Sex Lives: A Guy Dealing With Chronic Testicular Pain

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.