By Dan Savage - Apr. 11, 2024

I was told you help women who feel shame about their orgasms. I’ve been in my relationship for five years and always had difficulty orgasming. About a year ago, I had an affair during a manic episode. I hardly remember any of it, but it haunts me every day. 

It doesn’t help that my boyfriend constantly brings up the affair when we have sex. He knows two solid ways to make me orgasm, but he focuses instead on two ways I have a hard time orgasming and gets very angry when I don’t. When I tell him that it’s just my body, he brings up the affair and angrily says I was able to orgasm these ways with a stranger. I now feel anxious to have the big O as fast as humanly possible and try to guide him to do what feels best and even show him how to do it. But it always ends in an argument about how I orgasmed doing these things with someone else. We’ve had this fight at least three times a week for the last eleven months. 

Now I feel like my vagina is broken. He says it’s because I’ve had too much sex and accuses me of preferring sex with strangers and then starts berating himself for being too small. 

I’ve had many successful orgasms with him from penetrative and oral sex. I don’t understand why I can’t from his hand or when he’s behind me, and those are the only ways he cares about. Can you help me? 

— Feeling Increasingly Broken Somehow 

You don’t have any trouble getting off during sex — you’re fully orgasmic even during PIV alone! — your boyfriend has decided to ignore what he knows works for you and the gentle feedback you give him during sex. 

Instead, he’s choosing to do what he knows doesn’t work and then throwing mean-spirited tantrums about the size of his dick and the regrettable affair you had during a mental health crisis. (An affair you told him entirely too much about! He didn’t need to know exactly how you got off.) 

He’s not having sex with you to reconnect after the affair or even just for sex’s sake: He’s having sex with you to control and punish you. He’s intentionally setting you up for failure because wants to throw this affair in your face again and again and again. 

Yes, you had an affair and, yes, that was wrong. But if he can’t forgive you and get past it, FIBS, he has no place in your life, your bed, your vagina or your mouth. 

P.S. You aren’t broken — not yet. But longer you stay in this hell of a relationship, the likelier you are to start having the problem you’re worried about, i.e., difficulty climaxing. DTMFA: dump the motherfucker already. 

P.P.S. Some people insist on being told everything in the wake of an affair. But telling the person you cheated on everything — or extracting everything from the person you cheated on — is the relationship equivalent of salting the earth. Everything withers and dies, and nothing new grows. 

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