There's a subject men of my age don't write about, and I've been circling it for fourteen entries. Miho's night "wasn't peak performance." Yura's had an "own goal." I've been using the vocabulary of a man describing a golf round, and it's time to stop.

Here's the plain version. Before this summer I hadn't slept with anyone for over ten years. The reasons are private, and I'll leave them to the reader; they weren't medical and they weren't mysterious, just the kind of long, quiet arrangement of a life that closes a door and doesn't reopen it, and one day you notice the door's been shut for a decade. I'm 62. That's a lot of time for a body to forget what it's for.

So when the app started working, and dinners started ending in hotels, I discovered that wanting something and being able to do it had become two different questions. Hina's night was the first time I found that out, in a room, with a woman who was gracious about it in the way you're gracious about a colleague's laptop. I've written that line already. I wrote it because it was easier than writing this one: I was mortified. Not for the evening. For the decade. It felt like being handed a bill for it.

What I did about it

I saw a doctor. That's the whole paragraph, really, and it's the paragraph most men never get to. A urologist, a conversation I'd rehearsed on the train and then didn't need to, because he'd had it a thousand times. He wrote a prescription for the tablet everyone's heard of, the one with the thirty-six-hour window, and sent me off for bloodwork, and here is the honest status as I write this: the tablet helps, and it doesn't fix it. Some nights it's most of the way there. Some nights it isn't. The results aren't back, and until they are, nobody, including the doctor, is going to tell me how much of this is plumbing and how much is the man in the room.

What I can tell you is what it looks like from the inside. Four late nights and a gig before Miho. Thinking about the thing instead of the woman. The particular pressure of a first time when it's also, effectively, your first time in ten years. And then Yura, when I'd forgotten the tablet entirely and stood by a hotel bed doing arithmetic, and it went better than Miho's night had with the tablet on board – which suggests the scoreboard is at least part of it, and which is the most I'm prepared to conclude from a sample of three. The morning routine now is: take it early, on any day that might end in a room. It's a habit, not a cure. I'm still waiting to find out what the cure is, or whether there is one.

Why write it

Because the app is full of men in their fifties and sixties pretending this isn't a thing, and the women can tell, and it makes the evening worse for everyone. Because Yura and Hina and even Miho were kinder about it than I was to myself, and that deserves acknowledging. And because a diary that leaves out the one thing you were most afraid of isn't a diary, it's a brochure.

It's not fixed. I don't know yet whether it's fixable, and I'll write that down when I do. The bag has the right things in it and the morning has a routine and I'm trying, with mixed results, to stop treating the room as an exam. On a good night now I'm just a man in a hotel with a woman who wants to be there, which is all I ever wanted from this, and for ten years didn't think I'd have again. On the other nights I'm a man in a hotel with a woman who wants to be there and a body that hasn't got the message, and she's kinder about it than I am, and we manage. That's the entry. There isn't a neat ending, because there isn't one yet.