Going again: the pause after coming

Every man needs a break after orgasm, but nobody has ever measured how long. Here is what is known about the refractory period, multiple orgasms and dry ones

You come, and then nothing works for a while. The cock softens, the interest drops, and the idea of starting again feels faintly absurd. That pause is the refractory period, and every man has one, although its length is one of the least measured things in sexual medicine.

This chapter is about that pause, the hormone that may or may not cause it, the men who seem to skip it, and the orgasms that arrive with nothing coming out.

The pause after the finish

The refractory period is the time after orgasm before another erection and another ejaculation are possible. The classic description goes back to Masters and Johnson in the 1960s: minutes for some young men, hours for older ones, up to a day. Ask around and everybody agrees with the direction. Ask for the numbers and there are none.

We could not find a single population study that timed the refractory period across ages. The pause also varies for the same man from one night to the next, depending on tiredness, alcohol, how long ago the last time was and, very much, on who is in the room.

The prolactin story

The favourite explanation is a hormone called prolactin. In a German lab study, ten men had blood drawn every two minutes while they masturbated to orgasm. Prolactin jumped right after orgasm and stayed high for the whole 40 minutes of measuring, while arousal without orgasm did not raise it. An analysis pooling three of the same group's studies found that the rise after intercourse was much larger than after masturbation, by the authors' estimate 400% larger. That intercourse was penile-vaginal; nobody has measured it after sex between men.

The neatest piece of evidence was a single man. A healthy volunteer who could come several times in a row was tested in the same way, and his prolactin did not rise at all after three orgasms. It fits the theory perfectly, but it is one man.

Then came the mice. In 2021 a Portuguese team raised and blocked prolactin in male mice and found that it neither caused nor shortened their refractory period. Mice are not men, but the experiment was cleaner than anything done in humans, and the prolactin explanation is now officially open to doubt.

Men who come more than once

Multiple orgasms are usually filed under women. The one descriptive study in men interviewed 21 men who reported more than one orgasm in a session. Their stories broke the textbook sequence. Some had orgasms without ejaculating, before or after the one that did. Some kept their erection between orgasms. Some had always been like that, some discovered it late in life, and several had deliberately taught themselves.

The common thread is separating the feeling of orgasm from the act of ejaculating. That is where most of the techniques sold online start, but none of them has been tested in a proper trial, and 21 interviews are a starting point, not a method.

Dry orgasms

Sometimes the orgasm arrives and nothing comes out. There are two main reasons. In retrograde ejaculation, semen goes backwards into the bladder instead of out of the tip, so the orgasm is dry and the next pee looks cloudy. In anejaculation, no semen is released at all.

Medication and surgery are the usual causes. Drugs called alpha-blockers, widely prescribed for an enlarged prostate, cause ejaculation problems in about 4% to 26% of men on tamsulosin and up to about 28% on silodosin, and much of that is actually no emission rather than true backward flow. After the classic operation that trims an enlarged prostate from the inside, the monopolar TURP, up to about 65% of men are affected. Diabetes can do it too, by damaging the nerves involved.

A dry orgasm is not dangerous in itself, and for the multi-orgasmic men above, an orgasm without ejaculation is part of the repertoire. But if it is new and you have not started a medicine or had surgery that explains it, see a doctor.

Going again, in practice

For a gay man the refractory period often has a practical side the textbooks ignore: two people, two orgasms, and rarely at the same moment. Who comes first, and whether the other one is still in the mood afterwards, is a matter of negotiation, not physiology.

The data offer little beyond reassurance. The pause gets longer with age, varies from night to night and has no official normal length. If you want a reason to keep the habit going, the frequency study in Ejaculation is a good one. And if the problem is getting hard again rather than wanting to, the hardness scale in Erection is the place to start.