Listening for Your Own Consent
While there are a lot of good articles on the internet about consent, I wanted to expand our framing of it as a way to honor ourselves and our connections to others. In between the “Absolutely not” and “Omg yes please” is a space that I think deserves our attention. These moments might be the times we’ve had a part of us that feels onboard, and a part that is feeling more reserved. Or the moments we leave an interaction and think to ourselves “That was fine, but I’m glad it ended. I wasn’t feeling like myself.” Although we may have been active participants in what we were doing, I believe there is value in checking in with ourselves to better honor our own consent.
The throughline of this discussion is “If you’re not sure if you have consent, then you don’t.” And notice how even that sentence centers the other person, and not ourselves inside this moment. Of course we need to be considerate of our partners' consent: listening well, not putting on pressure, looking for enthusiasm, and making sure their consent is informed and specific. And, we should also remember that we are an equal party in these moments and deserve the very same high standard of consent from ourselves. I often think we may struggle with societal beliefs of what we “should” want and then fall into common traps of expectations and societal scripts.
For those of us who find this resonating, what can we do to shift our experience? One of the first places to find change may be in examining some of the assumptions and expectations we have about who we are and what we “should” want. Oftentimes these “shoulds” come from larger societal stories or personal experiences like “people hook up on the third date,” or “if I say no to sex, my partner will think I’m upset with them.” As we can catch these assumptions, we can examine them and choose to drop or modify them to better fit who we are and what we believe.
We can also take the listening we extend to partners and check inside and listen to ourselves and our own bodies. If we are feeling some hesitation, take a moment to check in with it and see if you can get clarity on what it’s communicating to you. Perhaps that means setting a particular limit to what you’re wanting from the interaction, or it’s letting you know that the best thing to do is to not do anything at all. Any boundaries you set are valid and you don’t need to justify it to anyone.
A great practice is to set boundaries as we learn them for ourselves. If we are carrying around the expectation, and/or the lived experience of someone reacting poorly to boundaries, this can be an intimidating thing to do! But, setting boundaries tells us a lot about who our partners are. Safe partners respect boundaries. They listen, understand, and honor the limits we set. Partners who ignore, push back, coerce, or guilt us for setting limits are people we ought to be wary of and consider how to keep ourselves safe.
