Performance Anxiety?
Not Me... Let's Party!!
At the very first orientation we attended, right before our first club dance, the host spoke of sensory overload and performance anxiety - the former causing the latter. Sensory overload, he said, happens when you are suddenly seeing, smelling, hearing and touching so many new things that your brain can't process them - it's like all these things are happening, but you can't get it through your head that it's SEXY, that you should have an erection!! And *not* being able to get an erection, when it's time to show 'em what you got (and how you can use it), is performance anxiety. It will happen to you, our host told us - you can count on it.
Humph, never happen to me, I thought to myself, barely listening. I was more interested in the girl accross the table from us. Sensory overload? How could that ever happen... hell I'm getting a stirring in my loins just looking at the girls and knowing something sexy might happen with anyone of them and me in just a few hours. After all, I had recaptured the prowess of my youth.... I was a born-again superstud... Performance anxiety? HA!! Not me!
Now we fast forward 4 hours... after the hottest sexiest dancing, the salacious rubbing, meeting lots of sexy people and, in particular, meeting a super-nice, super-hot couple who were very interested in us... the four of us go to our hotel room, there's alot of sexy foreplay, I'm feeling good about myself and this new experience... I look down and yep, there's the Little Guy standing straight and proud... I find myself poised over this cute, bubbly, willing, *new* lady, her husband and my sexy wife over on the next bed obviously enjoying each other... we start to do "it"... this is perefect, just what we fantasized about. She feels so good, I look around the room, I can see my wife, I can hear his wife moaning, this is the sexiest moment of my life... but...wait... what is this? What is happining? I'm going soft! What the F---? How can this be happening to me? It can't be the lady, next to my wife she is the hottest woman I've ever been with. It can't be that another man is making love to my wife, that is one of the sexiest things I've ever seen! What is happening to me?! And that's where things started going down hill, because the more I thought about it the worse it got. The lady, having obviously experienced this before with other men in the lifestyle, was very encouraging - but despite a lot of personal attention I looked like I had just gotten out of a cold swimming pool. (Later, we talked with them about it... her husband assured me it had also happened to him, and not to worry about it. "It goes with the lifestyle," he said.)
This problem still happens occasionally - usually it seems to be caused by environmental factors like alcohol, lack of sleep, prolonged anticipation of an evening-yet-to-come - and sometimes there is no apparent reason. One of the interesting things about this issue is that, when the activity's over and I'm alone with my wife, the Little Guy bounds out, ready and willing to play. We have better, hotter sex than we ever had before we started swinging.
Well I guess the reason I'm telling this story is to simply affirm that yes, performance anxiety does happen, and *will* happen - The important thing is to be able to handle it gracefully, because quite honestly, I've never met a woman in the lifestyle who didn't understand, forgive, and go on with enthusiasm. Often, with some gentle coaxing, you can recover and make a second go of it... but I've found that focusing on some other activity (like Plan B: Please Her Orally) often gets the Little Guy interested again.
Of course, it may never happen to you - but the odds are that it will, since it happens to most of us. Just be prepared to take it in stride.
