I am a 30-year-old cishet woman from the Pacific Northwest. I am reaching out today about faking orgasms. I have been dating this guy for about six months and he is perfect. I love everything about him and part of that is I feel like we have great sex. The caveat is that I have never had an orgasm during sex with him and consistently fake them. I have always had a very challenging time achieving orgasm with partners, whether male or female. As it turns out, thing he loves most about sex is when his partner starts getting loud right before or during her orgasm. He doesn't just love it: it turns out that it is almost always the thing that makes him come. So, I started faking orgasms when we first started dating and hoped that things would change as we got to know each other's bodies. Now, six months later, I'm still not having orgasms -- which again, is not unusual for me during partnered sex -- but I want him to enjoy sex with me, so I've kept faking it. Even the few times where I haven't faked it, he can still cum, but he really ruminates on it. It's very clear that he doesn't have as much fun, which, for me, spoils the whole experience. I want to be clear that having an orgasm isn't the goal for myself during sex. What I love about sex is the physical intimacy, feeling close to my partner, and providing pleasure to someone I deeply care about. That's why I feel like I still intensely enjoy sex with him, despite the faking. However, as our relationship progresses, the lie is weighing on me. I can see myself marrying this guy, but I just can't get past the question: Am I going to be faking orgasms for forty years? That seems like a horrid betrayal of him. What do I do? How do I unravel this?

Future About Keeping Everything Real

There are two things I want you to do, FAKER: First, go see Babygirl -- see it alone -- and then watch some gay porn with your boyfriend.

Zooming out for a second...

I've advised partnered women who wanted to stop faking orgasms to start faking something else: getting close. After a few months of getting fake close instead of fake there, a woman can say this to her boyfriend or husband: "Something changed with my body when I hit [insert current age] and it's made my orgasms harder to achieve -- it even happens when I try on my own -- so it looks like we're going to have to experiment with some new things to get me there!"

That's a lie -- obviously -- but it's a defensible one.

Now, let the record show that I believe "I've been faking it" is something a man should be able to hear without falling apart. I also believe straight men should be able to wrap their heads around why women might fake an orgasm with new partners and then feel obligated to keep faking orgasms. (I also think men should admit that we would fake orgasms if we could.) So, while lies are generally bad, I would argue that there's a difference between a wholly self-serving lie meant to deceive and a partly self-serving lie meant to spare. Some men do feel humiliated -- some men feel betrayed -- when they're told (or they discover) that their partners have been faking orgasms, and if a small lie ("my orgasms have gotten more elusive") helps a woman back a bigger lie (months or years of faked orgasms) without hurting her partner's feelings, I will allow it.

But your issue is a different, FAKER, since your partner sulks when you don't fake an orgasm -- and thinking you're there helps get him there -- which puts you under additional pressure to keep faking it.

Reading your letter made me think of Romy, the powerful CEO played by Nicole Kidman in Babygirl. (Anyone who thinks sharing a couple of details from the first two minutes of a movie that's been out for months -- and has been widely discussed everywhere -- constitutes a "spoiler" should skip the rest of this response.) The film opens on Romy (Kidman) having sex with her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas). It looks like Romy is having an orgasm -- it looks Romy and Jacob are coming at the same time (that happens a lot in movies) -- but then we see Romy slip down the hall and into her home office, where she masturbates herself to orgasm while watching porn. The real orgasm we watch Romy have by herself (primal, grunting, animalistic) looks and sounds nothing like the fake orgasm we watched Romy perform for her husband. Later in the film (spoiler!), Jacob is devastated to learn Romy has been faking orgasms the entire time they've been together; that revelation does almost as much damage to their marriage as the affair with her hot male intern.

I think seeing Babygirl -- alone -- might inspire you to level with your boyfriend now, FAKER, instead of waiting until you've been together (and faking it) for twenty years.

As for your boyfriend's issue -- he has a hard time coming unless he thinks you're coming and sulks if you don't -- you need to google "copulatory vocalizations," share a few articles about it with your boyfriend, and then sit down to watch some gay porn together.

Copulatory vocalizations are the noises female primates make during sex; sometimes female primates make these sounds -- sometimes they howl -- because they're climaxing, sometimes female primates make these sounds because they're trying to attract other mates, and sometimes female primates make these sounds because they push male primates over the edge. (Sometimes it's all of the above.)

What your boyfriend needs -- what's already working for him -- is not your orgasms, FAKER, it's your copulatory vocalizations. And this is where gay porn comes in.

I've encouraged opposite-sex couples who wanna have simultaneous orgasms during PIV to watch gay porn and pay close attention to what the bottoms are doing in scenes where the top and bottom come at the same time: the bottoms are stroking themselves and communicating -- verbally and non-verbally -- with their tops as both approach orgasm. So, straight men who want their girlfriends or wives to come at the same time they do during PIV need to stimulate their partners' clits and/or encourage their partners to stimulate their own clits during PIV. (And any straight man who won't stimulate his partner's clit and/or discourages his partner from stimulating her own clit isn't interested in his partner coming.) And both partners need to check in with each other -- they need to communicate -- as they're getting close.

But what I want you and your partner to watch are scenes where the top comes but the bottom doesn't. If watching gay PIB turns you off -- there are a lot of closeups and anal isn't for everybody -- you can close your eyes and listen, FAKER, because it's what you and your boyfriend are gonna hear that's important: bottoms getting loud and staying loud even when they don't come. There's nothing the least bit insincere about the sounds gay bottoms make when they're getting fucked -- their copulatory vocalizations are real -- and you can see (if you open your eyes) that these sounds help push the men who are fucking them over the edge. And they're not faking it, FAKER, they're loving it. (In case you live in a red state where Republicans have made online porn harder to access, I went to the trouble of transcribing a short gay porn clip where the bottom didn't come and the top did: Top: "Your ass feels so good!" Bottom: "Your cock feels so good! Fuck me, daddy! Oh, my God! Yes! YES! Fuuuuuuuck! Fuck me! Come in me, daddy! UH! UH! UHHHH! FUCK, YEAH! YES! YES!")

Like the power bottoms in gay porn, FAKER, you should be able moan and groan and shout encouragement to your boyfriend without having to pretend you're coming -- and it's the only way to avoid having to fake orgasms for the next forty years. You have to make your boyfriend understand that your copulatory vocalizations -- even in the absence of an orgasm -- are signals of your sexual pleasure and (sigh) his sexual prowess and you're loving it just as much as, say, a locked gay bottom enjoys having his ass fucked.

If your boyfriend can wrap his head around why women sometimes fake orgasms (step one), your boyfriend should be able to wrap his head around the fact that you're already giving him everything he needs in the run-up to his orgasm (step two); even if he can't make you come during PIV, he can make you howl. And finally (step three) he needs to accept -- he needs to internalize -- that sincerely meant/felt/howled copulatory vocalizations are better than faked orgasms.

P.S. I shouldn't say men can't fake orgasms, as some men have faked orgasms. But we're less likely to, less likely to need to (men are lot less likely to have sex they don't wanna have), and a whole lot less likely to get away with it when we try (an empty condom/hole is a bit of a tell.)

Read the rest of this week's column here! And this week on the Lovecast: A divorced man is out dating and learning about tantra. A couple of women he's seen were both mothers, and although he found them attractive and his dick got hard, he couldn't come with either of them. They both blamed themselves for having changed postpartum bodies. Who is the culprit- the ladies or his dick?

On the Magnum, Dan chats with cultural historian Kelly Coyne about off-kilter domestic arrangements- married couples who live apart, stay at home dads, and married couples who sleep apart. (Spoiler: it's the snoring!) As usual, straight folks have a lot to learn from gay arrangements.