“What’s Good Sex?”

In pursuit of the seemingly ubiquitous yet elusive

A few days ago, the best friend and I met for drinks. I knew something was up when my normally let’s-stick-to-beer friend handed her credit card to the barman and told him to keep the shots coming. When a friendship has survived everything—hideous acne breakouts, the tragic end of first relationships, panicked phone calls about missed periods, cheating partners, runaway bride acts, and, most recently, detailed conversations about home loans and floating interest rates—it’s reasonable to assume you know everything there is to know about the person. It’s hard to keep secrets when both of you know the contents of the other’s lingerie drawer so well that you can advise each other, with credibility, against pairing a certain kind of thong with a specific pair of shorts. Which is why I was shocked by what followed next: “What’s good sex?” she asked me baldly.

With all the grace of a battering ram in a china shop, I offered her a prolonged, “Haiiiiinnn? Means what?” In my defence, there had been no less than seven rounds of shots and considering I wasn’t going through a sexual existential crisis like my friend, I was well on my way to the kind of inebriation that inspires I’m-too-old-for-this-shit morning-after epiphanies.

“Nothing, forget it,” she muttered. Somewhere from the dregs of my fast-slipping sense of equilibrium, I remembered my best friend duties and dragged her outside to continue the conversation. Three fortifying gulps of water later, with a measure of sanity (and grammar) restored, the questions burst forth. “Did something happen? Are you not enjoying it suddenly? Don’t worry, it’s probably just a phase,” I offered in a rush.

“I guess so,” she nodded slowly, looking unconvinced.

“But what happened?”

“I was talking to XYZ. And he told me I don’t participate enough,” she mumbled, hoping that my alcohol-addled brain wouldn’t focus on the name. He is the ex from lifetimes past, who breezes in and out of her life, often at terribly inconvenient times. We all have a variation of such an ex—the one who skulks around on the periphery of our lives, fulfilling some inexplicable purpose. The piece with the jagged edges—the one that doesn’t fit neatly into the jigsaw puzzle of your romantic life. The one with whom sex is never completely off the table.

In my friend’s case, he was not qualified to give her suggestions or feedback on her sexual prowess or proclivities. He can, at best, be compared to the jeggings frenzy that hit us sometime in the mid to late noughties—a torrid affair while it lasted, but mercifully short-lived. Why my friend had opted to hang on to this particular pair long after it had stopped looking good on her, I will never know. But like I said, all of us have that one ex who serves no purpose other than occupying precious closet space. The last time they’d hooked up was when my friend had bid her teens a teary farewell. He was hardly a credible source for a sexual-performance review.

“He’s an idiot,” I told her. “You’ve obviously gotten better in the last 6 years!”

Later that night, as I googled ‘good sex’, I was confronted with a staggering number of How Tos. Advice on ‘good sex’ was available everywhere, in every format—from 140-character tweets to 1,400-word essays to several-hundred-page-long sagas. Apparently, there are a lot of people out there who have nailed this ‘good sex’ business. Good for them.

Thinking about good sex reminded me of a fling I had last year. He hated oral sex—unbelievably, unlike most men, the getting part, not the giving. I couldn’t believe my luck—how often does a girl stumble upon such a perfect one-night-stand? But the point is: our definitions of what constituted good sex were pretty different. He had some weird shit going on that I was curious enough to try but decided wasn’t for me—even though it meant giving up the man who gave head and didn’t want it in return! (They’re not unicorns; these men, though rare, really do exist.)

Coming back to my friend: if I had actually answered her question, she would have sworn off sex altogether. Because there’s no way my friend with the sensitive gag reflex is ever going to try some of the stuff I’ve put on the non-negotiable side of my checklist. Over the next few days, I asked a bunch of friends what ‘good sex’ meant and I had my own sexual epiphany. More on that next time.

—Sonali Khan was holding on to her virtue, and then she fell in love…with several men. She drinks whisky, not Cosmopolitan

good sexsexual relations