Affirmation has to be self affirmation, not outside ego affirmation. It has to come from a place inside - no amount of performance or appeal will allow you to hear it unless it's already being said inside. I spent years and years looking outside, getting whole armies of people to tell me what I needed to hear inside. I believed it because it wasn't ringing with some resonance. We have to learn to love ourselves, and then the love we receive from others can get in.
Life is the greatest gift, just being is the greatest gift of all.
Once you experience that, it frees you to do all kinds of things from a place of unconditional love. Appreciate and integrate sexual play and sexual feeling of excitement and let those be signals to be more vibrantly there and present and whole in relating, rather than thinking that because there's sexual feeling that comes up there has to be intercourse. Then, once I got the feedback that they were interested, I felt I had to come across with something so that I wouldn't be just a tease. I got real bound up in that cycle. Now I see that I don't have to avoid sex to not be a tease, but that I can integrate it and just be whole, be myself.