Prologue · read it here, free
A Man Called Mark
Mark is thirty-six, and until one ordinary night in October he had never given a single thought to how an erection actually happens. Why would he? It happened. For twenty years it had arrived when it was wanted and left when it was finished, as dependable as the kettle. It was not something Mark did. It was simply something that was true about him, the way being right-handed was true about him.
Then one night it wasn’t.
There was nothing dramatic about that night, which is part of what made it so bewildering afterwards. He and Ella had been out. He’d had a few drinks — not many, but enough. Work had been brutal that week; he’d spent two days braced for a conversation with his boss that, in the end, never came, so all that adrenaline had nowhere to go and just sat in him, humming. They got home, the kids were at her mother’s, the house was quiet, and it had been a while, and they both knew what the empty house meant.
And nothing happened.
He wanted her. That was the part he couldn’t make sense of. The wanting was all there. But his body, for the first time in his adult life, declined to follow the wanting — and the more he noticed it declining, the further away it went. He made a joke about the wine. She was kind about it: it’s fine, come here. They fell asleep. In the morning he told himself it was the drink and the week and the tiredness, all of which was true.
He was right about the cause. He had no idea, yet, what he was about to do with it.
Because the next time they went to bed, Mark brought someone with him.
Not literally. But some part of his attention peeled away from Ella and from his own body and stood off to one side, watching, holding a clipboard, with a single question. Is it working? And then, a moment later, having checked: Is it still working?
You cannot answer that question and stay in the room at the same time. Mark discovered this without understanding it. Every time he checked, he stepped out of the very thing that would have made the checking unnecessary. He was a man trying to watch himself fall asleep. The watching was the problem, and the harder he watched, the bigger the problem grew, and the bigger it grew, the more reason there seemed to be to keep watching.
By Christmas, sex had quietly become an examination he could fail. By spring, he had started, very carefully, to avoid sitting it.
It is remarkable what a frightened man will organise.
Mark began going to bed a little later than Ella, or a little earlier, so that the overlap between them shrank to nothing. He developed a deep and sudden interest in box sets. When intimacy started to look likely, he would feel a specific dread arrive — low in the stomach, a full hour before anything could possibly happen — and he learned small, deniable ways to make sure it didn’t. A sharp remark that tipped them into a mild argument. A work email that urgently needed answering at exactly the wrong moment. Each one worked. Each one cost him something he couldn’t have named.
Ella, who knew nothing about the watching or the dread, knew only that her husband had gone somewhere she couldn’t follow. And she did what almost anyone does with a silence: she filled it with the worst available explanation. He’s lost interest. He’s met someone. It’s me — I’ve changed, I’m older, he doesn’t want me anymore. None of it was true. All of it grew, because Mark said nothing.
And Mark said nothing because of what he had decided the whole thing meant.
This is the part that did the real damage. Not the October night — the verdict he passed on himself in the months that followed it.
I lost my erection became I can’t satisfy my wife. I can’t satisfy my wife became I’m not really a man. One body, on one tired night, doing the entirely ordinary thing that tired bodies sometimes do — and out of it Mark constructed a complete indictment of who he was.
He told no one. Not Ella. Not his GP. Not the friend he’d known since he was eleven, the one he’d have trusted with anything else on earth. He lay awake at two in the morning typing things into his phone that frightened him more than they reassured him, then deleting the search history afterwards as though the phone itself might think less of him.
He is not unusual in this. A large share of men who go through what Mark was going through tell nobody at all. A genuinely startling number would sooner let a relationship end than say the words out loud to a doctor.
So there is Mark. A kind, capable, unremarkable man, alone with a problem he has profoundly misunderstood, slowly dismantling a marriage that was never actually in danger, over something his body did that means almost nothing like what he thinks it means.
I want to tell you three things about Mark before you turn the page.
The first is that there was never anything wrong with him. Not on the October night, and not afterwards. His body did a thing bodies do. Everything painful that followed came not from the event but from what he came to believe about it — and beliefs, unlike October nights, can be changed.
The second is that nearly everything Mark did to solve the problem was some version of trying harder, and trying harder was the engine of the problem. This is the cruel little trap sitting at the centre of psychological erectile difficulty: the effort to fix it is the thing keeping it alive. Once you can see that, you can’t unsee it — and seeing it is where getting out begins.
The third is that Mark got better. Not through willpower. Not through a pill. Not by becoming the tireless performer he’d convinced himself he was supposed to be. He got better by finally understanding what was actually happening — the thing nobody had ever explained to him — and then by doing a handful of quiet, unglamorous things, slowly, that taught his nervous system it was safe again.
You’ll meet Mark again in these pages. You’ll meet other men too: one whose erection vanished the night he got engaged, of all nights; one who had spent so many years looking after everyone else that he’d misplaced his own desire entirely; one who learned about sex from a screen and couldn’t work out why the real thing felt so foreign. You may find more of yourself in some of them than others. That is rather the point.
But before any of it — before how it works, before what to do — there is one sentence you need first. It’s the one Mark needed most and heard last.
You are not broken.
Let’s start there.