Tao, 39
After seven years together, we’ve started to have great sex. It’s taken time to shed my sexual guilt
Chen is 10 years younger than me, but she is much more sexually experienced. I was born in 1985, in the Anhui province of China, to a very conservative family. I don’t remember ever seeing my parents kiss. My teachers told me I would go to prison if I had sex before my 18th birthday. The age of consent in China is actually 14, so that was a lie, but our school continually dangled the threat of incarceration over our heads, to intimidate us. I had a girlfriend at 16, but I was afraid to even hold her hand. We wrote love letters to one another, which we exchanged wordlessly in school corridors. We dated for months but never touched.
My friends used to sneak out after school to chat up girls in cyberbars. Most of the flirting is virtual: you sit at a computer and talk to girls online, who will be in cyberbars in different parts of China. Even in my 20s, when I had escaped my parents’ house, I resisted going to them: I was frightened of being scammed by an impostor posing as a girl online. I suppose my upbringing has made it difficult for me to dissociate the promise of intimacy with danger.
I met Chen at 32, and while I had been in one long-term, adult relationship, my attitude to sex was still deeply conventional. Chen had grown up in a less repressed decade, and spoke freely about her love of one-night stands. Her boldness intrigued me, but also made me hesitant. When we started having sex, I felt like a teenager. I was used to having 10-minute sex, with little foreplay. Chen gently steered me towards more experimental intimacy. At first I didn’t like taking direction; I resented the fact that Chen was always trying to teach me something.
Chen and I have been together for seven years now, but we’ve only recently started to have really great sex. It’s taken time to shed my sexual guilt and learn to relish the experience. This year, Chen went on a massage course and became inspired to add oils and soft touch to our routine, which has helped me slow down. She taught me how to stroke non-erogenous zones like her belly for 20 minutes, before directing attention to more “sexual” parts, like her breasts or lips. The other day I came up with an idea of my own: I suggested we blindfold each other to intensify the massage experience. I will probably always be more sexually reserved than Chen, but under her instruction I am becoming a little wilder.
Chen, 29
He wasn’t used to talking about sex, and his fantasies tended to be quite safe
I went to high school a decade after Tao, so attitudes to sex had evolved a bit, although there was still repression. Couples kissed openly at the school gates, but I was repeatedly advised to remain a virgin until marriage. My reaction was to rebel. I didn’t want sex to be some shameful secret, I wanted it to be casual. I discovered that having sex with someone could be as pleasurable and uncomplicated as having a meal with them.
When I started dating Tao, I was constantly suggesting different sex moves and locations we could try. Tao wasn’t used to talking about sex, and his fantasies tended to be quite safe. Once, when I suggested doing it in the car, Tao started worrying about how we would run up drapes to blackout the car windows. I had to explain that the whole point of doing it in a car is the fact that you might get caught.
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But in other ways, Tao gave me a sexual education. I had experienced a lot of sex but very little real intimacy. I sometimes rushed into the mechanical act of it, because that felt less risky than attempting real connection. Tao wasn’t that technically skilled, but he had no problem communicating how much he cared for me. I was struck by how gently he held me; he wasn’t afraid of being vulnerable.
Recently, I trained as a massage practitioner, which has lengthened and intensified our sex sessions. I start by touching Tao’s hips and thighs with a slow, firm hand. Then I kiss him on the mouth. After years together, you get out of the habit of making out, and you can say so much with a kiss. Often I’ll lay my whole body on top of Tao’s, so he feels my full weight on him. He’s skinnier than I am, so sometimes I squash him a bit, but weight is reassuring. I used to try to inject a sense of danger into our sex life, but I’ve learned that Tao prefers to feel safe in bed.
Tao and I don’t talk about sex outside the bedroom. That’s a deliberate choice. I used to think the silence around sex in Chinese culture was symptomatic of repression, but I’ve come to realise that perhaps we hide sex in the shadows for other reasons: because we know that silence heightens pleasure. The most explicit language I will ever use with Tao is to say: “We have something very important to do tonight.” The secrecy is an aphrodisiac.