My College Roommate Gave Me the Best Sex Advice I Ever Got. I Ignored It for Twenty Years.

My College Roommate Gave Me the Best Sex Advice I Ever Got. I Ignored It for Twenty Years.

Sophomore year, two twin beds pushed against opposite walls, a box fan that never shut off. My roommate was painting her toenails and I was complaining, again, about a boyfriend who meant well and kept missing. She didn’t look up. She just said, “So have him do what you do.”

I laughed and threw a pillow at her. She was nineteen. What did she know?

Here is what I didn’t say out loud: on my own, I never had to wonder. I could have drawn you a diagram: what, in what order, how fast. But that lived in its own box. A private one. Sex with someone else was supposed to be its own skill, and I assumed the way I did it alone didn’t count.

So I kept the two apart. Through that boyfriend, and the next ones, and well into my marriage.

She had a point, and it has a name

Last spring I came across the OMGYES research, and one finding made me put my phone down. The way a woman touches herself isn’t a backup plan. It’s information, the most specific information anyone has about her, and most women have never handed it over.

The research even has a word for the handing over. It’s called Signaling: the different styles women use to guide a partner and give feedback. In the OMGYES catalog, 96% of women say they like it.

Ninety-six percent. That’s not a few bold women. That’s nearly all of us, quietly holding the map.

She was right. Twenty years and a stack of research later, I finally believed her.

Why I believed it this time

Advice from a friend is easy to wave off. Data is harder. OMGYES works with Indiana University and Yale researchers, and the findings come from in-depth interviews with women from 18 to 95, published and peer reviewed. It isn’t one woman’s theory. It’s what women kept telling the researchers, plainly, over and over.

And they weren’t describing anything exotic. That was the part that got me. The women in the videos talked about the same ordinary things I’d been doing for years and never thought to mention, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to pass them along. Every one of them had her own way of doing it. Not one of them sounded embarrassed.

What I actually said

I started with the story, not the research. One night I told my husband about my roommate, the toenail polish, the pillow I threw. He laughed in the right places. Then I told him I’d finally figured out she was right.

He didn’t hear a complaint in it, and there wasn’t one to hear: just a funny thing someone said to me in college that turned out to be true. He asked what I do. And for once, I just told him.

It was the easiest conversation about sex we’ve had in fifteen years of marriage. He said later it felt like being let in on something.

A small warning

There is a lot in there. Dozens of techniques, each with videos and interviews, and the first night I tried to take in too much at once. Go slower than I did. Pick the one that sounds like you and start there.

Also, I texted my roommate. We hadn’t talked in two years. Her whole reply was “told you,” with three crying-laughing faces.

If this sounds familiar

Women: if what works for you alone has always felt like a separate category, it isn’t. It’s the most useful thing you know, and nearly every woman has a version.

Partners: you don’t have to figure it out from scratch. The answer already exists, and she has it. Being trusted with it is a compliment.

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