My Boyfriend Doesn't Care That Our Sex Life Is Incredibly Boring

Q: I've been with my boyfriend for six months, and it sounds crazy to write this down but every time I have sex with him I achieve orgasm (yes, every time), but I still don't feel sexually satisfied. We've only sexted once, and the only other spontaneous thing we've done is had impromptu car sex while in a parking garage last month. Otherwise, we just have sex in bed at the end of our dates, then fall asleep. Rather than engaging in any sort of emotional intimacy with me, it feels like sex is a box he is checking.

I've tried to approach this topic with him a few times. He said that he views sex as something you do at the end of the night in bed. I talked about how much I love having morning sex. He was never down to try. We took a walk together one time and I tried asking him about what kinds of things turn him on, or what kind of fantasies he has, and he immediately shut the conversation down. When we do have sex, it's always the same: some fondling, making out, then I am on top until I climax, then he basically falls asleep.

I brought this up on a girls trip recently, and no one seemed to understand where I was coming from. They couldn't believe that I was "complaining" when I was still having orgasms. It ended up making me feel really isolated, and I started second-guessing myself. Am I overthinking this?

A: There are so few times I want to go against Girls Trip Wisdom, but I am going to have to. In my opinion, your friends are looking at this all wrong.

To them, it seems like you ordered a burger medium rare and it came out medium.

To me, it seems like you ordered a burger and the restaurant gave you spaghetti, which is nice, but decidedly not a burger. And now everyone wants you to suck it up and eat the spaghetti and be grateful you got fed. And maybe that would be fine one time, but now it’s every night.

A lot of things can make a person orgasm. Some people climax from ab workouts. Or having to pee. Or possibly even having a baby. Having an orgasm does not mean someone had good sex. It just means their body responded to a stimulus.

I’m very vocal about detaching orgasms and good sex for this exact reason. They’re different! Yes, you can come but are you turned on? Are you excited to get it on with your partner? And, equally importantly, is he excited to have sex with you? Because frankly, this guy does not seem to be into it. He’s using you to get off in the way he likes — his timing, his routine, his preferred position. I’m not sure that your wants or needs even factor in here. He’s treating you more like a sex toy than a sex partner.

You aren’t just having meh sex, you are having meh sex with a partner who is being explicitly told how it could get better, and he does not care. At all. He doesn’t mind that you’re bored and craving more intimacy. And that — far more than the sex being mediocre — is my concern with him.

Most people have different sexual preferences than their partner, from time of day to favorite position to kinkiness level to frequency to duration. It’s incredibly unlikely for two people to match up flawlessly forever and ever. All the differences you discuss are addressable, but not with this guy! Because he doesn’t care that you’re dissatisfied! Beyond being a selfish lover, he’s actively shutting down your attempts to have a healthy, open-minded conversation about this.

You can stay with him and keep pushing this boulder up the hill — trying to talk to him about how your current sex life isn’t working for you — but I don’t think you’ll get anywhere. If he isn’t pulling out all the stops in month six to turn you on, when do you think that will happen? Year eight? When you have two kids and one of them has RSV and the other just brought a recorder home from school? No!

More broadly, this situation gives you a very clear picture of how he communicates with you, which is: he doesn’t. He isn’t interested in listening to your needs and he doesn’t care to adjust at all to make your life better. He will not compromise and he certainly isn’t mature enough to explain why. (Say, for example, he has a difficult time staying hard in the morning but nighttime works great for him. He could tell you that! But he won’t. So we have to assume he’s just an ass.)

It should, generally speaking, be easy and joyful to have fun, hot sex with a new partner. Please leave this man and find someone who is thrilled to share a sex life with you, to learn what turns you on, and to enthusiastically pursue pleasure. They’re out there, I promise.

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