Is it okay not to orgasm? Friends think I’m enduring bad sex

Dear Roe,

I’m a 34 year old woman and I have been with my husband for eight years. I still have a lot of single friends and love them dearly, and consider myself sex-positive. But I find myself feeling a bit alienated by their conversations about sex and the singular focus on orgasms and pleasure above all.

My husband and I have an enjoyable and active sex life, I do often orgasm and I have no complaints in that area. But my husband and I do occasionally have sex when I’m not very turned on, and where I don’t have an orgasm – and that’s fine!

Sex is still enjoyable, I’m happy to connect with my husband, and sometimes sex has a different priority. But my friends look down on this type of sex – and they way they talk about sex and orgasms makes me feel judged for not always pushing for multiple orgasms every time.

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Am I missing something? Are they right? Or can you help me articulate why I’m not simply enduring bad sex with my husband?

The aim of every friendship between married people and single people is for neither party to turn into either the patronising “You’ll Understand When You’re Married” type, or the pitying “Marriage Is The End Of Excitement” type. It’s wonderful that you and your single friends are still close, and now that you’re having different experiences of romance, it’s important that you keep celebrating each other.

Some of the tension you may be experiencing here might be about intention. It doesn’t sound like your friends have explicitly criticised your sex life, and they may not realise that the way they criticise orgasm-free sex is making you and your marriage feel judged. This is something you can absolutely raise with them, and if they are good friends, they’ll want to hear your perspective and ensure that they’re not hurting you.

Sex without an orgasm is fine, and if you choose that, of course that's a legitimate choice. But for many women, it's not a choice. It's their only option.

I think it is important to contextualise your friends’ attitudes and conversations around sex – and other discourse around sex that emphasises the importance of women experiencing pleasure and orgasms. These conversations may seem singular to you because you’re lucky to be in a culture and social circle that is allowed to focus on the importance of orgasm – but these conversations are far from singular, and they’re also incredibly new.

Women are still criticised and judged and shamed for having any kind of sex, let alone for asking that sex be pleasurable for them. While sex education for young people will mention erections and ejaculation, it rarely if ever mentions clitoral or vulva-based pleasure or orgasm, so that young people still grow up believing that sexual pleasure during sex is all about the experiences of people with penises.

Your friends – and many people who talk about sex, myself included – will often focus on the importance of orgasms because the ability to do so without facing social judgment is a brand new privilege that deserves celebration, is not as common as you think, and because frankly, more people need to get on board, so if we empower and educate some more people along the way, super.

Essentially, some women’s newfound ability to expect sex to be pleasurable for them and to openly express that is about recalibrating a historical attitude towards sex that has completely overlooked and even policed our pleasure. Sex without an orgasm is fine, and if you choose that, of course that’s a legitimate choice. But for many women, it’s not a choice. It’s their only option. It might be helpful to frame your friends’ conversations as trying to advocate for that sense of normalisation and recalibration, not judgment.

But sex that doesn't start out with ripping-clothes-off levels of lust and desire, but is still enthusiastic, consensual and enjoyable, does of course exist

The same goes for them discussing sex that occurs when one person isn’t very turned on. Unfortunately, many people have experienced being pressured, coerced or even assaulted by people who claimed the unwilling partner would “enjoy it eventually”, which is why conversations about enthusiastic consent are so important.

But sex that doesn’t start out with ripping-clothes-off levels of lust and desire, but is still enthusiastic, consensual and enjoyable, does of course exist. That’s because mutually shared lust is merely one reason that people have sex.

In fact, in a study by Cindy Meston and David Buss, they report 237 reasons that men and women cite for having sex – and not all of these were to do with sexual desire. The reasons ranged from “I wanted to show my affection to the person” and “I wanted to express my [emotional] love to the person” to “I was afraid to say no”.

Even in these examples it is clear that there’s a huge difference in the motivations behind these reasons – wanting to evoke positive feelings and connection in a sexual relationship is a positive reason, while being coerced, pressured or trying to avoid negative consequences is a negative reason. The latter is why the idea of enthusiastic consent states that consent must be freely given; you must be excited to say “yes” and not scared to say “no”.

Researchers Amy Muise, Emily Impett and Serge Desmarais examined people’s motivations for having sex, and divided these reasons into two categories: approach goals and avoidance goals.

Approach goals essentially refer to having sex with your partner to experience or provoke something positive. Examples could include, “I want to feel close to my partner.” Avoidance goals refer to having sex with your partner to avoid experiencing or provoking a negative feeling. Examples could include, “I wanted to prevent my partner from getting angry with me.”

Researchers discovered that when people had sex for approach reasons, they felt more sexually and emotionally satisfied – even if they didn’t have a huge amount of purely sexual desire before and during the sex. In contrast, when people had sex for avoidance reasons, they reported being less sexually and emotionally satisfied.

It sounds like when you and your husband have sex without feeling overwhelmed with lust, you’re still having sex for approach reasons, and sex is about experiencing, communicating and expressing positive emotions, and these benefits can feel worth not always having an orgasm.

You can explain this to your friends and express that you appreciate and share their desire for women to feel comfortable in their desire for pleasurable sex – and because of this, you feel that all of your reasons for wanting sex and connection are respected within your marriage, physical and emotional fulfilment included. But you can also explain that sex can be used to express a range of desires, emotions and connections, and thus the reasons for having sex can be varied – and that you’d like them to respect this, too.

[ Roe McDermott ]

If you have a problem or query you would like her to answer, you can submit it anonymously at irishtimes.com/dearroe. Only questions selected for publication can be answered.