There’s something I don’t understand. I see these articles all the time about how women pretend to have a headache, or pretend to be asleep in order to get out of having sex with their husband. Am I missing something!? I have never done this. If I don’t feel like having sex, I tell my husband that I don’t feel like having sex. But more often than not, he already knows if I feel like it or not, and doesn’t push the issue enough for me to even have to say that. And more often than that, I want to have sex! I enjoy having sex with my husband. I know that’s not an approved 1950’s thing to say, but come on… it’s 2017! I like having sex with my husband. I initiate sex with my husband. 

Here’s the other thing. I’ve never faked an orgasm…with my husband that is. Ever. One, it’s OK if it doesn’t happen every time. Two, we both know my body well enough at this point that we know how to make it happen every time. We take the time to make it happen because it’s important to both of us. Why on earth would I fake an orgasm? How about this instead. Let’s include our husbands so they know how to make it happen.

I just find these two ideas (trying to get out of sex, and faking orgasms), to be so detrimental to women. It’s almost like we are conditioned to act like this. It’s unfair to us, and it’s unfair to our husbands.

Can you imagine if your husband faked a headache, or faked an orgasm? How would that make you feel? It would make me feel pretty lousy, and it would be pretty clear to me that our communication sucked. Instead of having sex we should be talking and working out our trust issues.

We should be working on respecting one another more, not making the other person feel bad about not wanting to have sex, being more understanding, and even being more selfless and having sex for the sake of our partners depending on the circumstance. There’s compromise with everything in a relationship- including sex, and we should have the decency to be able to talk to our partners about it. We should know our partners well enough that once we feel the waters, we gently back off if we can tell it’s not the time. We should be honest enough to just say we aren’t in the mood, and accepting enough for that to be OK. 

And can we please stop teaching women that they should dislike sex? Sex can be amazing for women if we let it. If we don’t condition our daughters to think they should dislike it by telling them to fake reasons to get out of it, or fake orgasms. We should encourage women to know their bodies well enough that they can teach their husband’s how to satisfy them. And we should be upfront about what the true expectation of an orgasm should be.

Why is it that we don’t find out until our 30’s that it’s rare for women to have orgasms with vaginal stimulation alone? We go for a good chunk of our sexual lives thinking there is something wrong, when in fact most women struggle with this. Why do we have to wait to learn these things until we’ve already gone through the most embarrassing and unsure moments of our lives?

Let’s stop making excuses and faking things, and let’s start talking. It’s starts with women. Women talking to women. Mom’s talking to daughters. Let’s raise our daughters to actually know their bodies and be comfortable with their sexuality.