conversations he insisted that cunnilingus was "too degrading," an assertion he made with a weird lack of irony, given that I was going down on him regularly.
As the years passed, my frustration deepened and I started thinking about experimenting more sexually, but I was terrified of mentioning it. I didn't know what I wanted to experiment with -- I really believed that I'd "already tried" BDSM, and that I didn't like it -- but his initial rejection of mere cunnilingus didn't make me feel confident.
Finally, I got to the point of directly asking for sexual experimentation, and we had the worst fight ever.
I recall that our relationship was somewhat rocky already. One of my journal entries from that time contains the sentence, "I can't seem to not make him angry when I'm trying to discuss our relationship." For this particular fight, we were sitting in his room reading when I scraped together my courage and asked for his help in figuring out my sexuality. "Well, what do you want me to do?" he demanded.
"I don't know,” I said, "but I think there must be some way to find out -- I don't know, there have to be books?"
"That's ridiculous,” he snapped. "I love you, but I'm not going to read books in order to figure out how to have sex with you."
It got worse from there. I was crying within the first few sentences. At one point, he outright shouted at me "I don't care about your satisfaction," at which point I said, "You can't mean that," and he repeated it. Eventually, I simply turned around and walked out of his room. I had nowhere to go; it was a long train ride to visit him, and the trains had stopped running that day. It was mid-winter, and freezing cold. Crying, I put on my coat and shoes and exited the house, onto his suburban street.
I walked completely at random. I was hardly able to see. Fortunately, because it was so cold, no one else was out and about. I muffled my sobs by bowing my head into my collar. After fifteen minutes, I discovered my cell phone in my pocket and tried to call my best friend, but she didn't answer. I was still walking around crying an hour later, when she returned the call.
She calmed me down and got the story out of me. It was the first she'd heard about my inability to orgasm, and she didn't know how to advise me because she didn't have the same problem. Also, it was obvious to both of us that trying to communicate with my boyfriend wasn't working. It was obvious that there might be no way to successfully communicate with him on this topic at all.
Eventually, after she'd managed to quiet me into a trembling jellylike mass, my friend said gently, "Okay, hon, you need to hang up and go back inside." She was right. So I did.
When I stepped back into my boyfriend's room, he was still reading. I could sense from the texture of our silence that he felt bad, though. I was exhausted, I felt like a stiff breeze would blow me apart, but I told myself that I had to set a line. I was sure my voice would waver as I made myself say: "If you're going to tell me that you don't care about my sexual satisfaction, then I can't do this anymore...."
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