I am 21 years old, and I have only been with one guy, my current boyfriend. We started having sex 7 months ago, and it is nothing like I thought it would be. During intercourse I feel absolutely nothing.

I am turned on before we have sex, but once it starts, no arousal, nothing. I know that we are going to be married, and this is going to be my sex life for the rest of my life! I love him regardless! So, I was wondering, is there something wrong with me? Something wrong inside there? PLEASE HELP!!

I am sure there is nothing physically wrong with you, though it wouldn’t hurt to be checked out by a gynecologist. (Do you masturbate successfully? If you do, then you can be sure there is nothing physically wrong.) Here is my guess as to what happened. The first few times you had sex, you were so emotionally stimulated, so nervous, so worried about whether it would work out all right, that any feelings of arousal got swamped. That happens to a lot of young women their first time or two. But then you started to worry about this lack of feeling. Every time you had sex, you would say to yourself, am I going to feel anything? And those worries were strong enough to lower your level of sexual excitation to the point where you felt no sexual arousal at all. And if your partner is not very experienced, that probably didn’t help matters.

Here’s what you have to do. You have to figure out a way to have orgasms. Maybe your partner could give them to you by stimulating you with his fingers or his tongue. If that doesn’t work, maybe you have to learn to masturbate, if you don’t already know how. Once you learn how to become orgasmic, then you can teach him what you need, and your problems will be just about over. I also want to tell you that most women can’t have an orgasm from intercourse alone, so don’t expect that to happen. It might, but if it doesn’t it’s not a big deal. It might help you a lot to read up on sex, and especially on how women respond, so that you can put your own sexual activities in their proper context.