Dating A Guy With Sexual Performance Anxiety – What You Can Do
Exploring sexual performance anxiety
Today we will talk about sexual performance anxiety, especially when dating someone with sexual performance anxiety.
We will uncover what performance anxiety is, what are its leading causes, and what you can do if you or your partner are experiencing performance anxiety to not only know how to navigate it with grace.
But also how to turn it into the erotic sexual superpowers that will help you both have the best sex you’ve ever had.
What is sexual performance anxiety?
So what is performance anxiety? The straightforward definition is when the act of sex, the idea of having sex or approaching sex with a partner, gives you anxiety when you or your partner is experiencing some form of emotional and physical resistance to sex.
An over-fixation of what you’re doing in bed. Even if you can get aroused, you may be too distracted to reach orgasm. Sexual performance anxiety leads to a cycle of troubles. You might become so anxious about sex that you can’t perform, which leads to even more sexual performance anxiety. It is recommended to see a doctor or a licensed therapist if you are experiencing Sexual Performance Anxiety.
In case you’ve already tried seeing a professional about your sexual anxiety, premature ejaculation, or erectile dysfunction before, and it didn’t seem to help, here’s my more holistic and embodied approach.
Signs you or your partner is having sexual performance anxiety.
Here are a few sexual performance anxiety symptoms that you or your partner might be experiencing:
They get irrationally angry or frustrated when they cannot last as long in bed (have premature ejaculation) when they stay too long (Delayed ejaculation), or when they get soft during lovemaking (erectile dysfunction).
Another sign is if your partner is getting angry, frustrated, or generally resistant to you trying to initiate sex and is turning you down often.
This also can be caused by many other things, but it could be the reason your partner turns down some of your advancements, and it’s essential for you to know that.
Another sign that you may notice if your partner has sexual performance anxiety is that during sex, often, their breath will become shallow and quick.
Their body becomes tense, and you notice that their mind is distracted.
It could be that you noticed they are too focused and stressed about trying to make you orgasm in a way that kills your mood and often causes erectile dysfunction.
What causes sexual performance anxiety?
But why? You might be asking yourself. What makes me or my partner experience performance anxiety?
Well, just like anything with human beings, we are complex and multidimensional, and there can be many reasons you experience sexual performance anxiety.
I feel that beyond erectile dysfunction and other primary sources and causes of sexual performance anxiety, there are other deeper psychological factors in play.
And here are some of them:
Porn is a leading cause of sexual performance anxiety.
Unfortunately, most of us get most of our sex education from pornographic movies as we grow up due to a lack of proper sex education.
In pornographic movies, everything is a performance. People are there not to create a scene that resembles how normal people have sex, which is usually full of vulnerability, Inhibitions, fears, awkwardness, laughter, and ups and downs, like anything else that humans do.
Instead, they come to perform to create a specific scene like any other play or movie.
And consuming porn, as helpful as it can be to a certain degree, also taught a lot of us on a deep level that sex is a performance.
That we are supposed to do things in a certain way, be a certain size, etc.
That our female partner is supposed to look and sound a certain way or arrive at a certain destination, and that orgasms and ejaculations are the end all be all of the sex.
Therefore, we are under the impression that if we are not gonna perform in that way, then something is wrong with us as lovers; we are not living up to the ideal, to the expectation of performing like a porn star.
Sex is NOT a performance!
In reality, when human beings come together in sexual union, each of us brings our naked humanity, our baggage of trauma, and our inner wounds that we are dealing with.
We are all perfectly imperfect human beings, and that’s what’s so beautiful about us, when we are connecting with another human being.
To see each other’s humanity and recognize each other’s soul instead of trying to fixate on certain arbitrary and physical goals and destinations like getting hard, lasting long, an orgasm, being valued as a “great lover,” etc., but rather to really.
Sex can become something much more powerful;
we can down-regulate each other’s nervous system, amplify each other’s hearts and amplify each other’s love, and see the world through another person’s eyes.
All of these things are what sexuality and intimate connection are really all about.
Past trauma perpetuating sexual performance anxiety
Another reason that a lot of people experience sexual performance anxiety is that a lot of us grew up in an environment that told us that we were not good enough.
We have heard that in all kinds of ways from our parents and our environment. The love that we received was conditional.
Only If we behaved in a particular way that they wanted us to behave did we receive love.
They didn’t have to tell us in that way for us to receive that as a message loud and clear. We saw how when we’ve expressed emotions such as frustration, anger, or sadness, we’ve been put down and told to go to a room and relax.
We got the message that certain aspects, certain expressions of our humanity, are not worthy of attention, appreciation, and love.
And so we go and spend our entire adult life trying to compensate for that by being the best that we can be; We pursue a career and try to have “the best” partner, the sexiest, most successful relationship.
We connect with people sexually, not as the imperfect humans that we are, but through a pretend mask that we put on ourselves, hoping that the other person, our partner, will keep validating us and the mask we put on. We look for people and external situations to tell us how worthy we are.
We look for love and a sense of worth everywhere other than the only place it can be truly found: within our own self.
Sexual performance anxiety and the nervous system
The psychological patterns we mentioned above can affect how your nervous system is wired. That is how you start to experience sexual anxiety in the body that causes most sexual Sexual dysfunction, such as erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation.
It’s a vicious cycle of sexual dysfunction that can really affect one’s mental health: worrying about performance > the worries create anxiety > the anxiety creates the dysfunctions and repress.
If we want to treat the core of the issue, not just the symptoms, we have to have a holistic approach that considers the body and the nervous system.
When you see sex as a performance, for example, and all the thoughts and emotional patterns associated with such core beliefs, what happens in your body is that your breath becomes shallow and quick.
As a result, your nervous system, especially your sympathetic nervous system, which is in charge of stress responses, is getting activated.
When the sympathetic system is activated, you may experience muscle tension, tingling sensations, and the evermore quickening and shallowing of the breath, which creates the whole experience of sexual performance anxiety.
Breath is the key to all sexual performance anxiety.
If you really want to master your sexual performance anxiety and down-regulate your sympathetic nervous system, it all comes down very simply to mastering your breath.
And mastering your breath and breathing properly will change every aspect of your life, not just your sex in the bedroom.
Here are two things you want to do when you notice your partner having sexual performance anxiety:
Remind your partner, “Hey, it’s okay. Take a deep breath.” Have them take deep breaths from their nose all the way down to their stomach and pelvis and exhale slowly from their mouth. Have your partner repeat that for a while until their system calms down.
Another incredible way to help your partner deepen their breathing and activate their parasympathetic (relaxation mode) is to start doing it yourself.
We constantly regulate each other’s nervous system, whether we are conscious of it or not.
And when you’re doing it consciously, you have the power to down-regulate your partner’s nervous system by deepening and elongating your own breath, by becoming more present and aware of the sensations of your body at the moment.
That allows them to let go of the performance, to let go of the fixations and come back to presence.
An ego boost to help with sexual performance anxiety
The next thing that I want you to do is, of course, reassure your partner and tell them that it’s not about them getting hard, lasting longer, or making you orgasm.
That they’re not expected to perform in a particular way; tell them how much you enjoy spending time with them, how much you enjoyed the connection itself.
Tell them what specific aspects of your connection and sexuality you really, really love that have nothing to do with their sexual performance, outcomes, and orgasms.
Tell them how you appreciate them, how you love them, and how it’s totally and absolutely okay.
Show him with your words, body, and energy that they are totally welcome as they ARE.
Your emotions are your superpowers.
Lastly, something that can potentially not only deescalate their anxiety and allow them to open up to much more pleasure and to deescalate the whole situation to the cessation of tension.
But that can potentially turn their sexual performance anxiety Into a superpower.
Anxiety, in all of its forms, is never a singular experience. There’s usually a full spectrum of underline subtle experiences such as anger, shame, and sadness.
When we stop seeing any of these emotions as “bad” or less than, as something to resist and suppress, and instead as different aspects of life force energy that is flowing through your body-mind in different intensities.
Energy currents with a potent message to teach you, and you start accepting your emotional experiences, allowing yourself to feel your feelings; those experiences become your very evolution, transformation, and growth.
Help unpack their emotional experience with sexual performance anxiety
And so an incredible thing that you can do to metabolize and treat your partner’s experience around their performance anxiety is to simply have a conversation about it.
Invite them to have a vulnerable and open conversation about it. The opposite of shame is vulnerability.
Make space for their hurting inner child that hasn’t been fully accepted and loved as the perfectly imperfect humans that they are.
Inviting vulnerability at the moment of performance anxiety will not only deepen your relationship but will also amplify the amount of pleasure they can receive and give and the quality of their life.
Get curious and inquire into their sexual performance anxiety experiences.
What exactly is happening in their body on a sensational level?
What are the emotional patterns that are associated with their experience?
Get very curious and very attuned and actively listen to what they have to say. That in it itself will allow and lead your partner into a space of acceptance and love.
That is really what’s missing behind the desire and the need to perform.
In conclusion
I hope you found this article helpful in understanding and navigating your or your partner’s sexual performance anxiety.
If you want to go much deeper and have my support on your journey to treat sexual performance anxiety, erectile dysfunction, and premature ejaculation and become an epic lover in and out of the bedroom: click here to apply.
