August 4th, 2016 - Kristy Money

“I know we’re out of time, and that this is just a postpartum checkup, and you’re not a sex therapist, but…”

I second guessed myself for launching into this chestnut. Maybe this was a bad idea. My OB-GYN’s waiting room looked unusually crowded and I could tell she was flustered and wanted to move to the next patient. She’d clearly checked off all her boxes for my visit and had her hand on the doorknob.

I kept going because the stakes were too high. “I’m a psychologist so I can say with pretty good certainty I meet the criteria for anorgasmia. It’s lifelong except in my dreams.”

At this point, I had her attention. She peered up at me, on the exam bed, from her red-rimmed readers. I rushed through the explanation because if I didn’t get it out, no telling if I ever would.

“I’ve been to different sex and trauma therapists for almost ten years now and tried the usual treatments but nothing has worked, so before I go can you please just examine me with that in mind, so I can know once and for all  nothing is wrong with me physically that’s preventing an orgasm?”

I doubted she got requests like this often. She delivered my twins, though, and she’d seen me in all my glory as she caught not one but two newborns I delivered vaginally.

I didn’t even stop to breathe. “I mean, I know there’s a major psychological component. I did grow up Mormon. But can you please check just in case it’s anatomical, too?”

I’d done my research because of course I did. I’m me. When I looked at myself down there in a mirror in the bathtub, I looked fine. No abnormalities to speak of, except a skin tag I noticed after the birth of my first child. But I was feeling desperate to find a cause.

It was 2016 and I was there for my long-overdue postpartum visit after what I thought would be my last pregnancy and birth. I’d been married to my person almost a decade; the man I loved and who’d eagerly done his homework on women and pleasure from the start. Our bookshelf had an entire section on sexual health, so extensive and obvious that the collection later embarrasses our two older children when their friends come over. They roll their eyes like their mother is Gillian Anderson’s Dr. Jean Millburn, sex therapist from Netflix’s Sex Education. Except, unlike in the show, I’m a mom (of five!) who teaches other women to orgasms but cannot get there myself.

I felt it was safe to assume she wasn’t looking at my clitoris during the delivery—a lot was going on at that moment. And she was a board certified OB-GYN, so surely she’d come across anorgasmia before, even if that conversation didn’t happen a lot. 

She nodded her head, gave me a quick exam, and quickly said, “Everything looks good, you’re normal.”

That was it?

I wasn’t as relieved as I thought I’d be. In fact, I was devastated. I was really hoping for an anatomical/structural origin because that would make so much more sense and end my search for a cause. What didn’t make sense was doing everything right for almost a decade without being able to climax. At least she didn’t throw any shade at my awesome second set of lips. I was a far cry from the young, deferential, virginal bride-to-be who, during an exam with my first OB-GYN, was told there were no abnormalities—before being advised to consider a labiaplasty.

She didn’t have time to discuss it with me, she claimed, but suggested I see a sex therapist. Ah, so she wasn’t listening when I told her first thing that I’d seen a sex therapist—two, in fact—and was still only orgasming in my dreams once in a blue moon.

Looking back, I wish that OB-GYN had referred me to a pelvic floor specialist or urogynecologist so I could have started the deep dive I began only recently into what does work, when my research inevitably uncovered that many of the treatment options available now have no scientific basis. Then again, that pelvic exam at my postpartum visit happened one year before the first researchers published their outside-the-box findings on how a common, data-proven pelvic floor dysfunction treatment can apply to sexual disorders, too. They were likely working on phase one of their experiment on rats in 2016, but that day I couldn’t have known a peer-reviewed study would publish soon and rock my world.

Maybe life unfolds the way it should sometimes. I wasn’t “woo” enough to fully believe that yet in 2016, but I’m mulling it over now. I’ve seen too much to not at least entertain the idea that what’s meant to happen, will happen, but only when it’s meant to. And if it doesn’t, it just wasn’t for me.

If you had told me as I walked out of my OB-GYN’s office in 2016 that I’d be anorgasmic for another nine years, I wouldn’t have believed you. And not just because I don’t listen to random strangers who accost me and try to tell me my future. No, I wouldn’t have believed you because I still directed a ton of pressure inward to figure out that aspect of my sex life, so surely I’d have put enough heat on my subconscious to get with the program and give me an orgasm? It will surprise no one to hear that approach was a significant part of the problem.

Que sera, sera.

I needed to get out of my own way. And I did. Eventually. Better late than never to the orgasm club.

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Kristy Money is a neuropsychologist, lecturer, creative writer, and parent. She specializes in exploring the intersection of science, the written word, and spirituality. Her writing and interviews have been published in The New York Times, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Inscape, and The Exponent II. She’s the founder of Hill Country Neuropsychology and teaches in the counseling education program at Texas State University. She lives in Austin Texas with her husband, their five kids, and their chihuahuas Dolly and Elvis. You can find her online at https://kristymoney.com, on Instagram @drkristymoney, and on Bluesky @ofjacob.bsky.social.