A
male
age
30-35,
anonymous
writes:I am struggling with some sort of sexual performance anxiety. I am 17 years old, and lost my virginity on my 17th birthday to my current girlfriend. Since age 13 I've had anxiety about sexual things, feeling that I needed to be sexually active in order to be socially acceptable and in order to maintain a positive self image. The majority of the pressure I felt was coming directly from my own self, and the little bit coming from outside is unimportant because everybody gets a bit of that I think. Anyways, from ages 13-15 I created fictional sexual encounters for my peers. Making up these stories automatically put me in a bad place because I had built a standard of sorts that I had no way of satisfying, what with having no sexual experience in reality. At the time I didn't realize this, and had full confidence in my sexual ability. Then at 14, my drug use got out of control and I created a litany of legal problems for myself, which both stimulated and hurt my ego. On the one hand, getting in trouble was "badass" but on the other, I basically destroyed my life and was sent away to various substance abuse programs. In these programs my sexual anxiety began to surface. Most of the other guys in these programs were 2 or 3 years older than I, and as a natural result they were more experienced in life than I was. In group therapy situations whenever anything sex related came up I got incredibly nervous and lied about my experience, but to these other guys it was obvious I was full of it. Most of them ignored my stories and didn't care, but one day a guy called me out and I felt like I was going to explode from panic and discomfort. Things like this happened in pretty much all of the programs I attended. Before getting put in these programs I had spent the better part of a year developing an obsessive crush on a girl, and the night I got taken away from home I found out that she felt the same about me. Losing her like this was pretty crushing. When I got out of rehab I started talking to her again right away, to find out that in my absence she had been drinking and partying excessively and experimenting sexually, mostly with a much older man. She didn't actually have sex with anybody, but the concept that some old guy had defiled the girl I was crazy about hurt. We started dating soon after I came home, and started messing around with sexual things. I found that when I fingered her or we had oral sex I didn't really get hard. It wasn't that I didn't like what we were doing, I was just always thinking and couldn't relax and enjoy the experience. Then one day we decided to actually have sex, and I got the condom on and everything, but then it just died and I couldn't fix it. She didn't seem to care all that much, but I definitely did. She knew that I was a virgin and the stories she had heard were a crutch for my ego, I told her so, so I didn't expect to be so nervous, especially when she was a virgin too and wasn't going to uphold me to any sort of standard. This first sexual failure destroyed my confidence completely. We tried again a week or so later and the same scenario happened again, and that was a fatality so to speak for pretty much everything positive I perceived about myself. We broke up shortly after this when she skipped school for the day to go hang out with the older guy I mentioned previously when he got out of prison for being a slimebag. Yet another epic blow to my self esteem. From March of 2011 until August of this year I was single with a few little flings that lead to nothing but annoyance. During this time my problems got worse and worse as my thoughts stewed in my head and my self hate and sexual anxiety steered me away from even talking to girls I thought I might like. Pretty much everything I did made me feel worse, and made it harder to do anything to make myself feel better. Over this past summer I began spending a lot of time with a girl I'll refer to as K. We hung out for months everyday before I made any sort of move on her even though I didn't have much doubt that she felt the same about me as I did about her. Eventually I kissed her though, and the next night she slept over my house. But nothing happened, I was too nervous again!! She was greatly disappointed, and I did my best to explain to her that I was a virgin and I was nervous. She understood, and told me she was going to bring me out of my shell. So she did. We had sex on my birthday, and she became my girlfriend. We've had sex a number of times since, and she's always been incredibly satisfied and happy with my performance, for a while it seemed my issues went away. But some conflicts came up about the fact that I masturbated and watched porn and it grossed her out. She didn't really want to even touch me to hold my hand or kiss me for about a week, and then we broke up because she felt too weird about me and with all my anxiety and inability to relax she didn't want to deal with it. The next day we got back together though as we realized how much we missed each other and didn't really want to be apart. The night we got back together she gave me oral sex, and having been overcome with intense emotions of sadness and loneliness, I got a huge long lasting erection and everything was amazing about the whole experience because I wasn't thinking about it I was just doing it. But the next day my anxiety came back and I couldn't get hard and now I'm right back to constant worry about everything and feeling like things aren't going to work and thinking all the time. I can't focus on just being intimate and passionate, I just think about my penis and how it's not going to work. I know it's not a physical problem because alone I get strong erections without any issue. In the last few days though even that has been getting harder (no pun intended). Basically I'm constantly stressing about sex and the function of my penis even though I know it works, and it's making my life shit. I'm always emotional and my moods are all over the place and I'm getting on my girlfriends nerves again with my crazed reactions to everything. How can I learn to believe in myself and stop doubting my abilities even though I know that I have them? How can I learn to just relax and live, not analyze and contemplate and fret about everything? HELP!! Thank you so much if you've read this entire thing, any help and support I can get is more than appreciated!! I'm ready to stop cowering in the shadow of my self doubt and anxiety
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broke up, condom, confidence, crush, erection, got back together, lost my virginity, move on, my ex, my penis, older man, oral sex, porn, self esteem, talking to girls Reply to this Question
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Fancy yourself as an agony aunt? Add your answer to this question! A
female
reader, Candid Cally +, writes (8 November 2012):
Have sex with music playing...preferably music with a good beat, positive vibes, and no lyrics that will bring you down or make you think.
Seriously, music has been the only way I have been able to derail my thoughts and just simply lose myself in the intimacy of the moment...
I prefer dance/techno/electronic/trance type music. That newfangled dubstep wub wub wub bass dropping stuff can work too if you have a system that can handle it
A
female
reader, supermum  +, writes (6 November 2012):
 Go and see your doctor. They can prescribe medication to help with anxiety, and offer advice and reassurance. This happens more often than you would believe.
Watching porn wont help you. Real sex is nothing like what you see on the screen, although masturbation is completely normal at your age.
It is important that you seek help now, before this problem takes over your life.
I will tell you something though.... it is only sex. It may be a big deal now, but it is as natural as the air we breathe. You will soon get the hang of things, fear not dear.
...............................
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