous system doesn’t distinguish between “fun intense experience” and “intense experience.” It just knows something intense happened, and it responds accordingly.

The biological part

During the event, your body was running on a cocktail of stress hormones and feel-good chemicals.

• Adrenaline kept you alert, present, socially switched-on. You might think that heightened state you feel in those spaces is just excitement, but it’s your sympathetic nervous system doing its job.

• Oxytocin, aka the bonding hormine, flooded in every time you made eye contact, had a deep conversation, touched someone or were touched.

• Dopamine rewarded every new experience. Your body was, essentially, lit up.

When you go home, all of it drops.

This is called a come-down, and it's physiological before it's emotional:

• the adrenaline crash can leave you feeling flat, a bit hollow, disproportionately tired.

• the oxytocin drop (sometimes called a vulnerability hangover) can make you feel suddenly tender, exposed, or inexplicably sad even if the night was genuinely good.

Your nervous system, which was in a high state of activation for hours, now needs to find its way back to baseline. And that transition is not always smooth or comfortable.

The come-down in practice

Going home alone after a sex-positive event, your body might be exhausted in a way that feels disproportionate to what you actually did. It can be:

• Wired and tired at the same time (like finding yourself laying in bed at 3am and you can’t quite sleep but can’t quite think either).

• Hungry in a primal way.

• Sometimes sore, sometimes numb, sometimes hyper-sensitised to everything.

This is normal: it’s your nervous system doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. The mistake is expecting to feel fine immediately, or to be able to process everything the moment you enter your apartment. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do in the first hour is eat something, drink water, take a warm shower, and let your body remember that it’s safe. That’s it: nothing else is required yet.

The emotional: the full spectrum

The emotional landscape after a sex-positive event is vast and it doesn’t always look the way you’d expect.

Sometimes it’s just pure joy.

The feeling that your heart is about to explode out of your chest because it’s so full of love and gratitude and belonging. The immense pride of having chosen something for yourself after years of ignoring your desires. Those nights are fucking real and they’re worth celebrating.

Sometimes it’s loneliness.

Sometimes you go home with a very particular kind of loneliness: the one that only exists in contrast. That kind of loneliness comes to you when you’ve just been surrounded by people being very open and very connected and you somehow still felt like you were watching the whole scene from behind glass. I’ve stood in rooms full of people and felt more alone than I do in my apartment on a Sunday. That contrast is disorienting. Let me add though: it’s also not a sign that something is wrong with you.

Sometimes it’s grief.

You met someone, something happened that felt deep and real - a conversation, a kiss that made your heart beat loud, a moment of intimacy that made you forget the people around - and you went home with that warm feeling of possibility. And then NOTHING.

It’s not necessarily ghosting. More like… the intensity of those spaces doesn’t always survive contact with regular life. People go home and settle back into their routines. What felt like a beginning in that room was complete in itself. And that’s hard to hold when you’re solo and hoped something more had already started building.

Sometimes it’s confusion about your own reactions.

I’ve had nights where my body responded in ways my mind couldn’t immediately explain. Recently, I felt nothing else but disgust when a guy I used to feel excited about came to say hello. Learning to take those signals seriously, rather than overriding them to stay in the experience you thought you were supposed to be having, is its own kind of work!

What is worth paying attention to is where these emotions live in your body.

Because they will show up there before they make sense in your head.

• The loneliness might feel like a heaviness in your chest or a tightness in your throat.

• The grief might feel like a specific kind of “hollowness” in your stomach, the particular ache of something that almost was.

• Confusion can show up as a vague restlessness, an inability to settle, a low-grade agitation you can’t quite name.

• The emptiness of a depleting night can feel like a literal weight - your limbs heavy, your energy flat, your body wanting to curl in fetal position.

This is going to feel frustrating, but these sensations are not problems to fix immediately. They’re your body completing the emotional experience the only way it knows how: through sensation. If you notice them, name them, and let them be there without immediately reaching for your phone or a distraction or an explanation, they will move. Emotions are designed to pass through. They only get stuck when we won’t let them land. Uncomfortable, but true.

By the way, all of this is data: none of it is failure.

Intensity, joy, and confusion - all at once.

The psychological: what the mirror shows you

This is the part that takes longest to understand and I think the part that makes solo attendance in sex-positive spaces truly transformative if you’re paying attention.

These spaces are mirrors. They show you things about yourself that your regular life keeps hidden. The tricky thing is learning to tell the difference between two feelings that can seem almost identical from the inside: productive discomfort and depletion.

Productive discomfort: the state worth staying in

Productive discomfort is the feeling of being stretched. You’re outside your comfort zone, things feel unfamiliar, there is a low amount of anxiety… but underneath it there is also curiosity, and usually the sense that something real is happening even if it’s not comfortable. This is worth staying in, because this is where growth actually lives.

Depletion: the flat landing

Depletion is much different. There is no aliveness underneath the discomfort, just a kind of emptiness. You’re going through motions. Your body is sending clear signals - leave, rest, this isn’t for you tonight - and you’re overriding them because you paid for a ticket or because leaving feels like admitting something.

I had a night recently where I stayed too long past the point my body had already checked out. I felt empty, like I was watching a movie of myself evolving in the space. I tried dancing. I stood around. I waited for something to shift when really the most aligned thing I could have done was go home 2 hours earlier. The moment I walked out of the club, I felt a huge sense of relief. I came home, made tea, got into bed, and journaled for an hour at 5am. I needed to unpack what this particular discomfort was actually about.

It was about growth. About having moved on from certain connections without fully realising it yet. My body knew before my mind did. And the skill is learning to listen to it before you’ve exhausted yourself overriding it.

A walk, a journal, a source of water, and a ray of sunshine

The integration: what to actually do with all of it

Integration is the word used in these communities for the period after an experience where things settle. It begins in the hours after and can continue for days or weeks. It happens whether you engage with it consciously or not - the question is just whether you’re present for it or not.

Here’s what actually helps:

1. Give your body what it needs first.

Food, water, a warm shower, sleep. Don’t try to process anything significant while your nervous system is still in the come-down. You’ll just spiral.

2. Move it out if you need to.

Not everyone processes through stillness and that's completely valid. Emotions are stored in the body and sometimes the most efficient way to complete the cycle is through movement. So go for a walk, a run, shake your body out, or stretch. If you feel restless, agitated, or like you can't settle, that's your nervous system asking to discharge. Listen to it.

3. Journal or talk to yourself out loud.

If you do better with words, write down what happened before you talk to anyone else - just to get your own honest account down before someone else's interpretation shapes it. And if you’re not a person that journals, record a voice note to yourself. Sometimes speaking out loud what you experienced with no audience is enough to bring something up.

4. Talk to someone who can witness you - not judge you.

Sometimes what you need isn't advice or analysis: it's just to be heard. If you have someone in your life who can listen without interrupting, without immediately trying to make it better, or without projecting their own feelings onto your experience… that kind of witnessing is incredibly powerful for integration. Being seen in what you're feeling, without someone trying to change it, allows something to complete. If you don't have that person, a coach or therapist can hold that space intentionally.

5. Let the difficult feelings stay as long as they need to.

The loneliness, the confusion, the flat feeling, the disappointment: treat those feelings as information. They are your system integrating and deserve to take up space, not pushed away through distractions.

6. The thing I wish someone had told me clearly

Give yourself permission to leave early. Really. Sometimes staying through discomfort is brave and useful... and sometimes leaving before you’re completely depleted is the most self-aware thing you can do. There is no prize for staying until the end - and learning to tell the difference is a skill.

The reframe: going home alone isn’t lame

Here is what I’ve come to understand after years of doing this, and after sitting with a lot of people in their afters.

Going home alone after a sex-positive event isn’t the default option for when the night didn’t work out. It’s not what happens when you failed to connect or weren’t attractive enough or weren’t open enough or didn’t do it right. Sometimes it’s simply what happened. And in that alone-ness, if you’re willing to stay with it rather than escape it immediately, there is often something genuinely valuable waiting.

Trust my experience.

The 5am journaling. The realisation that your body was giving you accurate information about what you have outgrown. The understanding that a quick connection was complete in itself, even without a sequel. The pride of having shown up for something that scared you regardless of how it unfolded.

Sex-positive spaces put so much emphasis on partnered interaction - on the connections made, the experiences shared, the things that happen between people - that it’s easy to measure your night by what didn’t happen with someone else. But some of the most significant things that have ever happened to me in those spaces happened entirely inside myself. On the way home, in the hour after, in the dark and quiet of my own bed, finally alone with what the night had shown me.

That’s not nothing. That’s actually everything.

If you’re navigating sex-positive spaces solo and finding it more complex than the empowerment narrative suggests… you’re not doing it wrong. That complexity is the work. And you don’t have to figure it out alone.

xoxo,

Valentine Blue

Your Solo Sex Coach and Playful Guide to Erotic Freedom

Two months after ending my last relationship - and my first real decision to be single, ever - I found a random event on Instagram. A “temple night”. In Amsterdam. At a venue I already knew from ecstatic dancing, 15 minutes away from my house. Run by two women, with a mandatory workshop for first-timers.

I stopped scrolling, read it again. I don‘t know what it was, but something in me immediately said yes. Ngl I was fucking terrified. I also had no idea was a “temple night” was. But I signed up before I could talk myself out of it.

Getting ready to attend a temple night

I told almost nobody

I didn't tell many people I was going. This felt too new, too outside of everyone's comfort zone (including mine) to announce. I had just come out of a long-term relationship, which a lot of my people already didn‘t quite understand. I could already imagine the faces. So I kept it mostly to myself, which meant I carried the whole thing alone. I was feeling it all: the excitement, the nerves, the curiosity, the confusion, the “wtf am I gonna be doing there” and the “I feel I was meant to find this event”.

I spent HOURS reading the event guidelines trying to feel more prepared than I was. Because yes, I COMPLETELY over-prepared. I took multiple outfit options on the day so I could read the room before committing to anything. I packed snacks and water like I was going hiking for two days. I figured the more I’ll know going in, the more in control I’ll feel once I’m there. And honestly, that logic wasn’t wrong.

What I didn’t anticipate though was how much I would want to talk about it afterwards. Because after, I felt so happy, so weirdly aligned, so right about the whole thing… and I had nobody to tell who would actually get it. That part was a little lonely. Beautiful and isolating at the same time.

The workshop that I didn’t expect to change my life

The event started with a 3-hour workshop, mandatory for all first-time participants. I honestly cannot overstate how much that decision shaped my entire experience. Walking into a space like that for the first time without any context, any tools, or any prior contact with the people you're about to be intimate with… that would have been a VERY different night. The workshop gave me all that. It also gave me something I didn't know I was looking for: proof that I wasn't the only one with doubts and questions.

We learned the basics of consent. We explored the wheel of consent: a framework for understanding the difference between doing something for someone and doing something to them, and what it actually means to receive. We played the 3-minute game, a practical exercise where you practice asking for exactly what you want, in small, specific doses, with different partners. Simple in theory, and slightly uncomfortable in practice. Exactly the kind of discomfort that opens something. Practicing the wheel of consent brought me my first “aha” moment: I discovered that I really enjoyed “taking” (aka giving for your own enjoyment) and as someone who had always been kind of passive in bed, that hit pretty deep.

The tool that stayed with me - the one I went on to write my sex coaching certification thesis on, the one I still use in my own intimate relationships and teach to clients today - was the RBDSM framework. And before your brain goes somewhere else: this has nothing to do with BDSM. RBDSM stands for Relationships, Boundaries, Desires, Sexual health, Meaning + Aftercare. It’s a communication framework for intimacy: a way of having the conversations most people never have, before, during, and after any kind of intimate experience. It completely reframed the way I think about communication in close relationships. Not just sexual ones: ALL of them.

The facilitators (two women, warm and playful and clearly very good at what they did) held the space in a way that made nervousness feel welcome rather than something to hide. I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t also lowkey scanning the room, trying to imagine who I might end up close to later that evening, checking if I felt attracted to anyone. I didn’t, particularly. I found that interesting too.

The sage, the shorts, and the entrance

After a little break (where I went outside and basically talked to no one), more participants arrived: the ones who had signed up for the night only, skipping the workshop. The experienced ones. We all meet upstairs, and get changed in the same room. Which was a little strange.

Then the big moment came: the temple night. At the door, there were “angels”: volunteers whose entire role was to welcome each person individually as they arrived. A tall, beautiful man in nothing but shorts smudged me with sage from head to toe. I had no idea what it was for at the time, I just knew it made me pause. Like a threshold. A transition.

And I walked in.

The space was stunning. Colourful, draped fabrics everywhere. Candlelight, incense, carpets layered over carpets, soft music in the background. And inside that one space, multiple smaller worlds - each with their own energy and their own rules.

A cuddle corner, for non-sexual touch only.

A sensual feeding station with grapes, chocolate, and cut fruit; the one rule being that you had to be fed by someone else, never yourself.

A playfight area with mattresses.

A kinky corner with some feathers and leather impact tools.

A “bell bitch” station, where whoever rings the bell gets taken care of by everyone who wants to answer, blindfolded, in whatever ways they have consented to.

And a more private, closed-off area where sexual interaction was welcome.

In the middle of everything, there was a dance floor. And on the side, a divan for people who wanted to take a break, breathe, and witness rather than participate.

The two women explained the flow, introduced the angels and walked us through the spaces. They also said clearly that they themselves would not be engaging intimately with participants that evening. We started with a warm-up to merge the groups: gentle paired touch, co-regulated breathing, eye gazing… and then the music changed.

The night began.

Read more

I had to repeat that number because it sounds ridiculous even to me, and it's my own life.

Those seven people were from my intimate circle: some I had been having sex with, some I had been making out with at play parties, some I had been in a undefined something with for months. And in the space of one week, I let them all go.

I thought that would break my heart… it didn’t. Instead, I felt space. Like I had given myself room to breathe. And I understood why.

I walked away from seven connections

Modern dating confuses attention with intimacy.

Someone texts you back, keeps you at arm‘s length, says “I miss you” on a Sunday evening, and we read those signals as care and closeness. But attention and intimacy are not the same thing.

Attention is easy. It costs nothing and requires nothing of the person giving it. Someone can “stick around” for months by texting sporadically, showing up when it's convenient, pr offering just enough warmth to prevent you from leaving, without ever being fully present with you. Some call that breadcrumbing, I call that maintenance.

The difference only becomes obvious when you get real honest about how you feel after spending time with someone.

• whether you feel energised or depleted

• whether you feel seen or just acknowledged

• whether you feel nourished or just less alone for a few hours

When I sat down with that question, it became obvous that what I had with those seven people was attention. Lovely at times, inconsistent, ultimately thin. Little dopamine hits that were not fulfilling me, because what I was craving underneath was steadier and deeper.

I got tired of complaining that my dating life wasn‘t what I wanted it to be. So I had to be really honest with myself about how I was filling it… and why.

The projection: falling for a feeling instead of a person

This might make me sound like a bitch, but I wasn't really attached to those people. I was attached to what they activated in me.

There is something that happens in the first stages of connection, when your mind looks for what‘s familiar and pleasant to validate your experience. You take the fragments you have (a few good conversations, a moment you felt them open up, or a specific way they look at you) and you unconsciously fill in the gaps. And suddenly you're not just attached to who is in front of you, you're attached to a version of yourself that only seems to exist in their company. The sexy you, the playful you, the funny you, the smart you.

This is basically how human beings work (yes, it is backed by modern psychology): we discover parts of ourselves in connection with others. The problem is when we mistake the activation for the connection.

Those connections reflected something back to me, but none of us were actually letting each other in. I don‘t want mirrors: I want windows. I don‘t want to chase a feeling: I want relationships capable to hold it. And up until then, I hadn‘t been able to articulate it, because of what I grew up believing about love.

Scarcity mindset in love and intimacy

When I worked through the first section of the Intimacy Reset Guide, I found out that my main leak in intimacy was scarcity. And that’s a sneaking place to be in, because scarcity feels like lack but it actually isn’t.

You might recognise the scarcity leak in yourself if any of these sound familiar:

• you grew up in a family where people stay together out of duty, not choice: so you learned that staying is what love looks like, even when it makes you unfulfilled.

• you received love as a reward for being competent, performant, or achieving things.

• you've been in situations where asking for more meant losing the person (or being exposed for disappointing them) so you stopped asking, learned to want less (out loud at least) and be “easy-going”.

• you keep hearing from your coupled friends that “relationships require compromise” (aka lower your standards and consider yourself lucky to have someone who chose you).

• you are constantly reminded by society that “all the good ones are taken” or “dating gets harder after a certain age”.

Keep me close

When you hear those messages enough times, you begin to believe love is a limited resource. That there are only so many chances, so many compatible people, so many opportunities to be chosen. And once you believe that, you’ll accept all kinds of things that don’t actually nourish you.

You relate to connection the way some people relate to money: you hold onto what you have, even when it's not enough, because something feels safer than nothing. You‘re terrified to let go because it feels like you‘ll lose everything if you do.

Surprise: you probably won‘t. Scarcity is just a story. Like an old computer programming still running the show when all you had to do was click on “update the system”. The moment I saw that pattern clearly, it lost most of its power.

What I did about it (and what you can try)

At that point I had two choices: either keep going the same way (surrounding myself with unfulfilling flickering connections hoping that someday some good ones would emerge) or try something new. I chose to update the program.

I mapped who the new me is: how she speaks, how she divides her time, what she no longer tolerates, what she asks for, how she dresses (I even gave her a name!). Every morning, before I even get out of bed, I listen to the NLP audio practice I recorded, and vizualise what it feels like to live as her.

I gathered my courage, drafted a few messages, and hit Send. And the funny thing is: I wasn’t even expecting replies, because that wasn’t some kind of test they had to pass or fail. Because I did that for me.

If you want to try this for yourself, here is where to start:

1. Name what you’re actually getting.

Not what you hope the connection could be or what it is on a good day: what it is, reliably, most of the time. Does it leave you full or empty? Seen or managed?

2. Separate the person from the feeling.

They are not the same thing, even if they feel like it in the moment. Sometimes you might think you miss someone… but when you slow down, what you actually miss is a feeling state. Being seen, being touched, being a version of you that gets activated by their attention. Once you can name that, reaching out becomes a decision rather than a reflex. Because you are no longer acting from urgency or lack, but from intention.

3. Notice what you are tolerating.

The inconsistency, the lack of clarity, the breadcrumbs, the way you show up when they don’t… that’s where the leak is.

4. Say the thing, simply.

No need to write a novel. You just need one honest sentence: “I’ve realised this isn’t what I’m looking for.” is enough! You don’t owe anyone a full explanation for choosing yourself.

However, if you need some extra inspiration, here is a screenshot of what I sent, with a bonus on how it was received (ngl though, not everyone was so receptive, and that’s okay - because once again, you’re doing it for you!).

Don’t get me wrong: sometimes I miss the attention.

And yes, sometimes not having the kind of partnered intimacy I know I deserve is frustrating. But nothing changes if nothing changes.

It’s one thing to understand that intimacy is bigger than sex or romance... it’s another thing to not default back into old patterns when you’re tired, lonely, overstimulated or scared.

Being chosen is not the same thing as being cherished. Being kept is not the same thing as being wanted. Those distinctions used to feel abstract to me… now they feel so obvious in my body I cannot ignore them.

It's not about higher standards.

This expression gets thrown out as though standards are a gate you build to keep unworthy people out. It's about building enough of a relationship with yourself that you stop needing the connections that keep you stuck.

The secret is: the more intimate I've become with myself, the less urgently I seem to need intimacy from any one person.

I swear that’s not selfish. I swear I still like people (most of them). I swear that doesn’t make me a bitch. Or maybe it does, in some people’s eyes. But let me tell you this: the relief I felt, that wasn’t indifference: that was integrity.

The seven people I let go of last week weren't bad people. They just didn't fit anymore: not because the bar got higher, but because I got clearer.

If you recognised the scarcity leak in yourself (the one that keeps you holding onto connections that don’t quite fit because letting go feels like a gamble) you’re not alone. It’s one of the four patterns that hold us back from secure intimacy. Good thing is, patterns can shift when you can finally see them clearly.

The Intimacy Reset is my free masterclass on identifying your intimacy leaks and building a richer, more resilient intimate life - with yourself as the foundation. You can join for free here.

xoxo,

Valentine Blue

Your Solo Sex Coach and Playful Guide to Erotic Freedom

She’s a tantra teacher. Last time I met her, she was all silk robes and eye gazing and sacred rituals and womb healing. So what the fuck is she doing here? She doesn’t belong here. But wait, actually… neither do I.

Painting the picture

Just an hour before that, I was all dressed in pink, wearing a tutu, drinking sparkling wine, eating grapes, and thowring fake money at strippers in a vibrant sex workers collective.

And now there I was. Tight black dress, chains falling down my chest, in a slightly questionable BDSM dungeon, supporting a friend who was about to peg a man with a huge dildo. Once I realised that, I laughed. And suddendly, my “what is she doing here?” became “who the fuck am I to judge?”.

“who am I to judge?”

Pick a lane

We like it when people make sense, don’t we?

When they’re consistent, predictable, easy to categorize. Pick one lane and stick to it. But the truth is… we are rarely just one thing. We just learn to present one version at a time. Preferably the one that won’t confuse people too much, depending on who we’re with.

We say we’re open, we say we’re curious, we say we don’t judge… but the second something doesn’t fit into a neat category, our brain panics. It can’t compute two things at once. Kinky or tantric. Prude or slutty. Soft flower or wild animal. I see that in myself all the time. I am all of those things. There are days where I could dominate the world, and there are days where eye contact feels more intimate than anything else. And neither of those cancels the other: they coexist.

Where judgment comes from

So what if you don’t need to resolve the contraction, what if you don’t need to choose, because there is no choice to be made?

What if the goal isn’t to become one clear thing, but to expand your capacity to hold it all?

That moment with that woman wasn’t really about her: it was about me. It was about the parts of myself I was still trying to organize into something that made sense. For me, for people around me, for the people judging me. I was still trying to fit into clean, coherent boxes, so I could belong. So I could feel in control. But the whole fucking range of my expression does not care about control.

We are multidimensional

The more you allow yourself to be many things at once, the less you feel the need to put anyone else in a box.

You can be the person in silk and the person in chains.

You can be the one who meditates and the one who ends up in a dungeon at 2am without needing to justify it.

That night, I didn’t actually learn something about her: I learned something about the parts of myself I still try to organize into something that makes sense… and how exhausting that is. Even after years of solo (s)exploration. Even being a sex coach who is supposed to know it all. Growth isn’t linear.

If you’ve ever felt like you don’t fully fit into one box, one label, one “type” of person or desire… you’re not doing it wrong. You’re probably just allowing more truth in than most people are comfortable with. And that’s something that makes you an Odd Bird. Welcome to the Flock. Here, different is the new normal.

xoxo,

Valentine Blue

Your Solo Sex Coach and Playful Guide to Erotic Freedom

No one really talks about it. So I will.

This article is the last part of a 5-part series. You can read Part 4 here and find the full reading journey linked at the end of the article.

“I don‘t know why but I feel like I can trust you”

I became that person

I‘ve been going to sex parties for 3 years. Which is not that long when you think about it - but it‘s long enough to see recurring patterns. Even when I‘m not actively part of the “care team” (aka the team that checks on the emotional and physical wellbeing of the participants) or facilitating a workshop, people come to me for connection or comfort. Some say it‘s the energy I carry.

Somewhere along the way, I also became the one people turn to after. Not because I have all the answers (I really don't) but because I stay. I listen (REALLY listen). I don't lose my shit when things get messy. And trust me, they do get messy.

The snowglobe effect

“hey… can I ask you something?“

“can we call?”

“I don‘t know why but I feel like I can trust you.“

I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of those.

And every single time, I’m soooo glad I picked up.

We all integrate, whether we want it or not. Integration is how we typically call the period after an event that has an influence on us. How the mind and body process things when life goes back on track and emotions settle. A bit like what happens after you shake a snowglobe.

On average, integration starts in the hours following the event, until a few weeks later. This is when I learned to stay available - after making sure that I am taking care of myself first. You can’t pour from an empty cup.

Fun and games

Sometimes what comes after is pure, innocent joy. A glowing feeling you carry around for days. And sometimes it’s confusion. Jealousy that makes no sense given what actually happened. A feeling of rejection or emptiness when every external sign points the opposite direction. Old stuff surfacing out of nowhere - shame, grief, a longing you can’t name - finally moving because the space felt safe enough to let it.

None of that means something went wrong. None of that means the experience was too much or a mistake. It means something real moved. And that’s actually the point.

What most people don’t realise is that sex-positive spaces are not just places where fun things happen. They are mirrors. They show you things about yourself you don’t always get to see in your regular life. Like those super concentrated powder detergents that reveal everything with one scoop. They show you where your conditioning still has a grip on you, how you relate to desire when it’s right in front of you, how you handle closeness or attention or being seen, , where you abandon yourself, and where you crack open like an egg.

And once you’ve seen it, you can’t really unsee it. This is where the real impact comes. Sneakily, in the quiet after, when you’re alone with what you felt.

Sitting with the intensity of the experience I‘ve just lived

The part where people struggle

This is where I see people struggle the most.

Because something was revealed, but there is no space to hold it. There is no place to land, no place to say “hey, it’s actually totally normal to feel this way”, no place to be seen and held in whatever is happening. Some people shut down, some numb it out or push it away by staying busy, and some spiral inside for weeks. And it’s such a shame - not because the feelings are bad, because this is actually where the gold is. This is the moment where things can truly shift. Where something confusing becomes something useful. Where an experience stops just being a story you tell and starts changing how you move through the world.

In the kink scene, this is what you’d call aftercare. The intentional period of physical and emotional care after an intense experience, when the excitement and hormones and adrenaline drop and the body and nervous system need somewhere to land.

People in the scene understand this.

So why do we keep neglecting it in sex-positive group spaces?

What I actually do

I’m not here to tell you that sex parties are dangerous or that organizers are not doing their job. Every experience is different, every person is different, and every body is different. What I’m saying is that learning to hold yourself - or to be held - in the aftermath changes everything.

This is a big part of the work that I do. Not telling people what they should or shouldn’t have done. Just sitting with them in the after, while they figure their shit out. Helping them make sense of what came up. Letting emotions move instead of calcify. Turning something confusing into something that actually supports their life, their relationships, their sense of self.

Because sex positivity - or whatever we want to call it - was never about having more sex, being more open, more wild, more anything. It's about stepping out of the shoulds. The “this is what it's supposed to look like”. The “this is what you do next”. And learning to actually listen. To your body, to your limits, to your desire… even when (especially when) it doesn't make immediate sense.

You don‘t have to sit with this on your own

If something has come up for you - in a space like this, or anywhere else - and you’re not quite sure what to do with it… you don’t have to figure it out by yourself. I know how that feels like. I’m right there with you.

This article is Part 5 of the erotic freedom series:

• Part 1: I don’t go to sex parties to have sex - and I’m not the only one

• Part 2: Those men who don’t want to fuck me - even when I ask them to

• Part 3: Those men who really want to fuck me - and I ask them not to

• Part 4: Why we show up - the 8 real reasons people go to sex parties

• Bonus: 10 ways to make friends at sex parties

xoxo,

Valentine Blue

Your Solo Sex Coach and Playful Guide to Erotic Freedom

Not always, but often enough that I can’t stop noticing it.

(PS: I’m teaching a masterclass called The Intimacy Reset about this exact thing, aka rebuilding intimacy with yourself beyond coping mechanisms, performance and emotional survival mode. It’s totally free, and you can join here💙)

I used to call a lot of things “self-care”.

Doing my nails, booking massages, spending an entire Sunday scrolling in bed and ordering things I didn’t really need. Going shopping at the mall when I didn’t know how to fill my afternoon. Buying myself sweet treats after a hard week because I “deserved it”. ngl, sometimes those things did help. But if I’m being real, it wasn’t really care. It was compensation.

Nursing myself to health - Shame LESS Society Halloween Underground Soiree

Modern self-care is bullshit

We are told to regulate, soothe, optimize, rest, hydrate, journal, take baths, buy candles, touch grass, do breathwork, romanticize our lives. And listen, I’m not against any of it. I love a little treat as much as the next person.

But somewhere along the way, self-care became heavily focused on symptom management. And that causes me to heavily struggle with the concept, because now that I see it, I cannot unsee it.

Modern self-care is basically like putting a band-aid on an open wound. It protects, but it doesn’t heal what’s underneath.

Modern self-care = nervous system regulation

A lot of modern self-care is built around quick relief. It soothes the damage so we can stay productive. It recharges the battery just enough so we can keep oiling the big machine. Most of us operate out of a dysregulated nervous system. Stress, anxiety, chores, responsibilities, the text you shouldn’t have checked, the email you shouldn’t have received, all of that activates our survival mode and keeps us in a state of constant alertness. When we’re stressed for too long, our body starts looking for quick relief, quick comfort, tiny dopamine sparks, so it can feel better. That’s literally biology. And again, that’s not inherently bad. Relief matters. Regulation matters.

But if your entire relationship with yourself only exists when you are recovering from burnout, heartbreak, anxiety, overstimulation, loneliness, or emotional hunger… that’s not intimacy with yourself. That’s maintenance.

And I think many of us know this.

Modern self-care is not the enemy

Back then, I was trying to soothe feelings I didn’t know how to sit with. A few of them will probably resonate with you:
loneliness,
emotional exhaustion,
disconnection from myself,
unworthiness,
restlessness,
the feeling that I needed to “fix” my mood before I could go out and interact with people.

so I was doing what seemed to be best. I was compensating. And then I was wondering why I was feeling empty the next day again. Sometimes self-care becomes another performance of “being well” while we quietly continue living in ways that disconnect us from ourselves.

Modern self-care is not the enemy. A deep tissue massage isn’t shallow. Going for a run isn’t useless. Rest matters. But I think we’ve confused temporary soothing with actual intimacy with ourselves.

Self-intimacy as the foundation

Sorry babe, but no amount of routines can compensate for self-abandonment. No amount of “self-care” fixes the fact that you keep overriding your needs.

or saying yes when your body screams no.

or living so disconnected from yourself that you only check in when you’re already burnt out.

You can regulate your nervous system every Sunday and still spend the rest of the week treating yourself like shit.

That’s why so much self-care feels like a reset button that only works for a few hours. It protects, it softens the impact, but it doesn’t heal what’s underneath. It doesn’t stay, because the foundation is leaking.

That’s a big part of what I’ll be exploring inside The Intimacy Reset. The masterclass I’ve spent weeks to build, and that I’m now offering for free. Built from everything I’ve learned in 10 years in the sex industry, science-backed research + my own lived experience of erotic empowerment. Condensed in four parts, bingeable in one hour.

I believe everyone should get the chance to built a stronger foundation underneath it all, so this is my gift for you. You can join the masterclass for free here.

In the meantime, stay curious, stay sovereign, stay odd.

xoxo,

Valentine Blue

Your Solo Sex Coach and Playful Guide to Erotic Freedom

I am not tantric enough.

I am not single enough.

Not partnered enough.

Not poly enough.

Not queer enough.

I am not healed enough.

Not ambitious enough.

Not rich enough.

Not sensitive enough.

Not sexual enough.

Although sometimes,

I am too sexual.

I am too intense.

I am too much.

The problem isn’t me: it’s the boxes.

No matter which one I try to fit into, I have to cut something off.

I should make myself easier to understand, to label, to place.

Leave some parts of me to the side because they don’t belong there.

I place myself in those boxes so I can be something right.

So I can identify. So I can stop feeling like I am doing something wrong again.

But I don’t live in one lane… and neither do you.

We move, we change, we explore, we shift, we contradict ourselves, we evolve depending on the space, the people, the moment, the version of us that is being called forward.

You simply can’t be understood in a system that needs things to be simple, because you’re not simple.

You’re not unconsistent: you’re multi-dimensional.

You’re not an in-or-out: you’re a range.

I’m tired.

And the exhaustion doesn’t come from being too much or not enough: it comes from constantly trying to be the right amount of something.

So I want to reframe it in a way that will actually serve me, that will actually serve you:

What if you are not here to be enough? What if you are here to be many?

Erotic freedom is not choosing the right box: it’s realizing you were never meant to fit in one. And knowing that you can belong anyway.

Explore beyond boxes. Stay curious, stay open, stay odd.

xoxo,

Valentine Blue

Your Solo Sex Coach and Playful Guide to Erotic Freedom

I can’t blame them though. It’s easy to assume from the outside. You hear “sex party” and your brain fills in the blanks: orgies all night long, people living out their wildest fantasies, hooking up in every corner. SURE, that can be part of it. But if I’m honest, after a few years navigating different sex-positive spaces, mostly solo - this porn-looking version feels very incomplete.

I’m Valentine Blue, sex coach for the solo and the unconventional, curious explorer of sexuality beyond boxes. And when it comes to sex parties, what I’ve seen, what I’ve experienced, and what people keep telling me again and again is this:

Most people don’t go for sex.
They go for what sex represents.

Freedom.

Expression.

Curiosity.

Connection.

Permission.

And sometimes, just the relief of being in a space where nothing is automatically expected from you.

After interviewing dozens of people, from total newbies to absolute legends, in events, on social media and online, I’ve narrowed it down to 8 categories. 8 reasons why we really show up to sex parties - reasons that are NOT penetrative sex.

This article is part of a series about sex-positivity and erotic freedom, inspired by my own personal and professional experience:

• Part 1: I don’t go to sex parties to have sex - and I’m not the only one

• Part 2: Those men who don’t want to fuck me - even when I ask them to

• Part 3: Those men who really want to fuck me - and I ask them not to

• Part 5: What happens after a sex party (coming soon)

• Bonus: 10 ways to make friends at a sex party

1. “Everything can happen… but nothing has to happen”

Someone recently commented one of my Instagram posts saying:

OH BOY did I smile when I read that comment. Because SAME babe. This is probably the biggest reason people go - and the most misunderstood.

There is something so fucking powerful about being in a space where the door is open to everything… but you’re not pushed through it. You can flirt, talk, watch (consensually), connect, cuddle, explore, or just sit there and take it all in (pun intended). No one is giving you a checklist, no one is timing your performance, and trust me, no one is going to judge you for not interacting sexually.

You don’t have to do anything to belong there. And ironically, that’s what makes people relax enough to let desire emerge.

2. Curiosity

Curiosity is a big one for me. Not just in these spaces, but in how I approach intimacy in general. Because most of us weren’t taught to stay curious growing up: we were taught to be productive, goal-oriented, to get somewhere, to get it right. Even with sex. Curiosity is often the first crack in the “shoulds” we’ve been taught. It opens the field, it soften the edges. It brings back some of that innocence we had when we were kids… when we just want to know more, to see more, to experience more… just for the sake of it. No goal, no outcome, just curiosity.

Some people just want to see what it looks like in real life. Some people come to get spanked (yes, someone really said that). Some people come to ask questions about things they don’t fully understand yet, about things they’ve been wondering about for years but never had a space to explore safely. They just expand their map. And I fucking love that. Because sometimes, just knowing that something exists is enough to shift something inside you.

3. People-watching (yes, really)

Being a voyeur has nuances. Yes, some people love watching. But it’s not just about “getting off” on watching others: it’s about witnessing.

There is something deeply fascinating about witnessing people in their raw, sweaty, unfiltered selves. You see vulnerability, awkwardness, confidence, hesitation… all of it. You see relationships and dynamics that don’t follow the usual scripts. You see bodies that don’t look like what you’re used to seeing. And you realise: average people fuck too.

It sounds funny, but it often comes as a shock for some. I’ve seen people get scandalised to learn that old people, fat people, people with disabilities, and in general humans who are not considered generally attractive also go to sex parties… and like to have sex. We’ve been fed very narrow ideas of what is hot or desirable, but most of us are actually pretty average looking: and people-watching reconciliates us with this fact. If you look around long enough, you’ll realise that we all have body hair, scars, moles, fluids, cellulite, aging bodies, unique genitals, tits and buttholes.

You start seeing beauty in places you weren’t trained to see it. You start softening your own gaze. You start realizing that attraction is way more complex, way more human than what we’ve been told, and that is incredibly humbling.

4. Connection

Talking, laughing, asking questions, making new friends, flirting, sharing stories you wouldn’t usually share with strangers, feeling seen in a way that’s not filtered or performative. Even networking in my case. In those spaces, you don’t need 3 weeks of polite conversation to get to something real, and for a lot of people, that’s rare.

YES: sex is also a form of connection. There is nothing wrong with that - that’s also what these spaces are for (duh). Although the way you approach it can either make this the best experience of your life or your worst choice ever.

If you’re coming in there with the underlying assumption that people owe you something (especially if you’re a straight man), if you’re showing up acting all entitled, believing that this is YOUR chance to finally get laid and that something SHOULD happen to you… you’re probably going to have a very bad time. The only thing you’ll most likely get from that kind of attitude is pissing people off. And if you piss people off, there’s a high chance you’ll be called out, kicked out, put on a blacklist, and even get banned from other sex parties. Yes darling: these spaces are built upon mutual consent, awareness and hightened consent culture, and organizers talk to each other.

The whole point is: nothing is owed, everything is chosen. And when that’s understood, connection actually becomes a lot more natural.

5. Expression (let’s be real, when else are you going to do this?)

By expression I don’t just mean “wear something sexy”. I mean the whole range of outfits (or lack of). The attitude. The playfulness. The fifty shades of weirdness. A whole fucking playground for personal expression.

It’s not about being seen: it’s about finally seeing yourself. Trying on a version of you that doesn’t fit in your everyday life. Letting your body move differently, speak differently, take space differently. I’m talking cross-dressing. Impersonating a goddess, a vilain, a soft little creature. Behaving like a dog or a poney. Walking someone on a leash. Being the one on a leash. Wearing a mask. Taking off your mask.

I’ve hosted workshops around archetypes before, where I invited people to step into parts of themselves that don’t usually get space. The rebel, the wild one, the lover, the one who takes, the one who surrenders. Things get interesting very quickly when people give themselves permission to play with that.

I’ve done things in those spaces I would have never thought of in my “normal” life. Like that time where I was supposed to offer food to volunteers (I am the volunteer care team lead for Shame LESS Society, that’s litterally my job), and instead of giving out boxes, I spontaneously took off my clothes, laid down on the kitchen island, and offered them to eat the food off my naked body. That was DEFINITELY not planned. That was definitely a bit chaotic. But that was also definitely a beautiful moment of pure expression and play. That decision encovered a new kink of mine - a kink I have been exploring ever since: food play.

That’s what I mean by expression. Sex-positive spaces offer you a place where you don’t just think about who you could be: you try it on.

Feeding hungry mouths at Shame LESS Society Underground Soiree

6. Personal growth

Okay, we’ve come to the part can shake you off a little. Because that’s the part people don’t always expect. I’ve seen it, and I’ve lived it: these spaces can be fun, light, and playful, but they can also bring up a lot.

I often say that 3 hours in these spaces can feel like 3 years of life. Things are concentrated, amplified, intense in their own way. Which means that in just a few hours, you might experience rejection, desire, comparison, jealousy, clarity, confusion, curiosity, numbness, longing, insecurity, boundaries you didn’t know you had, or didn’t know how to communicate. You might meet someone you’re deeply attracted to… and see them an hour later passionately kissing someone else. You might think you’re a straight man… and get strangely turned on by the idea of getting pegged (which btw, has nothing to do with your sexual orientation).

You might discover that your “type” isn’t what you think it is. Spotting someone across the room whom you are strangely drawned to. You might discover that you are exactly someone’s type, too, meet someone out there who is going to think you are the sexiest thing alive and that there’s a unique interest about you. If you leave yourself open to it you will find a variety of interesting connections outside your typical attraction range: skin colour, body types, ability, genders... You get to discover that attraction isn’t as fixed as you thought… and that you can explore that without it having to mean something definitive about your identity. It is very common in kink spaces for people to engage with someone outside of their typical orientation, and that doesn’t mean they are bonded for life. It’s just part of the exploration.

And hey, that said, those experiences don’t automatically lead to a huge breakthrough or personal revelations, they still do something: break the routine, stretch your perception, think outside the box, expand your map.

7. Belonging

“I just like being around people who get it”: that sentence came up soooo many times.

Imagine a place where you don’t have to “act normal” because “normal” doesn’t exist there in the same way. Yes, there are rules and guidelines to respect. But at the same time, everyone there is navigating shame, desire, curiosity, boundaries, and figuring shit out… just like you. I can recall a few “aha” moments where I thought “oh my god I’m not weird for feeling/thinking this way?” and those moments switched something in my brain.

Sex-positive spaces offer a different kind of belonging: not the one where you fit into a box, but the one where you don’t have to fit at all. You just exist in the same room. And sometimes, that’s the first step to feeling at home somewhere.

8. The energy (and YES, the sex)

Hard to explain, but iykyk.

Sometimes you don’t go to do: you go to feel.

And YES, sex is part of it (I know, you’ve been waiting for this one from the beginning, and it FINALLY appears!).

So… why do we show up?

For sex, sometimes. But more often for everything around it.

For the freedom of knowing you can say yes.
And the safety of knowing you can say no.

For connection, expression, curiosity, freedom, belonging.
For the parts of yourself you don’t get to meet in everyday life.

For the reminder that intimacy is bigger than what we’ve been taught.

Some people people go and play all night. Some people go and never touch anyone. Some people go once and never come back. Some people build whole communities there. There is no right way: only your way.

If you’re curious about sexuality beyond the traditional scripts, but you don’t know where to start, and don’t want to lose yourself in the process, I am here to help you navigate this step by step and with clarity. Self-intimacy coaching helps you make sense of what comes up so you can become the hottest, weirdest, version of yourself. Start here.

xoxo,

Valentine Blue

Your Solo Sex Coach and Playful Guide to Erotic Freedom