Intimacy f*ckup #1
Four women told me they were frigid. Both times, it was my fault.
Wellbeing Warrior · Confidence Magazine · October 2026
One of them said it on camera, running the event with a microphone in her hand. Two of them got that word in a room I put them in.
“I didn’t feel anything. I think I must just be frigid.”
Four women, over two days, in two different rooms. None of them knowing anyone else had said a word. Not hedged, not fishing for reassurance. Said flatly, the way you report a fault on a boiler.
One of them said it with a camera pointing at her. She was the MC, running the event, mic in hand, good at her job. In almost the same breath she told me she was amazed I had got a room of women in this country up on their feet, dancing and touching themselves, in public.
Both true about the same woman. So it is not the shy ones, or the sad ones, or the ones who are no good at life. It was the woman with the microphone.
Nobody in either room was frigid. Both days, the f*ckup was mine.
Now, the advice everybody gives. Every podcast, every relationship book, every well-meaning friend two glasses in.
Communicate your needs. Tell him what you want. Just be honest about what you like.
Absolutely frigging useless.
I teach communication for a living, so you would expect me to be nodding along. That advice is an instruction with no shape. No when. No how long, no order, nothing for when the honest answer is “I don’t know.”
So I am not going to tell you to communicate better. I am going to hand you a kettle.
First, the two ways I got it wrong.
F*ckup one: I asked them to feel something in a room with no edges
Day one. A live event, in the orangery of a pub.
I took the room through Scrumptious Stroking, on the wrist. You stroke your own skin slowly, and every time you actually feel it, you say yes. Out loud. The strokes you cannot feel, you leave alone. You are not chasing a sensation, you are teaching the body to register one.
I demonstrated. I gave them the When Harry Met Sally diner scene, the full “YES. YES. YES.” Proper laugh out of the room.
It is a good exercise. I teach it to women all the time.
I had them do it standing in a room full of women they had never met.
Some of them felt nothing. Two came and told me afterwards they must be frigid.
A body only stops scanning when it can see the edges of the room it is in. I even said so while it was happening. I pointed out that some of them had taken a seat with their back against a wall and some had not, and that their bodies had chosen that before they did.
Knowing it does not fix it. A room full of strangers has no edges.
Their bodies were doing exactly the right thing. I handed them an exercise that needs safety, in the one setting that could not give it, and some walked out with fresh evidence against themselves.
That one is mine.
The most dangerous exercise in Britain
Day two, my retreat. This time, somewhere with nothing at stake at all.
Ask someone to make you a cup of tea. Ask for exactly how you want it. Before they move, they say it back to you. When it arrives, you adjust it. Then, if you fancy, you change your mind completely.
We will argue about politics at dinner. We will hand a stranger our entire birth story in a queue. Ask for half a sugar and a splash, not a glug, and suddenly everyone is very interested in the carpet.
The saying-it-back is the part everyone wants to skip. I found out why when I demoed it with one of my co-leaders. I gave her my order, then said, “Now mirror back what you heard.”
She looked at me and said:
“Oh, shit. I didn’t prepare for that. You didn’t tell me.”
She had not been listening. She had been waiting. Halfway to the kettle in her head, nodding in the right places, taking in none of it. Waiting for your turn to be useful is a different job from listening.
It is why so many of us think we asked for something, when what we did was say it near someone.
F*ckup two: the lemon
What I schlepped there, for tea. Hot water and a leaf.
At least ten kinds, most of them herbal. I forgot the caffeine free, which I am still annoyed about.
The cups, where I lost the plot entirely. Hand-painted porcelain with saucers. Chunky mugs you hold with both hands. Fine mugs with a thin rim, because some women will only drink from a thin rim and they are right.
Honey. Agave. Sachets of sweetener. Sugar, which I forgot, because which woman has sugar in the house any more? Sugar is not in. Sugar has been cancelled.
The milks. Lactose free. Half fat, because nobody wants the calories. Oat. Soya. Coconut.
All of it in one suitcase. Plus homemade, homegrown tomato soup, because apparently I cannot help myself.
I got it to the station, up one flight of stairs, and stopped.
A gentleman came up behind me and asked if he could help. I said, “Yes, please.”
I did not reach for no, I’ve got it, a sentence I have said a thousand times while not having it. I did not have it. So I said yes please, and he carried it up.
After that I stopped waiting to be offered. I asked. Another man took it down the other side. Another one in the tube.
Every single one of them loved it. I thanked them properly, “Oh my God, you’ve made my day. Thank you so much, it was so heavy,” and they lit up. Each one. A man got to be useful for a minute and it visibly improved his morning.
My co-leaders took one look and started rolling it around.
“Holy moly, this is heavy.”
It was. That is the point. I could not have done those stairs on my own, the asking cost me nothing, and every man I asked walked off happier than he arrived.
Then a woman at the retreat asked for lemon.
I had no lemon.
I planned for every preference I could imagine and I still could not guess hers. You cannot guess. Not when you love them. Not when you are trying your hardest. Not when you have brought five different fucking milks.
You have to ask.
So it’s not really about the tea.
Correct. Three things came up, and they come up every time.
“I am happy to make it for everyone else, but when it came to asking, I didn’t know what I liked.”
She can tell you exactly how everyone else takes it. Ask what she wants and the file is empty. A preference nobody has asked you for in a decade does not keep.
“I felt ungrateful adjusting her and telling her to go back and change it to how I asked for it.”
Someone gives her something, and the giving makes it rude to want what she asked for. The gift turns into a bill.
(If you have ever said “no honestly, it’s fine” through gritted teeth about something that was absolutely not fine, you know this one. Welcome. It is a big club and the tea is terrible.)
“If I asked that of my husband they would just say make your own tea from now on then.”
She has run the numbers. Her asks are expensive, there are only so many, and spending one on tea would be a waste.
Put the suitcase next to that one. Not one of those men resented being asked. It handed them a job, a thank you, and a decent story for later. Her husband is not a worse man than a stranger on a staircase. She has simply never put it to the vote.
Then the asking got bigger.
“Oh, maybe I want honey. Oh, I didn’t know that there were this many kinds of teas. Oh, do I actually like the tea bag in or out?”
They had stopped asking for what they wanted. They had also stopped finding out what was available to want. Nobody is frigid because the menu was one item long.
The question that stopped the room
“Would you want to be on your deathbed and then find out that you have been making a cup of tea the way your partner does not like for decades?”
Nobody laughed.
Turn it round. Imagine being the one who got it wrong for thirty years. Cheerfully. Every morning. Because nobody ever fucking told you.
Staying quiet only looks like the generous option from in here.
Do this one this week
The tea. Ask for exactly what you want, out loud, in detail. Not “however you make it.” Have them say it back before they move, which is the step everyone skips and the one that does the work. Adjust it honestly when it arrives. Then swap, and make theirs exactly as asked.
Your job here is to notice what happens in your chest when you ask. That flare of too much, too fussy, too needy is a receipt from every other time.
Then move it into the body. This one is called Receive and Adjust, one of the daily practices from my month of Touch Points.
Three minutes on a timer. The timer is not decoration. A thing with a clear end is a thing a body will relax into.
One of you touches the other somewhere completely unsexual. A forearm, the back of a hand, the scalp. Nowhere this is heading. For three minutes the receiver adjusts out loud, in real time:
“Slower.” “Firmer.” “A little higher.” “Stay there.” “Lighter.” “Yes, like that.”
The giver says nothing and takes no offence. The giver follows. Then swap.
On your own, do it on your own forearm, and honestly, do that first either way.
The last word on frigid
For centuries that word was about men who could not perform. Somewhere along the way it got handed to women, and by 1952 it sat in the psychiatrists’ manual as a disorder, listed next to male impotence.
Nobody accurately mapped a clitoris until 1998.
So for decades women were diagnosed as the faulty part by people who had not yet bothered to look. The diagnosis never asked about the room she was in, or whether anyone had ever asked her what she wanted.
The wiring was always fine. What went missing was the asking.
So start with the tea. It works because it is ridiculous.
Somebody in your house wants the lemon, and you have no idea which one of you it is.
Listen to The Scrumptious Woman Podcast.