The Orgasm Gap Is Really a Conversation Gap

A new UK survey of over two thousand sexually active adults was recently conducted, and sadly what it shows me is nothing new. I have heard this over and over again from clients across seventeen years of practice. It comes from Superdrug Online Doctor, so it is a commercial survey rather than peer reviewed research, worth taking as a snapshot rather than gospel. But the patterns in it match what I see in my consulting room almost exactly, and one of them is worth taking properly apart.

Start with the number that makes people panic

On average, we are having sex around 105 times a year. What we would actually like is closer to 144.

Before you start doing anxious mental arithmetic about your own relationship, notice what that gap is really saying. It is not that everyone else is having more sex than you. It is that most of us are living with some distance between what we have got and what we want, and a lot of people have quietly assumed they are the only ones.

Now the number that actually matters

Only around a third of people in the survey said they always orgasm during partnered sex, and the split is stark. 48% of men. 24% of women. But the same survey asked about solo sex, and the gap very nearly closes. 46% of men. 37% of women.

That is the detail that matters, and it is not a one off. A study published in the journal Sex Roles only weeks ago surveyed 2,272 people across Switzerland and the EU and found exactly the same shape: a 37.9% orgasm gap during partnered sex, and a 3.1% gap during masturbation.

Same bodies. Same people. Wildly different outcomes depending on whether somebody else is in the room.

Knowing is not the same as saying

The researchers tested whether anatomical knowledge predicted orgasm. It did, during masturbation. During partnered sex it made no measurable difference at all.

What did make a difference was open communication.

So the issue is not that people do not know what works for them. Plenty do, and they have the solo data to prove it. The issue is the distance between knowing something about yourself and being able to say it out loud to somebody who is right there, naked with you, and quietly hoping they are doing alright.

42% of people in the UK survey said they have struggled to communicate what they want during sex, and my clinical experience backs that up completely. That is not a character flaw. Talking about sex, no sex please we're British, desire, passion, eroticism and for some people simply what they actually like and want, can be one of the hardest conversations most of us will ever be asked to have, with the highest stakes and by far the least practice.

It is not about trying harder

There is a daily diary study from last year that turns the usual advice on its head. Researchers looked at what they called orgasm pursuit: how much effort people put into their own orgasm, and how much they believed their partner was invested in theirs.

Believing your partner was actively invested in your pleasure predicted orgasm and satisfaction more strongly than your own pursuit of it did. It is not primarily about technique, and it is certainly not about trying harder. It is about whether you believe somebody is paying attention to you.

One of the top turn offs in the survey is poor hygiene, and rightly so. No one wants to go there when things aren't, let's say, freshened up. A close second was a lover using their phone during sex, which genuinely surprised me, I did not expect that to be common enough to make the list. But looking deeper, going on your phone mid sex is not really about the phone. It is a stand in for not fully being in the room with each other, and it turns out that is the thing people notice and mind most, far more than any particular technique.

What throuples know that couples often do not

This is the part I find genuinely interesting, and it is where a lot of received wisdom has it backwards.

Research by Conley and colleagues found that people in consensually non monogamous relationships reported slightly higher sexual satisfaction and higher orgasm rates than monogamous people. A large review of the research in 2024 found much the same: people in polyamorous relationships are as satisfied or more satisfied than monogamous people, and practise equally safe or safer sex.

The obvious explanation is more partners, more variety, more sex. I do not think that is it, and neither did the researchers, who suggested that non monogamous people may simply be more focused and more skilled at pursuing sexual satisfaction.

Here is what I think is actually going on. You cannot run a throuple on assumptions.

If there are three of you, or two of you with other partners, you have to talk. About boundaries, about what you want, about what you are not comfortable with, about jealousy, about time, about safer sex. The structure will not let you avoid it. That review put it plainly: consensual non monogamy requires clear and ongoing communication, consent, respect and flexibility.

Monogamy asks for none of that by default. Two people can share a bed for twenty years, love each other genuinely, and never once say out loud what they actually want. Nothing forces the conversation. And going by this survey, a great many of us take that option.

The good news, if you are reading this in a monogamous relationship, is that the same conversation is completely available to you. It is just not compulsory, which means you have to choose it on purpose.

A word about faking it

One more figure, because it connects to all of the above. 58% of women in the survey said they had faked it to spare somebody's feelings, and 59% to bring things to an end sooner. Men reported doing the same, at lower rates.

I have no judgment about this whatsoever. Faking it in the moment can be the least awkward option available to you at the time. But what you do need to know is that it quietly costs you every time you do it, because the person you are with learns a version of what works for you that is not quite true, and it gets harder to correct the longer it goes on.

So what do I actually take from all this

Almost every gap in that survey, in connection, in satisfaction, in orgasms, traces back to a conversation that has not happened yet. Either with a partner, or with yourself.

The genuinely good news is that conversations are a skill rather than a personality trait. You can get better at them deliberately. Nobody is born able to say "a bit to the left, and slower" without wanting the floor to open up in toe curling embarrassment. It is learned, like everything else worth doing.

A bit of homework, if you fancy it

Pick the one thing in this piece that made you go "oh" a little. Then finish this sentence out loud, even if it is only to yourself in the bathroom mirror: "one thing I actually want more of is..."

You do not have to say it to anybody yet. Hearing yourself say it honestly, once, is the whole exercise. If there is a partner involved, or two, you can build up to saying it to them when it feels right.