Resolving Erection Problems: Medical Options

“You want to know how I feel, I’ll tell you. I feel like an absolute nothing. I know I can satisfy her in other ways and I do, but that’s not the point. I feel like shit, like the center has been taken out of me.”

“I have trouble sleeping and I can’t concentrate at work. All I think about day and night is my problem, about how I can’t do the job anymore. I feel limp and weak, just like my dick.”

While any problem in the critical area of sex is very upsetting to a man, nothing generates as much concern, anxiety, shame, and even terror as an inability to get or maintain erections. Only the loss of his job can make a man feel less of a man. The primary meaning of impotence, the term traditionally applied to erection difficulties, is a lack of power, strength, and vigor, the negation of all that we consider masculine. Men have been taught to tie their self-respect to the upward mobility of their penises and, when their penises do not rise to the occasion, they no longer feel like men.

A man in therapy said it like this: “I’ve never felt like this before. I just don’t feel like a whole person and certainly not like a man.” Other men have used terms such as “useless,” “hopeless,” “fraud,” “lost my manhood,” and “can’t cut it anymore” to describe how they felt when their penises weren’t functioning.

Women are often baffled by the agony a man goes through when he fails to get or keep an erection, but they have no parallel experience with which to compare it. A woman can participate in intercourse or any other sexual act without being aroused or even interested. A man is in a more difficult situation. Because of the incorrect belief that sex demands a rigid penis, his “failure” is obvious, dangling in full view. There is no way to fake an erection and, though not impossible, it is difficult to have intercourse without at least a partial erection. So he feels that he cannot have sex; and in his eyes, a man who can’t have sex is not really a man.

His partner may be sympathetic and supportive, but he may be so consumed with self-loathing that he can’t accept what she offers. Many men distance themselves from their partners after such “failures” and engage in orgies of self-flagellation. The result is usually a miserable time for all concerned.

Given all the feelings men with erection problems have, clear thinking becomes difficult. Yet such thinking is exactly what’s needed, because you need to make some decisions about how to deal with your situation. It may help you to feel better to realize that, given the various treatment options available, there is almost certainly a solution for your problem.

There are a number of ways in which penises disappoint men. Almost all men have had at least a few experiences when they wanted an erection and didn’t get one or when they lost an erection at some embarrassing point. Some men have problems with getting or maintaining erections at the beginning of a relationship. Then, after they become more comfortable with their new partners, their erections become more reliable. Because these kinds of difficulties are common and transient, it’s best to view them as a part of life rather than as problems. A man can explain to a new partner that it takes him a few times to get comfortable enough for his penis to join in the fun or, perhaps better yet, he can put off getting into sex until he feels more comfortable with her.

There are also chronic difficulties. Some men usually have difficulty attaining erections, while others usually have trouble maintaining them. For still other men, the problem is that their erections usually aren’t as hard as they would like.

My belief is that if it bothers you, it’s a problem. But the solution may not lie where you think it does.

DRUG THERAPY FOR ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION

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