LAST UPDATE | 19 Sep 2023
YOU KNOW THE feeling you get when you meet ‘the one’, the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, and you’ve got this burning love and urge, that pull to be with them but you can’t express it? That was my experience when I met the mother of my child, my now fiancée, back in 2020.
“I can’t stay tonight.” “I’m too tired.” “Can we just cuddle?” These were all excuses I had become familiar with using to avoid looking at what had stared me in the face for the previous 10 years of my life. I was a young man with a lot of talents, confidence in abundance, surrounded by girls; yet riddled with a dark secret.
I had tried to have sex for all of my adult life, without success. I had relationships so opportunity was not my issue. There’s a natural pattern to any relationship and when you’re young like that, after a certain time it’s pretty much expected that once both parties are consenting, of course, sex becomes part of the deal.
I would imagine that couples with a ‘healthy’ sex life have an awkward phase initially, but once they get used to one another and a familiar intimacy develops, it all starts to flow. Well, for me and any girlfriend, every attempt to have sex was like that first awkward time, and things just didn’t improve, ever. I just could not perform.
At first, I put it down to nerves and inexperience but as time went on it became clear that it wasn’t as simple as that. Countless hotel rooms, trips away and dream holidays that promised so much but all ended in the same way.
The longer this went on, the more it started to affect me and my relationships. I started to feel more and more isolated. The idea of any sexual activity at all became something that I wanted to avoid at all costs and being so young, it was not an easy subject to address over conversations, so it just continued as the awkward elephant in the room. Naturally, the longer I was in any relationship, the more people might feel inclined to mention us getting married and becoming parents.
Every time someone would mention kids, I would freeze, hold my breath and wait for it to be over as I knew it wasn’t possible. The pressure was unreal.
I thought about going to see a doctor so many times over the years but I was so ashamed, embarrassed and afraid of what they would say was wrong with me, so I avoided the GP. I felt that it was my fault that I couldn’t have sex and that it was something I would have to fix myself. When it came to doctors, I carried my own bias as I don’t feel comfortable with them in general. As a result, going to a GP or a hospital didn’t seem like an option to me.
Without health insurance too, private doctors seemed worlds away. It was only later in my life after my now fiancée Fiona urged me to be honest with her about why we weren’t having sex, that I discovered what was wrong with me by Googling my symptoms. Seems ridiculous now, saying it back but that was the level of fear and shame I had carried around sexual function for years.
When checking symptoms I found a specialist doctor and I decided it was now or never. When I went for my first consultation, he quickly told me to take everything off and instantly held my penis in his hands. As he started to assess and talk to me about my penis, he assured me that this was a common condition and ‘a simple circumcision’ would fix it. So there it was, the issue that had plagued me for so many years, it could be fixed next week in a short operation under general anaesthetic. It was all as simple as that.
The official diagnosis was Phimosis. It occurs when the foreskin is too tight to be pulled back over the penis. According to the Cleveland Clinic, virtually all males are born with this condition and between the ages of two and six, their foreskin loosens up and begins to separate from the head of the penis. Interestingly, it is estimated that only 1% of people still have this condition when they reach the age of 16.
It is a surprising and worthy statistic given that I first discovered I had an extreme form of this condition at the age of 26.
This was in 2020 and after seeking this medical advice, I was circumcised. Health insurance companies in Ireland at the time considered it a ‘cosmetic’ surgery. The operation was a success and I recovered well. Before the procedure, I had half opened up to my partner Fiona about everything, so she was expecting me to be declared ‘fit to play’ once the injury had healed.
Things didn’t go according to plan. After the operation, I could get an erection but it would never last long enough to have sex. I had hoped everything was going to be okay but every time we tried to have sex, it wouldn’t work again but for different reasons. It was like reliving the trauma of my early twenties again. Lots of stress and disappointment, another night going to bed knowing that it hadn’t happened. There were some false dawns that I wanted to be able to count but Fiona assured me I could not. It seemed the gods had decided they weren’t finished with my humiliation and so they sent me… Erectile Dysfunction.
“Getting it up,” was a phrase I heard for the first time around 11 or 12. It was always used as a joke about old men or as an insult reserved for undesirables.
We were conditioned to believe that ‘real men’ never had a problem getting it up.
It seems that in nearly every movie and TV show too, all men miraculously found their groove and wooed their love interests. In short, they got a hard-on instantly. This, evidently, was not my experience – nor has it ever been. I was at another crossroads and was still feeling a tremendous amount of embarrassment and shame around all of this. I had had my operation but it was obvious I had more to grapple with here. I had heard that Viagra gave you an instant erection that would not go away until after sex so I figured I would give it a go.
The first time I bought Viagra I felt like I was dealing with class-A drugs. It was surreal. After placing my order at the pharmacy I was asked to sit in my car and wait for further instructions. The call came. My drugs were ushered to the door and handed to me abruptly as if I were carrying a live bomb. I felt I should have worn a trilby hat and trench coat and slinked back into the night.
If I was still hoping to battle the shame of my condition, today was not the best day. Off I went with the explosive drug in my pocket but as my luck would have it, the actual explosion I was hoping for later that evening never happened. I always thought that you automatically got an erection from taking a Viagra tablet but you have to be aroused in the first place or it will not work. When I took the tablet, I started to feel dazed, tired and warm. These were all normal side effects but felt so alien to me. I realised then that once I waited for an appropriate time and became aroused, the tablet would do its job. I also found that depending on your age and situation you will need different strengths, so it’s something you have to get used to.
When I was younger, I remember wondering where babies come from. I don’t recall ever asking, but I have this sense that it was just pretty straightforward – “when a man and woman love each other, they get married and have babies” – a depiction used to cover all sexual topics… a blanket expression, all boxes ticked on this express tour of the birds and the bees.
In the meantime, I was living under a blanket of shame and guilt amid the lack of clarity around the how and why of sex – questions I so desperately needed answers to. Ignorance was my foe in all of this.
The infamous banana and condom sex education from a middle-aged woman who visited our class to teach us about sex was the only guidance I was afforded in my sexual journey. That and porn.
Pornography served two functions for me, the first being the one that comes with puberty that most young boys have but the other was about the provision of information. Porn was a place where I could watch people having sex and try and learn something from it. Effectively, it helped me understand how a man put it in, how long it took for him to get hard during the act and when and how he pulled back his foreskin. Unfortunately, I couldn’t replicate any of these things. That is how people learn, by doing and making mistakes but I couldn’t start and so had no idea how anything worked.
Often I had more questions than answers after watching pornography, the first one being, why does my penis look so different to the ones in the videos? Those answers were not as easy to come by. We didn’t talk about sex in school apart from that one class with the banana and the condom. Hey, it was Ireland in the ’90s and noughties, so we didn’t talk about sex at all. It was never a conversation that was had with my parents. It was almost like “Well of course he knows what sex is and how it works, it’s everywhere and he has access to so much information that we don’t need to have ‘the talk’ the way they might have had when my parents were younger.
I would also try and make sense of the questions I’d have from TV and just from listening to people and joining the dots where I could. I had heard somewhere that most Americans get circumcised, I connected it to it being a Jewish thing and it happened when you were born so you knew no different. I would also be so scared that someone would see my penis at the urinal and realise I hadn’t pulled back my foreskin and must be a virgin which was very scary.
I used to look out of curiosity at other penises and I never saw one the same as mine which worried me.
The friends I have are very open and I feel comfortable talking to them about anything, except this. When it came to my sexual secret, I wasn’t able to talk to anyone. It wasn’t anything to do with lads not being able to talk, it was all about shame. I was telling a lie every day by being in a relationship for that long and not having sex. Every day that went by made it harder to tell the truth and eventually I got to the point where I felt that I couldn’t turn back.
Although I feel like I have very open and supportive friends, I’m also aware that in many different male groups, this stuff just doesn’t come up. The only thing you talk about in relation to women is how many you’ve had sex with and how. You don’t talk about any of the problems.
There were a few other fundamentals that neither source detailed extensively, however. Questions like… What is wrong with my penis? How do I pull back my foreskin if it’s not ‘looking right’? Why does my penis look different to the diagrams or those of the perfectly shaved porn stars? These are the questions I grappled with through my teens and into my mid-twenties.
Post-surgery and relying on Viagra, I realised I needed real help. I was feeling so defeated and just wanted a normal sex life, so off I headed to sex therapy. Most of you will have at some stage seen the movie, There’s Something about Mary. There’s an excruciating scene where the protagonist, Ted (Ben Stiller) gets his penis caught in his zipper.
For years I had tried to masturbate regularly in the hope it might ‘fix my issue’ but was left in terrible pain. It turns out that that action of pulling my foreskin back was akin to the trauma poor Ben Stiller endured in that movie. It was the wrong way to go. The good news is that with sex therapy, I was able to learn how to masturbate correctly.
My main take from sex therapy was that talking to someone about sex is as helpful as speaking to someone about any mental health issue. For me, it removed lots of the shame I had associated with not being able to have sex and not feeling adequate sexually. I feel that similarly, through regular therapy in the past, there can be a stigma attached to attending sex therapy.
Talking about sex in a serious way is sort of taboo, it’s fine to crack jokes and tell tall tales of one-night stands, but talking about sex honestly, from a place of vulnerability. That still seems to be not okay by the lack of it around the place.
During my time with my sex therapist, questions began to arise about my fertility. Both my doctor and my therapist seemed to be of the impression that my issues around sex were physiological, meaning both my mind and body had a part to play in the difficulties I was experiencing. From what I understand, this is common. I was sent to have my semen tested two weeks after moving in with my girlfriend. We were nine months together at the time, ironically.
The specialist felt that my issue may be the result of low testosterone, which can have an effect on libido. After semen analysis, it showed that due to my low testosterone, the morphology levels of my sperm were not good. The results came back and brought many tough conversations to our door.
I was by all accounts utterly infertile. I had the testosterone of a 50-year-old man and all my swimmers were duds.
I was told I had less than a 1% chance of having children naturally and a slim chance of being able to successfully conceive via IVF or IUI. I was prescribed testosterone to see if this could help boost my system.
At first, taking the testosterone injections made me feel like there was something seriously wrong with me. Three times a week I had to go to the bathroom, take out the needle and inject myself. I really struggled to process this at the beginning but it soon became as normal as brushing my teeth. At the time I had never heard of anyone using it. The doctor told me that this treatment may not work to correct my sperm. He actually said that a lot of doctors would not even entertain this idea to solve the problem I had. I was told to expect the changes to take nine months before any improvements but in my case, it worked after about four or five months.
I gradually began to experience an increase in my libido and then it finally happened… The daily doses of Viagra and the injections worked, and I had sex for the first time in July 2021. Like proper, ‘everything worked’ sex.
Having sex for the first time is a huge moment in anyone’s life. When it happened to me, I felt this incredible relief inside. The thing that had tortured me for so long had no power anymore and I was free. That voice that came with the shame disappeared and it was just me in my mind. I was so happy for myself and Fiona, after everything we’d been through as a couple in such a short space of time. I distinctly remember feeling like I now knew what everyone else had known for a long time. I didn’t feel like I was strange anymore or weird.
In my mind, I was aware that I hadn’t lost my virginity until I was 26, which was “unusual”, but it was only a minor issue. The other part of my relief was that for the first time in my life, becoming a father was now possible.
Hoping to increase our chances of having a baby by some miracle, my partner and I decided to cease all contraception. Unexpectedly, two months after losing my virginity Fiona told me I was going to be a Dad. On 23 June 2022, we welcomed our beautiful daughter Charlie into the world and she is the most wonderful light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak.
I now accept that I have had a troubled start with sexual function and intimacy. It’s been a difficult road and it would be great to see a more open discussion around this issue for men. I now also accept that I will always need a pill to have sex, the way other people need a pill to manage their heart conditions or their chemical imbalances. And you know what, I’m okay with that now.
Some people, no doubt, will think I am insane for writing this down and sharing it in such a public way. I am doing so now because not talking about it for so many years destroyed so much of my young life.
That silence in the end was fixed with a quick Google search. I have asked myself countless times since, why it took me quite so long to type in my burning questions into the search bar when the information was at my fingertips all along.
The simple answer is… shame. My hope is that by my talking out about my struggles with my sexual function I may help others to break their own deafening silence.
Bob McQuaid is a musician, singer and a new dad.
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