Ask people to name the ways couples have sex and most stop at three: intercourse, oral, and whatever they are too shy to say out loud. Mutual masturbation rarely makes the list, which is strange, because a lot of couples are already doing it. Touching yourself while your partner watches. Guiding their hand to where you want it. Lying side by side with no particular finish line. It is one of the oldest forms of shared intimacy and one of the most overlooked, and it deserves a better reputation than it has.
The numbers nobody quotes
The biggest modern snapshot of how Americans actually have sex is the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, run out of Indiana University. In the 2009 wave, published by Herbenick and colleagues in 2010, partnered masturbation showed up at the most recent sexual encounter for 28.9% of men and 23.6% of women. Close to one in four. That is not a fringe act. That is an ordinary night.
The reason it feels rare is that nobody talks about it. Intercourse gets the movies. Oral gets the jokes. Two people getting each other off by hand gets silence, mostly. But the data is plain: this is a normal, common thread running quietly through healthy sex lives, and a later 2023 study in the International Journal of Sexual Health even found that recent mutual masturbation lined up with higher sexual satisfaction. It is not a consolation prize. For a lot of couples it is the main event.
Intercourse gets the movies. Oral gets the jokes. This gets silence, and it should not.
Why sex therapists reach for it
There is a reason clinicians have leaned on this middle ground for more than fifty years. When Masters and Johnson published Human Sexual Inadequacy in 1970, the centerpiece of their treatment was sensate focus: slow, structured touching with the goal of orgasm deliberately taken off the table. In the early stages couples were told not to aim for intercourse at all. The point was to feel rather than perform, to drain out the anxiety that comes from chasing a result you can fail at.
Decades later, therapists Linda Weiner and Constance Avery-Clark spent a careful 2014 paper clarifying what Masters and Johnson actually meant: the touch is for your own interest, not a performance staged to please the other person. Take away the scoreboard and the pressure leaves the room with it. Mutual masturbation sits squarely in that tradition. Nobody has to get hard on cue. Nobody has to finish to prove a thing. You are next to someone who wants to be there, and that is the whole assignment.
The one rule that matters
None of this works without the part that is never optional: both people want to be there. Mutual masturbation only counts as intimacy when it is freely and enthusiastically chosen by two adults, every single time. A partner's no is a full sentence. It is not a problem to route around, negotiate down, or wear away. The entire appeal of this middle ground is that it runs on low pressure, and pressure is exactly the thing that breaks it.
That is also why it belongs to a bigger, more honest conversation. When two people in a relationship want sex at different rates, the answer is never to push. We wrote a whole piece on desire discrepancy, and what to do when one partner wants more, because managing your own desire honestly always beats leaning on someone else's. Doing this side by side, on the nights you both actually feel like it, is one of the kindest versions of that.
How to start without making it weird
If it sounds awkward on paper, that is normal, and it passes fast. Start small. Watching is a good on-ramp: one person touches themselves while the other simply pays attention, no hands required yet. From there you can guide, show, say what you like out loud. None of it has to lead anywhere in particular.
If you want a structure to lean on instead of a self-conscious silence, a paced session helps. Some people like a voice setting the rhythm: our free JOI guide does exactly that, an instructor calling the pace so you do not have to think about it. If you would rather have plain, unhurried steps written out, the jerk off instructions page lays them down. Use either one solo first to learn your own timing, then bring it into the room together.
The trick is to drop the destination. No orgasm required. No performance. Two people, some time, and no clock. Try it once with the pressure off and see what happens.