You want to give your man sexual pleasure, for sure. Yet somehow you can’t seem to manage it…. he doesn’t ejaculate, and even though he tells you sex was pleasant, you can see his frustration and even his emotional pain. No doubt he’s very happy to pleasure you, but you want to return the favour. What can you do when he can’t ejaculate? (This is called delayed ejaculation; you can read a book about delayed ejaculation here.)
Let’s start by looking at the causes of delayed ejaculation.
One thing that seems to maintain delayed ejaculation is high-frequency idiosyncratic masturbatory behavior. This, put more simply, is hard and fast masturbation. Read more about that here and here. Something as simple as encouraging the man to masturbate with his other hand – which will most likely fail to produce an orgasm – can be helpful in letting him see how his delayed ejaculation and idiosyncratic masturbation have become an ingrained pattern of behavior.
Video – delayed ejaculation – what you need to know
Another cause of delayed ejaculation is the discrepancy between a man’s inner world of fantasy and the actual nature of his sexual relationship with his partner. To overcome this, a couple need to integrate his masturbation fantasies into their sexual relationship, which will not only reduce feelings of guilt but also make it easier to overcome delayed ejaculation.
Dealing With Delayed Ejaculation & Achieving Pleasure
For emotional issues that interfere with delayed ejaculation, one basic strategy is to identify inhibitions and anxieties so that your man and you can come up with new sexual scenarios and develop appropriate techniques to help him reach orgasm.
The aim is always to increase erotic stimulation, identify the man’s orgasm triggers, and increase intimacy.
Greater intimacy between you and your man is likely to reduce performance pressure on him. Mutual pleasuring will increase verbal and physical intimacy, and this will help to overcome inhibition and sexual isolation.
Video – achieving greater intimacy
Is he ready, really ready, for shared intimacy?
An “automatic” erection does not necessarily mean your man is ready to have sex. His sexual arousal may be too low. So what you can do here is relax, take away expectations of orgasm and d to encourage him to see his ejaculation as a natural culmination of a gradual process of sexual play leading to ever increasing sexual arousal.
As you do this, your man learns to be more direct in his requests for stimulation and more straightforward in allowing himself to enjoy erotic feelings. By being more “selfish,” he will experience more subjective sexual arousal and is more likely to enjoy an orgasm during sex.
Orgasm triggers
A great help in dealing with delayed ejaculation can be multiple forms of stimulation and knowing what will trigger his orgasm. New and different kinds of play might include fantasy, testicle stimulation or playing with his partner’s breast or anal area during sexual intercourse.
Orgasm triggers are very variable from person to person, but you can find out many of them by looking at what he fantasizes about. (He fantasizes to get himself off, so if you can turn fantasy into reality, that will help him overcome DE.)
Intravaginal ejaculation must be approached gradually, with a couple only starting intercourse when they are both highly aroused.
To recap.
Two factors tend to promote and maintain delayed ejaculation: vigorous and fast masturbation patterns and a big gap between a man’s inner world of erotic imagery and the actual reality of his sexual life with his woman. To put that another way: his fantasy turns him on more than his actual sex life with you.
So if you can bring his masturbatory fantasies into the open, this will help to relieve any guilt he feels, aid honest communication between you, and if you can act them out, help him reach orgasm. So, if you can incorporate these fantasies into your sex life, this is going to help him get aroused and bring him to orgasm faster.
Simple techniques can help a man in this situation. Even something as simple as switching hands during masturbation, for example, will increase his awareness of the way in which he masturbates and how difficult he may be making it for himself to attain orgasm and ejaculation. If his other hand can’t bring him to climax, no wonder his partner couldn’t do it either!
Therapy can be helpful
If your man is willing to see a therapist, there are many therapies which help overcome delayed ejaculation. One starting point is to examine the inhibitions and fears which may lie behind the problem and to develop sexual situations and techniques to overcome them.
Cognitive-behavioral strategies involve a three-part combination: (1) forming a connected and close intimate sexual team between man and his partner;
(2) enjoying comfort with sexual pleasuring; and
(3) increasing the level of erotic stimulation.
1 If a man and his partner form an intimate team, the degree of performance pressure which the man feels will be a lot lower. Helping each other to enjoy pleasure is important in generating the increased level of intimacy that can overcome inhibition and a sense of separateness. This is important in overcoming DE.
2. An erection does not mean a man is ready for intercourse. A man may need to be more aroused even if he is hard. A man needs to understand that he can enjoy sexual pleasure and gradually increasing arousal, and ejaculation is the expected end point of arousal.
The more direct the man can be about requesting stimulation, and the more he can enjoy erotic feelings, the more confident he will be of his ability to be sexual and the more likely he is to enjoy high levels of arousal that ill take him to orgasm. The need to be selfish, to seek out his own pleasure, is a key factor in recovering his orgasmic capacity and overcoming DE.
3. There are many ways of getting greater stimulation and greater arousal: enjoying sexual fantasies during partner sex, enjoying stimulation of the testes, perineum, anus and nipples are just some of these. Each man can discover his individual orgasm triggers.
Finally, a man who is hoping to find some effective treatment for overcoming delayed ejaculation should not initiate sexual intercourse until he’s very aroused. Fantasies can be an effective way of heightening arousal.
But remember that change has consequences
It’s important for each of you to ask yourself what’s at risk if the man changes the way he responds during sex. There will certainly be some consequences if the symptoms of delayed ejaculation disappear, though what they might be will be different from couple to couple.
For example, the woman might wonder if the man will search out new sexual experiences with other women; the woman might wonder if he will find her as desirable as he does now; and so on.
These points, and others like them, can be very enlightening for a couple to discuss as they work through these issues.
When dealing with delayed ejaculation, a couple need to look at their erotic life together. One of the biggest questions is what happens to the foundations of the relationship when you start to work on your sexual issues.
If you have a boring sexual life, and an inhibited attitude to sexual experimentation, bringing some of heir hidden and dark sexual shadows into the light may make your sex lives more vibrant, flowing and exciting.
Men with DE often show exaggerated concern for their partner as a way of hiding the things they fear. Changing the focus of attention from the couple’s inhibitions with each other onto each partner’s own conflicts and fears can be very illuminating!
In other words, while it’s exciting to discover new erotic worlds, it can also be scary and lead to defensiveness, fear and guilt. A man working to get over delayed ejaculation should be aware of which of his own sexual fears (if any) have been sheltered by his apparent inability to ejaculate.
A very effective way of getting to the bottom of a person’s unmet or unexpressed wishes or desires is to have them imagine being completely self-centered in sex, with no need to think of the partner. What would be an ideal sexual scenario if there were no restrictions?