“I have been faking orgasms with my partner for years. I enjoy our sex life, but I never climax. How do I tell him that my orgasms over the past five years were faked and show him what feels good for me?”

Petra's answer

Dear reader,

first, I am going to tell you something that may surprise you: you are not the first or the only woman to have done this, and it does not make you a bad partner. Faking orgasms is far more common than people write or talk about. In one representative US study, almost 59 per cent of women said they had faked an orgasm at least once in their lives. The good news lies in another finding: most women who had once faked orgasms eventually stopped. Better sexual communication and a partner who listened more closely to their wishes were among the important reasons they stopped.

So there is a way out of this! I am delighted that you asked, because you have no idea how many women will read this and feel as though the answer were written especially for them.

It is hard to say

Before we come to your five years, I want to make a small digression for another reader who is here right now. A woman who may have faked an orgasm for the first time last night. Or who is considering it because she feels uncomfortable saying that she did not climax when an orgasm is somehow “expected”.

Please do not start down that road. Not because you owe your partner some kind of sexual report, but because faking begins to teach him exactly the opposite of what you want. Think about how logical it is. Your partner does something. It does not work well enough for you to reach orgasm. You then fake an orgasm. What has his brain just learnt? “Excellent. This works.” He is very likely to repeat the same thing next time and feel delighted with himself, while you fake it again. He becomes increasingly convinced that he knows you perfectly, while you move further away from what you actually need.

That is not the path to better sex. To put it another way, it is not a path on which you will be enjoying yourself with your partner five years from now. Quite the opposite: your interest may disappear altogether. Or let me compare it like this: by faking orgasms, you are training your sexual GPS by telling it for five years, “Yes, yes, keep turning right, this is perfect,” while your whole body wants to go left. Do not be surprised if, after five years, your partner has no idea where to drive. You have been assuring him all along that he was on the right road. And after five years of faking, dusting your grandmother’s crystal in the display cabinet may become the most exciting prospect of the evening when the other option is sex.

That is why I especially want young women to read this: sexuality is not a stage on which a woman has to put on a performance so that a man can leave satisfied with his own act.

You are not there to affirm his masculinity. You are not there to prove that he is “good in bed”. And you are not responsible for his ego to the point of sacrificing your own experience.

Your pleasure is not a bonus

Sexuality is a space shared by two equal people. Your pleasure is not a bonus. It is not dessert that arrives if there is time left or if you have not counted calories that day. It matters just as much. And there is something else that is extremely important: orgasm is not the only proof of good sex. You can have wonderful sex without reaching orgasm every time. The problem begins when you feel that you have to produce one — even by faking it — to prove that the sex was successful. That pressure itself can make orgasm more difficult.

Female sexual arousal is not a simple on/off switch. It can be affected by stress, a sense of safety, the relationship with a partner, body image, how present a woman feels in the moment, whether she is sufficiently aroused, whether she has enough time, what happened during her day and, very concretely, whether she is receiving the kind of stimulation that works for her body. Research involving women who have difficulty reaching orgasm commonly identifies stress and anxiety, insufficient arousal and not having enough time among the reasons.

Now for the finding I would most like to print in large letters above half the world’s beds. In a large study of women, only 18.4 per cent said that penetration alone was sufficient for orgasm. For 36.6 per cent, clitoral stimulation was necessary, while another 36 per cent said that clitoral stimulation made their orgasms better. So there may be absolutely nothing “wrong” with you. Your body may simply need something different from what it is receiving at the moment.

Your partner’s feelings

But there is an additional problem in your situation. We cannot take back those five years. We can decide what to do with the sixth. That is why I would not advise you to sit opposite your partner after dinner one Tuesday and say, “By the way, just so you know, every orgasm I have had over the past five years was fake.” The truth matters. But the way we say it matters too. From that sentence, he might hear only: “For five years I thought I was a good lover, but actually I was a fool.”

That is not what you want to tell him. What you want to say is: “For five years I did not know how to talk about my pleasure.” That is an entirely different story.

I might say something like: “I need to tell you something that is very difficult for me to talk about. The problem is not that sex with you does not feel good. It does. But for a long time I felt under pressure to have an orgasm, and I started faking it. Then I did not know how to stop without hurting you. I do not want to do that any more. I want us to discover together what genuinely works for me.”

It may hurt him. He may become angry. He may ask, “Why did you not tell me sooner?” That is a legitimate question.

Do not become defensive. Do not shift the blame onto him. Tell him the truth: “I was ashamed. I did not know how. And every time it happened again, admitting it became more difficult.”

That is the truth, and it is exactly what often happens. Research shows that women often stay silent about what they want because they do not want to hurt their partner’s feelings, because detailed conversations about sex make them uncomfortable, or simply because they feel ashamed.

Take orgasm off the agenda

After that, do something that may be even more important than the conversation: take orgasm off the list of tasks. Do not make a new mistake by turning the next time you have sex into a project called “I finally have to come”. Otherwise, you will lie there thinking: Am I close? Why has it not happened yet? He must be waiting. This is taking too long. What if I cannot do it again?

If you choose that direction, I can only add: congratulations, you have just created ideal conditions for an orgasm not to happen. Return to curiosity instead. What feels good? What does not? What would you like for longer? What would you like more slowly? What would you like to stop? What would you like repeated?

This is where your part of the responsibility comes in. Your partner is not a mind reader.

If you do not yet know your own body well, explore it. Not because there is something wrong with you, but because knowing your own body is part of sexual literacy. In one of my previous answers, I wrote that solo sexuality is the foundation and partnered sexuality is the next level. A person who knows their own sensations can show a partner more easily what feels good.

That changes the whole story. You are no longer waiting for him to “guess”. He is no longer sitting an exam. You become a team. And what does a well-coordinated team do? It scores goals! Literally and metaphorically.

You can guide his hand. You can say, “like that”, “keep going”, “slower” or “do not change anything”. You can talk before sex, during it and afterwards. Sexual communication is not a sign that your partner does not know something. Quite the opposite. It is a sign of a relationship mature enough for two people to teach each other.

Perhaps, after five years, you will have sex for the first time without an orgasm. But there will be no pretence either. And do you know what? It may be the best sex you have had in the past five years.

That is because, for the first time, the bed will contain neither his expectations nor your performance. There will be only the two of you — real, a little awkward, curious and honest. And I would much rather congratulate you for that.

It is never too late to get to know each other

Remember, a good sex life does not begin with orgasm. It begins when two people feel safe enough to show each other what feels good, what does not, what they want more of, what they would like to be different and what they still want to discover together.

Perhaps only now will you begin to know each other in a way that was not possible during all those years. Not because the sex between you was not good, but because one part of it always had a pre-written ending. For the first time, you can stop writing that ending.

Sometimes it may end in orgasm, sometimes in laughter, sometimes with the two of you exhausted beside each other, and sometimes with the realisation, “That was fantastic — do exactly that again.” This is the freedom of sexuality: not every encounter needs the same goal in order to have value.

You do not need to repair the past five years. You cannot take back the time, but you can decide that from today you will no longer perform in your own sex life.

Instead of a perfect performance, you can finally give your partner something far more valuable — the opportunity to know the real you. You do not owe your partner an orgasm. But you owe yourself the right to your own pleasure.

“What if my partner is faking too?”

Now I have an important message for every man reading this. I do not want to miss the opportunity to bring the broader picture of this enormous subject into view. I genuinely want to see women walking down the street with the most beautiful smiles in the world every day — relaxed and satisfied.

Dear men, if you read the research finding at the beginning about how many women fake orgasms and wondered for a moment, “What if my partner is one of them?”, do not go home tonight and ask, “Have you ever faked it with me?”

Ask something much better. Ask: “Is there something I could do differently that would help you enjoy yourself even more? Is there something that feels especially good for you that you may never have told me? I want to know. I want to learn your body, and I want you to feel safe enough with me to tell me absolutely everything.”

You can also be completely open: “I want to be the best lover in the world — for you. So teach me what that means for you.”

The best lover is not a man who believes he already knows everything. It is not the man who counts orgasms like medals and looks for proof of his own ability.

The best lover is a man secure enough to ask, interested enough to listen and curious enough to want to rediscover the woman beside him even after five, ten or twenty years.

You may receive an answer you did not expect. Do not treat it as criticism. If, after years of silence, your partner finally says, “I would like you to do this more slowly”, “this does not really work for me” or “I need something completely different”, she has not just told you that you are a bad lover.

She has given you a map showing you how to become a better one. And a man who wants that map has already travelled half the distance.

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An earlier version of this answer was first published by Živim / Jutarnji list on 30 August 2026.