Oh my gosh, you poor, poor thing. What an awful thing to try to recover from. Like, I think I would be unable to even mentally prepare to fuck this guy without sobbing. I like chiming in on ATMs, but this just sounds so awful I have almost nothing to say. Rinse thoroughly with warm water, all while hating your body and probably him a little bit, too, for making you feel so bad? Dark humor: have him smear VapoRub under his nose coroner style so all he can smell is menthol-lyptus goodness?
This is terrible. And there is no non-painful answer. I can only add one piece of information, and that is that peoples' ability to smell things is highly variable, and what is objectionable to one person smells great to another. Which is one way to say it's not your fault, because, well, it's not your fault.
"Androstenone and the closely related steroid androstadienone have been suggested, though never proven, to act as pheromones in humans. Different people report a wide range of perceived odors from these chemicals, from unpleasant and urinous to sweaty, woody or even pleasantly floral, and nearly 30% of the human population claims not to be able to smell them at all [6,7]. These two chemicals therefore represent an interesting example of genetic variation in the human population, and one that is relatively easy to document.
There are numerous possible causes for differential olfactory abilities, including age, gender, environment, health status and experience. Between the receptor and the change in membrane voltage that signals the presence of an odor to the brain lies a complex biochemical pathway, and mutations in any of the proteins in this pathway can also result in olfactory abnormalities."
I don't know what to say either. I know for me it was a lot harder to deal with desire inhibition in more positive relationships than, say, when it was someone abusive who hated me and also wanted me to feel bad about how horrifying and disgusting my body is. (Has that kept me from believing my body is horrifying and disgusting? Of course not.) But this is an awful situation where you asked and your partner answered and now you're both stuck with that. Ugh. I'm so sorry. I'm thinking about whether I can come up with anything that might help.
3: Damnit, I thought you would have something more productive than I would to suggest. Where are the dudes on this? Surely they have opinions.
Seriously, I think it's easier to steel yourself against unambiguously assholish behavior that you can at least push back against than this, coming from someone who is otherwise great and nominally loves you.
I'm kind of circling around an answer where he has to take ownership of finding a solution where he can get really fucking enthusiastic about having sex with you. It could be a fig leaf - suppose he asks you to try eating pineapple, and that gives him cover to return to the previous pre-discussion world where we all agree to ignore the problems with bodies. Or it could be a real thing - he decides that with a candle lit, he wouldn't be bothered your normal, human, completely okay smell. But somehow he has to determine circumstances under which he can then begin the long process of regaining your trust.
This is while all relationship counselors discourage open communication.
But now that he did this, you have to say something equally hurtful about him.
6: The goal is to reach the point that you can joke about how you both are so utterly repulsive that it's lucky you found each other.
I guess I'd wonder about communication about sex in general. And whether you are both clear about what you want out of sex more conceptually. For me, it's hard to go along with something that I know is not something my partner particularly likes even if I do because that feels like maybe there's more coercion than I'm okay with even though I'm sometimes hallucinating the complexity. But I worry, and so for me it's better to just skip it and not get maximum satisfaction but also not take on stuff that feels uncomfortable. Yet I'm willing to DO things that aren't my favorite and that doesn't feel coerced in the same way I worry about. If you and your partner are in different places on spectrums like those, that seems like an obvious disconnect and problem. Books like Come as You Are can have good exercises and talking points. Maybe work on non-sexualized sensual connection to your body, either by yourself or with him? It sounds like he's willing to do some work to make this better and like you'd like things to be better. I hope you can work with that somehow.
I don't have much to add because 2 rightly gets that smell is so weird and personal. But to the fella: suck lick it up and think of England. Sometimes people smell bad, and if you're going to be intimate with someone you're going to have to deal with their bad smells just like you're going to have to deal with them looking less made up in the mornings and on days off. If you can't handle that, you need to train yourself.
If the smell's so unique to you, that's probably for the best because it should be easier to Pavlovianly train him to associate that smell with sexiness using other cues. My female significant other's downtown smell is definitely a trigger to turn me on. (Alas, she has hangups about the process so cunnilingus is rare. She likes the process but not the idea, which is a bummer.) The smell isn't inherently amazing or whatever but it's her's. So maybe try working up from short sessions, associated with whatever he likes? But if he isn't willing to consciously buy into such a project it isn't going to work.
How can he be worried about vaginal cleanliness/odor when he's clearly such a douche?
Sorry about that. But this is way beyond my experience, or anything I can really imagine.
Your boyfriend is not an asshole for being honest with you. Although he should have told you a lot sooner. And probs could have worded his point more gently. But fundamentally he did the right thing by telling you.
You are not gross or awful, and your boyfriend doesn't think you are. The way you smell is an extraneous fact about you and has nothing to do with your core being.
Also, how can I enjoy sex with this asshole again?
Get him a cat, wait for him to grow attached, run over the cat. (Note: You can skip two steps if he already has a cat.)
It's like Pat Benatar says. Love is a battlefield.
Never say anything but positive things about your partners body. Never try to make your partner to say "honest" things about your body. 13 is the wrongest wrong thing ever.
Meh, what if the problem is addressable? You're probably right about immutable characteristics but I'd want to hear if I smelled bad if it were in a sense I could correct. I have in fact said this and had it said to me; it went well in both situations.
16: But does this make my butt look big?
I don't think I agree with 16. And I messed up the link the first time but Come as You Are would specifically be useful for both of you though the focus is on female arousal and satisfaction. Chapter 5 is about sexual disgust and chapter 9 is about unlearning disgust that gets in the way of your pleasure. I'm looking now to see if there are any pertinent exercises that wouldn't need the book but I suspect it's going to be a lot of repetition of what is enjoyable.
...the focus is on female arousal and satisfaction
And then we'll go find the Loch Ness monster.
I kind of go along with 13. I think everyone has a unique smell down there as well as everywhere. Sometimes it clicks with you sometimes not and I don't think it is anything that can be changed. It is unfortunate that it sometimes takes a while for the issue to be addressed. I have known wonderful women where it just seemed something just was not there and this is what I think it is. My current love is also a wonderful woman in every way and I like lying next to her and inhaling her natural fragrance. I think she needs to find someone with whom her natural smell clicks.
Now back to lurking and no further comment.
It seems clear that it was an important thing to get on the table, but OMG he could have been more tactful and even made it indirect. ("Can we wash each other in the shower before?" or something similar.) Keep in mind that guys are kind of unable to understand being tactful, as a rule. Total honesty is not always (ever?) the best response to a question, especially an intimate one.
Maybe he has a very sensitive nose. There was a long post recently on SSC about anosmia (lack of a sense of smell), and there's a wide range of what people can smell and how they perceive it., from nothing to "super-smellers."
This sounds like an thing the two of you could work out (or at least "research") in a wide variety of ways. If it turns out nothing works, then ... nothing works. You both have my sympathy.
Or make it sound temporary, if you want to hunt for a solution and still have cover to go back to ignoring it in the future.
Disclaimer: I stand by 11; I don't have any useful experience with anything like this. But I still feel oddly compelled to comment.
I was/am so humiliated.
I do feel confident, though, on this: If there is a malfunction here, it is his malfunction, and not yours. If we should be embarrassed by our physical imperfections, he's the one who should be embarrassed. If this is a problem with someone's physiology, it's his problem.
Here's where we really get beyond my experience: I can imagine (in a theoretical way) not wanting to perform oral sex on a woman. I mean, there are ordinary sexual practices that don't much appeal to me, so I get that.
But not wanting to do that with a particular woman that I was fond of -- I just can't imagine that. I've never run across it at all in real life, and even in my imagination, I can't comprehend any problem that wasn't either medical or easily remedied.
20: I know you're just being Moby but I have no idea how fragile our asker might feel and somehow this seemed over the line in a way that joking about psychological torture and animal cruelty, say, don't.
DO you have theories about the Loch Ness Monster though??
Seconding Thorn's recommendation of Come As You Are. It's a good book with a lot of knowledge about human sexuality that no one but a specialist would have. It can be a bit repetitive, but that's intentional.
I dated someone whose personal smell to me did not invite getting my face close, and I haven't had that strong of a reaction with anyone else. All was fine for other kinds of intimacy. Don't know if this helps at all-- I guess to reinforce the individual smells point.
Good luck, sounds like a difficult complication...
Damn. This sounds really upsetting, and I'm so sorry. I think it's great that you visited your doctor to make sure that there wasn't a medical problem going on, and I'm glad to hear that isn't the case. You've done your part, and I don't think it's reasonanle to expect you to do anything else other than bathing regularly, wearing cotton underwear, and maybe engaging in some minor landscaping. I concur with Heebie that the rest is on your partner to figure out.
Unfortunately, IME, attraction to a partner's smell (especially their intimate smells, but also just in general) is a) not something that can be changed, and b) an important factor in intimate compatibility. This strikes me as either something major enough that it requires serious consideration of whether you two have a future, or something that never, ever should have been said in the first place. Hell, maybe both.
16 and 33.2 are right on.
"He doesn't like my smell" is totally not "I don't smell good." This is literally what it means to have chemistry with someone. There are thousands of guys who would enthusiastically go down on you. Find 'em. I'd do it myself, but I'm married now. SORRY.
16 sounds sensible. It wasn't a good idea to insist on an honest reply and it wasn't a good idea for him to tell the truth. I don't think any couple has a 100% overlapping set of preferences in bed or anywhere else and as long as the overlap is fairly broad that's the best you can hope for. Insisting on your partner doing your particular favourite thing (whatever it is) when they obviously don't want to is never a great move, and going all in for an honest answer why not is a risky way to handle it - much better to work out things you know you definitely both enjoy and do more of those.
Still, now the secret is out and the damage done.
I'm horrified by the implications of 9. I really hope it was a bad joke. I think it might be OK for people to decide to do sex acts they find unpleasant out of a sense of duty, but it's definitely not generally OK to pressure other people to do so.
Basically this is the other side of that Dan Savage thing about "my kink's ok, your kink's ok". Don't condemn other people for liking different stuff from you: and also don't condemn them for not liking all the stuff you like.
39: apparently the standard changed from "enthusiastic consent" when we weren't looking?
Several comments including 23 seem to be ignoring the most important fact here - he *specifically* dislikes *her* smell. That's a fairly strong indicator of incompatibility - far from being a good candidate for "Pavlovian" reconditioning, it suggests that smell incompatibility has already conditioned him not to initiate oral sex, and that he is going to eventually "learn" that sex with her in general is not good.
This is *not* the same as excessive fastidiousness; when I like someone's smell, I also like their smell if they're sweaty or whatever. Nor does it necessarily mean that she smells bad objectively.
16 is very incomplete advice. One of the best things someone I dated ever did was tell me that she didn't care for my smell. We were otherwise highly compatible, so we stopped dating and became good friends. This was obviously the right decision. Other partners have since spontaneously reported liking my smell a lot.
"One of the best things" in the sense that to do otherwise would have been a terrible decision.
42.1 is what immediately occurred to me. And ogged is right in 35. As are all others who said how truly sad this is. Sorry.
This is a terrible situation and I agree with all the advice that's been given. It seems to me that the primary wrong here is him having hidden for so long the fact that he was put off by the smell of your body, which is in a very real way a fundamental sexual incompatibility. He should have have come clean with that very early in the relationship when it would has been much less painful to cut things off. (And of course he should have been more tactful about it.)
But all that's basically already been said. What I want to know is: who titled this post, the ATM writer or heebie?
urple is objectively pro-animal cruelty.
I didn't word that well, and the England thing was a bad joke for which I apologize. She shouldn't force him. It was a plan for how he could change assuming he wants to, and how she could work with him to do so. If he isn't enthusiastic about changing, it's impossible to do so, regardless of method.
Breaking it off is also a regrettable but valid response.
I'm not a perfect feminist. I roll my eyes when I hear about a man not willing to give oral sex to a woman, and that colored my response.
I don't have much to add. I concur that everyone smells different. I deplore making people feel bad about their bodies, even a little bit. And, let's be perfectly frank here, virtually everybody smells worse as they get older.
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Not to derail too much, but have we ever had a sex books thread? I've been thinking of taking advantage of the local feminist sex toy shop's lending library to try to sort of re-theorize myself about sex, and pick up any important bits of information that I might otherwise have missed. One that I think a lot of people here might like is Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics and Practice. The historical aspects are really neat. Plus: Sex!
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46: No he shouldn't have "come clean" early on, he should have broken up with her early on for vague reasons and taken this to his grave.
I was going to post the 42 thing- it shouldn't make you feel bad
"In the early years of the 21st century, grave goods began to make a reappearance in burials. Sometimes there were books or tools or sporting equipment. Most commonly found are engraved metal plaques carrying messages like 'his penis smelled bad,' 'her left nipple reminded me of Konrad Adenauer,' and 'I couldn't get past the six toes-thing.'"
I agree with natty. Bodies are gross. What's he going to do if she needs surgery on her breast or vagina and he has to help change the dressings? Or witness childbirth and recuperation? You've got to be able to put stuff out of your head and get down with your partner's body when they're old and dry and saggy.
In the idealized relationship talk you read about in Crucial Conversations and Carolyn Hax, this kind of discussion would be just fine. I'm suprised at how it plays out in the real world. In the script, it would go like:
Her, discussing facts: Seems like there are understandable reasons why we're not having sex as much, but we have oral sex even less than that. Is there a reason for that?Him, focused on mutual purpose: I would love to do it because I know you want more and I want to make you happy. There actually is an issue, though, I find the smell distasteful for some reason. If we could find a way to work through that, it would really make it easier for me.
Her, understandably emotional but trying to reward honesty instead of sending the message that she thinks he intended to hurt her: OK, that's kind of hard to hear, I might need some time to think it over... I know I would have trouble getting into oral sex with that issue too, I really hope we can solve it. I'll get an opinion from my gynecologist, is that a good first step?
Him: That would be great, and if we try different things and it turns out this is just part of how your body works and my sense of smell works, then we'll just find a way to make it work a little better. I still love you.
I know this stuff is way easier to write than to act out, but I'm surprised no one's offering it as glib advice.
I've always wondered how people deal with this risk of relationships being perfect except for the sexual compatibility. It sounds like the secret here is polite fiction, not problem solving, and I'm a little surprised about that.
That's a good way of putting it. I'm definitely on the polite fiction side, with tentative conversations around finding a solution but with cover if the solutions don't work.
Also to urpie: the OP tie was me, not the letter writer. I apologize.
I suspect the variation in advice here is in large part due to how strongly and how consciously people are affected by smell incompatibility. Possibly many people here saying suck it up and deal with it haven't been in both smell-compatible and smell-incompatible pairings, and - whichever case they're used to - are rounding off the stated variation to the substantially smaller variation in their own experience.
Basically, the only people who end up with real knowledge about this are those who initially filter on something entirely different than smell (e.g. looks, character) - bear in mind that many people who *think* they're doing this may actually be filtering on "chemistry as well - and have had long enough relationships with both kinds to notice how different levels of smell compatibility work out, and the difference between variation in smell-compatibility and variations in how objectively "gross" a partner is.
Ultimately the ATM couple has to decide whether this is a fundamental sexual compatibility dealbreaker or not, and they both need to be attentive to their own preferences and not project armchair moralizing by people with no skin in the game on top of that.
Also if the woman is on hormonal birth control, it's possible that if/when they try for a kid she'll be suddenly put off by *his* smell too, since there's some evidence that pill-induced pseudo-pregnancy seems to reverse the polarity of perceived smell-compatibility.
I roll my eyes when I hear about a man not willing to give oral sex to a woman
And vice versa, presumably?
Like, yes, when you're committed to someone you're signed up for things like 53, but everything's a lot harder if you're not starting from a base of fundamental compatibility on all fronts when things are otherwise favorable. Not impossible, just harder.
I agree with ogged in 35. This is your partner's issue. You are fine. Typical guy move (inadvertent or vertent) putting it on the woman. Or so I'm told.
This conversation seems like a much bigger deal, because it's happening two years into the relationship, and I would be wondering 'what, was he gritting his teeth to get through all the sex for the last two years?' (Ask me about the latter days of my marriage. No, really, don't.)
Getting past it, I'd want to be having an open talk about what about me and the sex we were having the guy was into -- what about me was wildly desirable to him. And if the answer wasn't something that made it sound as if his aversion to oral sex was tightly bounded and everything else really was good, I'd be thinking about ending the relationship (or consciously transitioning it to something that wasn't sex-based at all).
Partially, the physical incompatibility thing is real; just because he doesn't like your smell doesn't mean you smell bad, and maybe you just both need to find someone you actively want to spend hours nuzzling. But also, dropping that on you the way he did is tactless enough that I would wonder if he was either deliberately trying to hurt you, or being willing to hurt you to cover other reasons for not wanting sex with you (did I say ask me about the end of my marriage? Still don't.). Which sounds to me like a major problem.
Obviously, I'm importing my own issues here, so if it doesn't ring true, don't worry about it.
...and maybe you just both need to find someone you actively want to spend hours nuzzling
One someone or two separate someones?
I was thinking of one each, but sharing could work too.
The neutron that makes the two protons in Helium stable.
Moby writes alternative romance novels about physicists in his spare time.
The trick is getting a photo of an electron that looks like six-pack abs.
61 makes a good point: his disliking your smell does not equal you smell bad.
Maybe your MHC's are too similar, and he wants to reproduce with someone different enough that the resulting progeny will survive the plague. /s
For myself, my reaction to certain smells is entirely dependent on factors other than any "objective" metric of stinkiness.
How do you honest feedback-withholders deal with the realization that others are withholding feedback about you?? Not that it's a causative thing. Hmm maybe being blunt serves mostly as a way to create the illusion that others are also being blunt.
Anyway I've recently been on the other side of this -- a hookup who told me that she liked and was attracted to me but couldn't get past my smell (not "down there", just general). Surveyed a few friends and past partners, seems to be specific to her. WAY happier she told me straight up rather than fading out with vague excuses leaving me to wonder if it was some problem that would generalize into my future.
I broke up with a girlfriend, very early on, over something similar. I didn't tell her why, but I know for a long time afterwards she thought I was a dick for 'inexplicably' breaking up with her. And she was a nice person, and physically, otherwise, very attractive to me.
Some people's smell just doesn't feel right. That said, in 25 years of subsequent partnering, I've never met anyone else of whom I felt that way. Bell curve, and most people, presumably, are somewhere in the middle, and now and again, there's someone who just gels perfectly, and sometimes someone for whom it's the opposite.
I don't have any concrete advice, other than a data point for, "olfactory incompatibility, it's a thing."
My huge, huge sympathies, anon poster. That just sucks, and I'm not really sure how you do get your confidence back without bringing in a new sexual partner who finds you delightfully scented.
This was something I was worried about when I fell in love with someone I met on the internet.* Because, well, you can't smell someone long-distance, unfortunately, and it is seriously important. For some reason, there are people that just smell sort of like .... I don't know what, but it's vaguely urine-like, and really distasteful to me. I know they don't actually smell bad; it's definitely my nose. I first noticed it as a young teenager with a family that I baby sat for; all but the mother had the distasteful smell to me, and I asked my mom about it because I didn't really know it was something you generally don't ask about at the time - my mother reported that they smelled perfectly normally. I've since noticed it here and there with a variety of people. But I could never be with someone who smelled like that, because I find it actively bothersome.
*Thankfully, we were scent-compatible.
69: I love, love, love that Jammies has never said anything about my lack of breasts besides complete enthusiasm. I'm sure he has mixed feelings, but I don't want to know. Or weight gain, or pregnancy body grossness, or postpartum grossness. Don't wanna know unless it's an upbeat suggestion that implies he's fine either way.
my mother reported that they smelled perfectly normally
they smelt?
72: I kinda feel like when you're married, and theoretically this person is going to be your sex partner for life, this is key, because you're stuck with each other and the last thing either of you need is a too-honest comment coming in between you. In a dating or hook up situation, well .... then it seems like a reasonable time for it.
Ahem, semi-reasonable time, as in with Torque's comment above. NOT what happened to the poster.
69: Relieved that I can continue with the patched together self confidence I currently have rather than dwelling on new problems with myself I'd never even considered?
If feedback can be phrased in a way that doesn't involve saying negative about someone else's body then go ahead! Nothing wrong with asking someone to brush their teeth in the morning before they kiss you, or to shower before having sex after a long day, etc. You just shouldn't tell someone you think they're gross or ugly, or parts of them are gross or ugly. It's not that complicated.
When I was young a was a "whole truth" teller who like the narrator of Gatsby thought "Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known."
But having grown up I now temper that with a little of what John Darnielle says:
"When a person says he's 'just being honest', this is a good time to start looking for the exits. Especially a potential romantic partner, people who put great priority on just being honest. That means they're about to harm you in some very essential way. Not just that they're going to screw you over or cheat on you. They're really going to find the vulnerable spot and get to it, because it gives them pleasure. That's how they get their pleasure. And so they say to you, 'Hey, you know, I just try to be an honest person.' Oh, my friends, locate all the places to run in a fire in that kind of situation."
78.last: That certainly fits with my experience of people 'just being honest,' boy, oh, boy. I like this quote.
Sidenote: I remembered why I don't comment very often. I feel like just posting a series of qualifications to everything I say. Oh, how I admire people who have the knack of perfectly expressing themselves.
If you're a babysitter and the kids smell vaguely of urine, I'm pretty sure that means you aren't doing something you're supposed to do.
She said, maybe it's the skeevy look in your eyes;
That you mind has turned to apple sauce;
The dreary architecture of your mind:
I said, but what exactly is it turns you off?
61/72/78 seem a little off to me relative to the OP. He didn't volunteer this super-willingly, it sounds like it took a couple of rounds of "no, really, tell me honestly" to get him to say anything, and I think that lying under those circumstances is pretty different, and actively bad, compared to his not bringing it up in the first place.
I concur that this is a baseline sexual chemistry/compatibility thing, and that the best move (with 20/20 hindsight) would be if he had, early on, both noticed this and arranged to end the relationship for vague reasons. And that upon receiving those vague reasons, she didn't push for "real" reasons or "closure" from him.
80: Kids were well past potty training! (And the Dad, too, or so I assume). It's not really urine-smell, I just can't quite describe it. Slightly fusty? Who knows, it's obviously all in my head anyway.
Maybe the guy who works behind the counter at bowling alley and sniffs the shoes of all the women who rent alley-owned footware is the guy who knows most about love?
71.2: By any chance, did that family own a dog with no nose?
Heh. I was trying to make a joke like that but I failed to get it to work.
Also a destructive way to decline oral sex.
I'm with 33.2 and the like. Smell is a fundamental part of chemistry and if it's not there, it's a dealbreaker. (For me.)
It is hugely terrible to find this out in such a shitty way at such a late date. But it's definitely not your fault. You don't smell bad in some objective sense.
Do you want to leave him over this?
If so, Paul Simon would like you to leave in a way that makes a rhyme.
I mean, I'd be really angry (as well as hurt/humiliated/etc) about having been lied to for so long (by omission at least). I don't think there was any benefit to the honesty by the time it came, and this whole thing is his fault, and I'd leave him over it.
He SHOULD be very scared you'll leave, I guess is my point. You shouldn't leave if you don't want to, but you should consider it an option.
and for sure consider a rhyme scheme as on the table as well.
Nothing will bring in Millennial commenters like up to date musical references like Paul Simon.
Still boriig after all these years.
HE'S NOTHING WITHOUT ME, MAN. NOTHING!
That would have been funnier prefaced by "opinionated." Just saying.
WHAT A RESPECTFUL YOUNG MAN. WHY CAN'T HE SHACK UP WITH A NICE WHITE GIRL?
As a child of No Cal hippies i wholeheartedly endorse that "honesty" as the be-all to end-all is overrated bullshit. Dude should have bowed out long long ago and as a super duper smeller type i can't imagine this relationship has a future. So sorry, ATM-er. Horrible situation but totally his problem & fault.
On the humorous side, when the kid was about 4 he dove into our bed on an early Sunday morning, right after-unbeknownst to him-parental hijinks. Under the covers he burrowed, then abruptly surfaced complaining it was "hot and stinky" under there. We will continue to suppress guffaws until he has his own 4 year old and we can tell him this story. 😍
Arthur and I agree about almost nothing; but it's true, I have enriched his life quite a bit, now that I think about it.
As far as "should have disclosed earlier," this seems like it's making the complementary error to assuming smell doesn't matter: assuming that *everyone* knows smell matters. Maybe the guy genuinely enjoyed sex (but not cunnilingus) with the ATMer, despite smell incompatibility, because so many other things about the sex were good. Maybe he was happy with how things were, and being happy with them, didn't see the need to complain.
It seems to me like there ought to be some space in between Heebie's and Unfoggedtarian's claim that one should never disclose adverse information about your attraction to your partner, even when your partner specifically requests that piece of information, and dairy queen's and torque's claim that he had a strong duty to disclose. It can actually be hard to figure out which information is relevant, and which information is just stirring up shit best left unstirred.
Oops, dairy queen was saying that he had a duty to *break up with her*. That *also* seems not at all obvious from the ATM.
I'm of the camp that says that if, like the letter-writer, you are getting signals that your partner is reluctant to answer a question, maybe because he/she is finding it hard to formulate an answer that won't hurt you, and you then demand honesty and follow with some sort of version of "just spit it out," that the primary responsibility for any resulting hurt is basically on you. Not that you can stop yourself from feeling hurt when stuff like this comes out - your feelings are your feelings - but you can't really expect gentle diplomacy when you are forcing the issue like that.
If you are only two years into a relationship with no kids, breaking up over this is a clear option that may be best for both of you. If you do both want to work on this, a good couples counselor or sex therapist may be helpful in working through the painful parts of discussions, and maybe suggesting some alternatives. But even then, I wouldn't expect miracle solutions, and things may very well get worse over time.
Talking about someone else's relationship from a distance is always mostly bullshit -- we're not there, we don't know the guy, we're probably all wrong about everything.
But as a rebuttal to 'don't be so hard on the guy, she asked', pull back a little to the context in which she asked. They were talking about how their sexual relationship was slowing down, and in that context she asked why he wouldn't perform oral sex more. And his defense to a question which comes out to 'how come you're being a neglectful, insensitive lover' was 'well, I didn't want to tell you this, but your body disgusts me.'
To put it another way, she only pressed him on the issue because he had non-verbally conveyed that there was a problem with enough clarity that the question was necessary. I'm making up relationship rules here, from my unassailable status as a person who's good at this kind of thing, but I think there is a next thing to absolute rule that it is wrong to let disgust or repulsion for a partner's body affect how you treat them. Best, you don't feel any: you actively want to rub yourself all over them any way you can. More realistic over a long relationship where things happen, there are either moments or specific issues where you're sucking it up and talking yourself out of being put off. If something about your partner's body repels you in a way you can't get past, though, that doesn't make it okay for you to treat them as if they're objectively disgusting: your only decent options are either to somehow overcome the repulsion treat them well, or to admit to them and to yourself that you don't have the capacity to be a decent partner to them and leave, ideally before anyone's too emotionally invested (see Alex Salmond, torque's hookup as examples of when to do that -- early).
I don't know what makes sense to do to recover from this situation, but it does not feel to me like a 'so sad that they've got this incompatibility' thing. The guy fucked up.
Pivoting to the actual question she asked, about how she could get her mojo back? I think never having sex with someone who she believes is disgusted by her is a first step. If he ever wants to have sex within the relationship again, he can figure out how to talk her into it, by which I mean convince her somehow that he does, globally, find her attractive and desirable, and the smell thing is an unimportant quirk. This seems possible, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it.
If that hasn't gotten worked out somehow over the next couple of months? I'd leave, or explicitly reconfigure the relationship into something not incorporating sex. Which reduces the problem to finding a partner who does want to rub himself all over her any way he can; I'm not saying that's easy, but I understand it can be done.
...by which I mean convince her somehow that he does, globally, find her attractive and desirable...
Not blaming holding it against her when she kills his cat is a good way to establish that.
There should probably be an 'or' or '/' between 'blaming' and 'holding'.
I actually agree with 105. It's a bad idea to push for the reason, but yes the main fault here is on him for all the reasons in 105.3. I wasn't saying don't be so hard on him, only that he shouldn't have said it, and she shouldn't have pushed.
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"however far-fetched the accusation, in terms of public relations a small fig leaf was infinitely better than none"
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'"these kinds of lawsuits [that is, complaints against rulers] have unfortunately become so frequent of late that every day whole flocks of peasants may be seen"'
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This brought a wry smile. My first time with oh my gosh _full sex_ - which took me a humiliatingly long time to get to (I think I was 23) - involved me giving oral sex. And I very much wanted to. But when I (finally) moved into position, the smell. Jeepers! Just not expected. And so much stronger than I'd imagined! And although I persevered like a gentleman, the shock immediately caused full loss of, um, functional arousal. Which made moving onto the full sex part - which I'd been _so_ looking forward to - basically impossible. To avoid detection I felt I had to stay down there and keep going, and going, and going, in a terrible negative erotic feedback loop. To the point of are you OK honey type questions. In the end, we got there. I have no idea how.
Since that time - and many partners later - pubes of all parties have gotten generally shorter, showers more frequent, maybe, and I've just learned to like the aroma. Very much enjoy it, actually.
So my advice to the reluctant partner is to suck it up until positive adaptation happens. Thorough cleaning, trimming etc. can't change the basic biology and really, you wouldn't want it to.
And just to add, I've never noticed anyone to smell different. Let alone not to smell at all. So this aspect of the issue I can't directly relate to. As I experience things, some people have washed slightly more recently, maybe, and that's all.
The aroma of a woman, all over - and don't get me started on armpits - but especially down there, is the one of the most exciting, arousing, and divine things ever. I'm a complete perv over it.
Leave him. Ogged is right. You'll find plenty of guys who dig you and your smell.
115 Maybe not the bunghole. I know it's 2017 and we're all eating ass but I'm not into that. Everything else though.
I agree with 106 as advice.
105.2 makes a fair point, and most of 105.3 seems good, but something bothers me about it; I think it's buying into a conflation of not enjoying something about someone, with judging them as "objectively disgusting". That conflation seems like it predictably leads to people feeling a moral duty to force themselves to engage in sex acts they don't want to do, while concealing this fact from their partners.
Information isn't free, and different people have different levels of prior skill at noticing and articulating their own preferences. You can insist on behaving as though everything is fine so long as things seem long-term compatible, but the price is suppressing the information-discovery process necessary for prompt disclosure of major incompatibility. On the other hand, you can insist on prompt disclosure, but the price of this is that you sometimes get uncomfortable information that you may feel bad about, disclosed before either of you has any idea what to do about it.
You can push out the efficient frontier with introspection - and I'm sympathetic to claims that there's an affirmative duty to do so, but that takes time and attention, which aren't free, and different people have differing levels of ability to do so inside their own heads without a conversation partner.
Some of the ATM dynamic seems to have been that the guy was uncomfortable thinking or talking about his own enjoyment of sex, since bringing up the issue was likely to be construed as telling his partner that she's objectively disgusting and rejecting her. And as far as I can tell, he read the situation correctly!
Of course, withholding information because you think your committed partner will draw the wrong conclusions from it is culpably dishonest. But this seems like sketchy behavior caused by a fundamental lack of trust that communication in good faith can occur, rather than out of an affirmative desire to limit the other party's freedom of action.
54 is a decent description of what good-faith communication might look like in this circumstance. But I suspect that if the couple in question wants to be able to have that sort of conversation, they'd have to do a lot of work building justified trust, to get to that point.
My guess is that at this point both sides would be better off cutting their losses, and building communication capacity with a more smell-compatible person, but I'm just a random internet person lacking information about what makes the relationship good, so I'm not properly able to weigh that against the bad.
I think we've also been somewhat talking around the fact that criticizing women's intimate smells has a long, misogynist history, leading to unhealthy and vaginally irritating products like douches, scented tampons, "feminine odor spray," and so forth.
Also, I think LB is right on all counts.
118: The ATMer says:
I asked "just me? or all women?" He said just me.Not everything is sexism.
[...]
In most of life, my boyfriend and I are both great feminists
This may be one of those things where you need 10,000 hours to achieve mastery.
This being either oral sex or communicating about sex.
119: Not to speak for her, but I think J is correctly pointing out that any number of honest discussions about smell or taste (bad breath, BO) would be so much less devastating, specifically because of a long cultural narrative that women's genitalia are gross or dirty or smelly. Even the same conversation with genders switched has so much less cultural baggage. It's not that either person is sexist or a bad feminist, but this is an extra fraught topic, and a good feminist guy should have realized it. I think that pretty much all the women in this thread think this is completely obvious, and some of the guys, but it is nice to have someone state it clearly.
118. Dearest Josephine. I am on my way home. Do not wash!
And maybe it's generational, too. I think I am now one of the Olds culturally (certainly in the sheets), but so many guys my age have dated women who didn't want to receive oral sex or found the idea off-putting, because they figured it was such a big scarifice for the guy to get his face down there. Poor dudes spent a long time reassuring or just decided it was off the menu. That probably informs a lot of the comments here.
I only point out "I'm a feminist" when I'm doing something horrible because I figure when a man says "I'm a feminist" it's like a white person saying "I'm not a racist but...."
126: I thought the house style was ". . . because I'm a feminist."
One little white lie and I killed the blog.
Oh, fuck's fucking teeth. I just got into a genuinely interesting discussion on twitter with someone with an unusual name that I recognised at once, so I followed her, only to get a message back asking me to unfollow because my daughter was an ex of hers (which I knew from the name and facebook). And that faint glimmer of contact, that I might talk with someone who had known her since she stopped talking to me, even if it was about entirely different matters, was extinguished five minutes after I thought I saw it.
I'm tired. It's been a pretty horrible day. Tomorrow my human friend gets sliced open by the surgeons. And now fucking this. I'm off for a walk across the ice floes.
Oh man, that sucks. I want to tell you that your daughter will reestablish contact eventually if you just wait, but of course I don't know. But best wishes for Nell!
I guess this is the right thread to say I'm having lasers shot up my lady parts on Tuesday. Should be interesting (and will hopefully lead to greater functionality). I'm told I will not receive any superpowers, which is a little disappointing. At least they're giving me a cancer survivor discount.
They always downplay the possibility of superpowers. Sure, if everything goes as expected, it won't happen, but you're one wacky lab accident away from your own comic book.
If anybody is dressed like a stormtrooper, run.
Time was I could have convinced myself that a totally novel sex act could be devised from lasers and Star Wars characters.
I feel a bit under the weather myself, but probably not for any reason that deserves sympathy. Because of a combination of having a birthday in the house and me doing the grocery shopping without a list, I've eaten enough rich food that I think I should get gout to learn a lesson.
I vote for 'Gouty Dick' as your new pseud.
I need written instructions before I can be trusted with grocery shopping or oral sex.
134: I have had a great response to my (presumably slightly different) hot feminine laser action PLUS got very nice shots of my uterus before and after it was burned into an inhospitable crater.
F. Monster, thinking of you. My year of surgeries has made it clear how much harder they are on the people who love the patient and can't really do much more than that. I do hope your daughter comes around eventually. You are decidedly worth knowing.
Time was I could have convinced myself that a totally novel sex act could be devised from lasers and Star Wars characters.
It turned out to involve something entirely different as I recall it.
Sorry to hear that about your daughter, FM. I hope she comes around.
FM, Nell, J,R - hope everything goes well medically, and I'm sorry for the extra grief.
THEY SHOULD JUST BOTH START EATING ASS. PROBLEM SOLVED OR OVERWHELMED. WIN-WIN.
Until the ass-mounted lasers come.
Nell has been delivered to the chirurgens in good spirits. She would have me remember her to the blog.
140: well, officer, it's like this: we wrote out all the instructions and he really did try to follow them but there was a mixup with the envelopes. It was embarrassing enough when he complained that he couldn't find any carrots down there, but the trouble really started when he reached the supermarket.
PLUS got very nice shots of my uterus before and after it was burned into an inhospitable crater.
Well, I say we take off and laser her uterus from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
148 Good wishes to you and Nell.
Only just now getting into this thread, but very much endorsing 33.2: "IME, attraction to a partner's smell (especially their intimate smells, but also just in general) is a) not something that can be changed, and b) an important factor in intimate compatibility."
It's impossible to say what the causality was, but I was never attracted to BOGF's smell*, and it was absolutely part of the whole deal.
*more her general smell than down there, but I def. did not love her smell down there, either; she's the only woman (of a small, but not tiny, sample) I haven't actively enjoyed going down on.
148: Best wishes for unremarkable results and easy recovery.
134: Good luck! I keep wishing it had a cutesy portmanteau name like revajuvenation. Maaybe someone more clever can manage this.
so many guys my age have dated women who didn't want to receive oral sex or found the idea off-putting, because they figured it was such a big scarifice for the guy to get his face down there
This doesn't make any sense to me. I'm almost certain that I'm slightly older than you, and as long as I've been aware of it as a topic for discussion, refusal to go down on women has been a marker of retrograde attitudes (frex "The Sopranos"). I mean, I guess I've lived in relatively enlightened circles, but I have trouble thinking of a woman born in the '70s thinking that way, unless her milieu was entirely meatheads.
I am in the "This is about him, not you" camp. Or more accurately, about the relationship. Maybe that makes it worse?
If you are in a serious relationship, you have to be able to have "You smell a little funky to me" conversations. Or "why don't you go down on me?" conversations. But delicately because they are potential landmines.
I care about your health v. There is something about you that I find incompatible.
But this is not about your general personal attractiveness or desirability.
155: I didn't grow up among the coastal elites? So yeah, later than you think. Probably mostly OK by the 2000s, but I was long gone from there.
Also, having caught up, I'm mostly with Benquo, especially on 117. IMO "I think there is a next thing to absolute rule that it is wrong to let disgust or repulsion for a partner's body affect how you treat them" is way too strong a principle to be applying to "goes down every 3 months instead of every 3 weeks*". He wasn't cold and aloof at dinner because he didn't like her smell; he avoided burying his nose in her smell because he didn't like it, but nonetheless would do it on occasion.
I'm Team Incompatibility here--this probably isn't fixable, and anon shouldn't force herself to stay with someone who makes her feel bad about herself--so I'm not arguing that his behavior is in line with a successful, long-term relationship. I'm just saying that I don't think his pre-talk behavior crossed some sort of bright line. To flagrantly overshare, AB doesn't go down on me nearly as much as past GFs, nor as much as I'd prefer. I don't know the reasons, and I've decided not to care (and, given the gender roles and associations, I'd never insist), but I don't view her as even potentially breaking some sort of absolute rule.
This isn't intended to be a direct analogue to the OP--I really don't think it is--but merely pushback on 105.3. It would be bizarre if AB is being a cad if she dislikes my taste, but all clear if she dislikes some other aspect not tied to my person. It's sex. She's not enthusiastic about part of it. She's allowed to minimize participating in that part without being an asshole. If it's hiding non-sex issues, that's another thing, but the OP is limited to a sex-specific issue (at the outset; it's now far larger, of course).
*making some big frequency assumptions here, but I think it's 100% fair to presume sexual frequency as declining beyond the first year of a relationship, and also that oral isn't going to be part of every encounter for the vast majority of cases
157: Maybe. I don't think of where I went to HS in NJ as being in any way sophisticated (way more guys chewed and drove pickup trucks than drove a new car of any kind, let alone a fancy one), but maybe it's just the cues that I personally picked up. Sort of like the old thing that Archie Bunker types never viewed Archie as being a negative figure; if I saw/read something where the guy was grossed out by oral, he was generally being categorized as a jock or otherwise traditionally masculine, and I rejected that, where others might think "right on".
FWIW the two women I had sex with who grew up working class certainly welcomed/expected it, but I've never been with anyone from a small town or whatever.
154.2- Isn't something like that already claimed by the people who try to do plastic surgery to re-create virginal status? Not googling it because I'm at work.
refusal to go down on women has been a marker of retrograde attitudes (frex "The Sopranos")
And thus I have the opportunity to use one of my favorite jokes from high school- it's just like being in the Mafia, one slip of the tongue and you're in deep shit.
Yeah, the disclaimer in the first line of 105 is sincerely meant -- I'm not there, I don't know either of the people, I could be reading the entirely wrong things into the situation. But... whatever AB's deal is, she is acting in a way that doesn't make you worry that she finds you disgusting in any broad sense, so it's no big thing for you and you haven't pressed her on the issue.
The impression I get from the OP on the other hand, is that she was pressing the issue because the way he was behaving around sex in general made her worry that something else was going on (note that he confirmed that the issue wasn't limited to oral sex). Now, it's possible to be oversensitive, who knows how he was actually behaving, there are very few bright lines in the world. But under the assumption that the OP's being reasonable (and given that her snap reaction was to check out with her gyno whether there was a soluble problem, she seems like a reasonable sort of person), if she was picking up signals that he was generally grossed out by her body, then I'm judging him for sending those signals, both as wrong in itself and as leading to the conversation that hurt her feelings.
162:
"Talking about someone else's relationship from a distance is always mostly bullshit -- we're not there, we don't know the guy, we're probably all wrong about everything."
Yep. This statement should be repeated over and over. And, yet, sometimes it is easier to analyze from a distance.
"given that her snap reaction was to check out with her gyno whether there was a soluble problem, she seems like a reasonable sort of person"
From the OP, her snap reaction was to have a complete emotional meltdown and decide that she would never be able to have sex with her boyfriend again.
I thought she just said she'd never be able to enjoy it, not have it.
You're either not particularly good at this reading thing, or not strongly attached to literal truth. I'll give you meltdown as a judgment call, but the latter half of your summary is nowhere in the post.
I have had back-channel conversations with the poster throughout this, and I can confirm that they have had sex since then, but she is not yet able to enjoy it.
See, and having unenjoyable sex doesn't seem like a good thing either. Lee was extremely sexually confined, as in there was basically only one thing she'd ever do, on top of not really being comfortable women's bodies up close and eventually really hating mine in particular and I'm not sure where a person is supposed to go with that I guess on either side. I wasn't going to push her to do something she found unpleasant, but I certainly wasn't going to get anything I wanted out of it either. (I mean, obviously we should have broken up and eventually did. But it was complicated by a lot of things along the way.)
It's not a good thing, but it's a different thing from deciding to never have sex again.
Laser thing went well--no Stormtroopers.
RE 118, 123, 125, 155, 157, 159:
This seems like yet another case where people who otherwise communicate a lot can be in totally different bubbles about culture war stuff, depending on which communication channels you are tuned into. The existence of such bubbles is one of the most important things to understand about contemporary life.
My initial acculturation around sex gave me the sense that finding women's genitalia/smell disgusting was deprecated and Not The Done Thing Anymore, while finding men's genitals/smell disgusting was uncontroversial. Likewise I got the message that women's pleasure is Important and To Be Valued and women have the right to expect oral sex from partners, but men's desire to be pleased is retrograde and men insisting on receiving oral is atavistic and Not The Done Thing.
Obviously this is not the message everyone received. (I also initially had the impression that overt racism and sexism were almost universally deprecated and Not The Done Thing...)
It seems I was exposed to the antidote to stuff that was active on other channels, but not to the thing it was an antidote to, before I was sophisticated enough to draw the appropriate inferences.
162: That makes sense & I feel like I understand better where you're coming from now. Thank you for taking the time to explain!
Somehow, I have utterly lost the ability to make working links, but here's some timely commentary:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/style/my-vagina-is-terrific-your-opinion-about-it-is-not.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=mini-moth®ion=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0
I know that many other women have had their vaginas explained to them, because for the past 25 years my career has been dedicated to treating vaginal and vulvar problems. I have listened to women with completely normal exams weep that they have been told that they do not smell or taste correctly. That they are too wet, or too loose, or too gross.
Now, apparently, folks were suggesting that it was a good idea to put a mentholated petroleum product in one's vagina. (It is not.)
Oh dear, Vick's Vaporub was the suggestion for HIM.
mentholated petroleum product
For the woman who wants a man who is aroused by a pack of Kools.
178:
I am a huge Jen Gunter fan. More Jen Gunter in the NYTimes and everywhere please.
This blog post linked in ydnew's thing is good too.
https://drjengunter.wordpress.com/2017/10/25/vaginal-vicks-vaoprub-oh-my-god-people-just-dont/