Name: Alice
Gender: Female
Age: 19
Location: Minnesota
My new boyfriend is really frustrated and doesn’t want to have sex anymore because he can’t come. He says he’s had this problem for a while and hasn’t come with any girl for over a year. I see how upset he is and I know he still wants to sleep with me, but says it hurts when he gets excited and nothing happens. Is there something I can do? I tell him to see a doctor but I don’t think he will. Thanks a lot!
Wow, that’s a bummer Alice. Unfortunately, you don’t supply me with enough information for me to make an educated guess about what might be up with him. Does he have erections? Does he masturbate? Is he on any medications? These are the first questions I’d ask him. Since he isn’t here and neither are you, I’m gonna make a stab in the dark.
If I had to guess, I’d say your man is suffering from a real bad case of performance anxiety. He doesn’t need a medical doctor; he needs to learn to relax and be in the moment. If this is an arousal phase issue then that should help. If it’s and orgasmic phase issue, relaxing and enjoying the pleasure will also help.
Here’s how performance anxiety works. Say a fella has a less than satisfying sexual experience for one reason or another. Before he know it, he replaying the incident over and over in his head, till that’s all he can think about. The proverbial molehill becomes a mountain. He brings his anxiety to his next sexual encounter. His hyper-consciousness primes him for more disappointment. And he’s ready to interpret all disappointment as a failure. And this can interrupt either the arousal phase or orgasmic phase of our sexual response cycle.
Well, you can see where I’m going with this, huh? His fears become self-fulfilling. Before he knows it, he begins to avoid sex. His relationships suffer. He develops a full-blown sexual dysfunction. And his self-esteem takes a nosedive. His preoccupation with his problem makes it less likely that he’ll be fully present during sex with his partner, which pretty much fucks up his sexual responsiveness and any hope for spontaneity.
It sounds to me like performance anxiety is putting a damper on his sexual arousal and thus short-circuiting the rest of his sexual response cycle, including orgasm.
This is nothing to fool around with, especially for someone at his tender age. When I see this sort of thing in my private practice, I always begin the therapeutic intervention by calling a moratorium on fucking of any kind. This immediately takes a great deal of the pressure off the couple. From there we begin to rebuild the partnered psycho-sexual response one step at a time. We begin with sensate focus training, stress reduction, and relaxation exercises. I have the greatest confidence in this method. It succeeds over 90% of the time.
Good luck