New to the SSM forum......

[Bagheera]

But he also makes it clear that if I do not come then I must not be enjoying myself and that simply is not true.
I am enjoying myself and sure an orgasm is the best but to me the getting there is 80 % of the fun and he at times is so focused on the "O" for me it seems he is not enjoying the "ride" there. Do you see what I mean? What are your thoughts on that?

If you don't mind, Ali, I'll chime in here as well, since this is an issue that my wife and I are currently dealing with too. I will freely admit that I tend to take my wife's failure to reach orgasm when we ML personally: I incorrectly take it as my personal failure as a man and a lover. I've done some thinking as to where this "her O is the goal" attitude came from:

For me, it has never been a matter of keeping score, and I don't have a little log showing every time I've stimulated a woman to orgasm. Going back to the early 1980's, I just read too many things (Shere Hite's The Hite Report was one of them) that stressed, over and over, the importance of women having orgasms during sex, and that if you weren't giving your woman orgasms, you failed as a lover and were just an old-fashioned, intercourse-centered jerk.

Looking at the times then, the female orgasm had just been "rediscovered" as a result of the sexual revolution, and feminists were insisting on the right of women to "have their orgasms too." Everyone was trying to adjust and change their sex models to accommodate this, for example, take a look at a steamy love scene from a 1960's or 1970's romance novel and compare it to one from the 1980's or beyond -- suddenly, the man wasn't just "having his way with her" but bringing her to peaks of orgasmic pleasure as well. I think we all got a bit carried away, lost sight of the REAL pleasure behind sexual intimacy, and instead focused on the goal of orgasm --> and being a good, goal-oriented man, I bought into it and did my utmost to achieve that goal.

I've had to come around to the fact that now it's time for me to toss that old model out, and focus on mutual pleasure and intimacy as my goal in sex: whatever form that happens to take. To bandy yet another book around, I've been going through Bernie Zilbergeld's The New Male Sexuality, and working on adjusting that old attitude, taking to heart that (a) women don't always need or even want an orgasm to thoroughly enjoy sex with you, and (b) by putting the focus on her orgasm, you are pressuring her (and yourself) to perform and can make it *more* difficult for her to reach an orgasm, even if she wanted one.

So don't be too hard on your H: he's got a common modern-male affliction, and one that I'm finding difficult to break free of myself.

Take care,

Bagheera