I was engaged to be married when I was 25. Things didn’t work out and we called off the wedding a month before our date. The breakup had left me devastated, lacking any self-esteem or self worth. I had walked around a very lonely and sad girl for three years when I started dating a guy that I really liked. He was good looking, funny, successful and made me feel alive for the first time in years. He felt like a gift and I was determined to make things work out with him.

I had never had an orgasm although I enjoyed sex a great deal. I lacked the trust and confidence to get to that next level. I didn’t mind because to me, sex was really for the man’s enjoyment any way. I faked it with every man I had been with. I felt like it was more important that the guy I was with felt like "a man" than it was that I felt like "a woman" and had an orgasm.

Me and my new man started to have sex. He also had some sexual hang-ups. He was unable to receive oral sex and couldn’t really get into sex or feel it if he wasn’t ramming it in. We generally did not engage in foreplay and would usually skip right to the most painful and hammering sex I have ever experienced. I was so intent on pleasing him and keeping the relationship that the more he pounded me, the more I acted like I liked it. My moaning actually encouraged him to go further making the experience more and more painful. There were times I would close my eyes and try to send my mind out to another place-anywhere less painful. We would always end our sessions with me having one of my incredible faked screaming orgasms.

He was waling around feeling happy, satisfied and accomplished sexually. It was a different story for me. After sex with him, I would ALWAYS get a painful infection and would have trouble sitting down or going to the bathroom for days. I continued on with this for about 4 months. I constantly lied to him about my pleasure afraid that if I put myself first or was anything less than a pleaser, he would leave. The ironic part to all of this is that in the end, I broke up with him. My body could not take anymore of the punishment I was bringing to it. My attempt to keep the relationship no matter what was killing me.

I can't blame him for the pain I went through. He was under the assumption that I was satisfied with our sex. The bottom line is that I did not love myself or honor my body enough to communicate that I had needs that were not being met. I believed that men were somehow better than me, and I didn’t matter. My body, my sex was not equal to that of a man. Even in positive sex with other men, I never felt like it was OK to talk about what I wanted or even that it was OK for me to have wants.

This was the last man that I faked an orgasm with. Over the last few years, I have been honest with my lovers and myself. I still haven’t had an orgasm, but I have gotten closer than every before. Also my days of painful, hurtful sex are over.