The Truth About Testosterone & Aging No Man Wants To Hear

Even if you were told this when you were younger, you probably weren't listening

Men are painfully unaware of how testosterone works.

I know because I'm one of them.

It's so bad, that even if you were fortunate enough to learn about testosterone production in school, and how your body responds throughout your life, you probably weren't paying attention to anything beyond the part where your raging teenage hormones level out to be the hypermasculine dream in your 20s.

I know because I didn't.

Yeah, I remember being told that testosterone production in men wanes as you get older. Bodies weaken as they age, blah blah blah. The focus in health class was on how it affects your ability to build and maintain muscle mass. There was even a mention of some poor unfortunate souls experiencing erectile dysfunction.

How horrifying. How unmanly. How painfully patriarchal.

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I was twenty-eight years old when I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder.

There were other terms thrown around too: Operational Stress Injury. PTSD. Burnout.

Whatever you want to call it, the result was I couldn't do my job anymore. I had gone from being highly motivate, intelligent, and resourceful officer thriving in a high-pressure environment to being a mess of a man too afraid to leave his basement in the span of months.

Well, probably longer, but from the outside it looked pretty abrupt.

It destroyed my motivation. It took away my joy in life. And it emasculated me.

I now suffered from erectile dysfunction.

Talk about adding insult to injury. Not only did I feel like a failure as an officer, a failure as a husband and father, but I felt like a failure as man.

The thought that saved me, and allowed me to tell the doctor the truth when they asked, was a friend of mine who had experienced the same thing at age twenty-one.

We were at the Royal Military College, a posterchild of hypermasculinity. We were soldiers. We worked out together, we drank together, we endured hardship together.

His father received an unexpected terminal diagnosis. It changed him. Or maybe it just forced the things he was keeping suppressed to the surface.

You can't white-knuckle your way through everything.

He spoke openly to friends about his struggles. I didn't understand, but I believed him. And I watched as he was mistreated, pushed to the brink, and eventually found the courage to make the choice to leave the military.

He told me about how depression had ruined his sex drive. He told me that medication helped, and that he felt less ashamed about it when he could spend a weekend away with his girlfriend, ahem, 'rocking her world.'

So yeah, I told the doctor the truth. I was having trouble getting it up, and when I could I was unlikely to reach orgasm, which was the opposite problem I (and most men my age) usually faced.

Cialis for the erection, with the advice that it can't make magic happen out of nothing. If I'm not aroused then it wouldn't help. I assured the doctor that lack of interest and arousal was not the problem.

Wellbutrin to balance the anorgasmia amplified by the Citalopram. It also happened to help balance my mood. A nice two-for-one.

I was feeling well-versed in shameful issues of masculinity¹ by my thirties. I had found the medical workaround, and kept moving forward.

It still came a shock when between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-six I noticed a significant decline in my, uh, physical prowess.

At thirty-four I was a better, more knowledgeable, more capable, more in-tune lover than I had ever been. Sex was better than at any other point in my life.

I laughed at my twenty year old self. All that raging testosterone and not enough wisdom to use it better.

Youth is wasted on the young, as they say.

The refractory period after orgasm was getting significantly longer. Even when I could get erect again, the chances of me orgasming a second time in a day were swiftly approaching zero.

Cialis helped, of course. Physiologically it could dilate blood vessels and harden me up. But even if I wanted sex intellectually, my body responded with do we have to?

That was new.

Of course we wanted sex. I was a man in a man's body. Why was this even a question?

I did what I always do. I started reading. I started asking questions. I started talking to people. Curiosity helped me overcome shame.

That, and years of therapy helping me accept what was, and work on what could be.

• Side Quest: Did you know that Stoic philosophy formed the foundation of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

I realized I was aging. And that was okay.

There were other signs. My vision changed for the first time in a decade, hangovers lasted more than just a day, and I had to work harder to get the same results when I exercised compared to even five years previous.

I could live in denial, blame sexual partner, blame the world, blame myself.

Or,

I could learn to move on. My approach and understanding of sex had already changed incredible amounts since coming out as polyamorous. This was just another shift.

Plus, most partners didn't seem to mind when I needed to focus on their pleasure for longer during the extended refractory period.

Wild, right?

My dudes, you're aging. And you can't stop it.

As a man passes his physical prime (mid to late 20s) hormone production changes. Testosterone production slows.

Sure, there's plenty of healthy and not-so-healthy ways to make you feel like a younger version of yourself. I experiment with how they affect me and how long the effects last.²

But time marches on, and if you keep believing this will never happen to you, you're in for a rude awakening.

When it happens, take a deep breath, and don't get angry at the world. The world doesn't care.

Those around you do though. If you become mean and bitter you'll push people away from you. Even the important people.

Good luck enjoying your sexual prowess as a loner.

Better yet, take a good long look at your idea of masculinity, of what makes you a man.

You just might find it's not about what's between your legs. It's not about testosterone production. It's not even about sex.

I could tell you the answer, but if you're not ready to hear it then it won't help you.

I hope you figure it out though. There's a world that needs men. Just not the way you were taught to be a man.

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I write about life, love, and sexuality on the fringes. Hot takes from a man redefining manhood. Masculinity that isn't threatened by femininity or feminism.

Would you like to know more?

1. Shameful according to what I was raised to believe about masculinity. I’ve since changed my mind.

2. Nutrition and exercise have been the best places to focus on in my experience.