In Praise of Patient Women

About A Year Ago, after more than two decades of marriage, I found myself a single man again.

"Don't make any decisions for at least eighteen months," cautioned a friend who'd been through the process. "You don't know it, but you're a crazy man."

Good advice, perhaps, but I made one immediate decision: I wanted women in my life.

I soon encountered good news and bad.

The good news was that there were wonderful women out there who welcomed me into their lives.

The bad news was that when I first went to bed with them, I all too often failed to reach an erection.

A horrid fate, wouldn't you say? Shameful? Humiliating? Grounds for suicide?

Not really. Looking back now, I see the problem as a blessing in disguise.

That wasn't how I felt at first, of course. Agonized, I examined my sexual past for clues to the horrid present. Whatever the problems of my marriage, sex had not been one of them. True, I'd sometimes performed erratically with other women, but I'd written that off to nerves.

Once I found myself with a stunningly attractive woman. Our first night was a dream. Our second was a disaster. In retrospect, I think I was scared to death (scared limp, one might say), because I saw the woman as a threat to a life I then wanted to continue.

But here I was now, 50, free and a flop in bed.

I knew I wasn't 25 anymore. I didn't expect to make love three times in a morning, as I had in a little hotel on the Rue Bonaparte with the most beautiful woman in Paris many years ago.

But once a night, surely. An erection on demand, surely.

No such luck.

I was consoled by the belief that my problem was mental, not physical, that in some way I didn't understand, I was psyching myself out.

I was consoled, too, by a talk I'd once had with no less an authority than Hugh Hefner. Hef said that as a young man, he'd thought of sex, like most American men of his generation, in terms of performance, in terms of how long you kept your erection and how many orgasms you had. But as he grew older and wiser, he began to see that the point was not performance but pleasure, that there was a vast difference, as he put it, "between fucking and making love." Erections were not the point, he found; you could have great sex with or without erections.

Hefner's remarks were some consolation, yes; but at other times, I would recall the Hollywood producer of the Thirties who married a famous sex goddess, then killed himself shortly after their wedding, presumably because he wasn't functioning at a godlike level.

It's no fun to find at a crucial moment that your once-loyal companion Harry Hard-on has deserted you, that Steely Dan has become a limp noodle. It's easy to think you've disgraced yourself, that your manhood is in doubt.

I turned for advice to the sexual godparents of us all, the good doctors William Masters and Virginia Johnson. Their somber tome Human Sexual Inadequacy (a lovely title, that) diagnosed my disability--secondary impotence, they call it--and told me pretty much what I'd suspected.

For an otherwise healthy male, erections are natural. (I recalled a fellow I'd shared a tent with once while working for the U.S. Forest Service. Every morning, he would announce from his bunk, "There's a woman on the roof." How do you know? someone would ask. "Because my dick's pointing up there.") But if erections are natural, our psyches are delicate. Once we start to worry about erections, even to think about them, we're in trouble.

Our two related problems, Masters and Johnson say, are worrying about our sexual performance and becoming an observer, rather than a participant, in sex--evaluating instead of enjoying.

Ok, I was guilty on both counts. Of course I was performing, or trying to. What else was I doing in bed with those women I barely knew? And, let's face it, my instinct is to evaluate everything--movies, salads, sunsets. Once, after a failure in bed, I told my partner exactly what had gone wrong. "That's the first time I ever got an instant replay," she replied.

I had the classic problem, but what was I to do? According to Masters and Johnson, I needed to relax, to think about pleasure, about giving and sharing, not about performance. Be patient. If it doesn't happen today, it'll happen tomorrow.

Good advice--and not worth a damn if the women in my life hadn't cooperated. But they did. in spades.

I came to think that a man with an elusive erection is like a little boy with a skinned knee--he needs Momma to hold him tight and tell him it'll be all right. And I found that some otherwise tough, formidable women are happy to do just that.

I don't know if many women in their 20s would have been so patient--why should they have been? But the women I was seeing were around 40, veterans of the sexual wars, and if you treated them right in other regards, they could be wonderfully understanding.

All of them said, "Hey, this isn't unusual; you're not the only one." (Masters and Johnson note that virtually every man who comes to them for treatment of impotence is convinced he's the only one who was ever thus afflicted.)

One woman told (concluded on page 154)Patient Women(continued from page 103) me, "I know you're not impotent, because you want to talk about it. Men who are impotent deny it and won't talk about it."

These women showed me it was true; they do love to snuggle, to cuddle, to touch, to laugh and to whisper. Sometimes they like those pleasures even more than straight-ahead sex. They know, too, that there are quite a number of enjoyable things two people can do that don't involve an erection.

It helps to keep a sense of humor. "God is trying to humble me," I said, sighing, after one failure.

"She is succeeding," my partner replied.

When I told one woman how much I'd appreciated her patience, she said, "It was the best thing that happened to us. I went to bed with you right away because you expected it, but I really wasn't ready to have sex with you. This way, we got to know each other first."

It was not a problem I would wish on anyone, yet I came to see it as a blessing.

I won't claim to have learned humility, but I did learn something about patience and tenderness, about my own needs and about women.

When I became single, I was overwhelmed by the number of available women. There is a part of me that is still 18 and eager to jump into every bed at the earliest possible moment (and God bless that plucky lad). But another part of me knows I should go slow, both for my sake and for others'.

In time, I saw my lapses as a defense mechanism, wherein the prudent part of me was struggling to hold back the runaway-train part of me that was hell-bent for disaster. And out of this struggle, I was learning what I really wanted.

I came to imagine a little On--Off switch in my head that controlled my sex life. As long as it was at Off, nothing much helped. But, in time, my subconscious would flip the switch to On, then everything would be fine. Sensational, in fact.

That happy moment came, as best I understood this mysterious process, when I was comfortable with a woman, when I trusted her and was ready for intimacy. Usually, that meant I was focusing my attention on her alone.

I was learning that multiple relationships are not my thing, however tempting they may seem. I found juggling two or three women too emotionally demanding, too complicated, too damn duplicitous. If it works for you, brother, go to it; but I'm a simple man, probably doomed to a life of serial monogamy. Making one woman happy is challenge enough.

When I returned to singledom, like Rip van Winkle awakening, the world had changed. There were hard questions out there, questions about honesty and trust and fairness, about hurting and being hurt. The hell of it is, sex is the easy part.

Looking back, I think the women in my life understood me better than I understood myself. They knew I was a little crazy, but they thought I had a potential for sanity, and they nudged me gently in that direction. For me, the moral was this: Find the right woman, and the rest will take care of itself.

"'God is trying to humble me,' I said after one failure. 'She is succeeding,' my partner replied."