Whether kinky sex is a staple on the menu or you’re simply kink curious, you’ll be happy to know of its many benefits.
Polyamory itself is already widely considered kinky sex, which strictly speaking simply means alternative or unusual sexual practices. While most poly people don’t consider themselves alternative or unusual—polyamory is totally natural—it isn’t mainstream, and it does usually mean more sex, more sexual partners, and more variety.
Not all poly people pursue or are interested in kinky sex or BDSM, but being open minded and having exposure to the fantasies and needs of more partners does make it more likely that we are open to or more experienced with a wider world of sexual desires.
If you’re kinky, you probably already know that kink has all kinds of benefits. If you have kinky desires but haven’t started to explore kinky practices, there are a number of surprising benefits to health, psychology, sex, relationships and well being.
10 Kinky Sex Benefits
1. Stress Relief
Suppression, repression, guilt, and shame are common when it comes to sexuality or to unrealized sexual needs. Getting in touch with your sexuality in a deeper way and coming to terms with and acceptance of those desires is a huge relief and means a dependable resource for stress release.
While exercise, nutrition, faith practices and rituals (traditional or earth-based or alternative), healthy social relationships, team sports, cinema and reading, creativity, knitting and other hand crafts, nature, meditation, and having fun, are all proven ways to handle stress, sex is a very powerful tool for stress relief. Sexual tension in and of itself needs release, but it also acts as a relief for unrelated sources of stress.
Kinky sex is often deeper sex—going further into fantasy, intimacy, and intensity—all of which have even greater benefits when it comes to stress.
Read: Kinky Sex Ideas for Poly Lovers
2. Better Communication Skills
Sharing your fantasies, overcoming fears to spell out your desires, learning how to express broad ideas and nitty-gritty mechanical instructions, learning to listen and respect your lovers’ needs and boundaries, all contribute towards tremendous communication skills. Learning to share and learning to listen are equally essential to kinky sex and to life in general.
3. Sexual and Psychological Satisfaction
Kink is about body, mind and spirit. If you’re having incomplete sex or unimaginative sex, you’re only getting half of the satisfaction, physically and psychologically. In the same way that partner sex can be more satisfying than masturbation, partner sex that addresses your unique desires and needs is more satisfying and intimate than superficial or basic sex.
Read: 3 Ways to Build Intimacy in Poly Relationships
4. Sexual and Social Confidence
Learning to address your own desires and learning to compromise, to navigate your lovers’ needs and fantasies, opening to new experiences, facing your fears, accompanying your lovers on their journeys, all contribute to greater confidence in and out of bed.
Read: 8 Benefits of Role Play for Poly Lovers
5. Increased Trust between Partners and With Self
Along with confidence, those same elements—listening, facing fears, deeper intimacy, boundaries, overcoming shame, revealing ourselves, communicating on a deeper level—bring increased trust between lovers and increased trust in yourself.
Holding secrets for another person or keeping intensely personal details that you have been trusted with private and safe are all keys to increased trust. The respect that builds when lovers have a more intimate and more profound relationship, going beyond the surface, means trusting each other for discretion, safety, and privacy.
Becoming more trustworthy and becoming more trusting of others, and building a network that includes more trusted parties—brings more safety and security into one’s life.
Read: 5 Kinks that Work for Poly Lovers
6. Revitalize Sexual Relationships
Over time, familiarity can make sex routine or worse, non-existent. But throwing some novelty into the mix, adding new experiments and adventures, exploring new approaches to desire, or fulfilling longstanding but not yet spoken fantasies, can revive relationships that are getting too comfortable and bring sex back to life.
7. You Become a Better Lover
Learning to get in touch with your own fantasies, being open to trying new things, being willing to experiment with a lover to fulfill their desires, learning the necessary skills to play out the kinks and fetishes that satisfy them, growing in communication skills, getting more imaginative and creative in bed—all of these go miles towards making you a better lover.
8. Relieves Boredom
Whether it is boredom in bed, or general boredom in life, such as bored with your job or bored from lockdowns, seeking out a new experience and new expressions of intimacy can rescue you from monotony.
Read: 10 Ideas for Kinky Quickies
9. Pain Management
Sexual pleasure in general, including orgasm, help distract the body from pain and give alternate sensations to pain, allowing people experiencing pain temporary or lasting relief. Whether the pain is temporary or chronic, caused by injury or by conditions like arthritis or fibromyalgia and more, sex can help us cope.
BDSM sex has added benefits in the pain picture. Experiencing pain and experimenting with pain thresholds releases healing endorphins. It also teaches the body that pleasure and pain can co-mingle, rather than an either/or scenario. BDSM can be instrumental in helping us find a way to manage and cope with pain physically and psychologically.
10. Better Mental Health
All of these improvements that kinky sex can impact in trust, communication, sexual frequency and variety, satisfaction, pleasure, stress relief, pain management and more yield major benefits for mental health and happiness overall.
Study after study shows that kinky lovers in general and with BDSM sex in particular show fewer neurotic behaviors and greater happiness and satisfaction in life. Many BDSM lovers report simply that having an outlet and expression for their issues means they don’t manifest stress and dissatisfaction in other ways, and they are more confident and relate better to others.
Read: 4 Places to Meet Kinky Women
Does BDSM and kinky sex play a role in your relationship?
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