Bedroom Problems: He can’t get it up….

This very personal and beautiful post comes from Nancy* who writes…..

“I’m unsure as to when, exactly, our bedroom problems began.  My husband  would probably say that it was after the birth of our second child when he was also training for a marathon, but I can clearly recall having sex in both the morning AND the night of the same day whilst she was a babe in arms. (Not that she was in my arms during sex, I hasten to add.)  But it was sometime during the first year of her life that our sex life virtually stopped.  The time between sessions grew ever longer.  Then all affection virtually stopped: no more spontaneous kisses, pats on the bum, even hand holding disappeared as he sought to remove himself from any situation that might lead to me wanting sex.  He stayed up late watching TV, when we had always gone to bed together early and read.  Or, he went to bed extremely early and feigned sleep.

I know what each and every one of you are thinking.  You’re thinking he had an affair.  And that was my first thought, too.  The warning signs are similar.  I did voice that concern to him, which as you’d expect was not received well and created a bigger void between us.

I started to think I was losing my mind.  Maybe I had post-natal depression?  Maybe we just needed a divorce?  But over time it became clear that he couldn’t – for want of a better term – get it up.  In the olden days it was called ‘impotence’, these days it’s referred to as ‘erectile dysfunction’, ED for short.  But in our house it can to be known as ‘your problem’, although it was really our problem.  It affected both of us.  It distressed both of us and it reached into almost every corner of our relationship.

I can’t speak for what it was like for my husband to have problems with getting an erection.  I imagine it was pretty damn emasculating, after all it’s pretty much taken for granted that men want to have sex with women, and when you can’t it must make you feel pretty lousy.  And it becomes a vicious cycle, the more a man worries about it the worse the problem gets.

But I can speak from my own experience as to what it’s like for the partner of someone suffering erectile problems.  Sex and love are connected for us women, more so in a marriage.  ED raised feelings of ‘if he doesn’t want to have sex with me then he doesn’t love me’.  Resentment builds and the problem snowballed.  Being a woman I sought to take the blame.  I’m too fat, too tired, too old, blah blah blah.  That ate away at my self esteem until I felt like I was not worthy to have sex with.

It’s lonely.  I was in my mid-thirties when this happened to us, and I had always assumed it was an old mans problem so I felt like I couldn’t talk to anyone.  That no-one would understand.  I didn’t want to compromise my husband’s privacy by talking about it to friends.

But a basic Google search made me feel less alone. (Although weeding out the sites sponsored by drug companies is no easy task.(  I also read books, checked out from a library in the next suburb so no-one need know what I was reading about.

This is what I discovered about ED:

• It is not uncommon at any age.
• The majority of men will experience Erectile Dysfunction at some point in their lives, although it’s more common after 40 and sky rockets after a man reaches 70;
• may be caused by physical (heart disease, prostate cancer) or psychological problems (depression);
• is usually treatable.  This could be by therapy for psychological problems or tablets/injections for a physical cause;
• neither partner is to blame.

It was the last point that resonated with me. I wasn’t to blame and he wasn’t to blame. And playing the blame game was only leading us further away from getting ‘our problem’ fixed.  We started with our relationship and tried to put a bit of fun back into it.  I backed off in initiating sex and let him set the pace.  I won’t lie and say this was easy, compared to my friends I have a thriving sex drive and at times I was extremely frustrated. Sex, when it did happen, was often awkward and unfulfilling.  I won’t go into details but it did become more about him than it did about me, but we worked out compromises.

Slowly things improved, we started to reconnect as a couple and not just as parents.  Then, one sunny summer day, we had sex like ‘normal’.  I cried with relief.

Sex is never going to be like it was before we had kids, back in our twenties.  And that’s OK.”

MEDICAL NOTE: This post has been fact-checked by Dr Cindy Pan who says….

“If you suspect your partner is suffering from erectile dysfunction or if you are suffering yourself  please consult a doctor. This post is not intended to take the place of a medical consultation.”

You can click on Dr Cindy Pan’s website here and buy her book  Pandora’s Box here or Playing Hard to Get: How to Catch and Keep Mr Right, here. You can  follow her on Twitter here, check out her Facebook page here and catch up with her YouTube channel here