This post has been written in response to a question I received on my ‘Ask A Sex, Love & Relationship Coach’ page. If you are reading this and are a woman, I invite you to have a read of the article Dealing With Our Partner’s Resistance To Support to read how as women we can support our men. It’s important if you are a woman with a man experiencing sexual concerns and dysfunction that you read the other Article. The reason being is how you support a man with this is different for how a man supports himself.
The information in this article is useful to know, however this article is aimed at men and their role and responsibility in seeking support and working through their problems. What I’d like to cover in this article is information a little more specific to the question below. And my invitation is that even this sexual issue isn’t yours but you experience something else such as delayed ejaculation or maybe your erection softens during certain sexual activities or maybe you find it difficult to ejaculate during certain sexual activities that anyway, you read on. As there are always ways we can connect better to our sexuality and our pleasure and heighten the experience for ourselves and also our partners. (For information specifically around struggling to orgasm from receiving oral, you may find this article supportive).
The question I was posed…
"I am in my 30s and female (cis). Partner is in 40s and male (also cis). He is a giver and his priority is to always make me orgasm. Our issue is that he comes far too quickly for his liking. It doesn’t bother me, as I love him but he gets really frustrated with himself about it. For example, during oral sex he will come within about 2 minutes, penetrative sex much less time maybe 3/4 thrusts. We have tried edging, delay spray etc. but nothing seems to work for as long as he would like. He blames himself a lot which doesn’t help, saying it’s because he is older and overweight (he is a healthy BMI but more of top end). I have quite a high sex drive but due to him working away we only really get to be together a couple of times a month. In the time we are apart we are always sending each other sexual messages etc. He will absolutely not go and seek medical advice for this, I have tried to encourage him to as reading online it says to but he won’t. We have also tried viagra but it seems to just give him a raging hard on and doesn’t make him last longer before coming. Thanks for help in advance.”
My reply speaking directly to the man…
It can feel really uncomfortable when we notice that there is a part of us that does’t feel ‘good enough’. Whether that shows up in our career, love life, family life, sex life, wherever it may appear. We tend to listen to stories around us about who we should be, how we should behave. For men especially the communication for what it means ‘to be a man’ can feel deafening and overwhelming. The pressure to get it right. The pressure to ‘just know’. The pressure to get it fixed, sorted, solved. The pressure to be stoic. The pressure to let life’s struggles wash over you. The pressure to appear to the outside world something, that very often, isn’t what you’re experiencing internally.
So when you allow these subtle messages, conditioning and pressures chip away at you, they begin to influence various elements of your life. Often your sex life. The gentle hum of stress in the background can affect your ability to either get aroused, or when you are, it can affect how long you are able to last. The part of the nervous system that affects your ejaculation is via the sympathetic nervous system, the stress response, the fight or flight. So it’s no wonder if you’re in your head and feeling background stress that your ejaculation is likely to appear sooner than expected. I cover anxiety and stress in this article here around Premature Ejaculation.
Firstly, it’s always best to go and get your health checked when you experience issues around your sexual function as sometimes that can be the first sign of a potential health issue. So for piece of mind visiting your physician or general medical practitioner is the best place to start.
Also, I’d like to touch on why viagra would not have been useful. Viagra is used to help maintain an erection. It works by ensuring blood flow into the penis. It doesn’t influence the ejaculatory reflex which is why a man can have ‘a raging hard on’ but still ejaculate sooner than they’d like.
For the reason that the couple have tried edging and sprays and they haven’t worked, there are a few sentences which are bringing me to question what might be happening in their dynamic and psychosomatically for the man.
I’m going to take each phrase(s) and speak into it directly
‘…his priority is to always make me orgasm.’
When the woman’s orgasm is placed as a priority, as a goal, as a focus what that can do is take away the pleasure approach from sex and it becomes about achieving a ‘goal’ it becomes about ‘performance’. So inevitably, once you have performed your ‘role’ there is nothing else left to do so you unconsciously tell yourself that sex has finished. What if you both removed any goals of orgasm off the table and returned to a state of curiosity and relearning each other’s bodies with the approach to pleasure rather than orgasm? What if after he ejaculated you continued with your sexual explorations? Sex does not need to finish once a man has ejaculated, there are other ways that you can both experience pleasure afterwards. It’s especially important for men after ejaculating to have more intimacy as many men can experience post-coital tristesse, so continuing to nurture each other and connect sexually and intimately can be really supportive. It is also removing psychologically the expectation that the ejaculation needs to last longer to continue with pleasure, therefore, that flip in approach in itself allows the body to relax and get into it.
‘…far too quickly for his liking.’
‘…he gets really frustrated with himself about it.’
‘He blames himself a lot…’
I bunched these three sentences together as I am experiencing from them a similar theme here of there in some way being ‘failure’ or maybe stories of ‘not being enough’ and I’m wondering through where, if at all, you are also carrying these stories into other areas of your life? Support around your own self-esteem would be important here. To learn to embody what your masculinity means to you and to find ways to connect to that primal and empowered part of yourself. How would you like to feel more powerful in your day to day life?
‘…it’s because he is older and overweight…’
As well as exploring any health issues here including also hormones like oestrogen which can rise in men too, I’m also wondering what your general day-to-day self-image is like? What is your self-worth like? How do you feel about getting older? What’s your relationship like to your masculinity? What myself and colleagues find is when people begin working on their sexuality and any sexual issues they have, they generally find themselves having a look at their life overall and begin to make changes even to things such as diet and exercise. Not in a sense to look a particular way or prove anything. But because they want to take care of their bodies. How we transmit ourselves in the way we look and dress is how we want to be seen in the world. I talk about this here, and it’s relevant to both men and women.
‘…we only really get to be together a couple of times a month.'
The infrequency of sex can increase the sexual energy build up in the body. There are various ways to expel this energy and this is of course via frequent ejaculation or also using Taoist techniques such as the microcosmic orbit which is using breath to circle the sexual energy around the body and then store it around the navel in an area called the Tan Tien. The Taoists believe that this energy is then transferred into Qi, life force energy. So you have two options here, to bring into your life while you’re away a self-pleasure practice to release the sexual energy via ejaculation or, during self-pleasure practices and/or partnered sex, circle the energy around in the microcosmic orbit. The microcosmic orbit is a great practice for men to last longer and for women to experience valley orgasms.
‘He will absolutely not go and seek medical advice for this, I have tried to encourage him to…’
I feel this frustration deep. When we see people we care about who don’t go and seek support. I’ve written to the women here about how best to support a man in getting support. SO now my message is to the men - we love you and care for you. We see your pain and we also see your potential. We know how frightening it can be to go to the depths of who you are and explore what’s there. It’s terrifying to be intimate when you have been told your whole life that ‘real men get on with it’. I can tell you now, the real men that walk into my practice (figuratively speaking as I work over Zoom!) Are the men who really learn what it is to be empowered in their version of masculinity. Taking responsibility for themselves, knowing that they have the choice and the power within them to have the life they want. Having that sense of empowerment to change your direction is ultimately what it means to be a man. To have the strength to dive into the depths and really allow yourself to be understood and loved for the very person that you are.
Because let me tell you, you are enough, you are worthy and you are deserving of the sex and the life you want.
You just need to choose to have it.
Carla Crivaro is a trauma-informed and certified Sex, Love & Relationship Coach, she works with men and women internationally to reach their goals in delicious sex, profound love and authentic relationships. Carla helps men and women understand themselves and each other, sexually and relationally, in and out of the bedroom. You can reach her at hello@carlacrivaro.com.
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