I have been with my partner for three years and we have, in my view, a very good and active sex life. However, he’s become obsessed with the idea with we should have simultaneous orgasms.
Now I feel that every time we’re in bed, he’s trying to get us synchronised — and the more I feel under pressure to time my orgasm to his, the harder I find it to take pleasure in what we’re doing.
I’ve even faked an orgasm once to try to keep him happy. How on earth can I get him to relax?
Hollywood has a lot to answer for, doesn’t it? All too often in films you see two people panting away to some tightly choreographed peak of ecstasy, as if this were the normal state of things.
You never see any blockbuster heroine say to her beloved: ‘Hang on a minute, you may have popped your cork, but I haven’t — don’t you dare roll over and go to sleep!’
It’s no wonder that back here in the real world, many people feel insecure if they don’t experience coordinated climaxes.
A straw poll of 12 women I know suggests that simultaneous orgasms — while not quite as rare as unicorns — aren’t all that common (and often get less frequent with age).
Only two of my respondents said they experienced the phenomenon with any frequency.
Another said she had found it quite easy to time her orgasm to her partner’s in her early 30s, when she says she felt ‘at my sexual peak’, but almost impossible since having children. A couple of the women said they had found it easier to coordinate peaks with particular partners and not with others, but it didn’t always mean the sex was better.
One friend had found herself in a similar situation to yours. She said one man she dated in her 20s viewed sex as a failure if they didn’t reach orgasm at the same time.
The problem was that they had experienced simultaneous climaxes in the early weeks of dating and, when the pattern didn’t continue, he thought something was wrong.
Their time together was dogged by his quest for movie-perfect sex.
She says: ‘We would be making love and he’d keep staring at me and asking me how close I was to coming. It made me really tense — I felt like a failure for not meeting his expectations.
‘Eventually, I started faking my orgasms. He was happier and I felt miserable.’
She says her romantic confidence was dented until she met her husband, who had ‘no hang-ups whatsoever about that sort of thing’. Interestingly, once there was no pressure about timing she did sometimes experience the elusive twinned sexual peak.
It’s clear you need to talk to your partner outside the bedroom, when emotions aren’t running so high. The question here is what has made him feel that synchronised climaxes are so vital? Perhaps they were a feature of a previous relationship and he’s come to believe that they’re vital for good sex?
No two women peak in the same way (some don’t have orgasms at all, so much as a pleasurable plateau of sensation) and he needs to understand that.
It’s also quite possible he has been influenced by pornography. Rare is the man who has never seen a blue movie, and some develop unrealistic expectations from scenes where trigger-happy porn stars climax on cue. Why? Because they’re faking it and the whole thing’s a fraud.
You need to explain gently to your partner that you feel you’re being held up to some golden standard that doesn’t exist.
He needs to understand his expectations are making you tense and unhappy in bed. You would be wise to confess to having faked an orgasm, even if the knowledge hurts him in the short term. He needs to know you truly are under duress, and it will be salutary for him to consider that previous girlfriends might have faked climaxes, too.
The biggest downside of faking orgasms is that men think they have pushed some kind of magic button when they haven’t. They then become perplexed when they try to repeat the process to no effect.
If any of what you say makes your partner cross, point out the only problem here is that you are both striving far too hard to make each other happy.
Give him credit for being an old‑fashioned romantic, who passionately wants you to find twinned rapture.
There are plenty of people in this world who selfishly take their own pleasure in bed and don’t give a fig about their lover’s satisfaction.
Thank heavens he isn’t one of them. He just needs to relinquish his goals and relax; then he’ll recognise that’s the only way of stumbling into sexual serendipity. Erotic love can’t work to a plan.
Remind him that the great virtue of the ‘your turn, my turn’ model of sex is that one lover can give their entire concentration to the other’s climax. Nor should partners worry if just one lover (or neither) has an orgasm.
There are no rules when it comes to sex — we just need to unshackle ourselves from a couple of myths.
source: www.dailymail.co.uk
Posted in: sexual health