My girlfriend never wants a ‘quickie’

My girlfriend likes to take sex really slow. I also love that, but we don’t always have time in our busy lives to dedicate an hour or more to it (including foreplay).

This means we have sex much less often than I think both of us would like. How can I excite her into wanting the occasional quickie?

Perceptions of what constitutes a “quickie” vary, but compared to “average” durations, you and your girlfriend seem to be training for a marathon.

Research by psychologists at Penn State University in the US shows that most people believe sex that lasts longer than 13 minutes is “too long”, sex that lasts 10 minutes is about optimum, and sex that lasts between one and two minutes is “too short”.

When it comes to sexual duration, there is no normal, and no universal. There are, however, some subtle, but nonetheless distinct, differences between sex that is quick and “quickie” sex. Quick sex is just, well, fast.

The hurried early morning tryst that takes advantage of spontaneous tumescence, for example. Often it is a case of one partner wanting and the other giving, as long as it doesn’t take too long.

Quickie sex is more opportunistic. It takes place within a confined time and, often, within a confined space.

As quickie sex is rarely premeditated, the combination of speed, risk and adrenaline tends to turbo-charge arousal and women who might ordinarily be slow to respond can find that they experience much more rapid orgasm.

It is a paradox because, of course, one of the reasons women eschew quickie sex is because haste generally precludes foreplay.

Arousal generates lubrication and without that slip and slide, sex can be a bit uncomfortable.

Dryness can obviously be overcome by using a commercial lube, but that’s rarely available in a spontaneous situation.

Fortunately, foreplay doesn’t have to be physical. It can be psychological too. Priming techniques have been shown to trigger feelings of lust.

Research carried out last year at the University of North Carolina used search tasks with sexual words buried within them to prime people to think about sex.

Other experiments have shown that when people are asked to focus on immediate physical sensations, for example, being asked to describe what they are eating, smelling, feeling, touching or hearing, that they feel more sexual afterwards.

Instead of making an overt request for quickie sex, pepper conversations, texts and emails with references to your girlfriend’s scent, her skin, her sensuality, her cute giggle, or her pert bottom.

Your aim is to reframe the concept of quickie sex so that it is not about your urgent need for physical release, but about your immediate and unquenchable desire for “her”.

Sexual relationships are predicated on give and take, and most women will go the extra mile to make someone they love happy.

However, too many women have been put off quickie sex by indolent males, remote-control in hand, who unzip their trousers at half time and suggest that they might like to “hop on”.

That kind of behaviour depersonalises sex and is, frankly, a huge turn off. Quickie sex isn’t lazy sex and it’s certainly not about being “serviced”.

In fact it requires a man to be just as, if not more, engaged and attentive than he would ordinarily be. When you are having sex with a stopwatch you need to be acutely sensitive to the possibility that your partner won’t necessarily have time to reach the point of no return, so quickie sex should, as you say, be the exception rather than the norm.

If there is an overall orgasmic parity in your relationship, it doesn’t matter if one or other of you doesn’t climax every time, but it does matter that quickies provide mutual pleasure.

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