When I take a break from weed, I notice two main things.
Physically I’m worse. My joints ache. I don’t want to move. Sleep is difficult, especially at first.
Mentally I feel way more clear. My thoughts come more quickly, and I feel like I can hold more information in my working memory. I remember old things better and store memories for the future better. I can feel the curtain of brain fog lift after a couple of sober days.
I view them as a new and separate product.
The regular lights, the “big light” as my neurodivergent friends call them, are normal bulbs with electroc-mechanical dimmers. The bulbs still burn out, the dimmers still break, and sometimes the power goes out entirely in storms or for maintenance, but in general they are pretty reliable. But I need to get up and manually actuate the switch to turn it on or off.
The smart lights are luxury lights and plugged into floor or table lamps. They set the mood and the tone. I’ve never liked the modes where they change color or brightness automatically, but I do like the ability to make the house green on St. Patrick’s day, or make certain rooms red, orange, or purple for Halloween. Or sometimes just whatever mood we want to go for. Being in lamps, that makes it easy to do things like reset them or just manually turn the electricity off if they are misbehaving.
I would prefer if they were on an open-source locally-hosted software. When I first did my investigation a few years ago there were a couple of projects in their infancy so maybe I need to look again.
It really varies quite widely with a lot of different variables, and different people have different levels of control.
Back when I was 17 I could basically go all day. I could cum 3-4 times a day easily with just a quick 15 minute break after. I used condoms back then too- i always kind of liked condoms because the cleanup is easy and dulling the sensations help me last longer. It also helped that I was in the best shape of my life and full of hormones encouraging me to spread my DNA as far and wide as possible.
As I got older that just wasn’t as feasible. The hormones faded. My wife doesn’t like the feel of condoms so she got an IUD (I am certainly not complaining either way lol). The stress of college and work and maintaining a household builds up. I have been in-and-out of shape over time, but never as good as I was at 17. Back in college we would often find ourselves going through a long day of school, work, and trying to do chores around our apartment and going to bed at 11 PM, having to wake up at 5 or 6 AM the next day. So the longer we would have sex the less sleep we would get, so we would try to wrap it up in like 5 or 10 minutes. Eventually graduating college and getting a proper career instead of retail helped, but it’s still difficult to find more than an hour at a time to dedicate to sex.
There have also been occasions where I have been out of shape and failed to pace myself. I’d go with intensity for a few minutes, get an elevated heart rate and out of breath, and eventually be forced to lay down and suck wind without cumming. There have also been times where my wife might be a bit sore and start encouraging me to finish before I otherwise would.
By myself, there are some times where I want to just crank one out in a minute or two to get some quick stress relief or post-nut clarity. There’s other times where my wife is away traveling and I have the house to myself, so I take an hour to watch porn and have a nice time. I started messing with prostate stimulation a few years ago, and while I haven’t had a prostate orgasm yet I have gone I think 3 hours trying.
We also started swinging with another couple: a bi man and a bi non-binary vagina owner, and my wife is bi too. I’d say I’m heteroflexible (I’m not attracted to masculine traits, but I’m not gonna let that stop me from having a good time). One of the most surprising things about the orgies has been just how much orgasm variance there is.
The nonbinary person cums very easily, from both external and internal stimulus. I have gotten them to cum a couple times with neither- just me being the big spoon, them the little spoon, dry humping them with my dick rubbing against their ass. They usually cum 5-6 times per session and the other 3 of us need to go easy on them or else they’ll be tapped out in like 20 minutes.
I was worried at first that I might cum too fast. I am not sure what my refractory period is because I haven’t had the chance to test it in over a decade, but my guess would be at least a couple hours at this point. So I try not to cum until we are close to done. So far I have basically been successful, but there have been a few sessions where I didn’t cum at all. I think just from being tired. I’d be hard and functional for a few hours, then go soft and be unable to get hard again. A couple times that coincided with us going really late into the early morning hours, so I may have been sleep deprived. Or I might need to research anatomy a bit more- could be that I need to be in better cardiovascular shape, or perhaps exercise certain muscles like the kegels more.
He has only managed to cum a couple of times. According to the two of them, he has always been really hard to get to cum, but also he has almost no refractory period and he usually has the energy to keep going for hours. He also started some medication a couple months before we started swinging that has ED as a side-effect, so he’s been working to find the right pharmaceutical mix.
My wife has always had a difficult time cumming too, but can manage to with a Hitachi to the clit probably 75% of the time. She’s cum from penetration or me giving her oral maybe a dozen times in the 13 years we’ve been together, so not impossible but not common. She also has occasions with her Hitachi where she has been able to string together a videogame-style combo of 5 or 6 orgasms together but that’s also rare.
So there have been a few sessions where 3 of us don’t cum at all, but we still have fun for a few hours. With biological processes everyone is different, and every time is different. If you would like to go longer you should talk to your partner about it and make sure they know that. The hardest part is to find the right balance of communicating what you want without making them feel bad or pressuring them. But the most important thing is to have that shared expectation of how long you want things to last. He may not be able to go for a full hour, and unless you already know that you can find from prostate stimulation easily that probably won’t happen. But if he knows you are having a good time and want to go longer perhaps that 10 minutes can stretch to 30?
Maybe say “hey let’s block out a couple hours here so we can take our time”. Maybe use toys for a while and put on a good show for your BF. I find playing music can help for 2 reasons: setting the pace and measuring time. When you are topping with a penis, it’s easy to get into a sort of upward spiral of going faster and harder until you cum. Having a nice beat to match can help prevent that. Having a song change every 3-5 minutes can also be a good marking point- time for a position change, or a bathroom/water break, or maybe a hit of the vape, a bit more lube, a stretch. I recommend the instrumental version of the album “Music to Make Love to your Old Lady By”, but I also find lo-fi, chillwave, Dreamwave, and synthwave playlists. Vocals can sometimes be distracting or weird so I prefer instrumentals where possible.
And also, I’d recommend letting him know when you want him to cum. I get nervous about cumming too soon, or in the wrong place, so I appreciate my partner saying “now” and “here” so I don’t have to infer that.
Women-only spaces always seems to lead to TERF-dom. You’d think people would learn eventually. It just reinforced heteronormativity and viewing gender through a binary lense. It sows division.
A lot of the posts people complain about these spaces could very well be made by cis women who just aren’t perfomatively feminine enough. The “No True Scotsman” fallacy and all that. Back when I was on Reddit whitepeopletwitter and blackpeopletwitter used to have drama all the time about the racial identities of people using anime girls as profile pictures.