Advice to a man who experiences huge, periodic variations in his states of sexual arousal and readiness to ejaculate/orgasm. When premature ejaculation alternates with retarded ejaculation, what’s going wrong?
‘I am a thirty something year old (on the younger end) guy and got a place with my girlfriend around two years ago. We’d been together two years before that and I’d had, oh, seven or eight girlfriends before that – and, I thought everything okay-ish in the sex department. Now I wonder if there are strange waves, well ups and downs, of desire going on. Sometimes – and, like, for weeks, I feel really horny and can almost do nothing to stop my self coming way too soon (way sooner than either of us would like) and then it’s kinda normal for a bit and ten I go the other way.. it just takes me an age (way longer tan either of us would like) and I even find myself – as a guy! – faking orgasms (I don’t seem to have a problem staying hard). I’ve looked at your stuff and tried desensitizing my fantasies and thinking about the gas bill in the horny times and trying to let my fantasies rip in the ‘can’t come’ ones – but my girl is beginning to notice that I’m getting anxious. Am I weird?’
The Lovers’ Guide responds:
It’s a myth that thinking about the gas bill is going to do much to stop you coming too soon – in all probability, it has the opposite effect. Becoming more and more fully mentally in tune (in terms of thoughts, awareness, emotions, feelings) with the cycle of your sexual responses is the usual way of dealing with premature or retarded ejaculation, which you might like to think of as two sides of the same coin.
That said, this isn’t your problem. (The sort of therapeutic exercises therapists generally recommend for prem ejac or retarded ejac might help a bit, but don’t get hung up on them.) What seems likely is that your varying sexual response is a symptom of other underlying issues, which may be hormonal and/or neurological.
You don’t mention whether your mood when you’re not having sex is going through similar ups and downs. Do you find that you go through times when you are generally more alert, creative, energetic, and so on, and times when you are more lethargic, say, and lacking in affect? If so then the alert times need not correspond to the horny times, BTW, but there may be a pattern in the phasing. (High dopamine levels, for example, will tend to have you feeling high while inhibiting orgasm – witness people on cocaine or speed.)
Anyway, before we scoot you off to the doctor, run a mental check on any obvious causes of swings in your mood. Are there times periodically when you are more tired and stressed and times when less? Are there times when you do something which might particularly energise you? Is it the weather? Are there times when you drink more than usual? Are there times when you tend to eat more or less healthily? It could be that there is some obvious external factor.
You might feel that you don’t want all the rigmarole of getting this checked up medically and that you’re happy to go along with the ups and downs. If that’s the case, you still need to be honest with your partner; maintaining a fiction when you’re having sex isn’t the way to long-term happiness – indeed, you say your girlfriend is already noticing. It could be an idea to go see your doctor and see if you can get to the bottom of it. You’ll be amazed how scary an MRI can be when it’s not on television! Good luck.