I am married and have been battling with ED and DE issues for a long time and its been up and down. I have been pretty consistently having great sex with my wife in the past month and I want to share what I learnt. The most important realization was that there were two different issues for me:
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Performance anxiety
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Lack of arousal response
They are not so easy to distinguish and require different solutions. For 1. the most helpful thing was having a backup plan to get her off, mouth, fingers, toys. Once my erection was required for the sex to happen it didn’t work, so we needed to make sex not depend on my erection. Obviously, as soon as the pressure is gone the erection comes and I now have PIV everytime, but I should not take this for granted.
Porn and masturbation abstinence do nothing to help 1. and in fact they make it somewhat worse, BUT heavily reducing porn and masturbation greatly helps for 2. I have started trying to not masturbate alone and focus my sexual energy entirely on my wife and this has been an absolute game changer. It is very hard at certain points since we only have sex 2-3 times a week tops and I am often failing, but that’s ok. What matters is that I reduce solo masturbation to such a degree that I am super horny for my wife when the sex is coming up. However, I would not recommend nofap to someone who is not in long term relationship or can not have sex regularly, because it might lead to loss of libido.
