Estimated reading time: 16 minutes
Dear Dr. NerdLove, I feel like I should open this with a joke like “I never thought it would happen to me”, but I think I’m already going to get accusations of bragging or fake letter as it is.
My girlfriend,”Elyse” and I are 32 and 29 respectively. We’ve been together for more than six years now, and sex has always been an important part of our connection. Last year, when both of us noticed that our sex life had started getting boring to the we were only having sex once every other month or so, we decided to do the stereotypical thing and spice things up by trying out different fantasies to keep things fresh.
This is where things start sounding like I’m making things up: Elyse had always had a fantasy of a threesome with another woman but had never gone through with it. Previous boyfriends were, as she put it, a “little too eager”, while I could honestly take it or leave it. I won’t lie and say that I didn’t like the idea, but it’s never been a fantasy of mine; my fantasies tend towards public sex or being watched. We thought that this was a way of killing two birds with one stone – the threesome for her, someone watching me have sex.
We had read horror stories of threesomes gone wrong, so we did our best to plan things out. We talked it out in advance, we agreed that anyone we invited was going to be carefully selected and screened (no “bringing strangers back from the bar” for us!), we even got a hotel room to avoid issues about having sex with someone else in what is ultimately our space.
Once the night came, our guest arrived and things continued apace. At the time, everything seemed like it had been going according to plan, and afterwards, as we all lay there in a sweaty pile, it seemed like everything had been exactly what Elyse wanted. But the next day, I noticed that Elyse’s mood seemed off. When I asked if she was ok, she said she hadn’t slept well, that was all. But her bad mood seemed to persist over the next week and I had noticed that she seemed to be physically tense around me. When I pointed all of this out and asked what was bothering her, she finally told me what had been bothering her: watching me with the woman we’d invited upset her more than she thought. When our guest had been focusing her attention on her, it was one thing, but when she was with me, it seemed like “I liked having sex with her better,” and she couldn’t seem to get past it.
I truly and sincerely don’t know what I did that gave her this impression. So far as I can recall, everything had gone how we’d discussed. Nothing we or the guest did hadn’t been talked about and approved before we ever got to the hotel room and to the best of my knowledge, I didn’t behave any differently. Meanwhile, Elyse is struggling with the feeling that my having sex with our guest was something I liked more than sex with her. She says she knows its “just her”, and is having a hard time putting it into words.
Obviously, I feel badly because I apparently upset Elyse, but I’m flummoxed as to how or what to do about it. Do you have any insight as to what went wrong and what I can do to make things right? I hate thinking that I somehow ruined what was ultimately supposed to be her night.
Was It Something I Said?
You’re tempted to lead with a joke, WISIS, and so was I; I tried to come up with some variant of “well, let’s go to the tape”, but none of them worked.
Ah well. Let’s just move on to your problem instead of my need for a better joke writer.
The primary reason why threesomes go badly tends to involve one of two things. The first is piss-poor planning. The second are unexpected and unwanted feelings.
It sounds to me like you and Elyse were paying a lot of attention to the first aspect; you cover a lot of the things I always suggest to people who are trying to plan for their first threesome – talking things through, deciding in advance what is and isn’t on the table, making sure you both are involved in choosing a third and ensuring everyone’s on the same page.
So it sounds like you ran into the second reason, and that’s something you can’t really plan for. Not really.
I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “no plan survives contact with the enemy” before. The phrase refers to how plans are crafted with the understanding that other side will likely react in ways that you never expected. Because you’re dealing with other people, there is always an element of chaos; no matter how much or how carefully you plan, as soon as you put the plan into action, you’re going to run into circumstances that you didn’t – or couldn’t – account for.
One of the things you can’t really account for are feelings. Specifically, how you or your partner may feel at different points during the threesome. There are things you can do to try to anticipate and mitigate the potential for awkwardness or hurt feelings; taking penetrative sex off the table the first time is a fairly typical one, so the stakes don’t feel as high. It doesn’t sound like you did that, which means you and Elyse were taking a risk that I don’t think either of you realized. I suspect that, if you had limited things to just oral sex or just mutual masturbation and rolling around, you might not have run head first into this wall.
But, in the name of fairness to you and to Elyse, that’s not a guarantee of anything. It would hardly be the first time that a couple did everything “right”, had a great time when it was just oral, but still hit a landmine later. And, again, to be fair, neither of you may even be aware that the landmine was there in the first place. It sounds to me less like you made a preventable mistake and more that you found a hidden landmine that you couldn’t have anticipated. Especially if everyone was already sure that they’d be cool with it.
Without having been there (there’s that “let’s go to the tape” bit again), and not being a mind-reader, I can’t tell you what’s up with Elyse. It sounds to me like she’s still trying to find the right words for it, which is understandable. Were I to guess, I would guess that Elyse may have been feeling that discomfort in the moment, but didn’t say anything. She may not have been listening to her body or heart in the heat of the moment, she may have felt like she couldn’t say anything at the time lest she be The Funwrecker, or it may even be the case that it didn’t stop bothering her until the dopamine cascade wore off and the post-nut clarity kicked in.
I have no idea. The only person who really does is Elyse, so she’s the one you’ll have to talk to. This is why my suggestion is that you two do an after-the-fact debrief about how things went, so you can try to figure out precisely what happened and when. This is a time when you want to use a variation of the Awkward Conversation, where you not only block out time to talk things through, but make it clear that this is a non-judgmental space. The two of you aren’t having this discussion because anyone’s to blame or to assign fault, you’re having this to help Elyse talk through what she’s feeling, figure out the best way to comfort and reassure her and how to avoid similar issues in the future.
What you’re going to want to do is make sure that Elyse has the opportunity to try to figure out her own mind on this. This means that it’s going to be important not to suggest possibilities or guess for her; the last thing either of you want is to inadvertently point yourselves down the wrong path by accident. What you might want to do is ask if she knows where she’s feeling it or how it feels – if she’s feeling it in a particular place in her body, or what the emotion seems to feel like. It may help if she can describe it in sensory terms; is it prickly, is it hot, is it muscle tension, is it tension in her jaw, is it churning and roiling in her stomach and so on. Sometimes talking through where the emotion is hitting and what it feels like can give more of a handle as to precisely what the person is feeling and why.
Again, if I were to guess, the most likely culprit is that you responded differently to your third. We often don’t realize how accustomed we get to our partner’s behaviors, noises, vocalizations and so on during sex. We’ve learned how to “read” them and what they mean over time and through repetition, and it sets certain guideposts for us. We know that he does this most of the time or she does the other thing as part of their usual routine. We know that when he does this with his face, it means he’s really enjoying it, when she does that with her hand on her thigh, she’s getting close, when they make that particular noise it’s a sign to speed up or slow down and so on.
A variation or change from those expected behaviors, especially if another person is involved, is going to be harder to “read” correctly because it’s, well, new and different. And because one isn’t necessarily used to that new partner (and our brains produce elevated levels of oxytocin and dopamine with a new partner), things are going to feel different, which may make them responddifferently. So the odds are good that, while you didn’t perceive yourself as doing things significantly differently, someone who’s both very familiar with your usual actions and noises very well might. Especially if said person is paying close attention.
It seems most likely to me that this was what tripped the landmine – again, one that I’m guessing neither of you realized was there until you hit it. Something you did or a noise you made sounded different and so it hit different and left Elyse feeling like maybe you were more into your guest than her. That’s not to say that you did anything wrong, per se, just that this hit in a way neither of you expected.
But again: this is my speculating; the only person who really can give you an answer is Elyse. So first, I would recommend talking things through and giving her the opportunity to talk about how she’s feeling and why. Then, once you both have more of a handle on things, ask what would help reassure her and remind her that she’s your priority. She may not know, and that’s ok; you both may have to experiment to see what helps sooth her nerves and reaffirm the bond the two of you have.
The good news is that I don’t think it will take much, and I think this will be a speedbump in the relationship, not a head-on collision with a tree.
Make that open, non-judgmental communication a priority and treat her with some extra care and consideration to remind her why the two of you started on this journey together. The whole point was to keep your connection strong and vital for the good of your relationship and each other. As long as that’s your North Star, it’s hard to go too far off course.
Good luck.
Dear Dr. NerdLove: I’m writing this after one of the worst nights of my life. I’ve had sex with exactly one person before and that was with an escort. Tonight I was supposed to have sex with my girlfriend for the first time ever and nothing worked. My dick couldn’t get more than semi-hard and I couldn’t even get inside her. Mouth, hands, nothing worked and we had to give up.
My girldfriend is trying to tell me that it’s ok and she’s not disappointed but I can tell she’s just telling me that. I’m afraid I broke myself with porn (I watch it every day sometimes twice) and now I’m never going to actually have sex with anyone.
Too Soft Too Sad
There’s an old joke: the difference between concern and panic is that concern is the first time you can’t do it for a second time, panic is second time you can’t do it for the first time. It sounds to me like you’re skipping straight past the “second time” and heading for panic immediately… and you really don’t need to.
TSTS, you don’t mention how old you are, but I’m betting you’re pretty young and I’m further willing to bet that you’ve done a lot of panic Googling between then and now. I’m here from the future to tell you that it’s all ok. You didn’t break your dick by watching too much porn; that’s a lie that religious conservatives and red-pill grievance pedders toss about to convince people to feel like shit in order to perpetuate the grift. Masturbating to porn daily or even twice daily isn’t going to carve grooves in your brain that make it impossible to get aroused to women, no matter what some slapdick on TikTok said.
Here’s what happened: for all the jokes that men are peripatetic fuckbeasts who would get hard for a particularly alluring bundt cake if it were warm and moist enough, the fact is that dicks are divas and will refuse to rise to the occasion (as it were) for all sorts of reasons. Like having Goldilocks in your pants, if things aren’t just right, you can easily find yourself limper than al dente linguini. Even when you’re young, dumb and full of… excitement… erectile dysfunction is completely possible and normal. Absent certain health issues that are demographically unlikely, and considering you don’t mention having problems getting hard at other times, I feel comfortable telling you that this is not a sign of anything other than the vibes being off enough to make your own personal Pavarotti refuse to perform.
In fact, you don’t go into details but I’m going to go ahead and lay my money down, based on what you did include, that the problem comes down to one of four possibilities.
- You drank too much
- You got concerned that you were going to be a one-minute man and cranked it before your date
- 100% pure nerves and anxiety
- Some combination of the above
Any one of these would take the metaphorical wind out of your sails. A combo platter would all but ensure it. Cranking one out before your date – a very common practice, I might add – simply means that you weren’t going to be coming in as hot and horny as you might’ve been otherwise. By itself, that can cause issues, but might be overcome with excitement and age. If you pair that with being nervous or anxious about having your first time with your girlfriend, however, you up the odds of having performance issues – the (temporarily!) lowered level of juice combined with performance anxiety or stage fright is going to make it much more likely. Anxiety is like the anti-horny; it’s very hard to get aroused when you’re anxious. Doubly so if you’re anxious about having sex or getting hard in the first place. And if you’re even a micrometer less hard than concrete or have the slightest impediment while you’re experiencing that anxiety… well, that’s going to create a self-reinforcing cycle.
Similarly, alcohol may have a disinhibiting effect on the brain, it’s infamous for having deleterious effects down south. “Whiskey dick” is a very real, very well-known phenomena; the brain may be willing, but the blood refuses to stay where it needs to go. And because alcohol can be an amplifier for anxiety, if you were downing some extra booze to try to drown out your jerkbrain’s voice, the odds are very good that you accidentally created the very circumstances you were trying to avoid.
So, the good news is that this is all normal. You’re not broken, porn didn’t wreck you and you’re not doomed to be trying to shoot pool with a rope when there’s another person in the room.
The bad news is that the anxiety you’re feeling can create a cycle that ends up perpetuating itself; you get worried that you’re going to have ED, so things deflate, which “confirms” that you’re “broken”, so the next time sex is on the table, you’re going to be full of anxiety again.
But! We can circle straight back to the good news, because this cycle is easily broken, and you’ll go right back to being harder than oak when you want to be. You just need two things.
First: you have to relax and trust your partner. She was trying to reassure you that everything was ok. Let her. She’s not lying, she’s not thinking less of you, she’s trying to comfort you and help you feel better. She wasn’t thinking that you’re less of a man, she was thinking you were upset, possibly scared, and was concerned for you because she cares. Take her at her word instead of snatching defeat from the jaws of future victory.
Second: take penetrative sex off the table for the next few weeks. You had a negative experience, which is already making you gun-shy. But more to the point, you’re pretty clearly anxious over having your “real” first time and dealing with entirely unnecessary shame over having hired a sex worker. You’ve built things up in your head to the point where you’ve invested sex with awesome and terrible significance. It’s not surprising that you got performance anxiety in the moment, because you built it up so much in your brain.
So, as with many other situations, the way to win is not to play. You take penetrative sex off the menu, so it doesn’t matter if you can get hard and keep it hard. You can make out, you can do hand stuff until your forearms cramp and you develop tennis elbow, you can go down on each other until you both learn how to breathe out of your ears… but penetration is off the table.
The point is threefold. First: you’re going to learn to trust your dick again. Because you’ll have lowered the stakes, things will come much more easily, simply because you won’t have this absurd pressure on yourself. Every erection and orgasm is going to be a reminder that what happened was a temporary glitch in the Matrix, not a sign that you’re doomed to being limp forever more.
Second: it’ll teach you to decenter penetration from sex and to remember that there’s more to sex than tab A going into slot B. When you define sex strictly as penetration, you limit yourself in the ways that you and your partner can have sex and be physically intimate with one another. Taking penetration out of the mix will force you to think outside the box (er, as it were) and realize that sex is a holistic practice that isn’t just genitals; it’s the entire body and the mind. The more ways you have to have sex, the fewer ways there are for one thing to derail the entire experience.
That also leads to the third and most important point: sometimes penises may not work the way you want. You may not be able to get or stay hard. You may not be able to orgasm. But that doesn’t mean that sex isn’t able to happen. Fingers, hands and tongues don’t go limp and are often much more efficient at getting people off, especially women. Toys, whether insertion toys like dildos or stimulation devices like vibrators, also get the job done and quite well. And despite what you may think, these are just tools, not substitutes. A hammer didn’t build the house on its own, the person wielding it did. It’s the skill of the person holding the tool that does the job, not the tool itself.
And trust me: a guy who is not only not threatened by sex toys but is familiar with their use and comfortable with incorporating them into bed with his partner? Especially if that person is also ready, willing and able to put his hands and tongue into play? That’s someone whose partner is going to be veryhappy and very satisfied indeed.
TL; DR: You got in your own head about things and it gave you the yips, that’s all. Take some time to enjoy sloppy makeouts and more with your girlfriend without the pressure of needing to be rock hard and ready at every minute, and get practice in on all the many ways you and she can please each other that don’t involve penetration. This moment will pass and you’ll be confidently ready to try again before you know it… but with some new, very good habits that will make sex even better for the both of you.
Good luck.
