Before puberty and boobs annexed my adolescence, my mom, bless her, was always going on about the importance of delayed gratification — two words that, for me, mostly just meant that I’d have to wait a few more weeks before getting the latest pair of Jordans. Psychologically speaking, however, delayed gratification describes the process of resisting the temptation of an immediate reward in preference for a later, ostensibly more gratifying reward, a notion that some men believe also translates to their ejaculative satisfaction.
Put another way: The longer you wait, the harder the blow.
I mention the onslaught of hormones and my discovering that even the slightest, most inconsequential encounter with cleavage was enough to jolt my dick into action not because I have a tendency to reveal private anecdotes about my life, but because ever since it started happening, it hasn’t stopped happening. And ever since then, the concept of delayed gratification has become altogether meaningless. Because who wants to delay that sort of gratification?
Life is short and all I know is that these days, and all the days since the first day, I abide by my own psychological underpinning: I want to ejaculate as often as my significant other and my testicles will permit.
Having said that, I was at least vaguely intrigued by the community of men who sacrifice today’s pleasure for the sake of extra pleasure tomorrow. To be clear, this isn’t the same as edging which is a technique for bringing yourself to the brink of orgasm but never actually pushing the ejector button. “Do this enough times and your body will become a giant, pulsating nerve of sensation; and your orgasm, if and when you are brought over that edge, will be that much more intense and powerful,” reports VICE.
What I’m talking about is men who abstain from having sex or masturbating altogether to achieve a more powerful and more pleasurable orgasm when they finally decide to gratify themselves. “About three days apart seems optimum physically speaking. Mentally it seems like the longer you go without the tang the more it is appreciated when procured,” writes one guy on Yahoo! Answers. Another guy on Quora claims that after ceasing to ejaclate for two months, his “really intense orgasm” lasted 45 to 60 seconds. “Which is really long for me,” he wrote.
And finally, there’s this guy, who after living in a completely celibate religious community, was astounded by the volume of ejaculate that followed but felt like the sensation was just okay. “My theory was that erotic tissue is more sensitive the more you use it, and after months of inactivity, it took a few workouts to get the equipment back in top form,” he wrote.
So who do we believe? Well, according to Jamin Brahmbhatt, our go-to source for all things phallic that lesser urologists are unwilling to entertain, it is true that the longer a man waits to ejaculate, the more likely he is to see a higher volume of semen. “So the extra volume can be thought of as more powerful,” he tells me.
But with regard to pleasure, he thinks that abstaining from ejaculation is sort of like any other form of delayed gratification. “From a sensation standpoint, the longer you wait, the better the orgasm may also feel,” he says. “Think of it like anything else that feels good: The less you get it, the more you appreciate it.”
Uncomfortable as it makes me to admit it, it seems my mom, albeit unwittingly, knew what was best for my orgasms after all.
Andrew Fiouzi
Andrew Fiouzi is a staff writer at MEL.
