Sex Lives chronicles the evolution of one person's sexual history. This week: Brian, 29, St. Louis
I don’t know how old I would have been, but at my parents or grandparents’ house they had this book of Greek or Greco-Roman myths. Some of those get really, really horny, and you’ve got all kinds of sexy art and sexy statues. As a kid it’s like, “Oh man, there’s boobs!” and they’re talking about sex all over the place. I remember my parents being like, “Wow, he’s really interested in these myth books! Let’s get him more!” I was too young at the time to have the language to describe any of this, but I was like, yeah I want to see and hear more about these deities fucking. Like how hot is Aphrodite? So yeah, I think that’s probably the earliest sexual memory I have.
My first real adult relationship not living with my parents was freshman year in the dorms. We were taking clothes off, working up to it; it had to be one of the first times where I was stripped down to my underwear with a partner and that was when I found out that I had chronic testicular pain, which really hurts a lot and happens to coincide with sexual arousal. I remember just thinking like, did I somehow contract an STI? What’s going on? I just kind of shut down because I was terrified of…well my knowledge of sex was not great. We kind of just cut off the hookup at the time, and I had to call my folks, and then call a urologist's office. I had an embarrassing conversation with my resident advisor at the time—who happened to work in a urologist's office, which was very fortuitous.
But yeah, I basically found out I have this condition where I just have chronic testicular pain. There’s something wrong with my genitofemoral nerve; it just developed in a different way. It can happen during sex, it can happen not during sex. It can be an ache, it can be completely debilitating, where I have to sit down with an ice pack and it’s hard to walk. And it’s a thing that’s marked my sex life ever since. But it first happened literally the first time I tried to get shirtless with another person. So then that contributed to a lot of anxiety, and then when you have anxiety and testicular pain, that can give you erectile dysfunction. So a lot of my sexual experiences have been kind of reconciling those three kind of interconnected things.
The person I was trying to have sex with is a fine, nice person, but a freshman romance is really based on horniness more than anything else. So I went and got a bunch of tests because they have to rule a lot of things out. It took a while. And by the time I got the all clear like, “Yeah you’re good to have sex: this is just a thing you have to manage,” the relationship had run its course. We did a lot of other things. A lot of no-clothes situations, but I wouldn’t say we passed any more sexual milestones in that relationship, just out of an abundance of caution. I didn’t really have the tools to manage both the pain and the anxiety at the time.
It’s not a consistent thing, it doesn’t happen every time I have a sexual experience, but it’s something I always have to be aware of, and that’s where the anxiety comes in, because it could flare up at any point. I will say, the more comfortable I am generally, the easier it is to work around. Or at least it doesn’t bother me as much. But it can really interfere—especially with a new partner. Like if one out of 20 times you have sex someone’s gonna kick you in the balls really hard, you would have a second thought about having a lot of sexual experiences.
A couple years later, I did actually lose my virginity. It was after college, and I started trying to use dating apps. And I ended up hooking up with someone. And then about a year after that I started having actually good sex, like orgasming with another partner.
Some of the best sex I had was a time I went with a partner to a kind of retreat b&b and one night we just had a lot sex. I think I came like three times that night. I had gotten some therapy, I had medication that I could use for erectile dysfunction. I was with someone that I had had repeat sex with and I was comfortable. And we were in a new place. All the conditions were right for a long steamy evening.
Therapy has been the best treatment in terms of managing my anxiety. And like accepting that there’s all these things about my body that I can’t control and how do I be ok with that? And crucially, how do I communicate that to sex partners. Also pills have helped: I take the generic version of Viagra and at this point I usually have a bottle around that I can use if I need to. And if it’s with a new sexual partner, I almost always have to or do ahead of time. But I make sure they’re aware that’s what I’m doing!
This is a very moonshot goal, given all the difficulties I have, but I think it would be fun to at least try something with multiple partners. It’s less of like a secret long-term fetish, as much as I think for me the steps it would take to not just be comfortable communicating with one person, but to be able to do that with multiple people and being comfortable with it, would be a big step for me personally. So that’s kind of the dream or the goal experience, if that makes sense. Like I could look back at it and be like, “Ah I’ve come such a long way from wondering why my balls are hurting at 16.”
I had a partner ask me to tie her wrists and then be a little more dominant, which is like small potatoes for a whole lot of people, but for me, coming from a place of anxieties with my own body, it actually felt pretty nice. Maybe this is psychoanalyzing myself, but so much of my sexual history has been about recognizing that I don’t have utter control over my own body, so being able to play out something like that was fun. Maybe it seems like very vanilla stuff, but for me, it was like a big shift of like, “Okay, I don't have control over how hard my dick gets on a regular basis, but I can control what happens here.” That was a new experience; that was fun.
The whole time I’ve been talking about this, it probably sounds like “Oh, this sucks. This happened and this is so difficult.” But I really do think that if there’s a silver lining it’s that I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable in my own body and it’s forced me to have to communicate, which is one of the best ways to have good sex. I don’t think it’s all bad. I feel like it seems like it’s only horror stories of like E.D. and anxiety and testicular pain, but there have been good things about it, too. If I’m having a flare up, it’s us figuring out how do we still have sex. You have to be creative; you have to be open minded. I don't want to be super negative about this. There are things that have made it better and I have good sex, it just took me a bit to get there.
