Cut From Steel

He spent eighteen years winning and one night listening

Eric Taylor coaches high school football in Dillon, Texas, in a television show called Friday Night Lights. He has a line the whole country repeated back at him: clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose. Taylor is the good man on that show, and the show is honest about what the good man costs his wife.

Tami Taylor moved wherever his job went. She was a guidance counsellor, then principal of Dillon High, then a counsellor again at East Dillon after she resigned rather than apologise publicly for how she had advised a student. At the end of the first season Eric took a college job in another town and left her behind, and he came back a season later.

In the twelfth episode of the fifth season, Tami comes home with an offer to be dean of admissions at a college in Philadelphia. Eric refuses to consider leaving Texas. The argument stops being about football fairly quickly. Tami reminds him that she has stood behind him for eighteen years, and the writers let that sit there without a joke.

Eric changes his mind in the finale. He turns down the contract he wanted, tells his wife she gets a say in the rest of their life, and asks her to take the job. Eight months later he is coaching in Philadelphia and she is happy in the new post. That was not a lost argument. He had stopped treating it as one.

You are not moving to Philadelphia this weekend. Taylor belongs here because the hardest conversation in that marriage was the one he had put off for a decade, and the marriage got better on the day he finally had it.

She stopped asking and you called it peace

You noticed about two years ago that things had become unreliable. Then came the part you do not say out loud, which is that you began going up to bed after she was already asleep. She stopped initiating some time last spring, and you took that as being let off.

I will tell you what she is most likely doing with the silence. A survey of 13,617 women found that 79 percent had been with a partner who lost an erection, and that 14.7 percent of them had been blamed for it by that partner. The women who were blamed reported lower sexual satisfaction and higher rates of the relationship ending. In other words, your silence is not neutral in that bedroom. She is filling it in with something.

Three things the research says about this

So what does the evidence actually show about a couple in your position? I have three findings, and the third one is the useful one.

01 / You Are Not the Outlier You Think

You are in the majority and convinced you are alone in it. The Massachusetts Male Aging Study found some degree of erectile difficulty in 52 percent of men aged 40 to 70, rising from 39 percent at forty to 67 percent at seventy. A 2021 national survey using a stricter measure put overall prevalence at 24.2 percent, with 25.3 percent of men in their late forties and 33.9 percent in their late fifties. That same survey found only 7.7 percent of men had ever received a diagnosis.

02 / It Is a Vascular Signal Before It Is Anything Else

You should treat this as information about your arteries. Mayo Clinic's position is that because the arteries in the penis are smaller than those in the heart, you may have erectile dysfunction years before any chest symptoms appear. One study of 300 men with documented coronary disease found 67 percent had erectile dysfunction first, by an average of about 39 months. In the MESA cohort, men with erectile dysfunction had roughly double the cardiovascular events, at an adjusted hazard ratio of 1.9.

03 / Talking About It Tracks With Function

You may find part of the fix is conversational. A 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Sex Research found couples' sexual communication positively associated with every dimension of sexual function they measured, and erectile function was one of them. In a randomised trial, women's sexual function improved when their male partners were treated. A review in Nature Reviews Urology argues that the partner belongs in the assessment and in the choice of treatment.

Have the conversation this weekend

You should have it well away from the bedroom. University of Utah Health advises against raising it during or straight after sex, and suggests a private moment with time on both sides of it. Lead with the medical fact rather than an apology: this is common, it is treatable, and it may be telling you something about your heart.

You can then do the thing most men skip, which is bringing her to the appointment. The same clinicians recommend that couples attend together so both of you hear the options, and the Urology Care Foundation notes that some providers will ask to speak with your partner as well. Discontinuation rates for the tablets ran anywhere from 4 to 76 percent across fifty studies, and the quality of a man's relationship is one of the recorded reasons. So the treatment works better when two people are in the room.

One last thing. You are not protecting her by saying nothing. What you are doing is leaving her to guess, and she guesses worse than the truth.

— Travis

Insider Member's Corner

6 free habits that give the conversation a fighting chance:

You didn't put in 45 years to settle for beige.

01 / Drink · The Negroni

You need three things in equal measure: 30 millilitres of gin, 30 of Campari, 30 of sweet red vermouth, stirred over ice in a rocks glass with half an orange slice. The story goes that a bartender named Fosco Scarselli built it at Caffè Casoni in Florence around 1919, for a customer who wanted his Americano made with gin instead of soda. Scarselli’s name is documented. Whether that customer was truly a count is the part historians still argue over. Bartenders settled on the one-to-one-to-one ratio by the mid-1950s.

02 / Cloth · A Suit That Actually Fits

Tom Ford’s O’Connor runs about $4,190 at Neiman Marcus, made in Italy, cut with a full chest and a strong shoulder. Most men do not need that one, and every man needs the other half of the lesson. Spend whatever you spend, then hand a third of it to a tailor, because the difference between looking rich and looking borrowed is the shoulder seam and the trouser break. A $600 suit that fits beats a $4,000 suit that does not.

03 / Road · Route 66

You get 2,448 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica, across Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. It was established on 11 November 1926, and the last stretch left the federal system on 27 June 1985, so this is a road you now drive on purpose. Pure driving time is 32 to 38 hours, and doing it properly takes two to three weeks. For two people at a mid-range pace over a fortnight, budget somewhere around $3,400 to $5,000.