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friend honestly about it later, she insisted that I loved the whole experience. She said that I was merely feeling morning-after guilt. "You were totally into it," she informed me. She was clearly smug with victory, but angry that I resisted her version of events. I felt resentful for years.

I didn't even tell my partners about my orgasm difficulties until I'd known them for a while, because my secret felt like such Restricted Information: I couldn't give it to anyone I didn't trust. I couldn't abide the idea of "everyone knowing" how broken I felt. I couldn't stand the combination of pity and fascination that my problem evoked in the few who knew.

When I did get around to telling my partners, that was most complicated of all. I was quite unpopular in high school, and so I was something of a late bloomer -- boyfriend-free until my late teens. It took years before I had any confidence in my boyfriend interactions. And because I had no idea how to come and no idea where to start and little idea of how to communicate about sex, I could not give guidance about what I wanted.

I also felt paranoid that lovers would resent me if they felt I was demanding something too "difficult" during the sexual "exchange," so I downplayed my feelings. I told awful lies like "it's not a big deal that I can't come" -- lies that broke my heart as I spoke them, but felt safer than the truth.

I did manage to have one orgasm in my teens -- one. I'm still not sure how it happened. It occurred one evening when I was incredibly tired, but went out with friends to get a fudge brownie sundae anyway. When I got back, my boyfriend came over and wanted to have sex, and I let it happen -- despite being tired and uninterested and full of sundae -- because I had not yet internalized the notion that my boyfriends wouldn't hate me if I denied them sex. I was barely present during the act, but I jolted into awareness when I realized I was having an orgasm. Afterwards, exhaustion overwhelmed me and I fell straight into sleep -- so deep that my boyfriend was unable to wake me.

This was puzzling and hard to analyze. What aspects of my singular orgasm should go into my Unified Theory... and which aspects were irrelevant?

The chocolate? Well, chocolate is arguably a mild drug, and drugs help some people come. Also, there were studies that found mild aphrodisiac qualities to chocolate. So maybe.

The position? The position had felt really good but was somewhat awkward, and I felt weird asking my boyfriend to reproduce it, so I didn't let myself think about the position. (I'm much better at communicating with my partners now.)

What about the exhaustion? It made sense that being very tired might help me "let go." But I hadn't been very turned on or enjoyed the rest of the encounter, mostly because I was so exhausted; and I didn't want to deliberately force myself to have sex while tired. So while the exhaustion might have been a factor, I filed it under "less-than-useful" as well.

I didn't worry about the problem too much for a while, because I figured that now that I'd had one orgasm, surely it would become easy. I didn't tell my boyfriend it had happened,

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