How I came to cure Delayed Ejaculation is a bit of a story, but you can skip to our recommended plan to replicate this success here. I had been a Delayed Ejaculation sufferer, including Death Grip Syndrome, for all my sexual life. For any who are interested, here is my story – warts and all.
I started masturbating young
I was in year 7, or 12 years old. The internet had just been installed in the house via a 56k dial up modem. I can still act out the noise it made when connecting. The family computer was in my room, so it was all too easy. I went to an all male school, and masturbation talk was common. So it wasn’t any surprise I started soon after starting high school, where it became a daily habit with a dry hand while watching whatever porn I could find.
I first encountered Delayed Ejaculation when I was 17
She was the prettiest girl in school. A six foot blonde bombshell with a D cup bust, long blonde hair down to her waist, and a dirty mind. We were both virgins, and I still remember the day that I picked her up to bring her to my parent’s house. Her cheeks flushed a slight pink as I lifted her school dress off, revealing the black, lacy lingerie she had worn in expectation of, well, having her adonis ravish her.
Of course, we already know how this encounter ends. I actually couldn’t get hard at all, despite the naked Venus lying willingly in front of me. She tried everything. I tried everything. All to no avail. I got her off, repeatedly, but we both knew there was a wrongness to the whole experience. This wasn’t supposed to happen. We put it down to nerves and decided it was an off day.
But it wasn’t just an off day. While I could soon get an erection with her, she would jerk away, or suck away, or I would hump away, all without me getting remotely close to ejaculating.
Initially, she thought it was great – all of the worry and hype about premature ejaculation (in those days, the ads about nasal spray to help premature ejaculation were all over the radio), and here I was; some sort of sexual marathon runner that could go for 30 minutes straight with pelvis slapping intensity. I would replicate the many scenes of porn I had watched, moving through all the positions in a single session and thinking this was what great sex amounted to. The truth of this was that I felt my muscles aching from all these impressive moves more than any pleasure coming from my penis. And I spent every encounter firmly planted in my own head.
Eventually, neither of us could ignore the reality any longer. Despite my fervent attraction to her, the inability to cum sapped away at her self esteem. She began to feel like I wasn’t actually attracted to her. Or there was something broken in her vagina… Like there was something wrong with her.
Looking back, I was a tough gig for a girl to have as her first lover. Women place a huge emphasis on being desired – there are psychologists that argue this need to be desired forms the cornerstone of their own lust. That is, lust for women is reciprocal – desiring them with passion evokes a returned passion. They want to be ‘taken’ by a man overcome with need for them.
Hence, failing to finish the act after pumping away, no matter how many orgasms she might enjoy, was ultimately a breach of the male-female contract. Of the very duality upon which everything in a relationship revolves around–the polarity between masculine and feminine.
Perhaps that isn’t politically correct, but sexuality isn’t. No matter what I said, at a primal level between us, something was amiss. An elephant in the room neither of us could move along.
She was the first of many girls I couldn’t perform with. It is easy to see the patterns now, but I didn’t ever do anything to address them. Relationships were brief for me for my late teens and early twenties. All of the women were supportive for the first couple of times when I couldn’t get hard, and became thrilled when I did become hard for them. The elephant would always return though, as each woman eventually started carrying around an impossible guilt for not being able to make me ejaculate. All of them would lean into the problem, work hard and remain optimistic. But no matter their looks, their acts or their perseverance, nothing worked to get me over the line.
In those days, my searches on the internet didn’t uncover much about what I was going through. I couldn’t just type in ‘Cure Delayed Ejaculation’ like you can now. I did go to my Doctor, who simply dismissed my condition as ‘needing to be more selfish’ during sex, and ‘make sure you are using the right visuals’. In short, I was given advice to focus more on fantasy, which in retrospect I believe was bad advice. All I really knew was that only one thing worked to make me cum: my own hand. And then only when my penis and hand were both dry. This stayed a mostly daily practice, with video porn streaming sites becoming a ritual.
The first big change then happened
The first big change for me happened after I met a special girl some years later. I knew I was going to marry her after our third date, and I was spurred into action on to fix myself again. My searches then surfaced a few ‘Cure Delayed Ejaculation’ paywall sites that recommended masturbating and ejaculating at the last moment into your partner’s desired orifice. Again, in retrospect, I don’t think this really was suitable to cure Delayed Ejaculation. The best kernel of information actually came from a meme that had been posted on Imgur (or something like it) involving someone sharing their misery openly about trying to cure Delayed Ejaculation.
There, buried in the comments way down the thread, was my easter egg. The answer read: “Just stop masturbating. Worked for me”.
It didn’t provide an answer why, but I was keen on trying anything. So I did just that. I deployed to Afghanistan with the military for 6 months, and used the deployment to rid myself of porn and masturbation completely. Well – that was the plan. In truth I masturbated every two weeks or so, just to get some stress relief from the frontline operations, but there were three things that I was actually doing:
- Stopping consumption of porn completely for a very long time
- Stopped the frequency of masturbation
- Had to learn to achieve orgasm with lighter hand movements due to my shared accomodation situation (8 people crammed into a little room with not much privacy).
When I returned home and saw the special girl, we had four sex sessions over a few days before we had enough privacy to have three back to back sex sessions one evening. On the third sequential session, I was pumping away slowly and honestly feeling pretty tired, when she lifted her legs up straight, probably to stretch them. I turned my head from the missionary position to look at the legs, appreciating how sexy she was. Now, I’m not a guy with a thing for feet or legs, per se, but all of a sudden, I felt a new sensation building in my penis and at the base of my balls. A sensation I knew meant one thing. I held my focus on how her legs looked and kept my strokes long and even, feeling the sensation build, until I went past the point of no return.
“I’m going to cum” I whispered urgently into my special girl’s ear, and she moaned with something between relief, happiness and desire, wrapping her legs around me as she did so.
I thundered into her, feeling for the first time the bliss of a vaginally induced orgasm, and a satisfaction of emptying myself into her that felt right.
I was 26 years old, and had never felt it before. It triggered something between her and I. A hope. Had I done it? Found the cure for Delayed Ejaculation?
“I dreamt about babies” she told me the next day as we walked down the street. Then she said something that encapsulated everything with hard-hitting truth. “It was because of you. Because now you can… you know… put them in me.”
I cured Delayed Ejaculation!.. Temporarily
The next day we had sex again, but I couldn’t get there.
But I did again the next day. And the next.
For the next two weeks, I had the privilege of experiencing normal sex. One day I managed to finish twice in one day, even working through the ‘sensation noise’ of a cramp in my hip for the second time.
And so I went back to masturbating, thinking I had turned a corner for good and fixed myself. Sure enough, the ability to ejaculate from sex disappeared immediately.
I had a mishmash of being successful and not over the next few years, right up until we got married and it became real baby making time. That will light the fire under you to eradicate DE, and is where I suspect most of those reading this are currently at.
I found the cure for Delayed Ejaculation again… Temporarily.
I put myself on a strict no porn, no masturbation regime for a month, seeking to emulate what I had done with my military deployment.
It was a difficult thing to do, especially in the first two weeks.
The truth was, I didn’t want to stop looking at porn.
I didn’t want to stop seeing what impossibly beautiful and sexy women looked like nude, or indulge that part of me that wanted to see slutty acts. I would have cravings to incognito google porn, even though I mentally knew I wouldn’t masturbate. It is at that point that you start really thinking about whether porn can form an addiction.
I also had become dependent on masturbation as a form of stress relief. Whenever I hit a mental block doing a university assignment or wanted to ‘unclench my brain’, I relied on masturbation to give me that relief, always keeping it hidden from my wife.
In any case, wanting to impregnate your wife is a very powerful motivator, so I held strong. I was able to climax during intercourse with her, and from that single session she conceived – meaning we were very, very, very, very lucky.
Pregnancy and life with a newborn is not the best time for regular sex with your partner, and so I turned to masturbation again. And with that, forfeited my ability to ejacualate with my wife.
There had to be a better way. So I searched again for a more permanent solution…
To cure Delayed Ejaculation, I:
- completed two courses of hypnotherapy with two different hypnotherapists ($$$$$),
- completed a tantra course,
- abstained for nine months from masturbation and porn completely, and
- refused to touch my penis with my right hand, even while going to the toilet.
It was my effort to completely reset any neural pathways I depended on to achieve orgasm. What do I mean by that? I read significant amounts of research pointing to how the brain is plastic (brain plasticity), and we can program ourselves with rewards or punishments. In short – I believed I had coached my brain to only fire an orgasm trigger when certain conditions were met, that being:
- I was watching porn that turned me on (Porn Induced Erectile Dysfunction),
- I was masurbating in a certain way (Death Grip Syndrome), and
- I had internalised the porn into a mental fantasy (some sort of fantasy dependent psychological trigger – or rather it wasn’t just the porn that aroused me, I mentally applied the scenario to me).
My hypothesis was that it was impossible to trigger an orgasm with my wife’s vagina when I had hard coded myself to orgasm with my usual masturbation routine, which was reinforced hundreds of times over.
So – after my wife finished breastfeeding our second child, and we were ready to get jiggy with it again, I had never been more confident that I would finally be raring to go.
But it didn’t work.
I was gutted. I had risen to a new level of self discipline to hold strong to my regime, and had been unable to talk to anyone about it aside from my wife. And it was all for nothing. It seemed my month long hiatus from porn and masturbation was no longer enough to get me over the line to cure Delayed Ejaculation.
So I decided that abstaining was not enough. I needed to go further to replicate the feelings of sex. Instead of letting my pre-programming perish to a neutral state, I had to program in ‘this feels like vagina = ejaculate’ pathways.
Really, my new hypothesis revolved around a belief that I had to learn how to cum from something ‘warm and wet’ versus dry, rough and idiosyncratic (or particular). This was driven from my realisation that I came more from the actions I was doing while masturbating than the actual feeling I felt along my penis.
It was at this point that I sat my wife down and had a courageous conversation. I asked her permission to buy a sex toy, specifically a fleshlight. She is a highly conservative woman, and toys had never been part of our highly traditional intimacy repertoire. It was based on my research into reviews of what felt the most like the real thing, and the Fleshlight came out on top after I did my best to statistically synthesise wildly subjective reviews. A big pro was that it came with a ‘shower hand-free kit’, which works perfectly to learn to ejaculate while thrusting hands free, not only in the shower.
Still being a guy that couldn’t masturbate successfully with lube, the Fleshlight took that one step further in removing the hand component altogether, which I thought important given the brain plasticity argument.
I got the wife’s okay. “If it will help, then of course.” She was actually relieved she didn’t have to be involved in the experiments.
Finally – something that was a permanent solution to Death Grip Syndrome & its associated problems
I have put the routine I used to beat Death Grip with the Fleshlight here, as well as help with which model to buy, but the short of it was it took me a good month of trying once or twice per week with it being handheld before I finished for the first time. There was definitely a learning curve, but it was a huge relief. After finishing for the first time, it was like something clicked in my head, and it became steadily more reliable to make me finish.
Then came transferring the success to the hands free holder, and thrusting for the entire time. There was another learning curve, but after five failed sessions, the sixth worked. Then the ninth. Then the tenth. Again, I slowly trained myself to climax, with something warm and wet, without using my hands and without the use of porn.
Bringing the learning back to my marriage bed, we were delighted to find that I was successful more times than not, almost right away.
It’s still the best feeling, and one which I’ll never take for granted.
I believe it’s part of the contract of desire between a man and a woman. And for the times when I need to relieve myself and the wife isn’t up for intercourse (we are having lots of kids), then it provides a way that I can masturbate without regressing any ability to naturally climax.
Death Grip Syndrome was only one of my problems…
For me personally, here is how I breakdown my own Delayed Ejaculation:
The Fleshlight only addressed the Death Grip Syndrome I had. The porn addiction I addressed through swearing off it. The other psychological noise I addressed through:
- Not needing new partners 😛
- Addressing the failure to ejaculate with my wife head on
- Having courageous conversations about the realities of my desire for my wife versus what my body was trained to do, and how I could still enjoyed our intimacy even if I couldn’t finish.