After nights of sleeplessness, Rispa came to the Sexology clinic to seek help. She was tired with bloodshot eyes. She definitely had not slept for a while. She had also been crying a lot as a way of draining her frustrations. It occurred to me that she could be sliding into depression.
“I keep asking myself where I went wrong. I question God each day about why I have to go through this. I have even contemplated suicide,” she lamented. She was unable to contain the river of tears that rolled smoothly down her cheeks, gathering speed, before settling on the collar of her white blouse, leaving a sinister, oddly coloured hollow that pierced through my disturbed mind.
“I don’t understand; did you just say you have lost erections?” I asked, to which she nodded vigorously.
I went ahead to explain that, in my understanding, only men got erections. I explained that the clitoris does get engorgement when a woman is sexually stimulated, but we normally do not call it an erection. I asked her to confirm what she was talking about.
“When my husband fails to get an erection for three months despite my doing everything to arouse him, what do you call that?” she asked rhetorically, “Isn’t it my mistake? Am I not the one who has failed to arouse him? Don’t you then say that I have failed to achieve an erection from the helpless man?”
Oh, so the story was that James, Rispa’s husband, had lost erections for three months. I nodded in understanding. But her perception of the situation left me quite puzzled.
The couple had been married for 17 years and had three children. They had been happily married till James lost his erections. The loss had been progressive over a month, one bad experience leading to a worse one in a matter of days, until he could not erect at all.
But it is amazing that Rispa perceived the condition as a failure on her part. It was a reminder of the many negative reactions of most women when their partners develop erection failure. For many, the immediate suspicion if often that the man is having an affair. In fact, they go ahead to imagine that the other woman is much better than they are and that the man gets an erection out there but fails to react normally when they get back home.
This self-persecution makes women feel deficient, ugly, and rejected. It makes them react harshly to the man’s failure. Unfortunately, a harsh reaction from a partner only worsens the erection failure. It makes the man bitter that his wife does not empathise or care about their predicament.
Do not get me wrong, there are, of course, instances where men spend their sexual energies in an affair and are unable to perform back home. Before you reach this conclusion, however, you need to be sure that your man is not suffering from erectile dysfunction (ED)that just needs medical attention.
In treating ED, several men have also been found to discontinue treatment prematurely due to discouragement from their wives, who feel that it is their self-deficiency that is causing ED. They may not even be aware of the feelings themselves, but will react by discouraging the man from the treatment with reassurances such as the marriage is more important than sex and that she loves him, whether he functions sexually or not.
On rare occasions, a man can fail to get an erection because the woman has a sex problem. Take it this way: assume the woman has pain during sex, and so every time the man makes advances, she freaks out and denies him sex. Or it could be that the woman has a low libido and is never enthusiastic about sex. Whatever the case may be, if the woman repeatedly stops the man’s advances, he soon feels rejected, and one thing that can happen is that his erections start to fail.
I asked Rispa to bring James along for the next clinic appointment. A detailed medical history, examination, and tests showed that James had erection failure due to stress at work. What could have been transient, however, became chronic due to pressure from Rispa, which led him to have performance anxiety, a situation where the man is in persistent fear of failure whenever he imagines having sex. A few days of therapy solved the problem, and the couple was back to enjoying intimacy.
