If you find out or even suspect that your partner is faking their orgasm, it is all too easy to take it as an insult to your sexual skills. This can affect your wellness and wellbeing by reducing your confidence and self-esteem, but before you go down this road, stop and think for a minute: could there be other reasons that your partner is faking their orgasm?
Orgasm faking is actually very common. Around 60 percent of women admit to having faked their orgasm at some point, either during oral sex or intercourse itself. A recent study shows that this tendency to fake an orgasm may be more to do with protecting their own fear of intimacy than protecting the ego of their partner.
The problem is not actually limited to just women, either, with research showing that around a quarter of all men have faked an orgasm at some stage.
The study looked at over 350 women aged between 18 and 32 who said that they faked orgasms. The research revealed that may of the women claimed to have faked it as they felt insecure about their own sexuality – i.e. they wanted to have an orgasm but it wasn’t happening, and they felt a certain pressure to be ‘functioning’. Some of them also said that they wanted to get it over with.
A small group of women said that they did it to actually enhance their own experience, as they felt that increased sexual arousal was gained by faking orgasm.
Some women simply felt that having an orgasm with a partner was too intimate an experience and they were not ready to allow themselves to be vulnerable in this way with a partner. Pretending to have an orgasm was the simplest way of keeping their partner at arm’s length, and avoid truly connecting with someone else on a sexual or emotional level.