Porn stars: they’re just like us. They wash their own clothes. They do their own grocery shopping. And they have long-term relationships with other people — often, people who are working in the same industry.
There’s a good reason why porn stars tend to date other porn stars: if you’re a “civilian” (the industry term for people outside the industry), you probably wouldn’t be comfortable with your significant other going off to work to have sex with other people every day. But somehow, they make it work — and as Men’s Health, there’s a lot we can learn from porn star couples that we can apply to our own relationships.
We caught up with three porn star couples — Joanna Angel and Small Hands; Jessy Jones and Jaclyn Taylor; and Nadia and Peter North — at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas to learn about how they conquer jealousy, couple fights, and infidelity — plus, what sex acts are really off-limits off-set.
JOANNA ANGEL AND SMALL HANDS
Men’s Health: What was your first date like?
Aaron: Our first date was July 5th. It was supposed to be July 4th, but I was at a friend’s 4th of July party talking about how I had a date with Joanna Angel. No one believed me. And then I was like, “Wait, maybe I don’t have a date with Joanna Angel.” And then I got too drunk, and I couldn’t drive, and she called me a pussy. The next day I was like, “Oh my god, I fucked that up. I’ll drive up to LA, can I take you out to lunch?” and she gave me one more chance. So we had lunch, and we’ve been together ever since.
How has fame changed your relationship?
Aaron: Am I famous? The short answer would be that walking the dogs and making dinner, the small things are more important than ever. Not because of “fame,” or whatever that word means, but you get busy. Work takes a lot of your time and energy, so getting those nuggets of normalcy are more important than ever.
So, what’s a normal night when you can get it?
Joanna: I own my own business, so there is no getting off work.
Aaron: A lot of people don’t realize is that I’m our entire post-production for Burning Angel. I do all the graphic design; I do all the editing, I do the sound tracks and edit them in our studio here. I think for me and Joanna, a normal night is one or both of us manically makes dinner while one or both of us works manically. We both just work like insane people from the moment we get up to the moment we collapse with each other with burgers in bed.
What was your wedding like?
Joanna: We were married by the grim reaper. We didn’t want a traditional wedding, and I didn’t want a traditional Vegas wedding. Truthfully, it was the best night of my life. Which I know your wedding is supposed to be, but it really was. Everybody came in Halloween costumes, including my very religious family. We got married by the grim reaper in a Vegas chapel, and Aaron had devil horns coming out of his head, and I had blood all over my face.
Aaron: We walked down the aisle to Slayer. We rented out a friend’s restaurant in Vegas and then just partied.
You remind me that love exists.
Joanna: We met at the right time. And our needs aligned with one another. We were able to both make one another happy.
Do you have any advice on how to maintain sexual chemistry in a long-term relationship?
Joanna: The sex educator aspect is “communicate.” I don’t always agree with that because when you’ve been together a long time, if you’re analysing and over analysing, all the sexiness gets taken out of it. Sometimes you should just have sex. I’m not trying to knock all the amazing sex therapists out there, but sometimes you’ve just got to start fucking. And maybe communicate while you’re fucking. Everybody has time for sex. You can find the fucking ten minutes in your day. Put your phones away. Forget about everything else. And just lose yourself in each other and see what turns you on.
Aaron: This is a relationship. Part of a commitment to a relationship is a commitment to sex. If you have to schedule it, that’s not a bad thing. It’s a need just like eating or breathing.
How is sex on set different than at home?
Aaron: I don’t have to suck in my gut for the sex at home. I’ll put it like this: It’s always fun, and it’s always work. Even when it’s work, it’s still fun, and even when it’s fun it’s still work.
JESSY JONES AND JACLYN TAYLOR
Jaclyn: I used to date someone not in the industry, and he couldn’t understand why I wanted to do this and why he was sitting home while I went out and shot. It’s hard for people outside the industry to understand.
How do you separate the sex you have at work from the sex you have at home?
Jaclyn: It’s really methodical. We have it down to a science. For a regular person not in this business, going on set and having sex, they would be having a million thoughts running through their head. For us, it’s just like, this is your partner for the day, your coworker. We just get through it and we’re used to it. It’s so different from the sex you have at home. There’s a level of urgency when we have sex at home and a level of connection we have at home that we don’t have with other people.
Eventually the magic does wear off so you have to find someone who’s your best friend and who you can stand forever. We’re best friends, and we want to start businesses together and grow together in all aspects. That is what makes us strong: we have the same future in mind.
What constitutes cheating for you guys?
Jessy: So let’s say you do a scene with a girl and you do everything: you eat her out, have sex, kiss, cum on her face, whatever. Cameras are rolling, you need to work as a team, you do your job. I go into the shower. She comes in. We start fucking. That’s cheating. Same girl, same day. There’s boundaries.
Jaclyn: If there’s not a camera rolling, that constitutes cheating.
Jessy: Don’t be disrespectful to your partner. Don’t talk to girls behind her back, don’t go on dates. [Jaclyn is] one of the girls in the industry who doesn’t escort — like 95% of the industry escorts — and it preserves our sanity. When you’re off set, you shut it off, and you go on with your regular life. You focus on that and you accept it and you make your money and then after that —
Do you get along with your in-laws? How do they feel about the industry?
Jaclyn: My parents are really cool. They love him. They think he’s their son. His parents are OK with [his being in the industry]. Theyr’e totally cool.
Jessy: Yeah, but it ‘s different. Guys do porn and you think, “Oh, cool, he’s a stud.” My parents were fairly supportive. I used to tell them when I was 14, “I want to be a porn star and live in Los Angeles,” so it wasn’t anything new. For them, it ws like, “Whoa. You actually fucking did it.” Then they were more respectful.
Do you guys watch each other’s scenes?
Jaclyn: It’s very rare that we watch porn in general.
Jessy: It’s like working in a restaurant 14 hours a day. When you go home you don’t feel like cooking. Same thing with porn. You do porn all day, you’re on the set all day. You do scenes all day. Someone who watches porn after work is someone who is addicted to porn, I would say. But you watch each other’s scenes to improve each other and become better.
Jaclyn: He criticises my scenes a lot because he’s been in the business longer than me, and it’s constructive criticism. To be honest, I started as a Playboy model and it was easy — you lay there, you look pretty, you take pictures, and that’s it. Coming into this industry, I was kind of a little ignorant to that and didn’t realise that wasn’t the same case. A lot of people think you can just lay there and the guy can fuck you and that’s it, but it’s not like that at all. You have to put on a show. And he’s very professional and knows the right things a girl should be doing, because he works with so many girls every day.
What kind of feedback do you give?
Jessy: Just stuff that I know the director, when a girl leaves the set, might say, “Oh my God, did you see that girl’s back while she was arching? Did you see how she couldn’t stay in that position and was hiding the dick with her hand while she was sucking his dick?” A lot of little things: “where’s the camera? what’s your good side?”
Jaclyn: “If you have any rolls, how do you hide your rolls?” Make sure your face doesn’t look stupid, ya know?
Jessy: Like, when it’s time for the cumshot, make sure you don’t get too close, ya know?
Jaclyn: It’s natural to not think of those things all the time, especially when you’re newer, but it can’t be that way on camera. You have to think of the viewer at home and what they want to see.
What do you guys fight about?
Jessy: She can’t do money. If she has $10,000 in her account, she’ll act like it’s $100 and spend all of it for no reason.
Jaclyn: I grew up very privileged, so I didn’t really have to think about how much I was spending. But now we’re in this relationship where we’re looking to get married, so it’s about both of us now. We have to be realistic with our money and think about how we save it and spend it.
Jessy: We don’t get a retirement plan in porn. We don’t get health care in porn. We get nothing. And if you want kids, I want my kids to be taken care of. I want to take time off to watch them grow so I don’t have to work like crazy. So that’s why I’m saving a lot. We’re also at the peak of our careers — she’s 29, I’m 31. It’s going great. So we shouldn’t be spending $600 on hair product and nails when you’re not even shooting.
Jaclyn: But at the same time, it’s hard to understand, because he’s not a female in this business. In order to be relevant and to work and to keep working, you have to make sure your tan is always good, your hair, your nails. It’s a very competitive business and it’s a little hard for him to understand that because he’s not a female. But we’re lucky because we don’t fight about real things.
Jessy: We fight about dumb shit. Like, we’re in bed, and she’ll be like, “Jessy, can you go downstairs and get me something?” I’m like, “All right.” I go downstairs and open the fridge and she’s right behind me. Like why would you tell me to go downstairs?
Jaclyn: But it’s only stuff like that. We don’t fight about anything of real significance.
Do you guys want to have kids?
Jaclyn and Jessy: Yeah.
Jaclyn: I love kids. I wanted to have kids like yesterday. But my girlfriend has kids and it’s a lot of work. In this business, you have to be done before you have kids. And I’m not ready for that.
Have you had the conversation about how you’re gonna talk about how to explain to your kids that you did porn?
Jessy: I’m not gonna tell them.
Jaclyn: [ to Jessy] OK, but eventually they would know, so we’re gonna have to.
Jessy: I would mess with them. I would straight-up tape all the girls I had sex with — 50 girls — and make a magazine out of it, and I’d watch it with him and say, “So what do you think about her, son?” And he’d say, “She’s hot, dad.” And I’d say, “I fucked all these girls.” Or if he has a girlfriend and brings her home, I’d be like, “Know what? My tips are worth a lot.” He’d be like, “Oh, dad, you don’t know anything about sex!” And I’d be like, “Oh, I don’t?” And I’d open the computer —
Jaclyn: That is a terrible thing to say to our children.
Jessy: Seriously, though, I want to have fun with it. Because if I’m too serious about it, they’ll think it’s wrong. Everybody has sex. Everybody watches porn. It’s not wrong to do porn.
Jaclyn: Right, but would we want our kids to do porn?
Jessy: No, because — I think if we treat our kids right and get them into a good school and take all the steps we need to, I think they can find another profession if they need to. But at the end of the day, if they wanted to do porn, I wouldn’t stop them. I’d get all my business cards out of the book and give them all my connections and I would try for them to have the easiest way into the industry.
Jaclyn: But we don’t have kids right now, so it’s theoretical. But at the end of the day, my parents are the same. They just want me to be happy and support me. And I want that for my children too.
Do you guys have any advice for couples outside the industry? Is there anything they can learn from couples in porn?
Jaclyn: I always tell couples in and out of porn that if you want to have a successful relationship, I think you need to be open with each other and communicate. It’s very natural if you’re married to one person to want to explore sexually. It’s natural to be married for 20 years and love that person and want to have sex with someone who’s not your husband or wife. A lot of times, people are afraid to tell their partners that, and that causes a lot of people to cheat, and then you betray each other’s trust.
I love him and I could never love anyone else, but I don’t want to have sex with him forever. That’s kinda why I got into the business: because I wanted to be in a business where I could explore myself sexually, and it shouldn’t be something that’s taboo. It should be something you should communicate to each other because if you fulfill each other sexually, it builds a stronger relationship.
PETER AND NADIA NORTH
eter: I don’t know what to say. She’s a handful. She does it for me in every which way, and I will never meet another woman for the rest of the life
What was your initial reaction when he asked to open up the relationship for the first time?
Nadia: I’d never really thought about being with another guy, because I have him. But then we did it and it was like, “That’s kind of fun.”
Peter: And that opened Pandora’s box.
Do you have rules?
Peter: There’s one rule.
Nadia: (to Peter) You should tell me.
Peter: Tonguing another guy’s butt. She loves doing that to me, and thats just between us.
Why is that the dealbreaker?
Nadia: It’s really intimate.
Peter: It goes beyond oral sex.
How do you manage jealousy?
Nadia: We’re good at that. We talk about our fantasies beforehand and put the scenarios out while we’re casting our movies, so we’re always like, “Baby, what do you think about him? What do you want to see? What do you want us to do?”
Peter: I don’t know how to explain this, but because we’re very open-minded and so connected in different ways, it’s a real turn-on for me to see her with another man. And when we talked about it, she got it right away. It turned her on too. I brought up opening up the relationship after a certain period of time. I thought it would be a turn-on. I never thought I’d be a voyeur, but when she’s extremely turned on being with someone in front of me, and that’s turning her on more, and she’s turned on more, it’s a back and forth thing and it just flows.
I actually thought my libido was declining before I met her, but she is like Cialis to me. I was just focusing on business and sports and cars and she brought my hard-on back.
I gotta ask about the cum.
Nadia: It tastes great.
Peter: The reason for that is because I have fresh cut pineapple with my oatmeal every morning. Everyone thinks it’s an urban legend, but it’s absolutely true. But seriously, everyone thinks the reason is because I have an extra prostate gland or something but it’s just genetic.
Wait, how do you know that? Have you talked to your dad or grandpa about it?
(Laughs) That’s a good point, actually. No, I never talked to my dad about anything sexual. But I remember when I was a teenager just shooting 16, 17 — what we call ropes at high velocity. Vitamin E helps and being hydrated with coconut water helps. I never really thought it was a big deal, I thought it was normal. But the business made a big to-do about it.
(To Nadia) How do you feel about this skill?
Nadia: I didn’t know about it before I met him. But now, I always bring an extra thong with me everywhere just in case.
What advice would you give to couples outside of porn?
Peter: Mix it up. Always try new things.
Nadia: You have to remember that you’re always dating. Like, he bought me this huge teddy bear that I would’ve paid to see him shove in the Mercedes. It was about 6 foot tall. And he sent flowers to the hotel before I got there as a surprise. It’s always nice to be surprise your girl. And for girls, guys wanna see you dressed up. Roleplay is awesome. You don’t have to do it all the time.
Peter: And if you want to go farther — different wigs help.
This article originally appeared on Men’s Health
