I reassured my GF she didn’t need to worry about whether she was good in bed, but I wasn’t expecting her to be genuinely bad.
I feel really bad writing this even anonymously, but I’m not sure what to do.
A while back, I ended up in a long-distance relationship with a woman who had herself recently gotten out of a long dead-bedroom relationship. When I started making preparations to visit her, after a few months together online, she started worrying that she wouldn’t be good in bed, that she’d be rusty after so long without being intimate with a partner, and that I’d be disappointed.
I told her not to worry; I’m a pleaser, and I’m most invested in seeing my partner enjoy herself. We’d already discussed our preferences and interests a lot, and have a huge amount in common, and I assured her that as long as she was enthusiastic and enjoyed herself, I’d be satisfied.
I meant all of it, but when we actually slept together, I realized that I’d never done it with a partner before who didn’t have certain elements of being at least decent in bed, and it hadn’t occurred to me that it was actually possible for it to be so unsatisfying.
There’s an element of sensuality which all the partners I’ve been with before had, which they would express without even thinking about it. Something that I didn’t really get could be missing, where when they were turned on, they’d project that desire in arousing ways. I feel horrible saying this because she’s such a sweet person, but when she’s turned on and in the mood, she has all the sensuality of an aunt smooching her nephew on the cheek.
And it’s not like she’s a dead fish in bed, far from it. But she has such uncooperative movement, it feels like every attempt to do anything with her in bed is a struggle against her- and she’s not even doing it on purpose. I honestly worry I might get kicked or elbowed in the face or something by accident. And there’s a feeling of our bodies naturally fitting together which I just don’t have with her. When she’s on top, it literally hurts, like she’s giving me a burn with her thighs. Copious lube mitigates this, but doesn’t resolve it.
And I get that intercourse with a new partner is usually a learning process of feeling out what they like, but I’ve never been with someone before who not only seems unable to read the difference between an “Oh, that feels nice” reaction and an “Nngh, that’s annoying, stop doing that,” but whose efforts mostly lean towards the latter. She doesn’t get offended if I offer feedback, and listens to what I have to say, but she only retains so much of it in the heat of the moment, and I’m pretty sure that if I explicitly ask her to stop every time she’s doing something I don’t like, she’s going to feel paralyzed and overwhelmed.
I talked to her, and brought up some of the things which were causing the biggest issues for me during it, and she confirmed that as I suspected, those are involuntary reactions. She’s not doing them on purpose, and couldn’t stop herself if she tried. Before, I always thought of genuine, involuntary reactions as attractive, but now I think if I made it clear how much they actually bother me, she’d be devastated. And I feel like I’ve sold her a false bill of goods, because this is all stuff I assured her she didn’t need to worry about.
The hardest part of all this is that she has a very high libido, and affection is really important to her. It seems like her ideal level of intimacy would be maybe twice a day or so. Before we actually met up, I found this appealing, not because I didn’t get how demanding to do it twice-a-day would actually be, but because I’m used to enjoying getting my partner off, and not fussing so much about whether I come every time.
But even though it’s not at all difficult to get her off, the process is so much more awkward and uncomfortable than I’m used to that I just can’t enjoy doing it that often. She would be able to understand and accept “I’m not prepared to do it as often as you’d prefer because my libido is lower than yours.” But I told her that I was comfortable being together that often, if not having actual intercourse every time, before we met up in person. And I don’t think she’d be able to handle me telling her that I have to revise that because she turned out to be bad in bed.