Last night, I asked my partner to make herself come.
“Just lie beside me,” I suggested; “and do it very quietly and slowly, under the covers. I used to like it when you did that – I’d get very excited….”
“Ok,” she agreed, and licked her fingers. She laughed: “But I don’t know what you liked, though, because I wasn’t doing it.”
“Never mind,” I whispered back; “I enjoyed it, anyway.”
And then we stopped talking and concentrated on the steadily increasing tempo of one another’s breathing.
I’ve had a lot of solo shows over the years – not more than most men have had hot dinners, or anything like that – but quite a few. I’m not like the Graham/James Spader character in Sex, Lies and Videotape, you understand. It was never a single-minded obsession, or something I needed instead of any other sexual act; but it’s something which I do find exciting, in common with other sexual acts.
I think my interest in women wanking started in a very natural way: at the time, I wanted to find my partner’s missing sex-life, and I didn’t know where else to look. We’d once had loads of really great sex; but it had become increasingly sporadic and lacklustre. I knew she wasn’t getting much sex from me any more - and since she didn’t go out, I didn’t see how she could be getting it from anyone else. It seemed logical to wonder whether she was getting it from herself.
In retrospect, I understand that she had lost her mojo, big time. She hadn’t gone off me, or gone off sex – she’d gone off Life, with a big ‘L’. This is hardly the place to get into it, but whatever demons she was fighting in those difficult years, they did not leave her the energy or inclination to enjoy any of life’s pleasures – friends, family, food, fashion, fitness, frivolity – or indeed, any kind of fun at all. Fucking was just one of them.
When you’re in the middle of that experience, it’s harder to be quite so philosophical about it. We’re not talking about someone who’s ill, where you wait for them to get better; we’re talking about a state of mind, which went on and on and on and on. Throughout this time, I like to think I continued to be loving, supportive and committed, but after a couple of years, I did begin to wonder whether I’d ever recover my partner from the dim places in which she languished; or whether I would, like Orpheus, finally lose her to them. Even in brief spells when she was more like her old self, I think it’s fair to say that I remained fairly desperate regarding the question of whether I’d ever again get to experience any love or laughter in my life, let alone passion.
I’m not on my own in this predicament. Given a natural reticence in this area of life, and my my fairly limited circle of acquaintance, it's incredible that I’ve known two women who’ve found themselves involuntarily celibate while in long-term relationships. Fuck knows what sort of weird inner struggle was going on in their partners’ lives in order to disable their libido – I can’t say – but I do know we’re talking about literally years of enforced near-celibacy; so perhaps I wasn’t doing so badly, after all.
In those months, those years, I’d have given anything to have discovered some sign, some evidence of a positive desire in her. And not necessarily for myself – I’d have welcomed any positive want, any demand at all, however outré, and happily tried to meet it – even if it was merely to be separate from me. I sincerely believe I would rather have had her happy with someone else, than miserable with yours truly; if I was the problem. I loved her and wanted her happiness – and whatever she wanted, anything, I felt, would be better than this corrosive, enervating anomie.
I know this is all serious stuff to deal with and you’d think that while you did so, your todger could take a rain cheque. That’s how it seems to work in books and films; where thoughtful, sensitive chaps agonise and emote and act supportive, and never seem to need a wank. But it’s bollocks, isn’t it? In real life, your todger doesn’t know anything about taking time out, or whether it’s appropriate or not. Hell, it’s been making trouser tents at extremely inappropriate moments since you were thirteen! It’s on duty all the time, it’s on a mission of its own. It doesn’t get depressed. It doesn’t feel ambivalent. It just wonders when you’re going to stop being such a drag and give it some pussy. You can try not to think about it, by day; but at night, it’s another story: you might get away with going to bed in a fairly relaxed state; only to wake up with something attached to you, which feels like it’s about to nudge you under your chin, like those grotesque Beardsley drawings for Lysistrata.
So while our acknowledged sexual relationship limped on in fits and starts, with me feeling unloved, unattractive and old, I suppose I imagined a compensatory, virtual sex life: one where my partner was a repressed slut, giving in to her own desires privately; yet for some reason, unable to tell me what turned her on. Why fantasise about your own wife, I hear you say; are you mad? What on earth’s wrong with internet porn? Well, my wife, with whom I’d had a good time in the past, was a real, live woman, whom I fancied; albeit one who was near-terminally depressed. While internet porn, on the other hand, isn’t really much fun, is it? In fact, as far as I can tell, it’s almost entirely comprised of stoical (but hopefully reimbursed) young women, having their faces wanked on by ugly men who don’t expend much effort on fitness or grooming. It can actually be quite a fun thing to do, so I resent people making it seem so boring.
Porn appears to offer you everything – except the one thing you want – reciprocated desire. (Perhaps the men are deliberately ugly in hetero porn as a sign that female desire is irrelevant? Having their desire denied in this way, it’s no surprise some women prefer gay porn, because at least the men are fit, handsome and well-groomed, with good-looking cocks). All sorts of things go on in porn, but it isn’t serious about them; they’re window dressing, a distraction, a minority interest. What it is serious about, is the facial. Even my lover – a cock-sucker extraordinaire – who genuinely gets off on spunk (another story), doesn’t always want a face full of it, by any means. Yet in pornworld every single woman apparently always eschews every other kind of satisfaction in favour of this one act. And they don’t even want it in their mouths, apparently – the cum-shot requires visibility - to reassure the viewer that pleasure was genuinely achieved. But it's hard to imagine it was the woman’s pleasure in this particular situation.
Lots and lots of women take part – an almost infinite number – and yet there’s no point, because they’re the same, they have no individuality; something which would only be established by their particular sexuality, by the differences in their needs and desires, by the different ways they would exhibit their pleasure. (You can try so-called amateur porn in a search for female pleasure – and yes, now and then, you’ll see a woman who is genuinely getting off on diddling herself, or being fucked by two men, or whatever; and more to the point, exhibitionist enough to get off on being filmed diddling, or fucking two men, or whatever. Mostly, though, it’s just more of the same: non-professional women being paid, or persuaded by partners, to be filmed having someone wank on their face; but with the added disadvantage, that both men and women are even less attractive and take even less care of themselves than professionals.)
Now I’ve got that off my chest, I can go back to whether my partner let her fingers do the walking after bedtime, or not…... Not really, is the answer – and no one could have been more disappointed about that than me. I now see that I was only projecting my own frustration onto her – channelled into an imaginary sensuality. So I created a private sexual side to her, which for some unaccountable reason she was unable to share - hidden longings, she couldn’t, or wouldn’t articulate. Night after night, I’d lie there, feigning sleep; slowing my own breathing to a silent, even pattern (counted out like a sonnet, as it happens; 8 beats breathing in, 6 out). In this way, on the fevered brink of sleep, I would reach a state of arousal beyond excitement, where my cock developed a life of its own, twitching and pulsating and throbbing to the same quickening beat as the pulse thumping in my temples. All the while, my ears strained for the tell-tale signs of the sexual urges I imagined assailing her: fluctuations in her breathing, restless movements of her limbs, the almost imperceptible vibration of the mattress, the faint rustle of bedding disturbed by furtive movements of her hands, the soft squish of slick fingers busy in the hot, wet groove of her sex……..
I suppose that a few times, inevitably, over this period, my obsessive vigilance coincided with passing moments of unconscious arousal for her, when the erotic content of some dream briefly disturbed her slumbers enough to cause a faint moan to escape her sleeping lips, a mild tremor in a shifting limb; even perhaps the unconscious movement of a hand, responding to the urging of the dream… And however inconclusive all this might be for her, it was manna in the desert to me; usually enough to push me, helplessly, towards release. My straining cock, teased to a state of quivering hyper-sensitivity by the brush of the duvet over my swollen glans, now needed only the briefest assistance to begin a juddering ejaculation. And having built up for hours with hardly any direct stimulation, I think I’d achieved a state of tantric bliss, an all-consuming, all-body orgasm; during which my entire being seem to spurt out of me in great hot jets, one after the other, until the bed must surely be flooded, with seconds seeming to pass between the surge of each spasm, as it rose from the very root of my genitals, up towards the jerking head of my spurting cock.
And here’s a funny thing – my lover, B, experiences exactly the same intensity from such slow and covert arousal on the edge of sleep:
Actually I don't care where I masturbate, I can do it anywhere really. I'm not a bed-only girl - who is? Infact that's the last place I'm likely to be doing it, too cosy. Though it's the best place for one handed reading, obviously - and there are many times I have lain awake and quietly, slowly, masturbated, barely moving, in the darkness while someone is asleep beside me. It's exciting and addictive because you have such a powerful orgasm - and can't move - but you can't do it too often. Perhaps it's the thrill of being caught, though I would genuinely be mortified to be found out, I just can't help it.
Yet most of the time, I would be unable to reach for my cock and make those few simple movements which would have filled me with relief: for the simple reason that I was always waiting to be the witness of that imagined self-pleasuring; which my wandering thoughts, befuddled, on the very edge of unconsciousness, were absolutely sure was only minutes away. Then, before I knew it, I would finally be overcome by sleep indeed. As a result, the routine hard-on which assails most men in the morning – that cheery ‘hello’ from the little fella, which tells you you’re still alive and the world’s okay - was for me fuelled with half a night of frustrated fantasy. It was so rigid, I could have balanced my morning tea on it if I’d cared to try, or spun the saucer on it instead. If I didn’t bring myself off in the bedroom or the shower before leaving, I would go to work like an unexploded bomb.
Nowadays, I find it rather sad – though also touching, perhaps - to have harboured such extravagant fantasies about my own partner. I suppose it says something for my loyalty and commitment – not to mention my creativeness! - that I was prepared to build an elaborate fantasy around her; to magic into being some focus for my fevered, frustrated sexuality from her lack of interest.
It was, quite literally, years before I accepted the disappointing reality that what you saw was what you got. (And as it happens, what you got was further attenuated by the ordinary toll of tiredness, the demands of work and children, etc). Yet making allowance for both the long spell of depression and these constant contingencies, masked an unfortunate fact; our needs, our sexualities, were badly mismatched. It happens – and you don’t know about it when you hook up as young things and the other demands on you are so much lighter. Every night I was going to bed with a hard-on which wouldn’t shame a horse and a comatose partner. And on another part of the planet, my lover was going to bed with an aching cunt and a comatose partner:
As I said, I’ve always had to masturbate most nights……. Where, when, and what with depends what mood I’m in... I might just be bored – though that could also happen at any time, anywhere. I might be in an excitable mood, needing more time and attention.
With the benefit of hindsight, my own state of mind back then was based on an entirely false premise: I presumed that my partner’s sexual interest might, as an average human being, more or less match my own. As you can see from the insights into my lover’s sexual needs, this was a very reasonable assumption to make - yet also hopelessly inaccurate. Was there any sense at all, in twisting myself out of shape to try to get my quart into her pint pot? No – in some ways, there wasn’t - from the outside, it was a futile waste of the joy and pleasure life can offer us all. Yet I can only say it feels very different when you have years, instead of decades, of partnership under your belt, and still cherish the hope that one exclusive person will last you a whole lifetime.
And in a sense, my imaginings weren’t completely inaccurate; they simply didn’t apply to my own partner. I may have been disappointed to discover the mundane truth, around which I wrapped the coils of my own fabulous imaginings; time having merely confirmed she’s routinely a bad sleeper. But I also now know that while I fantasised about a partner who crept downstairs in the middle of the night to pleasure herself in the privacy of the darkened house, my present mistress, then unknown to me, was doing just that in reality. And to my intense personal satisfaction, she’s been happy to share her sexuality with me:
I'm not sure I have much privacy in which to masturbate, either - but I don't find it too much of a problem... Last night, for example: I went to bed after D………….. but got up again - unusually - to check something I’d forgotten to do. A couple of rude thoughts later and I'm lying on the sofa with my shorts pulled down and using the wet fingers of one hand to make myself come while another two wet fingers work on my nipples. It's late and I'm tired but I'm thinking about something really dirty, involving you - well your cock - and I was wet already, so it only seems to take seconds…..Your B
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
It’s a hot image – and information like that can go quite a long way, in a lover’s mind, feeding into your time together later. Don’t hold back, is my advice – with your hand, or your confidences – someone dear to you needs that sort of insight. And tight-lipped partners take note - after a while, they’ll just stop asking.
“Just lie beside me,” I suggested; “and do it very quietly and slowly, under the covers. I used to like it when you did that – I’d get very excited….”
“Ok,” she agreed, and licked her fingers. She laughed: “But I don’t know what you liked, though, because I wasn’t doing it.”
“Never mind,” I whispered back; “I enjoyed it, anyway.”
And then we stopped talking and concentrated on the steadily increasing tempo of one another’s breathing.
I’ve had a lot of solo shows over the years – not more than most men have had hot dinners, or anything like that – but quite a few. I’m not like the Graham/James Spader character in Sex, Lies and Videotape, you understand. It was never a single-minded obsession, or something I needed instead of any other sexual act; but it’s something which I do find exciting, in common with other sexual acts.
I think my interest in women wanking started in a very natural way: at the time, I wanted to find my partner’s missing sex-life, and I didn’t know where else to look. We’d once had loads of really great sex; but it had become increasingly sporadic and lacklustre. I knew she wasn’t getting much sex from me any more - and since she didn’t go out, I didn’t see how she could be getting it from anyone else. It seemed logical to wonder whether she was getting it from herself.
In retrospect, I understand that she had lost her mojo, big time. She hadn’t gone off me, or gone off sex – she’d gone off Life, with a big ‘L’. This is hardly the place to get into it, but whatever demons she was fighting in those difficult years, they did not leave her the energy or inclination to enjoy any of life’s pleasures – friends, family, food, fashion, fitness, frivolity – or indeed, any kind of fun at all. Fucking was just one of them.
When you’re in the middle of that experience, it’s harder to be quite so philosophical about it. We’re not talking about someone who’s ill, where you wait for them to get better; we’re talking about a state of mind, which went on and on and on and on. Throughout this time, I like to think I continued to be loving, supportive and committed, but after a couple of years, I did begin to wonder whether I’d ever recover my partner from the dim places in which she languished; or whether I would, like Orpheus, finally lose her to them. Even in brief spells when she was more like her old self, I think it’s fair to say that I remained fairly desperate regarding the question of whether I’d ever again get to experience any love or laughter in my life, let alone passion.
I’m not on my own in this predicament. Given a natural reticence in this area of life, and my my fairly limited circle of acquaintance, it's incredible that I’ve known two women who’ve found themselves involuntarily celibate while in long-term relationships. Fuck knows what sort of weird inner struggle was going on in their partners’ lives in order to disable their libido – I can’t say – but I do know we’re talking about literally years of enforced near-celibacy; so perhaps I wasn’t doing so badly, after all.
In those months, those years, I’d have given anything to have discovered some sign, some evidence of a positive desire in her. And not necessarily for myself – I’d have welcomed any positive want, any demand at all, however outré, and happily tried to meet it – even if it was merely to be separate from me. I sincerely believe I would rather have had her happy with someone else, than miserable with yours truly; if I was the problem. I loved her and wanted her happiness – and whatever she wanted, anything, I felt, would be better than this corrosive, enervating anomie.
I know this is all serious stuff to deal with and you’d think that while you did so, your todger could take a rain cheque. That’s how it seems to work in books and films; where thoughtful, sensitive chaps agonise and emote and act supportive, and never seem to need a wank. But it’s bollocks, isn’t it? In real life, your todger doesn’t know anything about taking time out, or whether it’s appropriate or not. Hell, it’s been making trouser tents at extremely inappropriate moments since you were thirteen! It’s on duty all the time, it’s on a mission of its own. It doesn’t get depressed. It doesn’t feel ambivalent. It just wonders when you’re going to stop being such a drag and give it some pussy. You can try not to think about it, by day; but at night, it’s another story: you might get away with going to bed in a fairly relaxed state; only to wake up with something attached to you, which feels like it’s about to nudge you under your chin, like those grotesque Beardsley drawings for Lysistrata.
So while our acknowledged sexual relationship limped on in fits and starts, with me feeling unloved, unattractive and old, I suppose I imagined a compensatory, virtual sex life: one where my partner was a repressed slut, giving in to her own desires privately; yet for some reason, unable to tell me what turned her on. Why fantasise about your own wife, I hear you say; are you mad? What on earth’s wrong with internet porn? Well, my wife, with whom I’d had a good time in the past, was a real, live woman, whom I fancied; albeit one who was near-terminally depressed. While internet porn, on the other hand, isn’t really much fun, is it? In fact, as far as I can tell, it’s almost entirely comprised of stoical (but hopefully reimbursed) young women, having their faces wanked on by ugly men who don’t expend much effort on fitness or grooming. It can actually be quite a fun thing to do, so I resent people making it seem so boring.
Porn appears to offer you everything – except the one thing you want – reciprocated desire. (Perhaps the men are deliberately ugly in hetero porn as a sign that female desire is irrelevant? Having their desire denied in this way, it’s no surprise some women prefer gay porn, because at least the men are fit, handsome and well-groomed, with good-looking cocks). All sorts of things go on in porn, but it isn’t serious about them; they’re window dressing, a distraction, a minority interest. What it is serious about, is the facial. Even my lover – a cock-sucker extraordinaire – who genuinely gets off on spunk (another story), doesn’t always want a face full of it, by any means. Yet in pornworld every single woman apparently always eschews every other kind of satisfaction in favour of this one act. And they don’t even want it in their mouths, apparently – the cum-shot requires visibility - to reassure the viewer that pleasure was genuinely achieved. But it's hard to imagine it was the woman’s pleasure in this particular situation.
Lots and lots of women take part – an almost infinite number – and yet there’s no point, because they’re the same, they have no individuality; something which would only be established by their particular sexuality, by the differences in their needs and desires, by the different ways they would exhibit their pleasure. (You can try so-called amateur porn in a search for female pleasure – and yes, now and then, you’ll see a woman who is genuinely getting off on diddling herself, or being fucked by two men, or whatever; and more to the point, exhibitionist enough to get off on being filmed diddling, or fucking two men, or whatever. Mostly, though, it’s just more of the same: non-professional women being paid, or persuaded by partners, to be filmed having someone wank on their face; but with the added disadvantage, that both men and women are even less attractive and take even less care of themselves than professionals.)
Now I’ve got that off my chest, I can go back to whether my partner let her fingers do the walking after bedtime, or not…... Not really, is the answer – and no one could have been more disappointed about that than me. I now see that I was only projecting my own frustration onto her – channelled into an imaginary sensuality. So I created a private sexual side to her, which for some unaccountable reason she was unable to share - hidden longings, she couldn’t, or wouldn’t articulate. Night after night, I’d lie there, feigning sleep; slowing my own breathing to a silent, even pattern (counted out like a sonnet, as it happens; 8 beats breathing in, 6 out). In this way, on the fevered brink of sleep, I would reach a state of arousal beyond excitement, where my cock developed a life of its own, twitching and pulsating and throbbing to the same quickening beat as the pulse thumping in my temples. All the while, my ears strained for the tell-tale signs of the sexual urges I imagined assailing her: fluctuations in her breathing, restless movements of her limbs, the almost imperceptible vibration of the mattress, the faint rustle of bedding disturbed by furtive movements of her hands, the soft squish of slick fingers busy in the hot, wet groove of her sex……..
I suppose that a few times, inevitably, over this period, my obsessive vigilance coincided with passing moments of unconscious arousal for her, when the erotic content of some dream briefly disturbed her slumbers enough to cause a faint moan to escape her sleeping lips, a mild tremor in a shifting limb; even perhaps the unconscious movement of a hand, responding to the urging of the dream… And however inconclusive all this might be for her, it was manna in the desert to me; usually enough to push me, helplessly, towards release. My straining cock, teased to a state of quivering hyper-sensitivity by the brush of the duvet over my swollen glans, now needed only the briefest assistance to begin a juddering ejaculation. And having built up for hours with hardly any direct stimulation, I think I’d achieved a state of tantric bliss, an all-consuming, all-body orgasm; during which my entire being seem to spurt out of me in great hot jets, one after the other, until the bed must surely be flooded, with seconds seeming to pass between the surge of each spasm, as it rose from the very root of my genitals, up towards the jerking head of my spurting cock.
And here’s a funny thing – my lover, B, experiences exactly the same intensity from such slow and covert arousal on the edge of sleep:
Actually I don't care where I masturbate, I can do it anywhere really. I'm not a bed-only girl - who is? Infact that's the last place I'm likely to be doing it, too cosy. Though it's the best place for one handed reading, obviously - and there are many times I have lain awake and quietly, slowly, masturbated, barely moving, in the darkness while someone is asleep beside me. It's exciting and addictive because you have such a powerful orgasm - and can't move - but you can't do it too often. Perhaps it's the thrill of being caught, though I would genuinely be mortified to be found out, I just can't help it.
Yet most of the time, I would be unable to reach for my cock and make those few simple movements which would have filled me with relief: for the simple reason that I was always waiting to be the witness of that imagined self-pleasuring; which my wandering thoughts, befuddled, on the very edge of unconsciousness, were absolutely sure was only minutes away. Then, before I knew it, I would finally be overcome by sleep indeed. As a result, the routine hard-on which assails most men in the morning – that cheery ‘hello’ from the little fella, which tells you you’re still alive and the world’s okay - was for me fuelled with half a night of frustrated fantasy. It was so rigid, I could have balanced my morning tea on it if I’d cared to try, or spun the saucer on it instead. If I didn’t bring myself off in the bedroom or the shower before leaving, I would go to work like an unexploded bomb.
Nowadays, I find it rather sad – though also touching, perhaps - to have harboured such extravagant fantasies about my own partner. I suppose it says something for my loyalty and commitment – not to mention my creativeness! - that I was prepared to build an elaborate fantasy around her; to magic into being some focus for my fevered, frustrated sexuality from her lack of interest.
It was, quite literally, years before I accepted the disappointing reality that what you saw was what you got. (And as it happens, what you got was further attenuated by the ordinary toll of tiredness, the demands of work and children, etc). Yet making allowance for both the long spell of depression and these constant contingencies, masked an unfortunate fact; our needs, our sexualities, were badly mismatched. It happens – and you don’t know about it when you hook up as young things and the other demands on you are so much lighter. Every night I was going to bed with a hard-on which wouldn’t shame a horse and a comatose partner. And on another part of the planet, my lover was going to bed with an aching cunt and a comatose partner:
As I said, I’ve always had to masturbate most nights……. Where, when, and what with depends what mood I’m in... I might just be bored – though that could also happen at any time, anywhere. I might be in an excitable mood, needing more time and attention.
With the benefit of hindsight, my own state of mind back then was based on an entirely false premise: I presumed that my partner’s sexual interest might, as an average human being, more or less match my own. As you can see from the insights into my lover’s sexual needs, this was a very reasonable assumption to make - yet also hopelessly inaccurate. Was there any sense at all, in twisting myself out of shape to try to get my quart into her pint pot? No – in some ways, there wasn’t - from the outside, it was a futile waste of the joy and pleasure life can offer us all. Yet I can only say it feels very different when you have years, instead of decades, of partnership under your belt, and still cherish the hope that one exclusive person will last you a whole lifetime.
And in a sense, my imaginings weren’t completely inaccurate; they simply didn’t apply to my own partner. I may have been disappointed to discover the mundane truth, around which I wrapped the coils of my own fabulous imaginings; time having merely confirmed she’s routinely a bad sleeper. But I also now know that while I fantasised about a partner who crept downstairs in the middle of the night to pleasure herself in the privacy of the darkened house, my present mistress, then unknown to me, was doing just that in reality. And to my intense personal satisfaction, she’s been happy to share her sexuality with me:
I'm not sure I have much privacy in which to masturbate, either - but I don't find it too much of a problem... Last night, for example: I went to bed after D………….. but got up again - unusually - to check something I’d forgotten to do. A couple of rude thoughts later and I'm lying on the sofa with my shorts pulled down and using the wet fingers of one hand to make myself come while another two wet fingers work on my nipples. It's late and I'm tired but I'm thinking about something really dirty, involving you - well your cock - and I was wet already, so it only seems to take seconds…..Your B
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
It’s a hot image – and information like that can go quite a long way, in a lover’s mind, feeding into your time together later. Don’t hold back, is my advice – with your hand, or your confidences – someone dear to you needs that sort of insight. And tight-lipped partners take note - after a while, they’ll just stop asking.
