A surprising amount of people have suffered from pain during intercourse. If you are one of them then the odds are that you're a woman.
It's not much fun having pain during sex. After all, sex is meant to be an enjoyable and happy experience. If you get pain, it isn't.

Fortunately, the trouble will often resolve if the man takes more time with love play so that the woman's vagina relaxes and her natural lubricant flows, and if the couple use one of the newer sex lubricants like Eros or Liquid Silk.

You can safely disregard one isolated episode of pain during sex. It's easy to feel pain when a sensitive part of you is being prodded quite hard.
But if the pain keeps on happening, you shouldn't feel you have to put up with it. You need to get something done to improve things.

I would say that if you know that your doctor is skilled at dealing with these matters, then he or she would be a good person to consult. But we have to admit that most family doctors are not trained in dealing with pain during intercourse.

It might be more realistic to go to your local family planning clinic. Many family planning clinic doctors (usually women) have spent a long time being trained by the Institute of Psychosexual Medicine (IPM) in the UK to deal with this type of pain.
Unfortunately, family planning clinics have become rather swamped with patients needing help, and they don’t have as much time as they used to for helping women with intercourse difficulties.

An alternative is to see a female IPM-trained doctor privately. There are also excellent NHS psychosexual clinics in some parts of the UK - notably Sheffield, Preston, Paddington and Tooting.

There are different reasons for the possible causes of intercourse pain, or dyspareunia, to give it its medical name. But it's important to realise that there is usually some emotional element in this problem.

If you experience pain during sex, it's almost certain to be distressing for you and also worrying for your partner. This distress may well make you tighten up down below. And this tightening up will very likely make the pain worse next time.

Unfortunately, painful intercourse can often have a destructive emotional effect on a relationship. Sometimes couples split up because of it. So that's a clear reason why you should get the problem sorted out as soon as possible.

There are dozens of possible causes of dyspareunia. Fortunately, many of them aren't too serious, but a few are.

Ideally, the assessment of what is causing the problem should be done by a doctor who is skilled in the technique of vaginal examination.

One of the first things to establish is: is the pain deep inside you? Or is it near the outside?
This may not be easy for you to say. Sometimes a pain is both superficial (near the outside) and deep. But deciding which it is can help sort out what's wrong. So before you go to the doctor try to establish where exactly the pain and discomfort is.

Another thing I should add is that vaginismus can cause both deep and superficial pain and is a common cause of pain during sex. It's a spasm of the vaginal muscles, caused mainly by fear of being hurt.
This spasm is often so painful that intercourse is impossible – sometimes for years.
Some women with vaginismus have never been able to have full sex or even use tampons. They also tend to be very fearful of vaginal examinations and so may never have had a smear test.
Vaginismus arouses strong emotions, and women who have it are often very angry with partners, doctors and themselves. But the condition is no one's fault.
Common causes includes restrictive upbringing, in which the woman was brought up to view sex as nasty or dirt or an upbringing in which the woman was given the idea that the vagina is very narrow and so sex must be very painful. There is also a background where rape or childhood sexual abuse has taken place. Experiences like these understandably make women fearful of sex and of being hurt. Another thing is painful vaginal infections and lastly unease with their partner – perhaps at an unconscious level.