Book Day 29 - Skill Issues, Learning to say no, learning to say yes to your body
This is the day before the last day of writing about the book in this manner. My priority now would be to add things that I might miss, that I might actually want to expand on in the next stage.
In this blog post, I will include a number of Skill Issues a person can work on.
Skill Issue - Learning to Say No
There is a special kind of nausea that happens right before you say no to someone you like.
It is a very stupid nausea, in that your body cannot tell the difference between “I am about to be a little bit honest about my limits” and “I am about to throw my whole life into the sea.”
Part of the issue is that your body cannot tell the difference between a Local no, and a Global no
One of the big mistakes in extended intimacy is treating every local boundary as if it were a global stance.
“I don’t want to do this tonight” becomes “I can’t be the person you need me to be,” and then everybody panics and starts negotiating for their entire future on the basis of one evening.
You can watch this happen in real time:
Someone says, “I don’t think I can go to that party.”
The other person hears, “You don’t support my lifestyle, you don’t trust me, we want different things, this will never work.”
The local no becomes a global apocalypse.
Because this is a way that things can get intense quickly, learning to say no and hear no can have disproportionate benefit.
Why saying no is so hard (especially for someone who likes you)
People talk a lot about how hard it is to ask for what you want. They talk less about how hard it is to refuse what someone you love wants from you.
If your partner likes you, they do not wake up in the morning excited to say no and disappoint you.
Things that make saying no harder:
Power dynamics: money, age, experience, gender; the more you have, the more “no” feels like treason upward.
Being new to the scene: your newbie is still learning what they are “supposed” to be okay with, versus where they are supposed to make their preferences explicit.
This is why “maybe” so often actually means “no, but I am still auditioning for the role of Cool Girlfriend / Chill Boyfriend / Enlightened Partner, so give me a second while I dissociate.”
Hearing no without eating glass
Hearing no well can be its own kink, and almost nobody practices it on purpose.
But you can practice it on purpose.
You’ve probably met a guy who keeps asking you for sexy things, pushing things a bit too far, sees you squirm, and get shy, and he gets a big cheshire grin.
You don’t want to be that guy.
Or you’ve met a woman who keeps asking you to do things. Bring me the cup. Bring me the purse. Get me a muffin. Make me a coffee.
And you do some of the things, and not the others. And she doesn’t really care.
Both of these people get off on power, in some way. The yeses give them pleasure more than the nos give them despair.
You don’t have to ball that hard, but you can ball a little harder than you currently do.
You can play a game where you ask for things for 5 minutes straight, and your partner is just supposed to say no to everything. That gets your nervous system used to hearing no.
Then you ask what they’d actually want to say yes to, and you’d get pleasant surprises.
You don’t actually know what you will get a no to. Only asking when you assume the answer is yes, makes the other person saying no so much higher stakes for both them and for you.
A few rules of thumb:
A no does not mean you failed. It is data about what will work. If that thing won’t work, something else might.
Treat the first no as data about your partner’s nervous system, or their current preferences, not as a failed sales call.
When someone says no, and you start a back and forth — people think they are negotiating; what they are actually doing is teaching the other person that a no will be cross‑examined until it changes course. If every no becomes a twenty‑minute courtroom drama, your partner will stop reporting their limits and start reporting what will keep the peace. Even if a person says no, you still want to yes-and their no, or use that as the start of something better.
If your partner never says no, you might want to talk to them about this. From the outside, this may look like “they never set boundaries.” From the inside, it may feel like “there is no way to set a boundary that does not become the main event of the evening.”
Designing a solid no
One of the most important pieces of infrastructure you can have is a shared understanding of what counts as a solid no.
What I mean is not “feeling out the vibe” or “taking the hint” or “I was kind of hoping you’d notice my micro‑flinch.” An actual protocol.
A solid no usually means:
You both know the words or signals that mean “this is a hard stop, not a negotiation opener.”
Those words end the thing immediately; post‑mortems happen later, not while someone’s nervous system is on fire.
If you blow through an agreed solid no “just this once,” you do not just make a small mistake; you make the category “no” less real in your relationship.
After that, your partner is no longer deciding, “Do I want this?” They are deciding, “Do I want the fight that comes with trying to stop this?” And very often, they do not and they let themselves get wrecked in some really intense way, and then have to handle it in some intense way.
Whose job is it to enforce the no?
There is a popular script that says, “Your boundaries are your job.” There is also reality, where some people barely know what a boundary is yet.
If you are the more experienced partner, you have picked a newbie who has not spent the last ten years in consent workshops; you cannot then be shocked that they don’t know how to scream “pineapple” at the right moment.
You can help by:
Teaching them how to set their limits farther in than their actual breaking point, so they don’t go give‑give‑give‑snap.
Taking inventory of existing power dynamics (money, housing, community, age, social circle) so you can discount their “yes” appropriately and take their small, embarrassed “um” more seriously than your own enthusiasm.
The point is not to infantilize your partner. The point is to notice how what they say maps to what they are feeling, before you accidentally trample on their no because you assumed that they are bold in one area, they are bold in another area. A lot of people with unique boldness also have unique shyness.
Maybe means no (for now)
“Maybe” is doing a lot of quiet work in extended intimacy.
Sometimes it means “I want to want this, but my body is not caught up yet.” Sometimes it means “I intellectually agree, but my trauma has not been consulted.” Sometimes it just means “I am tired.”
One policy that makes life gentler:
Treat “maybe” as a default no in practice, and as a “let’s check again later” in spirit.
Build a culture where curiosity about the maybe is allowed (“What would make this feel safer?”) but the action still defaults to no until both people are clearly, spontaneously at yes.
You will lose some experiences this way. You will gain a partner who believes you when you say “Your limits matter more to me than any particular story I want to live through.”
And once someone really believes that, their yes tends to get much bigger.
Skill Issue - Learning to listen to your body
There are moments when your body knows something long before your philosophy does.
You are saying all the correct poly words. You are nodding at the correct ethical nonmonogamy memes. You are explaining “desires towards” and “desires away.” And somewhere under the table, your foot is doing a small earthquake.
At some point, extended intimacy stops being a philosophy problem and becomes a proprioception problem. Can you feel what is happening in there, or not.
When your nervous system disagrees with your mouth
Some people have a lot of practice ignoring their bodies.
Think about it. If you’ve done sports in school, you’ve been yelled at by a coach to do stuff that might have been too hard. You learn to override hunger, override exhaustion. You probably ended up at parties that you really wanted to leave, but your friends were driving and so you had to put up and shut up and wait until the driver is ready.
In negotiations, this shows up as:
Saying “yes” while your shoulders crawl up and your jaw locks.
Calling something “just feelings” while your stomach prepares for impact.
On paper, you might be consenting. In your nervous system, you are in Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn.
Listening to your body is the skill of noticing what you are doing before you rebrand it as something else to make other people happy.
Fortunately there are tons of practices you can do with tantra or with kink to expand your awareness of your own body, so that you get the training in to notice what your body is doing while having fun.
The tiny sensations are the early warnings
People wait for big panic to count as data.
By the time you are sobbing in a bathroom at a party, the interesting information was already available several hours earlier, when you felt a something and overrode it, or tried to talk to your partner about it and they ignored it.
Some early signals:
A very specific tiredness that appears right when a conversation turns toward certain topics.
A “fuzziness” in your head when you try to imagine a scenario you are supposedly okay with.
Your body going stiff
You can get better at noticing these things.
Going into your body on purpose
“Go into your body” is one of those phrases that sounds poetic and useless until you give it a job.
In practice, it can be extremely literal and boring: you pause the meta‑conversation about values and check what your actual physical organism is doing in real time.
You can ask:
What are my hands doing right now? Are they relaxed, gripping, picking at something.
What is my breath doing? Am I breathing all the way down, or am I doing little high sips.
Where, exactly, does this conversation land—throat, chest, gut, back of neck.
Am I already dissociating.
If the answer is “I feel fine, but my body feels like it is bracing for a fall,” you believe the body first.
Listening to your body as a team sport
The fantasy is that each person should perfectly self‑advocate, have immaculate boundaries, and show up to the relationship with a laminated list of “Things My Nervous System Likes.”
The reality is: your newbie often cannot hear their body yet, especially under the pressure of pleasing you, keeping you, or passing your tests.
If you are the more experienced partner, part of your job is:
Noticing when their words and their body are out of phase (bright yes, flat affect, micro‑freeze).
Treating their fidgeting, silence, or sudden politeness as information, not as them “being confusing.”
“Listening to your body” becomes “listening to the bodies in the room.” Your nervous system and theirs are both data sources about what the relationship can actually hold right now.
Maybe, overwhelm, and slowing the dance
“What may you yourself find overwhelming?”
You are not above this.
You can be the advanced practitioner and still have your own nervous system capsized by the first time you actually see your partner do the thing you said you were okay with in theory.
Listening to your body as a skill means:
Expecting overwhelm as a normal part of the dance, not as evidence of moral failure.
Allowing the relationship to move slower than your philosophy, so that your cells have time to catch up with your takes.
Every time you let your body register, “This is too fast,” and you actually slow down, you are teaching yourself that your sensations are allowed to exist without blowing up the mythos.
And then you can have fun in those periods and linger in the slower thing, treat it like a tantra exercise.