This article is to be read by people over 16 years old only.
First of all, let me start by saying sex is not a taboo topic. One day, I would like sex to be spoken about as casually as talking about the weather or sports. And no, I am not talking about telling everyone the details about what you and your partner did last night. Instead, I want to talk about how issues like erectile dysfunction, performance anxiety, atrophic vaginitis/vaginal atrophy, and dyspareunia affect people's and couples' lives. If you're not familiar with any of the things above, I would suggest you look them up and learn about them because I'm sure you'll hear about them at least once in your life.
In this article, we're going to focus more on the male side of sexual dissatisfaction and pressures. This is mainly because I am a male and have more experience with these topics.
During my early teens, I was very promiscuous. I'm not proud of this, but I'm also not ashamed of it. Having many sexual relationships at a young age meant I learned a lot. However, I also believe that at one point, porn was a big factor in my life. We'll get more into that later on.
As a teen, I was very open about my sex life, as you can imagine being the most sexually active out of my friend group meant everyone came to me for their questions, and I was happy to share my "advice," which at that time wasn't accurate at all! But something I never spoke about was my performance anxiety. This just wasn't something that was "cool" to talk about. It was like a 17-year-old boy telling his friends that he worried about not being good enough or not being "big" enough; my friends at the time would have thought I "wasn't manly enough" or even worse, start making jokes about it.
For years, I lived with this. I watched porn to try to learn to be better or after every sexual experience, I would need to ask the girl how I went and need a whole essay to feel like a man. Of course, all that didn't help.
Luckily, at one point, I was able to talk to the only person I trusted to talk to about it, my psychologist. We did months of therapy around it, lots of interesting techniques you just wouldn't even think of, but of course, it came back to bite me in the bum a couple of years later. This time it was in the form of erectile dysfunction (ED). When this first started, I genuinely cried the first few times it happened. At times, even the other person involved would cry as well, thinking it was things like "I wasn't attracted to them" or "they weren't good enough." I think this broke my heart even more. To be fair, I had no clue what was going on myself.
Luckily, by this point in my life, I had a great GP and was very open with him. I had actually already seen him for varicose veins in my "downstairs" area. I actually thought I had testicular cancer, but that's a story for another time. I booked an appointment and explained what was going on. He asked me to get a blood test to see my testosterone levels and also gave me four scripts for a type of Viagra. You can imagine how this made an 18-year-old Joe feel, but I learned to live with it and kept it to myself. My testosterone levels came back a little low but nothing too crazy.
This went on for years. I was also working on this with my psychologist. She advised me to be honest with my partner about what was going on, which I did. She handled it amazingly. By opening up to my now wife about it, it was like a weight lifted off my shoulders that I had been holding on to for years by myself. Once I felt how supportive she was, I then became more open about this with my friends. It was actually so interesting how many of my friends, both male and female, have some sexual problems.
Another thing that happened was that my ED just got up and moved away. Because I was open and supported around the problems, they seemed to become less of a problem. For years and years, I held on to this secret, and it was actually the secret that conditioned me. Obviously, there was more than just this causing it, but it came to a point where I was all in my head, and as studies show, once someone gets inside their own head during intercourse, your body jumps into fight or flight mode and not in sexy time mood.
Once your body gets into fight or flight mode, the amygdala tells the body it needs to protect itself instead of enjoying sexy time. The heart rate goes up (and not for the good reasons), you start overthinking every little thing, and your brain says let's just stop and get the hell out of here. Funnily enough, when the amygdala goes off, it doesn't know the difference between being attacked by a bear or having sexy time.
So, for me, once I was open about the ED and no longer embarrassed, my flight or fight brain turned off! This means very, very rare usage of medication to help with sexy time!
This is why I am so passionate about talking about sex so openly because if I felt I could, I can only imagine how much this would change in my life.
So, men, take note - there is nothing wrong with having ED. In fact, 18 million men under the age of 20 live with this.
Women, take note - If a man is struggling during sexy time, 98% of the time, it isn't you or what you are doing wrong. It can be 100 reasons, including having a shit day at work! If you feel comfortable with the partner, be open with them and ask how you can help. Support him to go to the GP if it continues a couple of times.
At the end of the day, we're all humans, and nobody is built perfectly.
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