I will try to make it shorter but I probably won't succeed because this is about someone whom I have known for 25 years. I will call him D. He is 14 my senior and lives in Europe, where I am originally from but I moved to the US in 1992.

When he first met me, I was 16 and I found our age difference a complete barrier (funny but I went on to have lovers more than twice my age, but that was many years later). He was also not my type. Even now, that I am somewhat attracted to him is a complete aberration for me as he has a tender, tentative, high pitched voice and I prefer men with low, rich, confident voices (my ex second husband has such a voice). The voice quality is very important to me, much more so than the looks of a man. I think I might be unusual in that way. Funny but I do not have a musical ear and do not listen to music on a regular basis, yet I place so much value on the voice.

He fell deeply in love with me. He saw bad things coming (correctly, as it turned out) and did not want this love but could not help feeling it. And he felt it for many years and still, he says, feels it now - 25 years later.

I did not have a sexual relationship with D. until I was in my twenties, in between first and second (both now ex) husbands, and even then only briefly. I was at that time madly in love with a married man who reciprocated the love passionately but would not (almost, with minor exceptions like a bit of oral sex or breast caressing here and there or just sitting quietly together in an embrace) be physical with me because he did not want to cheat on his wife whom he had great respect for and with whom he had not one, not two, but five children together. His oldest sone was older than me... So because I was still full of feeling for this man, I did not even pay much attention to D. when I had sex with him. I did not even care to come... it was more like allowing him to love my body and that was it. I did not tell him at that time that I was in love with someone in America.

I will rewind a bit now. When I still lived in my home country, before 1992, I had three relationships with boys. The last one culminated in my first marriage. All three times I flaunted the relationships in order to provoke his jealousy and hurt his feelings, and enjoyed seeing the hurt. It was just the way I was.

In the first two years I did not even agree to meet with him, allowing only phone calls, and he basically suffered in silence.

He is a poet but he did not tell me about it until very late, when he started publishing and I was well into my second marriage. He self-identifies as a poet and creativity is very important to him (of utmost importance), so his non-disclosure of something so important to him probably means that he was afraid of how I would react, may be that I would put him down or something like this.

More poems in this works are dedicated to me than to any other woman, he says. He also says that I was the most sexually attractive woman in his life and that the way I treated him was not the way to treat any human being, not even someone as sensitive and fragile as he is, but absolutely anyone.

When I was closer to the end of my second marriage, in 2008, he finally got married, but he and his wife (20 years younger than he is) never lived together and she quickly became mad at him for totally weird reasons. They do not have children, neither together nor separately. He sees her several times a year only, but calls her his "wife", buys presents for her and speaks about her with tenderness in his voice. At some point they were close to getting divorced but now he says that neither she nor he is ready for such a drastic step. When he did marry her, he thought that it would be for life. With me, he says, he worked very hard on "erasing" me after that unsuccessful attempt to get me to attach to him when we were sexual together. He says that it was his last attempt.

He visited me several weeks ago and we were sexual together again but he would not come. I have never had this problem in the bedroom. This problem is why I am posting, looking for advice. He did have an erection, albeit not as spectacular as 16 years ago (which I attribute to his smoking because smoking makes penis smaller with time), but he would not come. He said that this is because how cruel I was towards him is still in his mind and that prevents him from coming. I do want him to come, I was very frustrated and disappointed to say the least, I will visit him in December and I want to know what I can do to make him come. A hand job, a blow job and vaginal sex all did not work. And I thought that I was good at blow jobs, but... not with him. A bummer. 16 years ago there was no issue - he came from vaginal sex just beautifully.

I have an analytical mind and I started to think that something is wrong here: I treat him now much more nicely than 16 years ago, which he himself acknowledged with a great deal of surprise - he even said that he did not expect that my hands would caress him so tenderly. So why could he come back then but not now when I only became better? His psychological theory that it is because of my cruelty does not explain it because if it were due to cruelty he would have been even less able to come 16 years ago. So other theories come to mind. The first one is: may be it is due to alcohol, as he drinks. I looked up "alcohol erectile dysfunction" and did get results. So maybe it is accumulated effects of alcohol. Age - I have been with men this age and they had great hard-ons, but I can see how each individual is different and this may have something to do with age. But it is all so weird because he has an erection! Yet he says that it is not hard enough or not hard the right way but it looks and feels alright! I guess it still falls under the definition of ED because if an erection is insufficient to complete a sex act, it is ED, right, no matter what it feels like and how it looks? I am at my wit's end, I really have not seen anything like this.

Then I made a faux pas, although it is still OK, he has recovered. I started explaining that 16 years ago I was in love with someone else and did not pay attention to him but now I am all focused on him so he should not feel worse now than he did back then. Well, he got so sad, it was amazing. He said that if I had lovers back then, I can still have them now so it would be risky to have a relationship with me. And other such things. Our relationship is completely asymmetrical: I am totally cool listening to his mentioning of having been attracted to other women, be it my bff (who used to be gorgeous and I would have been attracted to her had I not been heterosexual) or someone I do not know or, let us say, I helped him select a gift for his wife. I am totally comfortable - I like and am satisfied hearing that he has never been attracted to anyone else more than to me and I am fine with and welcoming of any mentions of his being attracted, but less so, to others, but he begrudges me my long past lovers. I even wanted to mention it to him, that asymmetry, but decided against it because he is clearly super sensitive... and instead I have decided to just not mention my past lovers to him any more.

Then I read his email, and found out that in the beginning of this courtship with his wife there was one occasion when he did not rise to her. She wrote all sorts of right things to him about it - that it happens to any man, that she knows that his sexual function is just right, etc. etc. A professionally written letter, essentially. I cannot physically read all his mail, but I've run searches for "erection", "rise", and the funny names that this couple used for their genitals... all my searches yielded no results, so it seems that it was an isolated incident rather than a recurrent problem. To me he said that with her he was able to come because she had not treated him the way I had in the past.

I should also add (and I have a very long thread about it under Bipolar) that he is deeply unhappy with how I look. He still finds my face, skin, and hair beautiful, but he is mad that I have gained so much weight and talks about it non-stop and wishes that I were as thin as before. So I understand that it is important to him and he is less attracted, but he does have an erection still, so my being fat probably does not explain why he cannot come, or does it?

So far my strategy has just been to be nice, warm and comforting over Skype (I talk to him daily over Skype) and just hope that his feeling of being afraid of me will eventually dissipate and I will succeed in gaining some trust, but is there anything else I can do when I am over there that would make him come?