how rushing into love is the same as rushing into sex

(and why it leaves us feeling hollow)

I thought love would find me like lightning, like a prayer finally answered. And when it didn’t, I convinced myself it was because I hadn’t prayed hard enough. Hadn’t manifested with enough devotion. Hadn’t fasted, healed, or cried the right way. So I tried harder. I did what women like me do when we believe the universe is withholding: I surrendered deeper. I whispered my needs to gods with names older than language. I flew across oceans, entered temples, asked Kali to carve a place for someone who could love me as deeply as I knew I could love. I offered my heartbreak to shamans in the Brazilian land. I let past life regressions show me why no man had stayed. I traced the ache in my chest like a pilgrimage and read every book that told me love was just a matter of readiness. And still, it didn’t come. Or rather — it came late, and I received it wrong.

By the time someone finally said, “I love you,” my body didn’t pause. It lunged. Not because I was ungrateful. But because I was starved. Four years of silence makes you forget the sound of affection. And when you don’t remember what love feels like, you mistake attention for arrival. I had been single for so long — not in the empowering, dancing-alone-in-your-kitchen way, but in the way where you reread old emails from abusive partners and realize the red flags were there the whole time, pulsing in bright crimson font, and still you didn’t see them because your eyes were trained on hope instead of harm. I was love-deprived. And when something finally resembled intimacy, I didn’t observe it. I consumed it. Quickly, desperately, without asking if my nervous system was ready. And in that consumption, I lost the very thing I had begged God for.

A medium once channeled a message to me. I didn’t know it then, but it would become the scripture that rewired my relationship to urgency. He said: “If you demand a car to go faster than traffic regulations allow, under the pretext of urgency, you undoubtedly expose yourself to disaster. If you ask a bridge to bear more weight than it is designed to carry, under the pretext of emergency, it’s likely to collapse. If you strike a plant mercilessly to tear off a fruit, under the pretext of hunger, you diminish that tree’s future potential — to your own detriment. If you lean over a well and stir up its bottom, under the pretext of thirst, you only muddy the water, making it unfit to drink.”

And I understood, maybe for the first time, that what had been granted to me wasn’t taken away — it was mishandled. Not by God. By me. I thought love would look like surrender, but I forgot that surrender includes patience. I thought desire was enough, but I didn’t know that desire, when expressed too fast, without containment, becomes destruction. I had asked for union and when it finally arrived, I met it with speed instead of stillness. I rushed, and in that rush, I broke the bridge before I could walk across it.

This is not just a story about love. It is a story about sex, too. About the men who write to me asking how they can last longer. About the shame that floods their bodies when they climax too soon, too fast, too uncontrollably. About the way no one told them that premature ejaculation isn’t a failure of stamina but a symptom of desire unmet, unprocessed, unheld. About the way we think that to master pleasure is to perform better, go longer, prove something. But traditional Tantra — the lineage I once gave my life to — taught me otherwise. It taught me that mastery is not the absence of desire, but the ability to hold it. It is the man who can feel his arousal rise like a wave and still stay in his body. It is the one who slows down when everything in him screams for speed. It is not about control. It is about trust. Trust that pleasure does not disappear when it is not rushed. Trust that God does not abandon us when we wait.

In 2025, my word of the year was observation. And I realized, with both beauty and grief, that observation is impossible in haste. You cannot witness what you are sprinting through. You cannot feel what you are devouring. And when you think you are going slow — slow down even more. Because slowness is not passivity. It is not a lack of drive. It is reverence.

I heard Teal Swan say that telling someone in the desert to “slow down” when they find water is cruel. And she’s right. When you are thirsty, you don’t sip — you gulp. When you are starved, you don’t savor — you consume. And that’s what many of us are doing when we rush into love. We are not making bad choices. We are trying to stay alive. So if you’ve rushed (into bed, into relationships, into futures that weren’t stable), please do not shame yourself. You were human. You were honest. You were responding to a system that never taught you how to hold hunger without devouring the thing that came to feed you.

And yet — if you’ve lived that once, maybe you’re ready to try something different. Maybe it’s time to ask yourself not what you want, but what pace you’re ready to meet it at. Maybe it’s time to treat your own longing like sacred fire instead of wildfire. Maybe it’s time to stop trying to consume love and learn how to sit beside it, warm your hands by it, wait for it to welcome you in.

And if you’ve ever climaxed too soon — emotionally or physically — maybe the only medicine you need is not performance enhancement or another technique. Maybe it’s breath. Maybe it’s prayer. Maybe it’s holding your own desire for five seconds longer than what feels safe. Maybe it’s letting your lover cry in your arms without trying to fix it. Maybe it’s keeping your eyes open the entire time. Maybe it’s not coming at all, and realizing you’re still whole.

You’re not broken. You’re just in a culture that never taught you how to be still with what you crave. You’re just someone who wanted to be loved so badly, you forgot to let it arrive in its own time. You’re just like me.

And maybe that’s enough.

I write these for the moments you don’t have words yet.