According to Margaret Howe Lovatt, sex with her live-in 'lover' Peter was "very precious, very gentle".
Sounds nice, you might think. But perhaps not when you learn Peter was in fact a dolphin.
As love stories go, Margaret's relationship with Peter the dolphin was, at best, weird and, at worst, warped.
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And like the most doomed love affairs, when it ended, one of the pair was so devastated they apparently took their own life.
Margaret's strange relationship with Peter began when she took part in an experiment in the early 1960s.
Aged just 20, she was part of a NASA-funded project to see how much humans could communicate with dolphins with a view to one day using this knowledge to start 'talking' to extraterrestrials from other planets.
Scientists believed that because dolphins have brains that are at least as large as ours, and that developing ways of communicating with them could open the door to talking with other intelligent species.
The project took place on the idyllic Caribbean island of St Thomas and was run by neuroscientist John Lilly.
There were three dolphins: Peter, Pamela and Sissy. Although Margaret worked with all three, she was given Peter as the individual dolphin she was expected to form a bond with.
And just like a human love affair, gradually Peter and Margaret fell for each other. Speaking decades later about her experiences of the project, she told of how Peter "became jealous" if she spent too much time with Pamela and Sissy.
As part of the experiment, Margaret had to 'move in' with Peter and lived with him six days a week in his tank. She slept on a makeshift bed on the elevator platform in the middle of the room, while doing her paperwork on a desk suspended from the ceiling and hanging over the water.
Margaret said as well as trying to teach Peter to speak, she also developed a physical relationship with him.
"Peter was a young guy," she said.
"He was sexually coming of age and a bit naughty.”
"That relationship of having to be together sort of turned into really enjoying being together, and wanting to be together, and missing him when he wasn’t there," she told the BBC.
She said Peter became "very interested" in her anatomy, especially her legs, and would spend long periods of time nestling between them, fascinated.
But it was only when a notorious profile by Hustler magazine appeared that the true extent of their relationship emerged.
The article claimed that Margaret took to giving Peter sexual relief whenever he became too aroused to participate in her experiments.
Margaret said: "It was just easier to incorporate that and let it happen. It was very precious, it was very gentle.
"Peter knew I was right there, Peter was right there … again it was sexual on his part, it was not sexual on mine — sensuous perhaps.
"It would just become part of what was going on, like an itch, just get rid of that, scratch it and we’ll be done and move on.
“[The sex] wasn’t private – people could observe it.”
But sadly, like a human love affair, Margaret and Peter's romance came to an abrupt end when NASA decided to end the experiment and they went their separate ways.
In a shocking twist to the story, shortly afterwards Peter drowned in what appears to be a suicide.
Strange as it seems, it is possible for dolphins to drown – and it appears that Peter deliberately drowned himself.
Dolphins need to surface regularly to breathe and it looks like lovelorn Peter decided to deliberately stay submerged until he suffocated.
As for Margaret, she moved on with her life and remained living on St Thomas, marrying the project's photographer and having three daughters with him.
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