Three Men On What Really Happens When Sexual Fantasies Come True
If you want to experiment in the bedroom, be prepared to be surprised.
Published on Jul 22, 2026
Daz looked again at his flaccid penis. Please, he thought. Come on. Please. Not now. His wife Jem and a couple they had offered to introduce to the world of swinging sat on the bed with him quietly.
Daz had taken the lead. He had suggested they all go over to a more private area of the party they’d come to. Now all four were waiting quietly for Daz’s penis to do something.
They waited in silence. Ten minutes ticked by. The man from the other couple sat in the corner with, Daz remembers, “a raging hard-on.” Daz’s penis continued to do absolutely nothing.
He started to sweat. He suddenly thought he might cry.
“It's bad enough when it's one person sat waiting,” he says. “When you've got three people sitting looking at you going, ‘What's wrong?’ you just want the world to swallow you up. At the time, it felt like the most horrendous experience ever.”
Sexual fantasies can live in our heads for months, years, decades. They can be simple or complex. They can involve dozens of other people or leave us on our own. Some stay just fantasies all our lives. But sometimes they come true, and they don’t always go to plan. The gap between what we want and what we actually feel can be disorientating, strange, and absolutely mortifying.
That gap was, in part, what kept Daz’s penis from doing what he needed it to. “You're so focused on the fantasy, like it's gonna be amazing,” he says. “When it actually gets to the moment, your brain suddenly goes: ‘Oh my God. Imagine if you couldn't perform now.’ It's just game over, almost straight away.”
Daz, who has since appeared on Channel 4’s partner swap-athon Open House and does intimacy and relationship coaching alongside Jem on YouTube, has gone deeper into indulging fantasies than most people. But sometimes fantasies go awry for more bluntly practical reasons.
Stephen* and his girlfriend were hanging out in a jacuzzi when the mood struck them. The bubbles, the steam, the frisson of knowing they might be discovered all made it feel more delicious. They hadn’t planned it, but they had both liked the idea of going for it in a hot tub.
“It seemed like a good opportunity for sex,” Stephen says. “It wasn’t.”
It all started off sexily. But the limitations of attempting to have sex in a hot tub quickly became apparent.
“When things needed to get a little faster and more intense the heat caught us,” he says now. “It was almost like a sauna.” Even as he attempted to keep going, he realized he was going to faint. Losing consciousness and abruptly aware that drowning in a jacuzzi while attempting to have sex would be a very stupid way to die, Stephen and his partner called a halt. He has no plans to try again.
Other fantasies collapse when the person that you thought you wanted to be turns out to be exactly who you don’t want to be. When they decided to explore watersports, Andriy* and his girlfriend did the prep. They booked a hotel room, and they took a lot of fluid on board. His girlfriend went first. Andriy lay down in the bottom of the hotel shower, and she stood over him. That first attempt was, he remembers, “really hot and amazing in the moment, because we were so horny.”
He felt great. Then it was his turn to pee on her. Still hard from having been under his girlfriend, Andriy couldn’t get going. (This is a common problem. Another watersports experimenter told me he ended up in the same position, dispensing disappointing plops of urine onto his partner while hard, then too self-conscious to pee freely once things had calmed down.)
At last he was able to pee too. But an unexpected sensation came over him. He felt ashamed.
“Her pissing on me was a lot hotter to me than the other way around,” he says. “Me pissing on her felt boring in a way as well—it felt like I was degrading her, which isn't my cup of tea, to be honest.”
The fact she had brought it up in the first place, and got a hotel room for the occasion, didn’t make much difference. “It felt not too good for me,” he says. It remains something he is glad to have ticked off his sex bucket list, but not something he’ll be returning to any time soon.
Daz recognizes that swell of emotion and excitement followed by a thudding low. “Beforehand you're so locked in on like, ‘Oh my God, I'm gonna do this’. It's game day. Like, ‘I've fucking trained for this my whole life. I'm ready.’ And then afterwards when you actually sit with those feelings for a bit, that's when it's more likely to become something you kind of dwell on."
The wave of emotion that comes after a long-held sexual fantasy comes true can be difficult to handle, and difficult even to put the right name to. Daz remembers when he and Jem first started on their swinging journey, they had talked about having sex with other people for a year. Finally, they decided to do it. They met up with another couple one afternoon and swapped partners, having sex in beds next to each other in the same room. In the moment it had felt great, the most incredible rush.
But now, as he came down from the high and the sky darkened, he felt himself getting unsettled. Why had Jem been so noisy? Why hadn’t his partner made that much noise? Did she hate it? Did Jem prefer this guy?
It kept nibbling away. The thoughts kept buzzing around his head. That evening, he felt he had to say something. “I think you enjoyed it too much,” he snapped at Jem.
Jem was having none of it. How, she wanted to know, could he suddenly turn this on her?
They were able to talk it through, find the shame that was underneath Daz’s lashing out, and try again. Yet what can be intended as a call to adventure can mutate into something that feels more selfish and grotty. The fantasy becomes a burden, something you feel almost cruel for loading onto your partner. You think you’re going to say: let’s explore this thing together. You hear yourself say: please give me this thing I want.
Calum McSwiggan, author and sex and relationships YouTuber, sees shame as one of the big constraints on our sex lives, and a reason why fantasies can go wrong: conversations that would turn awkwardness into something exciting and fun get shoved away; feelings that could be shared fester instead.
But that talking is essential. “The more exciting the fantasy,” he notes, “the more admin there tends to be.”
Introducing the idea, talking about the particulars and negotiating boundaries, then checking in afterwards – “even if it's a one-night stand, that aftercare moment is still important to make the other person feel valued”—needn’t be a buzzkill.
“I think there is something that is quite sexy in those processes, if we put those pornographic images out of our mind and think about the intimacy of being open and vulnerable with a partner.”
That talking helps take expectations away from the images you might expect having seen them in porn – where many people first encounter ideas that turn into fantasies – into something real, puncturing “ the hyper-fantasy version of sex [that] tells us what we should be doing and what we should be wanting.”
Daz concurs. “Often when people are talking about fantasies,” he says, “part of that fantasy is they're almost fantasising that they're somebody else as well.”
You are the guy who has threesomes, who sneaked a quickie in the park, who rented a dungeon. That’s part of the appeal—and it is also part of the danger. Your fantasy might be everything you want it to be. It might be just kind of fine. But the collision between the thing you desperately want and the person you are—and the real person your partner is—is where trouble can strike.
After sitting in silence with the couple who were waiting for Daz to get hard, he and Jem excused themselves to grab a drink for a few minutes, just to see if that helped. It didn’t. They called it a night and went home. It was disorienting and upsetting.
But they talked it through, and worked out what had happened: the pressure, the desperate need to be the guy he had presented himself as, had all got too much. When Daz and Jem saw the same couple at another party a few weeks later, they picked up where they’d left off. The vibe was good. They all had fun together. “Everything was fine. Like, no issues at all.” The fantasy came true.
*Names have been changed
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