Anxiety & Sex

You’ve done this dance time and time again. You’ve met someone sexy, you’re kissing passionately, the clothes come flying off and you’re all over each other. Then out of nowhere the anxiety sets in, the thoughts spill out, you’re trapped in your mind and you’re unable to be present in the moment. Sex doesn’t have the wild untamed magic that it used to have because you’re too busy worrying about things like ‘Will they like what I’m doing?’, ‘Am I enough?’ or ‘Why can’t I fucking get hard?!’

Well babe, I’ve experienced it all and I want you to know that you’re not alone. It’s no secret of mine that I’ve danced with anxiety and depression almost my whole life and it has popped up in ways I never thought possible, including in my sex life. As a sexually active gay man I feel the unrelenting pressure we all place on each other to be constantly fucking every man we see, and feeling that’s how my worth is measured.

I’ve seen my anxiety around sex manifest with long term partners and I’ve felt the embarassment and shame as it flares up around casual partners too. For the longest time I thought it was all doom and gloom and that I’d never be able to enjoy sex like I used to, or ever fully be able to let go. With a bit of soul searching, a damn good psychologist, and a sprinkle of patience, I’ve come to understand why these feelings come up and how to start loving sex again.

Anxiety in Hookup Culture

I want to talk about the biggest elephant in the queer room, which is hook up culture. There is a constant sexual undercurrent running through the gay community with an expectation that if you’re not hooking up with the next hottest guy or finding someone’s dick to suck then you’re not doing gay right. It can feel overwhelming and a bit icky when it’s not something that you look for in your sex life.

To understand why hook up culture causes me to be so anxious, I had to approach it with kindness to myself and look back to see what got me here.

I grew up in a small country town in NSW surrounded by blank profiles on Grindr and men hiding behind trees in dark parks. Hook ups were done under the cover of night and kept secret, like we were committing some kind of perverted crime. The first memories I have of hooking up with a random person are marred by recollections of me shaking uncontrollably as they touched me.

Flash forward a few years to my uni days when I started discovering more about my sexual self while also developing a language for my mental health. I swept through the men of my uni town like a ravaging wind, hoping against hope that I could solve my fear and anxiety of sex with exposure therapy. Plot twist: It didn’t work. I never seemed to find true enjoyment out of sleeping with countless random people and increasingly became more aware of the anxiety bubbling underneath it all.

I’m now in my mid-twenties with a mental health diagnosis in one hand and a prescription in the other. I’ve been on a journey trying to figure out where I sexually fit within my own community while also managing the anxiety that comes with that.

There have been weeks where I’ve pounded down the viagra and spent hours swiping through apps to try and find someone that turned me on enough to sleep with, but I never quite found the satisfaction I was looking for.

It turns out that I’m not that comfortable hooking up with random guys from Scruff and prefer a regular fuck buddy or long term partner. I have a lot of trust issues around sex and need to feel safe around the person I’m sleeping with.

I also learned to listen to my body more. Sometimes if I can’t get hard and I’m just not into having sex with the person then I don’t need to pursue that. Maybe they’ll just make a really good friend.

I would encourage you to explore this yourself. If you get wrapped up in anxiety when you sleep with someone casually, or sometimes question why you’re sleeping around so much, then maybe it’s worth digging a bit deeper.

It’s time we all became more comfortable with where we are in our sexual journey and remember that everyone's journey is different. You’re worth more than the next person you sleep with.

Sexual Anxiety in Relationships

I’ve had my own fair share of long term relationship, short relationships, fuck buddies and casual encounters. Anxiety around sex can hit at all levels of any relationship and the main thing that I’ve learnt is being open and honest around it with my partner.

My experience with sexual anxiety in a long term relationship has been interesting to say the least. My most recent relationship helped heal sexual scars from a previous partner but then swiftly began creating its own issues around sex, that have left me constantly questioning my sexual prowess when I’m with another partner.

The relationship began explosively, he was a highly sexual energetic beast who I found intensely attractive and connected with in so many different ways. However despite our sexual chemistry I couldn’t get hard for the life of me for the first month of us seeing each other. I handled it well initially but then found it really starting to affect my confidence around him and doubt whether he’d want to continue seeing me.

I couldn’t figure out why it was happening and the more I stressed about it the worse it got. It got to a point that I would take a viagra every time we’d see each other just so that we could fuck.

All of a sudden on a random weekend cleaning the house it came to me. Since my previous partner I had spent a lot of my time going over the wrongs they had done to me and reliving moments of pain and hurt. I started connecting the dots and realised that it was an extreme mix of guilt and pain that was causing my issues. I was still letting him hurt me even after we broke up.

It was then that I chose to forgive him and move on. I met him in a park one last time and told him that we couldn’t keep any contact for a while, wished him all the best and left that part of my life behind. It was almost instantly that I felt a change in myself. I was rock hard constantly around my partner and felt free to explore my sexual side in a way that I hadn’t before.

Fast forward to a year later as our relationship was coming to its end. Things had started to crumble and we both searched for something in each other that we just couldn’t give. He was constantly pushing me to sleep with other men in an attempt to ‘make our sex better’ or ‘get over my anxiety with other guys’ while I was begging for him to invest more in our own sex life - he wanted every cock in town and I just wanted him.

The anxiety that I felt through this stage of our relationship was the most severe that I’ve ever experienced. I was anxious having sex with him, I was anxious sleeping with anybody else and I began to feel incredibly anxious whenever we’d spend time together. I was worrying that I wasn’t good enough for him, I was scared that he didn’t want me and concerned that he wanted the other men he was sleeping with more than me.

To no-one’s surprise we broke up, and it’s been a couple of months now since we did. I’ve had time to reflect back on why I was feeling so anxious all the time and I’ve come to the following conclusion: I let him dictate how I should have sex and what it should feel like, rather than listen to what I needed.

Going through the process, especially in the last year, has been a journey of hope and self discovery. I’ve had my ups and downs but have felt myself coming into my true sexual being every day.

On the days where I can’t get hard and the anxious thoughts overcome me, I’ve learnt to accept those parts of myself and revel in the days when I feel like my entire authentic self again. If there’s one thing I can offer you out of all of this, it would be kindness. Kindness to yourself and kindness to others. It’s ok if you can’t get hard or you can’t bring yourself to be present in the moment, and you should definitely be more understanding if your partner can’t either.

Mental health is an incredibly prevalent subject in our community and we should be lifting each other up rather than dragging each other down.

Blog image photography by Alex Dubois Curated by Carlos Mantilla. Model V.