It took me a long time to figure out how to make sex pleasurable for me (about four or five years), and it's evolved and shifted over the years, too. Some of this involved mental issues, others physical reality, most a mix of the two.
I tried really hard to enjoy bottoming, but I just have no talent for it. For a long time, I thought that just topping without ever bottoming was somehow selfishly non-reciprocal or that it created unnatural boundaries and roles that I had no wish of pursuing. It is also very unusual for a guy in his late teens or early 20s to be a non-versatile top (and was even more so when I was that age), so anal sex played a very minor role in my sex life for many years.
Though I'm hardly gargantuan, my dick's just a little too big for many guys to be able to suck on it easily, though, and I met lots of guys who really weren't up for the challenge (especially for deep throat), so most of the time it was me blowing him and jerking myself. Needless to say, this became increasingly unacceptable, and two early relationships capsized (despite deep affection) because of sexual incompatibility.
It took the collapse of a four-year relationship in 1984 for me to really examine what my sexual needs were and how best to meet them. For me, denying the power and urgency of anal sex just stopped making sense, and I was beginning to age enough to seem credible as a top to my peers and guys slightly older.
That's when I came into my own, sexually speaking. But by then, the AIDS crisis was in full swing, too. So I did what most of my peers who hated condoms did: limit sex to JO/oral until you find someone acceptable as a partner and quickly set up house. I wound up in a nearly five-year relationship with a guy who was 99.99% bottom, but anything outside of that relationship was JO/oral. This continued inside and outside of two additional relationships up until about six years ago.
It's really only been since then that I've been so anally motivated (sounds strange to hear) that I positively wouldn't even consider an encounter that didn't include fucking.