Are you suffering from Great Lover Syndrome?

We need to talk about the other kind of performance anxiety...

Mar 13, 2025

Every man fears this: you’re with a lover, things are heating up, the clothes are coming off… and your member is not up to the task.

Most men have had this dreaded experience at least once. And for some, it turns into performance anxiety - such a fear of it happening that the prospect of sex causes anxiety rather than anticipation.

But there’s a related phenomenon that is perhaps just as common but much less discussed. It’s like a cousin to performance anxiety. And it’s most likely to affect men who you’d least suspect have any problem in the bedroom. The strong, masculine, stoic types. The guys who seem to have it easy with women.

Let’s talk about the ways in which we let our performance focus steal our joy.

Fear & Humiliation

First, let’s get this out of the way: the “regular” kind of performance anxiety is awful. Sadly, I speak from personal experience when I say that.

It’s a nasty problem to deal with because it is self reinforcing.

For me, it happened like this: the first time I put on a condom it was awkward and it took more time than it should have. Fidgeting with a slippery plastic wrapper and then struggling with an even slipperier rubber tube is, well, not very sexy.

By the time I was done, I was at half-mast at best. My partner’s attempts to stimulate me back to full attention were hindered by the very condom that caused the problem in the first place. A rubber on a half erect member causes all the wrong kinds of friction.

So, the rubber comes off and we try to reset.

Except now I’m in my head.

“What if it happens again? What if I try to put on another condom and lose my boner again? Am I going to remain a virgin forever because I can’t get it up?”

Being in my head and worrying about my boner is a boner-killer. The humiliation of not being able to get it up is a boner-killer. The fear of experiencing that humiliation again is a boner-killer.

The more I worry about losing my erection, the more likely it is to happen again.

Welcome to performance anxiety.

This sucks.

I’m happy to say that I don’t have this problem anymore.

When I finally overcame performance anxiety and no longer dreaded the “time to put on the condom” moment, I thought I was finally free.

But…

…while I was leaving one problem behind me, I was running head first into the next one.

Enter: performance fear, a.k.a. the Great Lover Syndrome.

Always the Good Lover

If you had asked me about my skills as a lover a few years ago, I would given a confident answer. Something like:

“Well, I don’t want to brag, but I think I’m pretty damn good. I certainly get glowing reviews if you know what I mean. And I can usually figure out how to make her orgasm pretty quickly.”

I saw myself as a good lover. Perhaps even an amazing lover. And indeed, when I had sex with a new partner, I often heard them tell me things like “this was the best sex I’ve ever had!”

My ego was very pleased with this.

There was only one little problem: sex wasn’t particularly pleasurable for me.

I had fixed my performance anxiety. I had fixed it so thoroughly that I could remain erect for long periods of time, even if I wasn’t feeling much.

And often, that was exactly what was happening. I was performing the “amazing lover” role. I was taking lots of time to touch my lover, to warm her up, to open her up. I was just the right amount of dominant and gentle at the same time.

I would flip her through a series of positions that I knew made her feel ravished in just the right way. I’d pay close attention to her every move, every breath, every reaction, to calibrate my actions. And I’d spend as much time as she needed with my face buried between her legs, regardless of how sore my jaw got.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not like I hated doing this. I love giving pleasure and much of what I was doing was mentally stimulating to me.

Also, I’m not much of a one night stand guy, so the women I had sex with were usually ones I felt deeply connected to. There was real love, care and tenderness there.

But physical pleasure? Most of the time, I wasn’t experiencing much of that.

Not until my lover had her one (or many) orgasms first. Then the routine was that she’d turn to using her hands or mouth to get me off.

And in those moments, I had to fantasize about porn, because I couldn’t finish otherwise. Because yeah, I was addicted to porn and that’s a whole other story.

Performance Mode

Performance anxiety makes it so you’d rather not have sex because you fear the embarrassment and humiliation of losing your erection.

Performance fear is when you’d rather not have sex because you fear that you’ll just be in “performance mode” and not really enjoy yourself very much.

Outwardly, these two phenomena could barely be any different. The performance anxiety guy is struggling in a very visible way. He’s experiencing difficulties and disconnection and turning away from his partner in shame.

The performance fear guy seems to be doing great. He’s “successfully” having sex and his partner is moaning, writhing and orgasming. He seems to be winning at sex.

But one layer deeper, the two phenomena have much in common.

Both of these put you in your head during sex. Both of them disconnect you from your present experience and from your partner. And both can lead to a situation where you’d rather not have sex at all because masturbation feels safer, easier and more pleasurable.

Both are also often related to pornography. The performance anxiety guy is imagining hardcore porn scenes in an attempt to get or stay hard. He’s maybe also using porn to try and “train” himself to get and stay hard (which inevitably backfires).

The performance fear guy is often having a pornographic kind of sex. And he might also need to imagine porn in order to stay hard and/or in order to be able to finish, because he’s not experiencing enough physical pleasure to do the trick.

And at the root of it, both men have the same beliefs about their need to perform, their duty to be a great lover and provide a certain kind of lovemaking experience to their partners.

They are both trying very much to be a good lover and a good man and they’re scared of being selfish. They don’t want to be one of those “bad men” they’ve heard so much about.

The Way Out

What’s the solution to this awful condition? I believe that in both cases, the answer is the same:

The solution is for men to learn to be in their bodies. To perform the trick of dropping from your head into your body.

The solution is deeper connection. And it’s for men to claim their right to pleasure.

This is hard to understand for someone who suffers from performance anxiety or fear: you have a right to experience total pleasure and joy. Sex is supposed to feel easy, fun, joyful and pleasurable.

You cannot get there by constantly trying to force it. Tensing up, trying harder will never get you closer to this goal.

And also: you can’t do this alone. You were never supposed to.

A mutually pleasurable experience is something you can only co-create with your partner. This kind of sex looks very different from what you see in porn. Different from what you’re used to and what you think is expected of you.

For a while (perhaps forever), this kind of embodied, connected sex might look selfish to you. You might have to open to an experience that is very much focused on you and your pleasure, at least until the fear and anxiety unwind.

This might be hard to accept because you don’t want to be a selfish lover. But just as you are willing to give your partner so much pleasure, you need to open up to giving her the gift of your pleasure.

You need to get vulnerable for this. There’s no way around that.

Even if you ultimately want to be the big, strong, heroic super-lover - the only way to get there, to authentically and fully get there - is through vulnerability.

You need to dare to explore your own pleasure, which means revealing yourself, being deeply honest, exploring what you haven’t tried before and making some missteps along the way.

True growth always involves this kind of journey. Sex is no exception.

Can you relate to performance anxiety and performance fear? Do you agree that this kind of thing is worth talking about, even when it’s difficult? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Thinly Sliced Life

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