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I've deleted all my dating apps. I'm a dating columnist who has stopped dating, because my well of optimism - my belief in the point of it all - has run dry. I tried to count how many dates I went on throughout the whole of last year, and I couldn't: it was that many. Do you know what I can count, though, and on one hand? The number of orgasms another human has gave me. I can live without love. But. I cannot fathom a world without lust.
I love sex - as, obviously, a lot of us do. Time suspends, and bodies clash, and dance, and melt into each other, all at the same time. I am my body when I have sex, not my brain. Giving myself over, losing myself that way is - and I genuinely believe this, so shut up - a pathway to the divine. Good sex makes you see stars.
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The thing is, though, that for at least a year now this has not been my experience. From maybe 80 dates I went home with a handful of men, but I did it too soon, too hopefully, too invested in what it might mean. That is to say: not 'casually'. And aside from the orally gifted film trailer editor who I referred to as the 'Wet Cabbage' with friends (he wasn't what you'd call assertive in public, and it was maddening, so we parted ways), none of them have made me climax. Not a single one. So I kinda feel like, right now, what's the point, then? I once declared a year-long vow of celibacy: while I don't want to skip bumping uglies for that long again, I'd rather go without for a while than keep up this charade.
I'm a feminist, vocal about the pay gap but not the gender orgasm gap. It's mortifying
A few tried their best, and few more were just weren't bothered but, either way, since I turned 30 I've resolved to stop faking it. Because I have faked it, before. God, now I think about it, I think I've been terrified to be a high-maintenance lover. Bloody hell. I'm a feminist, vocal about the pay gap but not the gender orgasm gap, because...because why? Because I just want to be loved? Not to be a nuisance? A sexual bother? That realisation is mortifying.
When I didn't orgasm with The Peacock the first time (WHO ORGASMS THE FIRST DRUNKEN NIGHT THEY SHAG A MAN ANYWAY?!) he just...stopped trying. Sex was about him, in the end, and I've spent my whole sexually active life prioritising a man's climax over my own. Until that magic 3-0 birthday I thought that's how you knew when sex was over: that he had come.
That's so not when sex is over. So. Things are changing. My new mantra takes a cue from Nicki Minaj: I demand that I climax. Like the Sex And The City girls say, 'It's my clitoris, not the Sphinx.'
For a gobby woman, I've been shy about the kind of sex I like and need and desire, and that's because what I want is something that you can't teach: genuine connection. So I'm opting out of dating for a while. Out of sex. At least until I meet a man who wants to give me an orgasm as much as he expects to receive one.
Read Laura Jane's column each week in Grazia magazine
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