You can’t judge a mouth by its shade of lipstick. Sometimes the girls you imagine would talk the dirtiest in bed turn out to be the most offended when you grunt something about how they should push their tits together, while that nice girl who always wears the long sleeve turtleneck wants you to “spray it” on her face. I like girls who break the stereotype in that way—the bad good girl. But whether you’re dating a girl (or a guy for that matter), or merely adding to your booty call roster, you must scramble to adapt to their semantics. Their love language.

After years of research, I have compiled some case studies.

The girl who ran away from home as a teen, whose father is a cop, and exhibits reckless behavior: Christy introduced me to the concept of oral sex. I was ignorant of the possibility that men could go down on women until I was eighteen. We woke up together at a friend’s apartment. She asked if I wanted “to eat (her) out.” Flustered and grossed out, I said, “No, thanks.” The next time we were together, she stole a line from Prince and said, “I sincerely want to fuck the taste out of your mouth.” I was intimidated by her and almost lost my erection, even at an age when it was impossible for me to not have an erection. “Fuck me harder, baby,” she said in attempt to soothe and encourage. A few minutes later she lost patience and screamed, “Pound my fucking twat!”

The girl who is still close to her parents, has various pets that sleep with her, likes to imagine that she is “one of the boys” but often kills the mood when she’s around: Beth said she would leave me if I spoke the word “cunt” in front of her. I asked politely if I could say “pussy” but she didn’t like that either. We had our sex in silence. Once, when I tried to add even the blandest vocal dynamics, mid-fuck—“Does that feel good?—she had a meltdown and asked if I was trying to humiliate her. She also would not let me pet her animals unless I was clothed.

The girl who is too self-involved to ask you about yourself, dances ballet but likes angry rap music, joins organizations like PETA and Greenpeace but loses interest in them quickly: Whitney never once mentioned my cock or my eagerly darting tongue, but focused on her own goodies whenever we screwed around on her ridiculously large bed. “Doesn’t my pussy feel good?” she would ask me. “Yes,” I would pant, trying to fuck her good enough so she’d notice me. “I’m the best fuck in the mall, ain’t I?” she’d query (we were working in a mall at the time). Once, in a moment of generosity, she said, “If you make me cum, I’ll make you cum too.” She must not have realized that I already came and was merely working overtime until some tension left her body. “Feed on my titties,” she said. “I wanna hear you slurp.”   

The girl who doesn’t own a television, likes (and understands) poetry, sometimes gets blindingly drunk and loses her cell phone at lesbian bars: Jen was basically a sex machine and would suck or hump anything that limped. She had a loud voice and talked constantly, even with her mouth full. She would suck my cock first thing in the morning while talking about her fucked up dreams. One strange detail is that she always referred to our body parts in proper clinical terms: “Your penis turned into a hammer (lick, pause) and you were nailing me to a cross, and then (suck, head twist, lick) your hands turned into penises and you fucked my vagina (lick, pause) with your left hand while titty-fucking me (suck) with your right.” When she got drunk, she liked to turn the tables. “How ‘bout I fuck you tonight?” she’d slur. “I got a strap-on with your rectum’s name on it. You wanna be my sexy bitch tonight?”