Why Is the Inexperienced Heroine Having All the Best Sex?

An admittedly opinionated note from a midlife woman who would like more grown ass adults in her romance.

I will happily suspend disbelief for a fictional man.

Make him a soft- spoken, generous to a fault billionaire. Give him a house with a library. Let him remember one passing comment the heroine made seventy pages ago and arrange something thoughtful around it.

I’m reading romance. I came prepared to cooperate.

But occasionally, we get to the sex, and you start asking a little too much of me.

She has almost no experience. She’s never really explored what she likes. She may have spent the previous chapters struggling to make eye contact or tell this man anything at all.

Then they get into bed, and suddenly she knows exactly what she wants, how to ask for it, and precisely what to do.

He gets everything right immediately.

Ma’am.

I was in my twenties once. The decade where you make questionable choices with even more questionable men. The decade so synymous with average men and less than average sex that it spawned a hit song, “Did I Shave My Legs For This?”

I have questions.

I’m not saying young women can’t know their bodies. They can and I would even argue they absolutely should. Inexperience with a partner doesn’t automatically mean inexperience with yourself. Confident communication and enthusiatic consent are a must for me when reading romance.

However, my eye starts twitching when the story has given me one version of this woman and the sex scene introduces someone with an entirely different skill set, without showing me how she got there.

Especially when her innocence is supposed to be part of the appeal.

Somehow, she’s both completely inexperienced and exceptionally accomplished at navigating a brand-new sexual relationship.

That’s a lot to put on a girl.

Where is the figuring it out? The moment something needs adjusting? The laugh? The discovery that the thing you thought would be sexy is actually awkward — I’m looking at you shower sex.

There’s room for all of that in a scene I still want to read.

Honestly, sometimes it makes the scene better.

A character paying attention to what their partner actually says can be incredibly sexy. So can a woman discovering something she likes and deciding she’d like a little more of it, please.

I enjoy the process of people learning each other.

And as a woman in her fifties, I’m especially interested in what happens when those people bring a few decades of living with them.

In my experience, sex gets better as you get older. There is something to be said for knowing yourself more thoroughly and being less interested in giving a performance. For having a clearer idea of what feels good and whether you actually like the person trying to make you feel it.

That doesn’t mean every older woman arrives with perfect confidence or that every older man has acquired useful knowledge. Age alone is clearly not a quality-control system.

But experience gives a writer so much to work with.

A woman may know exactly what she wants and still find it difficult to ask a new person. She may be comfortable with her body but nervous about being emotionally exposed. She may discover that something she accepted for years was never particularly satisfying.

There’s a whole love story in what she does next.

That’s part of why I write mature characters.

I want women in their forties and fifties to have desire, choices, pleasure, and room to discover something new. I want the life they’ve already lived to matter to the romance unfolding now.

In my Hudson Harbor books, I get to explore love alongside established friendships, responsibilities, personal histories, and the lives people have built before someone comes along and makes them reconsider some things.

Those are the people I’m interested in following into a love story.

And yes, into the bedroom.

I’m still here for chemistry. I still want the anticipation and the moment they finally stop pretending they aren’t thinking about each other.

I just happen to think there’s plenty of that available after forty.

What’s one thing you wish you saw more often in romance with mature characters? I’d love to know what you’re looking for.

Subscribe for more conversations about old heads falling in love, along with Hudson Harbor extras and news about my books.