Can Singles Live Hapily Ever After?

I have lived alone on and off for much of my adult life, and, ­­despite a recent wavelet of articles and books attesting to the wonders of the single life and what it signifies about us as a ­culture that so many more people are "going solo," as one book title calls it, I can safely say that I have never made my peace with it. Nor do I believe that the new statistics on single living—which are now higher than they have ever been, coming in at 28 ­percent of U.S. households and nearly 50 percent of Manhattan residents—indicate a profound psychological change in the way we conceive of ourselves, as some are arguing. Rather, I think they're a reflection of certain social realities, not all of them positive (accomplished women who put off marriage often find a scarcity of compatible mates), and certain adaptations (rather than compromise, women remain single). But perhaps the best place to start is not with a fresh-off-the-press "trend," based on more or less factual evidence and more or less provocative findings by sociologists and opinionmongers, but with myself, as an ostensible representative of this new singleton condition.

Looking back, I can't recall ever having harbored a deep wish to live alone. Although I grew up in a big family and shared my room for the longest time with first two brothers and then two sisters, there was a "lonely-in-a-crowd" flavor to my experience that didn't lend itself to dreams of holing up by myself so much as sharing quarters with more compatible souls. Oh, there may have been a period during my twenties when living on my own seemed like a great adventure, a deep immersion in selfhood that would stand me in good stead, even if only for the inevitable ­pairing up that lay ahead. I enjoyed fitting out my first apartment, a dark faux triplex on 79th Street, with dishes and bookshelves, and reveled in the luxury of working at my desk, writing a bimonthly book column, into the early morning hours without anyone protesting the light or the noise. There was pleasure in staking out my own turf, filling the fridge with handpicked groceries, turning on my Farberware coffeepot every morning to brew the kind of ground beans—strongly flavored but not too tannic—that I'd come to prefer. But I also recall the heaviness of the air striking me each time I returned home and unlocked the door with no one awaiting me on the other side, only an empty apartment and what the English poet Philip Larkin, a lifelong bachelor, called "the instantaneous grief of being alone."

Of course, there's nothing like the drawn-out sorrow of ­being part of an unhappy couple to make you wonder whether you overdramatized the burden of living on your own. To wit: I ­married in a state of great ambivalence at 34, became a mother at 35, and by 40 was on my own again, sharing custody of my daughter with my ex-husband. By the end of my marriage I felt overrun, the most basic decisions—like whether to feed our girl broccoli or some other virtuous green for dinner—taken out of my hands, and the idea of having a living space to myself, without an antagonistic male presence to contend with, seemed heaven-sent. I remember the sense of spaciousness I felt toward evening, when I looked forward to getting into bed and the prospect of reading or watching TV without having to make conversation or, as was more likely, patch up an earlier argument. But it must also be said that living with a small child, as I did for some of the week, is not the same as living alone; I found a good deal of companionship in my daughter even when she was addicted to make-believe and couldn't discuss grown-up subjects. Then too, the fact of her dependence on me was a constant, space-filling one, which went a ways toward alleviating my newfound partnerless state.

The years passed, my daughter grew up and away from a ­focus on me, and I meanwhile became involved with two men in ­succession, each of whom spent a lot of time in my apartment without officially moving in. The idea of marriage came up with both of them, but I didn't feel prepared to take that conclusive a step, and they both went on to other relationships. Then, as can happen without warning, the opportunities for meeting men became ever more scanty; I was older, for one thing, and pickier, for another. My daughter lived in a dorm in the same city and came home for sleepovers, but other than that, I was back to being the sole occupant of my apartment. Given that as a writer I also work at home, and of necessity by myself, that's a lot of time to one's own.

So let me be blunt about it. These days living alone often seems closer to a sentence of solitary confinement—an advanced course in living within the boundaries of the unaccompanied, unechoed self—than it does a racy prelude to a more domesticated future. If there is a claustrophobia that comes with being in too close proximity to another person, I've discovered that there is another kind of claustrophobia that comes with being in too unmediated a relation to one's own hermetic self. For one thing, there is no one to put on your "best" self for, so you're more likely to skip brushing your teeth before bed, say, or forgo a shower. It's nothing radical, but the subtle softening of grooming standards comes to reflect a deeper laxity of self-care. For another, it's easy to fall into a pattern of inertia, of not making the effort to see the movie or exhibition everyone's talking about. Not to mention something more important that is rarely alluded to in the new paeans to the single life—the lack of physical connection with another person, be it as basic as the touch of someone else's skin next to yours or the heightening of the senses that comes with good sex.

Indeed, there's a certain hour of the night—usually right before I go to sleep, when the noise of the city has abated and I can hear the anxious whirring of my own mind—when my aloneness strikes me with renewed strength, almost as a metaphysical condition to be uneasily pondered: What am I doing adrift in a queen-size bed, with no one's snoring to grumpily ignore or leg to push out of the way? How did I get to this place, where everyone I know seems to be coupled, happily or unhappily, but coupled all the same? (Although I don't mean to suggest that I'd prefer being in just any relationship to being on my own.) And am I fated to be stuck in this condition? From here it's a hop, skip, and jump to forecasting the scene of my own death, à la Bridget Jones, with no one to find me before the dogs have finished off my remains.

I've been thinking about this issue, despite the fact that I don't ­fully qualify as living on my own now that my 22-year-old daughter is temporarily back in her old room, because from what I can tell the single life—or "singlism," as social psychologist Bella DePaulo calls it—has suddenly acquired a new cachet. Whether it's a much-noticed article in The Atlantic by Kate Bolick called "All the ­Single Ladies" or a book called Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, by Eric Klinenberg (who himself is married and a father of two), there is a growing cadre of people bent on making a case for the promise of living alone. Most recently, New York Times op-ed writer David Brooks penned a column addressing the multiple factors—including the more than half of adults who are single—that have led to "an amazing era of individualism," in which "people want more space to develop their own individual talents." Unlike many others, though, Brooks also points out that this more flexible approach to human connections favors people with greater "social capital"—those who have the ambition and gifts to custom-make their lives—while leaving others to "fall through the cracks" into hapless solitude.

Klinenberg, whose book has become the go-to manifesto for what looks to be a movement of cheerleaders for the ­single life—although earlier books, such as E. Kay Trimberger's The New Single Woman and DePaulo's Singled Out helped set the stage—believes that the rise in living alone is nothing less than "a transformative social experience." To back up his claim that "we have embarked on this massive social experiment in living alone because we believe it serves a purpose," he brings ­together anecdotal evidence regarding all manner of "singletons," ranging from young people who've left home and are partaking "in their city's robust social life" to women who have outlived their husbands. He invokes something called "restorative solitude" (a little of which, I'd like to suggest, goes a long way) and touts the "rich new ways" the Internet offers us "to stay connected," with little mention of the impoverishing effect it has had on old-fashioned, flesh-on-flesh contact.

To his credit, Klinenberg does address the sense of stigma that women who live alone in their thirties and forties continue to feel. "Regardless of their personal or professional accomplishments," he points out, "they see their public identity `spoiled,' as the sociologist Erving Goffman put it—reduced from something big and complex and interesting to that of the single woman alone." Still, he insists that confidence in being a singleton comes if you work hard at it. Perhaps, but most of us are brought up with the expectation that grown-up existence entails being part of a duo of some sort. All of our cultural forces promote this image, from romantic songs to vacation resorts, and the fewest of us, I'd hazard, cultivate youthful visions of a future that features ourselves living alone by choice. Add to this the fact that in our society loneliness and aloneness are often experienced as one and the same state. "People are in this incredible panic to avoid being alone in the room with themselves," says Helen, one of the few women Klinenberg interviews who doesn't chirp about loving her domestic autonomy or remaking society. "Many people—and I'm one of them—abso­lutely live with loneliness all the time. It's like an illness."

I don't begrudge people who've found definition and meaning in the very fact of their being alone. I applaud their enthusiasm and satisfaction in being able to live as eccentrically as they like without worrying about being observed conversing with their cat or walking around in days-old clothes (heck, some days I barely make it out of my nightgown), but I'm not ­convinced that these are the signposts of a thrilling alternative to a more conventional way of being. Perhaps the real issue has less to do with whether we end up in a pair or alone than with the ­dramatic lack of options in how we conceive of adult living arrangements. By far the most intriguing part of Going Solo, tucked away in the conclusion, has to do with a description of the cooperative housing that exists in Stockholm, where people of different ages and sometimes genders live in collective dwellings, alone but not isolated. One such building, called Färdknäppen, operates like a modified kibbutz—offering different-size units, depending on family size, along with communal dining and shared ­services such as exercise classes and hobby rooms. To me, it sounds ideal—a way of living with others outside the usual confinement of coupledom. I can't imagine that this kind of visionary housing will be hitting our shores anytime soon, though, so in the meantime I'll have to make do with navigating my solo life as best I can, trying to ignore those lines from Bruce Springsteen's "Hungry Heart" that I can't get out of my mind: "Don't make no difference what nobody says/ Ain't nobody like to be alone." Ain't that the truth.

This is your Brain on Sex

In Dirty Minds, author Kayt Sukel explores the neuroscience of love and sex—and donates her body to advancing the science

Picking up Dirty Minds: How Our Brains ­Influence Love, Sex, and Relationships, an overview of developments in "the neuroscience of love" by journalist and science writer Kayt Sukel, jogged a fond memory. Part of my early initiation as the lone male-mascot editor at ELLE, it turned out, took place at a story meeting in which the subject of ­libido came up. I offered that I saw it more or less as just one of the ­primal appetites, like hunger—not much more ­complicated, given a certain passage of time, than "Shall we hit the rib joint tonight, darling, or go Thai?"

Er...no? I was gently given to understand, to the accompaniment of a few sighs and giggles, that the maintenance of the habit of intimacy was, in the eyes of my colleagues, a good deal more complicated than that. Emotional mind-set, relationship psychology, the barometric pressure of the domestic atmo­sphere, maybe the hormonal readings on a ­given day, and perhaps less effable elements besides—all ­entered into what could never be reduced to any kind of ­simple Newtonian equation. Ah, said I, with a dawning ­recognition of familiar, if seemingly impenetrable, complications. It's all so much more...conditional than the average fellow would have it be. I lean away from theories about how men and women are different in essential, hardwired ways, but now and then, there's really nothing else to say but vive la différence.

In Dirty Minds, it was the ­cotton-top ­tamarin ­monkeys that did it for me. I distrust the reverse anthro­pomorphism that animal experiments ­easily ­lead us into. But really, how perfect is this: We know that cuddling and mating release the neuro­transmitter oxytocin in a whole range of mammal­ian brains, ­including ours, and that this chemical ­cascade in turn ­fosters pair-­bonding. A 2010 study of ­tamarin couples looked ­further into this phenomenon and, Sukel reports, established that ­"snuggling and grooming were behind the [oxytocin] variance in females, while for men it came down to how much sex they were having." In the ­tamarin duos that showed high oxy­tocin ­levels, "males initiated the cuddling their mate ­wanted, and females solicited the sex their mate was after." Go ahead, call me reductive, but this ­passage put me right back in that story meeting.

Sukel's book fairly bristles with such causes to ­reflect on our erotic complexity, via data from animal and ­human experiments, genetics and epige­netics, endocrinology, and neuroimaging. But ­Chapter 12, "My Adven­tures with the O-Team," is the high point of the whole enterprise: The ­author consented to have herself strapped into an fMRI machine in a Jason-esque mesh mask to render her head immobile and to bring herself to orgasm while her brain was being scanned by the clanking ­machine enveloping her. After the short shudder of one ­demure climax that she thought did the trick came the request from the tech guy: Uh, fail ­better? So she rose womanfully to the challenge and ­really rode one home. Tech guy: "It was really, really great." Her reward? A 16-slice scan, reproduced in the book, of her brain on orgasm, lit up like a freaking Christmas tree. Serving the advancement of ­science can't get much better than that.

A Consequential Coming of Age

After half a lifetime of dating, Lena Michaels realized her most torrid affair had been with a girl—whose brash style had indelibly influenced the woman she'd become.

 Because I was a shy child who was paradoxically frightened by all things new and ashamed of the things I did not know, I became infatuated, at the age of 11, with a girl whom I can only describe as the opposite of me. I first saw Larissa in the yard of our Brooklyn Catholic school: her school-issued plaid skirt rolled up at the waist, her blond hair pulled back and gelled firmly to her head (a look appropriated from the Latino girls), her backpack stamped with a million overlapping graffiti tags drawn in colorful Sharpies. Her facial features were blunt, her eyes greenish and a little wild, and her walk like that of a rare bird—loose-hipped and confident, her ample chest thrust out, leading the way. One day, after weeks of staring at Larissa, studying her, I saw her womanly hips swaying in my direction. Did I want to, like, hang out after school?

Larissa, like me, was the daughter of Eastern European immigrants and lived in a scarcely furnished apartment on the second floor of a two-family row house where Cyrillic lettering lined the bookshelves. Watching her after-school transformation was not unlike watching a rock star get ready for a performance. The plaid skirt and collared blouse were discarded on the floor and replaced by second-skin jeans and a low-cut top, the school flats by Air Jordans. (This was the first time I saw thong underwear; Larissa didn’t hide or leave the room to change like other girls our age.) She applied bronzer to her fair skin that left streaks along her jaw and then, with the quick, practiced motion of a calligrapher, outlined her mouth in dark, heavy lipliner. She pulled out one strand of hair from her tight bun and sizzled it with a curling iron, producing smoke. Gold hoops entered her earlobes.

“Okay, let’s go for a walk,” she said. Except that it was more like a parade. Larissa seemed to know every kid on every stoop. She greeted each one with a kiss on both cheeks, and when she introduced me, they kissed me, too, and I tried not to look startled. There was a girl named Nicole who had a scar across her orehead because, Larissa later explained, she’d been in too many fights. There was a boy named Angelo whom Larissa chased through the basketball courts and smacked across the face after he called her “Sweet Ass.” And Tiffy, who lived with her father, a prison security guard, and two younger brothers in an apartment that smelled of cats and beer; they called each other “Boo” and “Hon” and “Mama.” At some point we’d stop at a deli and buy 25-cent “juice drinks” in small plastic barrels and a “loosie”—three cigarettes for a dollar. By then it was dark out, and my mother, somewhat concerned when I called after 9 P.M., came by bus to pick me up.

The word prude, a word I hadn’t known until Larissa started playfully taunting me with it, describes how I thought of my mother. The daughter of academics, she’d grown up with her nose in books, lost her virginity to my father in her twenties, and, though they’d separated before I was even born, would never be with anyone else. She never wore makeup and always kept her hair boyishly short. She was afraid of highways, spicy food, action movies, and the evening news. Cursing made her go pale. And though I couldn’t quite articulate it, I realized then that I’d inherited her fear, her shaky nerves—and more importantly, that I could become her if I didn’t do something about it. I wanted to be shocked out of what I saw as her limited and dull existence, to learn what I thought my mother had failed to. The day I met Larissa, I knew she was the teacher I’d been waiting for.

Because our parents worked several jobs, we were like house cats you’d check on from time to time with preoccupied curiosity. I can hardly remember what we did each day, but none of it, to me, was ordinary; most of it, in retrospect, reckless; and all of it fun. Like the time Larissa and I walked around in the rain all day (“It’s just water,” she said as I hesitantly threw my mom’s battered umbrella in the trash can) until our hair hung in wet spirals and our sneakers squished. Or when I slept over at Larissa’s grandmother’s in Coney Island, and we took our blankets to the beach at two in the morning and waited for the sun to rise. And, this being the early days of dial-up Internet, the time Larissa persuaded me to meet a couple of “guys” we’d been “chatting” with on AOL Instant Messenger. They could have been anyone but turned out to be 17-year-old boys, and Larissa hooked up with the better-looking of the two while I sat on the couch with the other and watched Full House.

Being friends with Larissa was a little like being abducted: I never could decide whether I should have run—run far, far away from her— or if I loved her in a sense so pure that were it a case of Stockholm syndrome, I’d have never known it. More than any boy who’d come later, it was Larissa to whom I lost my innocence; it was Larissa who would inform—and direct the course of—every romantic relationship I had thereafter. The subconscious checklist when I met a boy in my teens, and, later, men in my twenties, was simple: Did I feel intimidated? Frightened? Was there something strange about them—a kind of otherness?

My fascination with someone would begin with a kernel of information that baited my curiosity. There was the premed student who, having been diagnosed as bipolar, refused to take his medication; a philosophy professor who on our first date told me that his mother had recently attempted suicide by driving off what she thought was a cliff but turned out to be the edge of a ditch; a career waiter who revealed, also on our first date, that a freak accident had left him impotent; a musician who wore women’s clothing; a male model; a car dealer; a drug dealer; an art dealer; a successful author; an unsuccessful author; and an eccentric video artist. “It’s like you’re playing Choose Your Own Adventure with dating,” a friend once said to me. “You don’t look for partners. You look for teachers.”

But there were also times when I found myself not only reenacting the role of Larissa’s student but copying Larissa herself. Whereas she was what my mother called “healthy,” with thick hips and thighs and C-cup breasts, I, as a teenager, was shapeless, scrawny, frizzy-haired, cherub-faced. (Larissa’s friends nicknamed me ELF: Larissa’s Little Friend; only later, as an adult, did I come to prefer my thin, elongated frame to her exaggerated curves.) I loved watching the way Larissa was with boys. The way she’d playfully throw her leg over a guy’s with aplomb. How she’d shout back at catcallers (“Thanks, hon!”) when they called her “baby” or attached an adjective to one of her impressive body parts. By modeling my movements and the way I talked after her, I hoped some of her prodigious confidence would rub off on me. It was always in the moments when I felt most shy or apprehensive—most like myself—that I’d walk taller, laugh louder, curse too much, swing my hips, plant my heels.

To understand the effect this act had on the opposite sex, all you have to do is consider the difference between Lyla Garrity and Tyra Collette—Jackie and Marilyn resurrected—on the show Friday Night Lights. Lyla, with her cooing voice and baked goods, may be marriage material, but it’s Tyra, with her exposed midriff, who always turns heads. That someone like Tyra or Larissa could not keep male attention for very long is not the point. It was the control, the ease with which I learned I could obtain full command of the male libido (a concept I’m sure I didn’t actually grasp then) simply by pushing my shoulders back and using my limbs as tentacles to be casually rested on whichever male friend was nearby.

As we started eighth grade and Larissa told me about losing her virginity—the same year the nuns had begun preaching abstinence—the details she divulged about her sexual encounters disturbed me almost as much as they fascinated. She told me that men liked to pull her hair, that “shower sex” is not a good idea because the tiles hurt your back. Once, I turned around from the front seat of a car and saw Larissa running the tip of her tongue up the side of her boyfriend’s neck.

I knew what I saw in Larissa but not what she saw in me: What would a girl like her, who could easily find a sidekick as daring as herself, want with a prude? I never thought deeply about the answer until Andrew and I split up. I met him in my early twenties, and, like Larissa’s, his life seemed foreign and seductive. Only seven years my senior, he lived in a large apartment with bookshelves and expensive, antique furniture. He was a successful screenwriter. He was the kind of person who would decide midweek to buy a plane ticket someplace simply because he could, because he wanted to.

The three years I spent with Andrew were careless, impulsive. I’d just graduated college and should have been looking for a job; instead, I spent almost every day with him. In Los Angeles, we’d go to house parties and seedy Hollywood clubs. In New York, we’d get in his car and drive—upstate to visit open houses, pretending we were “in the market to buy”; to the beach in winter; to Brooklyn, where I would show him the places I used to hang out with Larissa. Other times, he’d work all day, and I’d lie in bed reading and watching him work. Or he’d read his writing aloud to me, and I’d listen with affection. I loved the way I felt around him, and so I stopped focusing on my life—full of worries and bills and questions about the future—and moved into his.

Then something happened. It began when, after two years of watching him work, I found a job I loved. I began acquiring things he had, things I’d wanted: connections, nicer clothes, furniture, rent money. Trips now had to be planned around my few vacation days. Our conversations changed from talking about his work to talking about mine, too. When he showed me his writing, I offered edits. And without my realizing it, our chemistry began to dissolve into polite resentment. I desperately wanted his attention and praise; he missed mine. We were still together when he went to bed with someone else—someone much younger, someone who was just like me when he and I first met. I didn’t understand, couldn’t see why, when I was inching closer to becoming his equal, he no longer wanted me. When we broke up, he looked down at his feet and said, “I can see the way you see me now, and I don’t like it.”

Treating relationships like a class in school means realizing that the semester always ends, the student learns, and the professor moves on. Or worse, the student loses faith in the teacher, sees his flaws, stops believing in the curriculum.

In junior high, I tried to keep up with Larissa in small ways: wearing lipliner, parting my hair on the side and gelling it. Clothes didn’t fit my prepubescent body the way they did hers, so I had my jeans tailored to hug what were not hips but bones. I learned to inhale.

I would have gone further, become more and more like Larissa until she inevitably adopted a new recruit, leaving me heartbroken and confused, like a monster abandoned by the scientist who created it. It would have happened were it not for the time when I saw Larissa in a way I never had before: as a young girl no more sure than I was about how to maneuver the adult world she so wanted to be a part of.

It was very late on a cold February night, and we were walking some 20 blocks back to Larissa’s because, as usual, she didn’t have enough money for bus fare. I must have been complaining, because the next thing I knew, Larissa was pulling me by the sleeve into the street and raising her thumb. “Let’s hitch-hike!” she said. A black Lincoln pulled over, and before I could object, Larissa opened the back door for me and hopped into the passenger seat herself. I couldn’t see the driver’s face, but I could see the bald spot that loomed above the car’s headrest and a large, hairy hand on the gearshift. The radio was loud, and if they talked, I couldn’t hear them.

What happened next I remember as a series of muted images. When we pulled up to Larissa’s house, Bald Spot began whispering in her ear, and the hairy hand took hers across the glove compartment. I saw Larissa shaking her head no. I opened my door halfway, one foot on the asphalt, the other still inside the car. The hairy hand took hold of the back of Larissa’s head, and then Bald Spot was bobbing up and down along her neck. I saw Larissa try to pull away. Then, suddenly, the driver recoiled. Sound returned, and I heard Larissa: “Run!” As we ran past Larissa’s dad and into her room, she told me that she’d bitten the driver’s hand. The cool, indifferent tone of her voice was gone, and for the first time I saw what Larissa looked like when she was afraid. We didn’t speak for the rest of the night. I can see the way you see me now, and I don’t like it. And when a few months later my mother said that we were moving to the suburbs, I didn’t argue.

It’s ironic that I missed what was perhaps the most important lesson that Larissa could have taught me. And I missed it again and again as I looked for her in the men I’d go on to be with—until I met Andrew and finally saw how skewed our power dynamic was, how completely I’d lost myself in the myth that he had created. Comfortable as I was in the role of elfin sidekick, I’d never chosen a relationship that required me to be an active party.

And yet there are still so many times when I think of Larissa. I think of her whenever I see Catholic schoolgirls acting out on the subway, away from the watchful eyes of the nuns, and remember how complicated, how fraught their lives may be when they’re not in their uniforms. I think of her when I leave home without an umbrella and tell myself that it’s just water when it starts to rain. Other times, I find myself imitating her exaggerated stride in the presence of men whose attention I want, or when I get catcalled by men whose attention I don’t want and have to remind myself not to be afraid. I think of her when I casually throw my leg over a guy’s and suddenly see— with the same disquieting wonder that comes when you look down at your hands one day and see your mother’s—Larissa’s denim-wrapped thigh.

Oral Sex Tips 2

Your hands can take it to the next level.
One Cosmo sex poll found that guys say their favorite thing is when a woman uses her mouth and hands on their package at the same time. Stack one hand on top of the other on his shaft, and gently twist in opposite directions. At the same time, flick your tongue—like a snake—over the tip.

You're probably missing a spot.
Here's a secret erogenous zone that you should definitely hit while you're down there: Trail your tongue down his shaft to the area between his testicles and the base. Purse your lips together, and lightly suck on the patch of skin. It's packed with nerve endings, so any attention you give it will feel heavenly.

Multitasking leads to more Os for you.
Our experts say that being stimulated in multiple areas will help a woman reach climax more quickly. So while his tongue is at work, have him play with your nipples. In the beginning, he should softly stroke your tips, but as you get closer, he can squeeze.

69 isn't truly amazing until you've tried this.
Lie side-by-side, with your head near his penis. As you both lick, let your hands massage each other's booties—there are large muscles there, so rubbing them will make for an even greater release.

Cooling down can be very hot.
Your temperature rises slightly when you're aroused, so anything cool will be a pleasurable jolt to your senses. Point a fan in your direction so that while he's between your legs, you're feeling both warm from his mouth and a cool breeze. The combo is unexpected, and anything surprising can send you over the edge.

A vice-grip can be nice.
The ridge of his penis—where the tip meets the shaft—is very sensitive to touch. Cover your teeth with your lips, and place them around that ridge like a vice. Apply firm pressure—like how you squeeze fruit—then release and repeat. This movement perks up the nerves there and then lets them relax, which can feel really good.

Sometimes thinking dirty is a bad idea.
The primary reason women give sex therapists for not wanting their guy down there is they worry they smell. Your guy probably loves your aroma, but you can eliminate that concern by taking a quick half-shower before a date. You will feel much fresher and won't worry about a funky fragrance.

He wants to pretend he's a bike seat.
You don't have to be on your back when you're on the receiving end of oral. Have him lie down, and then put your privates over his mouth. This gives you some control over the pace and motion, making it easier for you to orgasm. And experts tell us it can be erotic for a man to have your coochie that up close and personal.

There's a digital version of oral.
Here's a unique way to give his frenulum—the tiny bump on the underside of his penis where the shaft meets the tip—some special attention: Place the tip of your finger on it, then take his shaft (along with your finger) into your mouth. As you move your mouth up and down, rub your finger over the F-spot.

Feast his eyes.
You probably already know that guys are extremely visual, but it can be hard for him to get a decent view while you're down there lavishing his penis with love. Place a standing mirror next to you so he can check you out. The combo of feeling and seeing you will blow (pun intended) his mind.

Oral Sex Tips

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