"I’m sure you get messages like this all the time but I’m really not sure what else to do. My husband and I just celebrated our three year wedding anniversary which also marks 2.5 years of our struggle with his porn-induced erectile dysfunction.
My husband is a healthy 23-year-old man who has struggled with porn since he was 12. The first six months of our marriage were fine, probably because neither of us had sex before we got married and we were figuring things out together. However, it was shortly after that our love life has been nothing short of devastating for both of us. I’m running out of options. Even though he stopped watching porn a year ago, he still struggles with all of the classic symptoms—lack of arousal, inability to maintain an erection, inability to ejaculate, and so on. We’ve tried many things to try and work through his issues. We have stopped having sex for 3 month periods twice now. We’ve tried creating intimate dates with no sexual pressure with the goal of emotional connection to make a more natural approach to sex. For a while, I wrote down whenever he would decline having sex with me. I recorded how he was feeling, what he did that day, anything in order to find a behavior pattern. Now, I’m seriously out of ideas and nothing has gotten better.
When his porn-induced erectile dysfunction first became an issue, we were having sex maybe once a week. But now it’s only once every 3 weeks. Not to sound vain but I feel it is important to clarify that I am not an unattractive woman. I’ve been told I am beautiful for most my life and have never had any serious confidence issues about my appearance. I am 22-years-old, 110 lbs, and fairly fit. I take pride in my personal appearance and in making myself attractive for my husband. However, none of this seems to matter. I haven’t felt desired or physically loved in years and my self-esteem is so low now that it’s basically non-existent.
My lack of sex has resulted in the most insane sexual desire. I find myself absolutely craving sex no less than 3 times a day. In an attempt to encourage my husband to have sex with me, I’ve made it clear how open and experimental I am willing to be in the bedroom and that I am up to try anything. I constantly tell my husband how attracted I am to him and how intensely I desire him. His response is always that he wants to have sex and loves me but that he just can’t, isn’t feeling it, or too tired. He compliments me back but his words don’t mean much when he declines me after greeting him at the door wearing lingerie, when I’m kissing him and trying to be initiate intimacy, or when I’m literally just begging him to have sex with me.
I’ve only given myself to one man who I love with all of my heart but sometimes I feel like I’m drowning. I want to be intimate with my husband and have a healthy sexual relationship with him. It seems he has completely accepted that he has porn-induced erectile dysfunction. He has made efforts to fix it but nothing has worked so far. Any thoughts? I’m desperate!"
– E.
This story is sad but unfortunately it is extremely common. Viewing pornography rewires the brain and in turn has a huge effect on the ability of men to get aroused, especially if they start viewing it at a young age. Previously, erectile dysfunction was unheard of in men younger than 40 years of age, but now due to the amount of porn being consumed by teens today, erectile dysfunction is being found in males as young as 15-16 years old. Click here to watch a video interview with Gabe Deem, founder of Reboot Nation, a site dedicated to helping men “reboot” their brains and overcome porn-induced erectile dysfunction.
Gary Wilson, author of Your Brain On Porn, recently said in an interview, “By the time they find real partners, perhaps as much as a decade later, some guys discover they have trained intensely… for the wrong sport. (These young men) had simply conditioned their sexual response to screens, isolation, constant novelty, shock/surprise, fetish porn and watching other people have sex. Their erection problems with real partners resolved only months after they quit porn.”
This post was reposted from the Fight the New Drug blog. That blog can be found here: http://fightthenewdrug.org/help-my-husband-has-porn-induced-erectile-dysfunction-refuses-to-have-sex-with-me/
My husband is a healthy 23-year-old man who has struggled with porn since he was 12. The first six months of our marriage were fine, probably because neither of us had sex before we got married and we were figuring things out together. However, it was shortly after that our love life has been nothing short of devastating for both of us. I’m running out of options. Even though he stopped watching porn a year ago, he still struggles with all of the classic symptoms—lack of arousal, inability to maintain an erection, inability to ejaculate, and so on. We’ve tried many things to try and work through his issues. We have stopped having sex for 3 month periods twice now. We’ve tried creating intimate dates with no sexual pressure with the goal of emotional connection to make a more natural approach to sex. For a while, I wrote down whenever he would decline having sex with me. I recorded how he was feeling, what he did that day, anything in order to find a behavior pattern. Now, I’m seriously out of ideas and nothing has gotten better.
When his porn-induced erectile dysfunction first became an issue, we were having sex maybe once a week. But now it’s only once every 3 weeks. Not to sound vain but I feel it is important to clarify that I am not an unattractive woman. I’ve been told I am beautiful for most my life and have never had any serious confidence issues about my appearance. I am 22-years-old, 110 lbs, and fairly fit. I take pride in my personal appearance and in making myself attractive for my husband. However, none of this seems to matter. I haven’t felt desired or physically loved in years and my self-esteem is so low now that it’s basically non-existent.
My lack of sex has resulted in the most insane sexual desire. I find myself absolutely craving sex no less than 3 times a day. In an attempt to encourage my husband to have sex with me, I’ve made it clear how open and experimental I am willing to be in the bedroom and that I am up to try anything. I constantly tell my husband how attracted I am to him and how intensely I desire him. His response is always that he wants to have sex and loves me but that he just can’t, isn’t feeling it, or too tired. He compliments me back but his words don’t mean much when he declines me after greeting him at the door wearing lingerie, when I’m kissing him and trying to be initiate intimacy, or when I’m literally just begging him to have sex with me.
I’ve only given myself to one man who I love with all of my heart but sometimes I feel like I’m drowning. I want to be intimate with my husband and have a healthy sexual relationship with him. It seems he has completely accepted that he has porn-induced erectile dysfunction. He has made efforts to fix it but nothing has worked so far. Any thoughts? I’m desperate!"
– E.
This story is sad but unfortunately it is extremely common. Viewing pornography rewires the brain and in turn has a huge effect on the ability of men to get aroused, especially if they start viewing it at a young age. Previously, erectile dysfunction was unheard of in men younger than 40 years of age, but now due to the amount of porn being consumed by teens today, erectile dysfunction is being found in males as young as 15-16 years old. Click here to watch a video interview with Gabe Deem, founder of Reboot Nation, a site dedicated to helping men “reboot” their brains and overcome porn-induced erectile dysfunction.
Gary Wilson, author of Your Brain On Porn, recently said in an interview, “By the time they find real partners, perhaps as much as a decade later, some guys discover they have trained intensely… for the wrong sport. (These young men) had simply conditioned their sexual response to screens, isolation, constant novelty, shock/surprise, fetish porn and watching other people have sex. Their erection problems with real partners resolved only months after they quit porn.”
This post was reposted from the Fight the New Drug blog. That blog can be found here: http://fightthenewdrug.org/help-my-husband-has-porn-induced-erectile-dysfunction-refuses-to-have-sex-with-me/
RSS Feed