Too Much Masturbation Causes Problems
January 26, 2011 2 Comments
Dear Madame X,
I masturbate every night before I go to sleep. I have done it as long as I can remember, but now it’s becoming a problem. I never slept over at anyone’s house as a teenager and it was never a problem when I hooked up with a guy because we’d have sex. But now I’m in a more serious relationship and sometimes he doesn’t want to fool around before bed. So I have to go off to the bathroom to do it, but I worry that he knows what I’m doing. I can’t avoid spending the night with him or go home because it hurts his feelings.
Rocking My Clitoris To Sleep
Dear Rocking,
Aren’t you a lucky woman getting an orgasm every day!
What I’m going to say now may not be something you’re going to like, but you need to cut back on the masturbation.
Normally masturbation is a good thing and people can enjoy it every day if they want to. But when your desire to masturbate causes problems in your relationship and you’re unwilling or distressed by the idea of cutting back then you have a problem.
I’m not saying go cold turkey, but on some of the nights when you are sharing a bed with your partner and you haven’t had sex you need to try going to sleep without masturbating. Yes orgasms are nice, and yes they might help you sleep, but they are just that, nice, not essential. I don’t know if I would go so far as to say you have a sex addiction, but depending how you feel about the idea of cutting back you might be close.
You need to do this for two reasons that I can see. First, for the health of your relationship. If your man knows that you sneak into the bathroom every night to masturbate before sleeping I really can’t see how that would be good for your relationship. He would feel inadequate. You would feel guilty. And neither of these things would be true necessarily. Second, you need to learn how to sleep without having an orgasm first. It’s not healthy if you feel you can only sleep after an orgasm and you need to be able to sleep in different circumstances.
It might also be worth talking to your boyfriend. When one person in the relationship has a higher sex drive than the other it can cause problems, so letting him know how you feel and trying to come to a compromise might be helpful. But I have to say, I’m not sure if this is a higher sex drive or just an obsessive habit of yours.
If you need help dealing with this talk to a sex therapist, with or without your boyfriend.
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that it’s wrong to masturbate, just that if it’s getting in the way of your real life then there is a problem you need to fix.
Madame X is a master of sex. She is adamantly pro-sex which she translates to pro-fun and pro-safety. An avid practitioner of the activity, she has also been trained in the technical dos and don’ts. No mere agony aunt, she knows of what she speaks. Send her your questions, comments, and concerns about sex and relationships here.
I know this is an old post, but I just had to comment for others reading this in the future.
Madame X’s answer was the biggest load of judgmental crap I’ve ever heard. So it’s OK in our twisted Puritanical culture to booze it up or swallow a bunch of pills in the evening to get to sleep with the stress of our modern and married lives, but when someone finds a natural, intended way for the body to relieve its own stress, you JUDGE them? You say they’re doing something wrong in the relationship, and they have to cut back something therapeutic and beneficial in order to conform to a confining notion of married sexuality?
And you know nothing about physiology and stress. My God, what you’re saying could harm people.
One spouse shouldn’t have to sneak off in secret to relieve themselves if the other isn’t into sex that night. What I’m saying is that the spouse who needs an orgasm should be able to be open about it, and maybe there might be levels of intimacy in which the other spouse could be involved, helping, or just being there with them. But perhaps the other spouse would rather not be privy to it if they’re not in a sexual mood. It’s up to them.
BUT IT’S NOT A PROBLEM IN ANY SENSE OF THE WORD to need this or to engage in this release. It’s like eating or urinating or defecating. Some spouses do all of those things openly, sometimes together. Others do not. It’s just a bodily function, and it’s an individual and personal choice about how intimate people wish to be.
Only the religious zealots and otherwise narrow minded have made it a big deal, a judgmental crisis, when one gets some pleasure from a bodily function that it may only be invoked in a patriarchal-dominated and regulated ritual within a marriage.
What a load of crap.
Thanks so much for your comment.
You are right, I could have worded this response much better.
I agree, sex and masturbation are natural and normal and we shouldn’t be judged for doing it.
I should have started with the advice that she talks to her partner about their different sex drives and they find a way to deal with it together. I agree absolutely with what you said:
“One spouse shouldn’t have to sneak off in secret to relieve themselves if the other isn’t into sex that night. What I’m saying is that the spouse who needs an orgasm should be able to be open about it, and maybe there might be levels of intimacy in which the other spouse could be involved, helping, or just being there with them. But perhaps the other spouse would rather not be privy to it if they’re not in a sexual mood. It’s up to them.”
I stand by my comment that there is a problem for this couple though. The problem isn’t that she wants to masturbate, but the fact that she feels she needs to hide it and that she is unable to sleep without doing it every night. It’s that that needs to be dealt with in order for them to have a better relationship and happier sex life.