“How are you so warm?” His cheek resting on my chest, he marveled at my softness as I listened to him share a childhood memory about his Dad and a Brooks & Dunn song. I had my phone out and was playing songs in the candlelight and I had just put on the Kacey Musgraves version of Neon Moon. We were in and out of the sheets all night, me relishing being relished with consent for the first time in decades, and he clinging to something I couldn’t see.

I could feel a wave of buried pain trying to surface there in the dark, but I tried not to probe and just let it come naturally. It never did. He always caught himself before it started to rise too high and he’d start kissing me again to push it back down.

This was half of our relationship, these long Saturday nights that turned into long Sunday mornings, diving into each other, coming up for air to talk, and then getting lost in each other again and again and again until it was time to go back to our separate lives. The other half was long nightly phone calls about everything we could think to talk about until one of us fell asleep.

It was his bedroom half that was most authentic though. It was in the dark, when he was physically vulnerable that he became emotionally vulnerable. He poured his heart into mine for hours every other weekend and pulled back in daylight as if it never happened.

When we broke up, I asked him about it. I told him how differently I saw him in bed, how raw and real. “It’s a disconnect,” he said, “I don’t know if it’s healthy or not.” I felt for him. I had been practicing authenticity myself after a full life of autistic masking. I never wanted to go back to holding it all in and pretending to be something I’m not. I knew what he was feeling, and I also knew I couldn’t do anything to help him but be my most authentic self as a model.

Reflecting on our time together in the following months, it occurred to me my ex-husband had likely experienced something similar, as did many of the angry men in my comments. They all talked about this “need” of theirs to have an “emotional connection” during sex.

For five years I’ve had men telling me how important their emotional connection is and how “sex is the primary way” they get this need met. I’ve had fun with them over the years, teasing, “How in the world then, do you connect with your mother??” Unfortunately, this incestuous implication isn’t enough to stop them. They’ve been conditioned to believe this so strongly, they literally take it to their graves. A man will die alone, believing his wife never loved him because her libido dropped off and he was never able to get her back.

It’s no help when psychologists agree with them because they’ve experienced the same patriarchal brainwashing that sets the desires of men on a pedestal above the needs of women to feel safe and connected outside the bedroom. Psychology only sees the surface. It sees a hurting man, identifies his self worth issues, and determines that his wife is failing to perform sexually. But the real problem is deeper than that.

The real problem is men being taught to stifle themselves emotionally, making intercourse the only way they can safely release emotion. So although science does seem to say men primarily connect emotionally with sex, science has yet to say this is natural or normal. In fact, many men are not conditioned in this same way. Many men are fully capable of connecting with all kinds of people emotionally without ever touching them. They’ve been taught to hold their emotions. They’ve built emotional stamina and sex only enhances the experience.

I’ve experienced this myself in a dream state. You can read more about this in my post entitled “Channeling Men” from March of this year.

When I’m enjoying sex with someone, I’m enjoying the whole person. I’m feeling their feelings and holding their energy intertwined with mine. If a man is experiencing this with me, it’s going to be doubly overwhelming for him if he’s not well practiced in feeling his own. If he can’t hold himself, he’s not going to be able to hold me in that experience. It will elate him for a moment, but he won’t be able to sustain that feeling without repeating the experience because I’m the one who gave it to him.

My ex was over the moon after sex. For 24-48 hours I had a joyful loving husband. His whole personality shifted, literally overnight. He became the man I married, the one I was promised on our wedding day. But he would slowly decline over the next few days. Like a kettle, the bubbles rolled and I knew I needed to get him in bed again before it whistled. He wasn’t getting that release of his emotions if he wasn’t f*****g me.

I tried to connect with him emotionally over the years, but Christianity repeatedly taught me that men don’t “do” emotions like women do. Men are more logical, critically thinking creatures and need women to help them feel emotion through sex. I believed I was the one stifling his emotions every time I went to bed without sex. That’s a lot of f*****g pressure!

With Navy Guy I had healed all of that, so I was able to lie there in the dark with him, feeling empathy, but without any sense of urgency to help him release anything with my body. I gave him the space to say anything he wanted to, and he opened up to me more than any other man had. But it wore on him after a while. I got the feeling he had never exposed himself to a woman like that before and he felt shame for letting himself get too close to me. He lamented afterward that he felt like he was clinging to me and he needed to stand on his own. I agreed.

Men have been leaning on women for so long that women are in two camps now: those who fully believe it’s their responsibility to keep men afloat, and those who see men as an enemy who is barely tolerated. A big part of what I do here is to bring women to the center, and men too, when they’re receptive.

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