by Jacob Clark
From Michelle:
Since we started this project we’ve spoken to a lot of people about ED, its origins, and its affects, not only on his ability to get it up, but the psychological impact on both parties.
Maybe it was because we decided to fight it together from the beginning, but we were amazed at how many couples let themselves be divided over this issue.
One of my good friends (I’ll call her Mary, although that’s not her real name) confided that her husband of many years had a major problem with ED.
I never had a clue. They were a happy couple in every other way, or at least appeared to be.
When I told her that Jacob and I were working on this project an odd look came over her face. I knew in my heart she and “Bill” were suffering the same problem Jacob and I were.
But it took her awhile to open up about it. She finally admitted to me that she was ashamed. Not for herself, but for her husband.
“I didn’t want the word to get out that he has this problem.”
That he had the problem. He, as is he alone.
It turned out that Mary and Bill’s once vibrant sex life had trickled away to nothing, and she was blaming him for it.
Oh, she wasn’t mean about it at all. She didn’t yell at him or belittle him for his inability to get an erection. She chose instead to ignore it. To never talk about it. To stop fondling her husband. To give up on sex altogether. And that, of course, made the situation much worse.
Because that’s the worst thing you can possibly do.
Bill already felt bad about the situation. He was already under a lot of stress, feeling inadequate and unable to pleasure his wife of many years. He already felt he was somewhat less of a man than he’d been in previous years.
Here’s something you may not have realized: such feelings increase stress for both parties. And stress makes the problem so much worse.
Don’t either of you blame the other.
And just as important, don’t either of you blame yourselves. It’s nobody’s fault. Really.
Chapter 19: Don’t Do Without, Guys, For Any Extended Period.
That’s what did us in…
From Michelle:
We believe the main reason the ED monster came around was because Jacob was totally abstinent when he was abroad. And by totally abstinent I mean he wasn’t even jerking off.
I knew he jerked off occasionally during our marriage. I heard him whacking his wiener occasionally as I walked past the bathroom door. It wasn’t often, as he much preferred sex with me. It was usually just a matter of convenience, such as when he was especially horny but had to leave for work in half an hour.
Or when I had a cold and wasn’t feeling especially frisky and he didn’t want to burden me.
I accepted that he jerked off occasionally over the years, and it didn’t bother me in the least. Heck, who was I to talk? I fingered myself all the time when he wasn’t around, and I’ve always had a pretty impressive collection of vibrators in what he calls my “toy drawer.”
So it wouldn’t have bothered me in the least if he was spanking his monkey daily while he was abroad. In fact, knowing what we know now, I’d have called him up every day to demand it.
Jacob: Hello
Me: Hi honey. Have you strangled your chicken today?
Jacob: Have I what?
Me: Have you strangled your chicken? That’s what they call it nowadays. I saw it on one of those teen movies.
Jacob: Honey, it’s three in the morning here.
Me: I know, dear. That’s why I waited to call you until now. Don’t you remember, three in the morning is when you usually get hard. If I had a dollar for every time over the years you pressed that thing against my leg, hoping I’d wake up and climb on top of you…
Jacob: But honey, I have a book signing at nine a.m. I have to get some sleep so I can be nice to my readers and get them to buy more of my books. If I’m grouchy they’ll go buy somebody else’s books instead. And I’ll have to get a job at a 7-Eleven. You don’t want me to have to get a job at a 7-Eleven, do you?
Me: (thinking) I don’t know. Maybe. Would you give me free Slurpees?
Jacob: But baby, I don’t want to work at a 7-Eleven. I want to write my novels. It’s what I do best.
Me: It’s not the only thing you do well. I know you’re pretty darn good at stroking that salami too. And it’s a very nice salami, by the way.
Jacob: I know what you’re trying to do.
Me: What?
Jacob: You’re thinking that by complimenting my salami you’ll wake him up and make him hard, and then I’ll have to masturbate to make him go back to sleep.
Me: Well, he does like it when I talk about him.
Jacob: (sighing) Yes, he does.
Me: So, is it working? Is he getting hard?
Jacob (sighing again) Yes.
Me: Good. I’ll get off the phone now so you can butter your bread.
Jacob: Where do you come up with all these terms for masturbating?
Me: Some from movies. Some from the internet. Some I just make up. Now get to whacking, big boy.
Jacob: But I’m soooo tired.
Me: But honey, you know what Paul said. If you don’t ejaculate on a regular basis while you’re overseas, you may lose the ability to get a boner. Your balls will think you’re no longer interested, and will stop producing semen. And remember, he said your cock is a muscle, and just like any other muscle it needs to be exercised. Otherwise it’ll just go limp and just hang there. So get off the phone and slide that trombone, sweet cheeks.
Jacob: You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?
Me: Immensely. But you know what I’ll enjoy more?
Jacob: Sticking bamboo shoots under my fingernails?
Me: No, silly. I’ll enjoy it more when you come home and get stiff as a board and slide that thing inside of me where it belongs. But that may not happen if you don’t tickle the eel while you’re over there.
Jacob: Can’t I go back to sleep and wait until after my book signing?
Me: Absolutely not.
Jacob: But why?
Me: Because. You’re in Paris. The most romantic city in the world. And I know what will happen.
Jacob: What, pray tell, will happen?
Me: If you don’t beat the weasel, you’ll go to your book signing and this hot French chick named Fifi will bring you a book to sign, And she’ll tell you she’s read every one of your books and she’s always loved your work, and how my, what big muscles you have. And she’ll talk you into going back to her place and slipping your big Italian sausage into her and depositing your load there. And she doesn’t deserve it. She doesn’t pick up your dirty socks from the bedroom floor and cook you chicken spaghetti for your birthday like I do.
Jacob: Good story. You should be a writer or something.
Me: Ha, ha. My point is that you need to cum on a regular basis while you’re there so your balls don’t start to shut down. It’s use it or lose it time, buddy. And I’d much rather you blow your load into the bathroom sink than in some hot chick named Fifi.
Jacob: (sighing a third time) If I get up and jerk off will you let me go back to sleep after?
Me: Of course, honey. Now get up and knead that dough. I love you so much.
Jacob: I love you too, honey. (sighing)
Me: Oh, and baby?
Jacob: Yes?
Me: I’ll talk to you tomorrow morning. I’ll call you about this time again…
Sorry, I got off track a little bit.
The point I was trying to make was that we firmly believe the main reason Jacob developed ED was because of the long period of time he went without sex (even masturbation). Had we known that ahead of time, he certainly would have taken precautions. But since we didn’t, he didn’t. And that led to a lot of unnecessary guilt on his part.
As Paul puts it:
“Guilt when it comes to ED is a never-ending circle of bad. B-A-D. Bad. What happens is that a guy will start t
o develop problems getting an erection. So he feels guilty. And that leads to stress. And stress is one of the primary things that keep a man from getting an erection. So it’s a vicious cycle. You have to find a way to stop that guilt, so you can reduce that stress. Then you’ll increase the chances of defeating the ED dilemma.”
If we’d known before Jacob went to Europe that a lack of sex would lead to his onset of ED, we’d have done things differently. I’d have encouraged him to masturbate every day while he was there. I would have even given him permission to spend time with Fifi or to dally with a French prostitute (maybe the same thing) if that’s what it took.
From Jacob:
Now you tell me… sheesh.
From Michelle:
Oh shut up, you.
Anyway, we’ve always known that stress was a real mood killer in the bedroom, even for couples who have no problem getting hard. You know that too. We’ve all had times when one of us is in the mood for sex, but the other had a bad day at the office, or ran over a land mine on the way home, or something else which caused them stress.
But who knew that same stress could be a killer of penises?
I should note here and now that guilt works both ways. For awhile after he returned from Europe Jacob suffered in silence. He was moody and irritable and sulked a lot. He kept to himself, and when I asked what was the matter he always said, “nothing.”
Looking back, I was sure it was just the ED. It was new to us at that time and we panicked. We didn’t know what caused it or how to fix it and we thought it was permanent. We thought our sex life was over forever.
And Jacob blamed himself, in silence. Now I feel awful because I didn’t know what he was feeling, didn’t know how to help him.
And of course, like Paul said, his feelings of guilt and of stress made the problem worse.
I should also note that I was going through the same feelings of guilt about the same time. I hid it better, because us women are always better at hiding such things.
But I remember looking in the full length mirror on our closet door one afternoon. This was after our third or fourth night of trying to make Jacob’s dick hard with no success at all.
I looked in the mirror, examining my body, and shamed myself into thinking it was my fault. That I was no longer attractive. That I no longer turned him on.
I remembered the times early in our relationship when all I had to do was walk past him naked on my way to the shower, and his dick would rise within seconds. And he’d say, “Your shower can wait,” and throw me onto the bed and we’d make love.
I wondered at what point I stopped being a turn-on for him and became ugly.
The twenty extra pounds I’d picked up over the years looked like a thousand and twenty.
And I swear I counted every wrinkle on my face, dozens of times. I’d have counted the gray hairs too, but I couldn’t see the ones on the back of my head.
The next day I went to the mall and to Macy’s. I bought a dozen different products, from cold creams to facial scrubs to relaxing lotions. I spent four hundred dollars, but I was gonna look damn good for my husband.
That same afternoon I had my hair colored for the first time in my life.
Within a week I had given up. The wrinkles were there to stay, and I didn’t like my new hair color. Neither did Jacob, by the way. He told me I was as beautiful as I was the day he met me, and that I shouldn’t change a single thing about the way I looked.
They were pretty words, and oh so sweet. But I didn’t buy it.
I blamed myself that he couldn’t get it up anymore. I convinced myself I’d become a hideous old hag. I lay in bed at night looking at the ceiling thinking I’d failed him. More than once I cried myself to sleep.
Yet I did the same thing he did. I remained silent about it. When he asked me what was wrong I said “nothing.” We should have been talking it out. Reassuring each other about our continued attraction and our love for each other.
Instead we grew more and more isolated.
Other than not working his dick when he was abroad, the guilt and stress thing was the biggest mistake we made in regards to fixing OUR erectile dysfunction problem.
I hope you’re not making the same mistake.
Don’t play the blame game, please. It’s a very bad thing.
From Jacob:
In the first weeks following my return from Europe I felt like the lowest person on earth. I felt I was no longer a man. I felt I let my wife down. I was actually worried that if I could no longer please her in the bedroom, she might look for someone else. After all, sex had always been a very important part of our lives, right up until the day I left for Europe.
It sounds ridiculous now, but I was in a very bad place then. My penis was part of my body, not hers. Therefore it was something I did to break it.
I was desperate to fix it, yet I didn’t know how.
And she’s right. I was very moody. I wasn’t sleeping well at night. All I could think of was that I was letting her down. The only woman in the whole world I loved and I could no longer perform for her. When she asked what she could do to help I brushed her off. It was hard for me to talk about. I felt totally inadequate and totally emasculated.
I felt, in a word, like crap.
But being a typical guy, it never occurred to me that she might be feeling the same things.
I’m like most guys, I think, when I say I’m attuned to my wife’s feelings.
And I am, insofar as I can tell when she’s in a bad mood or when something is bothering her. I mean, that much is easy to see. She gets quiet, she snaps at me sometimes, and she isolates herself. She goes off to the den and curls up in her favorite easy chair. Then she covers herself with a quilt and reads for hours at a time.
So I know when something is wrong. Figuring out what it is, however, is a bit more difficult.
Michelle, like me, isn’t very forthcoming.
That’s why it took us a full week before we figured out that we were being defeated by the same kinds of feelings, and then decided to work together to stop them.
I thought the ED was all my fault. She thought it was her fault.
It wasn’t until we sat down one evening in front of the fireplace and snuggled (still my all-time favorite thing to do, even after all these years) that we came clean.
Then we cried. It felt so good to get those feelings out.
Then we decided that the guilt was getting us nowhere. That we had to do as much research as we could, and try everything we needed to do, to get this problem under control
And we never looked back.
If either of you, or both of you, are feeling such guilt, stop it right now. Such feelings are only making your problems worse.
It’s nobody’s fault. Really.
Chapter 20: This just in…
Consider a penis pump
We were getting ready to wrap this up and send it for editing, but decided to throw this in because we’ve had some success with it.
A few weeks ago we stumbled across something called a “penis pump” while shopping on-line for a new vibrator.
We figured, “What the heck? We can always use another tool in our toolbox.” So we ordered one. It came in about two weeks ago.
From Jacob:
It’s a simple device, really. It has a tube into which a man inserts his flaccid penis, and a pumping device which helps encourage blood to fill it by essentially “sucking” the blood into it.
Once the penis is filled with blood and erect, a small band (ours is rubber but some are elastic) is placed around the base of the penis to discourage the blood from escaping too fast.
I have to admit, I felt ridiculous the first time I did this. But I also admit that it worked long enough for Michelle and I to enjoy a great round of intercourse.
Maybe “session” is a better term. “Round” makes it sound like golf, and intercourse is way more fun.
Anyway, we were trying other things at the time, so the pump probab
ly didn’t do it all by itself. I don’t want to lead anyone on, or make anyone think the pump is a miracle cure. But in conjunction with the other things we did that night, my penis was as hard as it was thirty years ago.
Having said that, the next time we tried it three nights later the results weren’t quite so great. It got hard enough to have intercourse, but it was a bit of a struggle.
The third time we used it, the results were somewhere between the first two. It wasn’t quite as hard as it was the first time, but pretty close.
The point is, the penis pump (at least in my mind) shouldn’t be used as a stand-alone means of obtaining and keeping an erection. In such a capacity, it would likely fail as often as not.
However, used in conjunction with other things (like porn in the background, extended fondling or some of the other things we’ve talked about), I think it’s a good tool.
From Michelle:
Jacob didn’t want to use the pump in front of me at first. He said he felt silly.
I asked him why and he said because when he was a teenager he stuck his dick in a vacuum cleaner to get himself off.
I asked him why in the world he did that, and he said that teenage boys are so fascinated with their dicks they experiment with all kinds of things. Basically, he said, they put it anywhere and everywhere to see what feels good and what doesn’t.
I asked him whether the vacuum cleaner felt good and he said it did. But that for a long time after that he felt kind of dirty, like he was a “freak” for having done it.
He said those feelings eventually went away and he pretty much forgot about it. But sticking his cock into the penis pump brought back the memory and the feelings.
I told him there was no reason to feel foolish. That we all did silly things when we were young to pleasure ourselves. And I reminded him about the time when we were in college and he walked into my dorm room and told me he had a surprise for me.