Effect of Premature Ejaculation on Heterosexual Couples and Their Relationships

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Introduction: The authors investigated how men and women see premature ejaculation and also how premature or rapid ejaculation impacts on a couple's relationship. They asked one hundred and fifty-two men and their female partners about the man's ejaculatory habits, whether they thought the man had a problem with premature ejaculation (which they called rapid ejaculation or RE for short), how sexually satisfied the couple were, how well they thought their relationship was going, and their sexual concerns.

Interestingly, the men and women's comments on the men's ejaculatory behavior didn't really match up. In general, the women saw premature ejaculation or rapid ejaculation as less of a problem than the men did. And how women saw the men's ejaculation (i.e. as a problem or not) seemed to be largely influenced by whether they perceived the man as having premature ejaculation. But both sexes got less sexual pleasure the faster a man ejaculated, although this had no bearing on the pleasure and satisfaction that couples felt about their relationship in general. In other words, for most couples, the duration of sex before ejaculation has a bearing on sexual satisfaction but not on the couple's overall relationship and personal functioning.

The details: Premature ejaculation (or rapid ejaculation) is the most common sexual problem for men and affects between one-quarter and one-third of men. And even though there are of course many other ways of having sex, premature ejaculation (or rapid ejaculation) may affect both a man's and his partner's sexual satisfaction. Masters and Johnson made this point explicit when they tried to bring an element related to the female partner's satisfaction during sexual intercourse into the definition of premature ejaculation. Even so, few studies of either premature ejaculation (rapid ejaculation) or of the ejaculatory response have provided any data about the man's sexual partner; fewer still have looked at how the women sees the man's behavior. In this study there was a lot of data from both men and their female partners, all of which helped to illustrate the how both men and women saw the man's ejaculatory behavior, and to reveal how premature ejaculation (rapid ejaculation) affected a couple's functioning.

Defining Rapid Ejaculation

There is much conflict and little agreement about the definition of premature ejaculation (rapid ejaculation). Neither is it clear how various aspects of the condition are linked together. The two authors of the current paper surveyed the ejaculatory behavior of over 100 male university students, asking them to self-report on ejaculatory latency (time before ejaculation after penetration) and their control over ejaculation. They found that these premature ejaculation (rapid ejaculation) criteria were only modestly related, sharing, on average, only 10% of the variance.

The problem is that we don't know how reliable the men's description of their own sexual and ejaculatory behavior actually is! The problem of the reliability of self-reports of men's sexual habits has been looked at by a few authors: in one study, the reliability of men's reports of the time they take to ejaculate was examined by comparing how long they said they lasted during sex and examining them in a laboratory to see how long they actually lasted before ejaculation - but since the conditions are so different, this really adds very little to our understanding of premature ejaculation.

Ejaculatory behavior in the laboratory of men with premature ejaculation (rapid ejaculation) is not likely to be the same as when they are in bed with a partner, nor is it likely to give much indication of how long they can last during sex. In short, to know whether or not we are on the right lines when looking at men's estimates of the length of time they last during sex, we need to ask their partners some questions and see what they have to say on the subject. Regular or long-term partners are able to provide information about how long the man can last before he comes, and whether he ejaculates before he penetrates his partner; once you have this data you can compare what the partner says about these matters with the man's report of how long he can last, how well he can control his ejaculation, and his ability to control the timing of his ejaculation. You can also assess whether or not he is worried about ejaculating too rapidly, and establish his satisfaction with how much control he has over his ejaculation.

Most research on rapid ejaculation has split men into rapid ejaculators and non-rapid ejaculators based on predefined criteria. The current authors, though, included objective measures of rapid or premature ejaculation as well as assessments of how the men classified their own ejaculatory tendencies. They found that about one man in five reported that the had a problem with premature ejaculation. With the help of seven criteria which could be used to predict when a man would report himself as having an ejaculatory problem, they (not surprisingly) established that there were three components to self-identified rapid ejaculation: a behavioral component, an affective component, and an efficacy component. They then studied how a man's partner sees her man's ejaculatory behavior.

The Impact of Rapid Ejaculation

Among couples receiving sexual psychotherapy, it's been found that improvements in ejaculatory response (i.e. a longer time before ejaculation) are associated with increases in sexual and relationship satisfaction. Although a lot of men revert back to their original ejaculatory habits when therapy ends, the improvements in sexual satisfaction are maintained for at least three years. From this you might well conclude that rapid ejaculation or premature ejaculation need not lower a couple's sexual satisfaction (and of course it also seems that those reported improvements in sexual satisfaction after sex therapy may be related to more general changes in the relationship, not just to the man being able to last longer during sex).

However, researchers have not looked at the connection between premature ejaculation and sexual satisfaction or relationship satisfaction in couples who have not sought sex therapy. In other words, there is no evidence that premature ejaculation is an obstacle to a satisfying sexual relationship. For this reason, the researchers studied how both measures and perceptions of whether the man has an ejaculation problem affects sexual satisfaction and relationship satisfaction. In addition, they looked at how men and women thought an ejaculation problem affected the man and woman's self-esteem, their sexual pleasure, their sexual relationship, their overall relationship, and whether or not it it caused a man to avoid sexual intercourse.

Participants in the premature ejaculation research study

A questionnaire was mailed to 1,989 male university alumni. Only 260 (14.1 %) men and 166 of their female partners returned completed questionnaires. Only the men whose partner completed the Female Questionnaire were included in this study. Data from 14 couples was discarded because either the man or the woman had not answered the question asking if they  believed the man had a problem with rapid ejaculation. This left a final sample of 152 couples. The men ranged in age from 23 to 76 years while their female partners ranged in age from 21 to 77 years. Most were married or living together, and the relationships ranged from 6 months to 50 years in duration.

More than half of the couples had one or more children living with them. On average, both the men and the women rated their physical health as very good; both the men and the women said that they had sexual intercourse just under twice a week on average. However, the women said there had been more sex than the men in a typical 4-week period (women = 7.4 while men = 6.7).

Continued here.

Other pages on this website about the treatment of premature ejaculation

 The effective treatment of premature ejaculation

Treatments not requiring drugs Quick remedy and treatment for premature ejaculation

Drug treatment for premature ejaculation

Effect of premature ejaculation on a man and woman's sex life

Premature ejaculation - and your relationship

What is an ejaculation - the physiology of ejaculation

The medical view of premature ejaculation

Drugs and premature ejaculation