Advice For Couples Experiencing Delayed Ejaculation

It’s a common misconception, particularly on the Internet, that delayed ejaculation is a difficult problem to solve.  The reality is that most failed attempts at treatment result from a lack of understanding of what actually caused the problem in the first place.

It’s also partly the result of the fact that so few men seek treatment for the problem, mostly because they feel really embarrassed or perhaps ashamed about it. And that’s not too surprising. But it is a common problem, as you can see when you read this information about delayed ejaculation.

If you feel very different from other men – which is how a lot of men who can’t ejaculate during intercourse do seem to feel – you probably would want to keep it to yourself. Regrettably, however, a lot of men with this problem don’t talk about it even to their partners, and that’s where the trouble starts. You have to communicate if you want to save your  sex life and relationship. 

And even if you’re not in a relationship you can still make significant progress on dealing with the emotional issues that lie at its root. You see, a problem that seems very complicated  only looks that way because it’s caused by several factors working together. 

Video – relationship issues in delayed ejaculation

The first things is to think about your relationship. How do a couple feel towards each other?  How does the man feel about his relationship to his own sexuality? How does the man feel about the way he and his partner make love? These are just some of the many questions that have a clear role to play in understanding the origin of ejaculation problems.

Video – Origin of Male Ejaculation Problems

 

If, for example, one of the aspects that’s causing delayed ejaculation is lack of intimacy between partners, which in turn is leading to poor communication, the solution involves these problems. 

Essentially getting over it is about learning a new behavior which bypasses the old one. So as far as intimacy is concerned, there are some very good techniques you can use to develop a close relationship. Once you feel physically close, it’s possible to be intimately close.

Over the years therapists have come up with two main categories of reasons for delayed ejaculation. The first is the inhibition of sexual drive, and the second is a lack of sexual desire, which is also being called a desired deficit.

Both of these approaches to explaining delayed ejaculation (DE) come from therapists who have worked in the area and achieved considerable fame with their theories.

First was a woman called Helen Singer Kaplan, who was the originator of the inhibition model. The second was a man called Bernard Apfelbaum, who came up with the desire deficit or “lack of sexual desire” approach.

You might think, and you’d probably be right, that these look like extremely different approaches to the same condition. That doesn’t mean that either of them is wrong, because it could well be that the condition has more than one cause.

So using the “inhibition of sexual impulses” approach, Kaplan suggested that one way to “encourage” a man to ejaculate during sex was to stimulate his penis with extreme force, getting it as near to his partner’s vagina as was possible just before he ejaculated, so that he could push it in at the last moment and ejaculate intravaginally.

You might think this is not a very compassionate or sophisticated approach. The extraordinary thing is, though, that sometimes it actually works. Now that could be because using force to overcome a man’s inhibition about ejaculation is actually an adequate approach for some men. It may get them over a fear barrier, perhaps, or it may simply allow them to experience ejaculation in such a way that whatever was causing a blockage to their ability to ejaculate inside their partner is removed.

But it doesn’t work for everyone, and it’s quite aggressive. Whether the limited success it engenders justifies its use or not is another issue. Men who can’t ejaculate, and who are desperate to do so, would be delighted to have any treatment applied that actually results in them being able to ejaculate, regardless of whether it’s regarded by commentators like me as “aggressive” or not!

But what about the men for whom it doesn’t work? What you tend find here is that they require a combination of therapies. And certainly when that’s the case, you can bank on DE having a complicated origin, and the various threads that come together to cause it may need to be teased apart and dealt with separately. 

Delayed ejaculation is almost always an unconscious process. That means a man won’t know why he can’t ejaculate. Indeed, it would be quite extraordinary if he did, although I have come across men with great self-awareness who have a basic understanding of what’s going on. 

For example, some of them have a fear of women, some of them don’t like the partner they’re with, some of them have great resentment towards women, some, possibly, have a fear of femininity or are more oriented to same sex sexual activity.

And certainly some of the men with delayed ejaculation prefer sex with themselves to sex with women or indeed any partner. That psychological position is probably rooted in some traumatic experience in childhood.

And that’s one key to this problem: looking back into childhood. But the thing is, most men with delayed ejaculation don’t really want to look into their childhood for traumatic events that may have rendered them sexually incapable in adult hood. What they want is a cure. Regrettably it isn’t really as simple as that for the majority of men.

Nonetheless there are strategies that can be used, and, as in  Kaplan’s work, they are sometimes successful – even without delving into the subconscious. For example, one approach that is quite popular is to sensitize a man’s body to the sexual stimulation that he is receiving so that he becomes more aroused more quickly. 

For the fact of the matter is that delayed ejaculation is almost always characterized by a man having a low level of sexual arousal during intercourse, no matter how long foreplay or intercourse may continue.

In fact it’s not that his point of ejaculatory inevitability – the point of ejaculatory inevitability – is somehow set to high: it’s much more that he can’t reach that point, because he simply never gets aroused enough. That in itself implies that the roots of the condition lie in something that stopping the man becoming sexually aroused. And that turns out to be very often a disconnection from his body, or disconnection from the process of sexual arousal.

Video – low arousal in delayed ejaculation

So for some men it may be sufficient to “retrain” their bodies to respond to greater sexual arousal. And this is done through a process called sensate focus. 

Video – Delays In Ejaculating

And so do other techniques that are aimed at increasing arousal, like using porn, finding orgasm triggers on the body such as nipple stimulation or anal stimulation, or basically incorporating into the couple’s sex life those things which the man (and the woman!) find particularly arousing.

But of course this isn’t really going to work where a man has fundamental issue about the relationship that he’s in, or about sexuality, or about sex with a woman, or about femininity.

In those cases it’s hard to see how the condition can be cured without addressing the underlying emotional and psychological issues. For those men and women who don’t want to explore psychological issues, it could well be that there isn’t a great deal of desire to restore or develop an intimate and loving relationship. It could even be of course that people in this situation don’t fully understand what an intimate and loving relationship is in the first place.

Densensitization As An Approach To DE

That’s probably why sex therapists have resorted so much to desensitization as a way of retraining the man to ejaculate. This will probably work well if it’s applied with dedication in cases where there is a considerable level of anxiety on the part of the man.

Because desensitization is an effective treatment for anxiety, and it’s certainly true that a great many men have a lot of anxiety around sex, which can be eradicated just by giving them confidence. So desensitization would basically work by having a man masturbate to orgasm with his partner initially some distance away. Over a period of time, she will come nearer and nearer while the man masturbates to the point of ejaculation, although it’s absolutely essential that he takes the time and effort to learn relaxation and to ensure that his anxiety is reduced as much as possible by relaxation the nearer his partner gets to him when he is engaged in sexual activity.

Eventually, if this process is done carefully, he will reach a point where he can ejaculate with his partner beside him. And at that point, the next step may be the most difficult, potentially: to allow his partner to masturbate him to the point of ejaculation.

That can be tricky because men with delayed ejaculation often have a particularly “firm” way of masturbating which they learnt in adolescence. It follows that if you actually learn to masturbate using what’s been described as a “death grip“, it’s highly likely that you’re going to get accustomed to a high level of stimulation which will render you incapable ejaculating with either more gentle stimulation provided by partner, or the much less fierce stimulation of oral or virginal sex.

That’s why it’s absolutely essential for men in this situation not only to practice desensitization, but also to practice masturbating with a lighter touch. That process can be aided if they abstain from sex for some time so that their sex drive is actually higher, and if they find the orgasm triggers on their own body – anal stimulation being a particularly good one.