The story about one man’s struggle with delayed ejaculation continues.

He wants to do everything in his power to overcome delayed ejaculation and start enjoying his sex life “for the first time in his life”.

He says he’s taken “baby steps”, reducing the time it took him to reach orgasm and ejaculate while masturbating, and then, when he was almost at the point of ejaculatory inevitability, he put his penis inside his wife and ejaculated in her vagina.

While this is a big step for a lot of men with delayed ejaculation, it’s not actually a very satisfying experience for a woman who wants sex which allows her to feel a connection with her partner as they make love, ending with him ejaculating inside her. 

This shows the woman her man’s arousal and excitement. She can get pleasure from knowing he came because of her sexual desirability and attractiveness.

So you can see how emotionally challenging delayed ejaculation is to both a man and his partner, even when there’s a great deal of optimism and hope.

One of the critical things you need to deal with delayed ejaculation effectively is for the man has to have a very, very clear intention about what he’s trying to do. To me, that intention is all about ejaculating normally during sex which lasts for a reasonable length of time.

In this particular case history, the man reports that he believes the more a man masturbates in the presence of his partner, the more easily he’ll reach orgasm and ejaculate, which is a valuable tip. (I think he did this himself.)

He also recommends that you try to penetrate her and ejaculate inside her, or have her masturbate you, or give you oral sex, with the same outcome.

But then he says he realized he wasn’t progressing fast enough when he was dong these things himself. So he decided to try hypnotherapy – although initially the downloads that he got from a website didn’t actually work.

He also tried a local hypnotherapist who claimed to be experienced in this field, and had six sessions with no success. I’m not surprised, but still. Delayed ejaculation comes in all shapes and sizes. 

Don’t Despair – Treatment IS Possible

At this point a bit more self-reflection comes into play. The man says that he was actually becoming frustrated because “performance anxiety was a factor”. He was losing his erections, which, as all sex therapists know when they’ve dealt with a few cases of delayed ejaculation, is a potential risk with this male sexual dysfunction.

I believe this can happen because men with delayed ejaculation often have a low level of sexual arousal.

And our man admits at this point that he believes all cases of delayed ejaculation have some type of psychological causes in them.

So that’s a piece of interesting self-awareness which is very valuable too. But (ironically) he then says that for him, the chance of this problem being psychological in origin is quite remote. He thinks he has no sexual inhibitions …  seeing sex as shameful and so on. (How would he know, though?)

Is he, I wonder, postponing not only his ejaculation but also a really honest look at his problem?

Regrettably he also concludes that because the hypnotherapy had not worked his delayed ejaculation is not caused by psychological issues. Regrettably that is a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc (which basically means arguing from something that’s already happened, backwards — a rhetorical fallacy).

Even so he is trying to understand some of the psychological issues that may be playing a part in his delayed ejaculation. He’s been able to give up porn without any difficulty, which is very refreshing to hear, since heavy duty porn use can be a major issue for a lot of men with delayed ejaculation problems. 

So he wasn’t addicted to porn, he doesn’t have any physical problems, and he doesn’t believe that his problems are primarily psychological – which in fact we can’t assume on his self-diagnosis – but let’s take it as a working hypothesis.

Like he says, at this point, the only plausible cause of his delayed ejaculation is his masturbatory technique, which as I’ve said elsewhere on this website is probably the second most common feature found in men who have difficulty ejaculating during sex. Let’s see what he’s got to say about his masturbation experience.

He’s been masturbating since he was 14 years old, and is circumcised, and has never used lube. So we’re already establishing a picture where he will have given himself quite heavy duty, hard stimulation. He admits that he grips his penis a “little bit tightly” and he definitely strokes it very fast.

These are classic precursors of delayed ejaculation and other ejaculatory problems.

To me this is the answer: there’s really no need to look any further:  it’s traumatic masturbatory syndrome.

He even did the test that is recommended by sex therapists: masturbating with the hand that he doesn’t normally use for wanking. As he rightly observes, if you’ve conditioned yourself to masturbate to the point of ejaculation in a particular way, switching to the opposite hand will not make it easy to wank off to the point of orgasm and ejaculation. So there’s a conclusive piece of evidence, really.

Video – delayed ejaculation and masturbation

An alternative test, by the way, is to use the same hand that you would normally use for masturbation, but to add lube. Once again, what you’ll probably find is that the change in style, and the decrease in friction, prevents you from reaching orgasm and ejaculating easily, if at all.

Then switching back to the way that you normally masturbate, you will probably find you can come in seconds. So this is conclusive proof.

And of course the question still remains: what can you actually do about this,  if this is the cause of your delayed ejaculation?

The problem is that your body is still conditioned to respond to stimulation of your penis in a certain way — hard and fast pressure.

The problem is getting over this. One idea is to avoid solo masturbation altogether. But that is unlikely, even if you enjoy masturbation during foreplay with your partner. You can read a lot more about this meachnism in this book on delayed ejaculation.

(You can get the UK version of this work on delayed ejaculation here.)

However, you may wish to try it, while using lubricant, in the hope that the sexual tension that builds up from non-ejaculation will push you over the point of no return and overcome slowness in ejaculation and anorgasmia.

But Will This Work?

There are a number of flaws with this treatment strategy!

Delaying ejaculatory responses and resisting the temptation to masturbate when your sex drive is high requires great self-restraint. How are you at postponement of gratification? Most of us are quite poor….

I mean, we all know about sexual temptation, it’s part of the male condition. Sometimes nothing can make us linger in our sexual needs or postpone our desire for sexual gratification.

For me the critical factor here is having enough stimulation, either physically or in fantasy, to get to the point of no return despite the fact that you’re receiving less intense stimulation than you’ve been used to getting from the friction on your penis.

That means you need to be awakened to the sensations that your whole body can provide. Sensate focus can do this. 

Perhaps you and your partner can then bring your fantasies into your sexual relationship, too. And if you and your partner can act these fantasies out, so much the better. But there also has to be a change in your mental attitude to sex: that is to say, you have to become more aroused by mental, emotional, and bodily stimulation.

And that’s where I have a problem. To me, one of the reasons that men with delayed ejaculation struggle to come, climax, ejaculate, call it what you will, is because they aren’t really aroused.

I’m not saying this is necessarily true in every case, but it’s certainly a possibility.