How to stop premature ejaculation
Ok, so you’re having a problem coming too quickly. You put your penis into her vagina, feel that delicious warmth and wetness, and before you’ve thrusted more than a few times, once again, you’re ejaculating uncontrollably. That’s why you’re here, right? Well, the good news is that with some commitment, you can solve this issue quite easily and become a longer lasting lover.
And the other piece of good news is that you’re not alone! Whatever your friends may tell you about their sexual performance (and despite what you’ve seen in porn movies), the simple fact is this: over three quarters of men ejaculate within two or three minutes of entering their partner’s vagina.
This may be no comfort if you’re a quick comer, especially if you’re upset that you can’t last longer in bed, but what it means is this: premature ejaculation is both normal and very common.
Now, you want to last longer, and that’s a great objective. But have you thought how long would satisfy you? Would ten minutes of vaginal thrusting be good enough? Or would you want to go on for half an hour? Well, surprising as it may seem, the length of time for which you can thrust your penis in her vagina isn’t the point. Why? Because when you learn to deal with premature ejaculation, you don’t learn to go on for a particular length of time – you learn to ejaculate when you want to.
This may surprise you. As a quick comer, you’re probably used to your orgasm approaching and your ejaculation following hard on its heels with a sense of having no control over the process. How could anyone, you may think, learn to ejaculate when they want to? And what may seem even more puzzling is working out how this is done! I mean, how do you decide to ejaculate? And what do you actually do to make it happen?
The answer is that ejaculation can be either a voluntary or an involuntary function. It’s a bit like breathing. You don’t have to think about your breathing for most of the time because it just carries on. But when you want to, you can bring it under your conscious control, and choose to breath more slowly or faster as you wish. This is what you can learn to do with your ejaculation – slow it down or speed it up, but above all, choose when you want to come.
Sometimes, of course, when you are very aroused – or when your partner is very aroused – you will find that your ejaculation tends to happen more quickly. (After all, there is nothing like making love to a very aroused woman to make a man spurt faster!) But the point of what we’re going to do here is to make you feel in control – to leave you with an element of choice about when you come.
Why do men ejaculate so quickly?
Well, you may be thinking, that’s all very well, but why do men come so quickly anyway? (Which begs the question – how fast do most men come?)
There are several reasons. The first is that we’re male animals. As I said above, surveys show that three quarters of men ejaculate within two minutes of entering their partner’s vagina. For young men in particular, four minutes is almost a lifetime of thrusting! But why? You might think it strange that rapid ejaculation is so common.
After all, there are few things in life more pleasant than having your erect penis in a warm, moist vagina! But imagine how our ancestors lived. They wandered about in a harsh environment, probably at risk of being killed by hostile enemies. The shorter the time during which males were distracted by the act of sex, the better, because they were defenseless while they mated.
The quicker they mounted the female, ejaculated and dismounted, the better. Sex wasn’t for pleasure – it was for reproduction. So, in evolutionary terms, it would be much safer to make the act as brief as possible. And what’s more, the less time males spent on sex, the more time would be available for protecting the females and babies or hunting.
This must have been an effective strategy for preserving the species and producing babies, but it certainly didn’t leave us with a great legacy as human males: the thrusting of a penis in a vagina was designed to produce a quick ejaculation. And all too often it still does!
The second reason is that we learn to ejaculate quickly as young men. Most boys discover masturbation in secret, and I think almost every young man would be horrified if his parents ever revealed that they knew he was masturbating – it just isn’t talked about, even though every father in the world masturbated when he was a boy (and probably still does).
So even though almost all teenage boys masturbate with great enthusiasm and frequency, we don’t talk about it, and there’s still a lot of shame attached to the act. And the shame means it’s done quickly – under the bedclothes, in the bathroom, wherever: reaching orgasm isn’t something that a boy learns to prolong so as to enjoy the feeling. He never tries to keep himself on the edge of coming for as long as possible. Nor does he ever stop to savor the experience: the urgency is too great, and his quick orgasm is too rewarding anyway!
All of this means he does not learn about the feelings in his body as he moves towards orgasm, especially the feelings that mean he is about to ejaculate. The result is that he has no sense of how to slow down and spin out the process. And so he never learns how to control his arousal nor to control the speed with which he reaches orgasm.
And the third reason we may ejaculate quickly is that we’re not confident lovers, confident in our sexuality, or confident with women. Anxiety is the enemy of self-control, so fears about our performance don’t help us to be long lasting lovers. It’s a fact that having the confidence to know you can keep going actually helps you keep going.
The opposite seems to be true, too: if you’re not confident of your ability to keep going, your nervousness increases your level of emotional and sexual arousal, and, before you know it, bang! you’ve ejaculated too soon again.
To put this in simple terms, getting a woman and having sex is an urge driven by every aspect of our masculine being. It’s fundamental to our self-image as men, and it’s something that we think about endlessly (as you know!). There is of course another problem which can affect men that slows down ejaculation. This is a condition called delayed ejaculation. If you happen to have this issue, try this book: Delayed Ejaculation: How To Overcome Delayed Ejaculation at Home In Private
But often, when we get a partner, there’s a sense of perhaps not quite being in command of the situation or a certain surprise, perhaps, that we are in a sexual relationship with a woman who wants us to make love to her. Sometimes a man also has a sense of nervousness about not being a good lover, or he is not sexually confident. And some men are, at some very deep level, afraid of or angry at women. All of these things can precipitate fast ejaculation is to be expected. But it can still be controlled, as this book shows.
By the way, if you have any emotional or psychological issues of the kind described above, or you want to straighten out your feelings around sex, it can be very helpful to work with a shadow coach. This is a type of therapist who will help you discover what is in your shadow. This is the part of your mind that remains unconscious. Although unconscious, this part of your mind may have a massive impact on your well being and your way of expressing yourself sexually.
But can men really control their ejaculation?
I remember my first experience of sex very clearly. I ejaculated the moment I penetrated my girlfriend’s vagina and felt the warmth of her body around my penis, and I continued doing this for many weeks after that. No-one would describe that as a satisfactory sexual experience, I’m sure. But then what would be satisfactory? Ten minutes spent thrusting before coming? Half an hour? An hour?
I remember a friend telling me when we were in our late teens that he could actually choose when to let go and ejaculate. I found this absolutely astonishing: if he and his girlfriend wanted a “quickie”, he said, he allowed himself to ejaculate almost at once, simply choosing not to make it last; but if they wanted prolonged intercourse, then he could thrust away for ages. What kind of ejaculation control was this, I wondered?
I found it difficult to believe this, because like most men my experience was about grimly hoping for the best and yet nearly always coming uncontrollably – not that it was ever unpleasant, of course, but it was certainly disappointing. So, like I said above, the important thing about premature ejaculation is not so much that a guy comes quickly, but that he has no control over when he comes. If you’re a quick comer, what you need to learn is not to last longer but to be able to control your ejaculation and have choice over when you ejaculate.
We’ll cover more about that in the next post.