From a very candid letter to my spouse.
It’s taken me some time to figure out my own feelings about sex, and even longer to get together the confidence to talk about it. So here, in no particular order, are some things that are true about sex and myself.
First, I’m a sexual vampire. No, seriously, what I mean is, like a vampire, I have to be invited in. For some reason, I have a hard time asking for what I want, and I usually try to come at things sideways instead of being very direct. So if I ever do go to the trouble of asking for sex, it’s not because I vaguely feel like it. It’s because I’ve reached the point where I need it.
Second, also like a vampire, once the thirst comes upon me, it doesn’t go away, it just gets stronger, and cannot be satisfied except by human flesh.
Ok that’s another joke. But it’s also true. Women’s hormones are more cyclical. Men’s are progressive. They start low and gradually build. And they keep building, getting stronger and stronger until something happens to relieve them. After an orgasm, they crash again and start rebuilding. Mine seem to take around three days generally to get back to the level of demanding sex again. So in an ideal world I would have sex twice a week and be perfectly balanced. Not that I can’t and don’t go to extremes in either direction above or below that, that just seems to be my natural rhythm. So, the vampire goes to sleep, but wakes up about every three days and goes looking for a maiden to satisfy his thirst.
Seriously, I’m not trying to be weird. But vampires are one of the archetypical representations of a sexual monster/creature. They represent something within us, exaggerated and fictionalized.
Returning to the subject of thrist, I actually have some things to say about why that slang term (thirsty), which is symbolic of sexual desire in vampire stories, is actually a very appropriate term and has some good reasoning behind it. It’s fairly well known that touch is a physical, emotional, and psychological need of humans. And sex is a specific, very strong need of men, and me specifically.
I’m going to get a little into biology here for a minute. For women, it’s in their interest to have their sexual desire decline a bit as they age, and especially after having children. Sex (specifically pregnancy) becomes more and more of a risk as you age, so it’s not a bad idea to be less driven toward it. And women already start a bit lower on the desire scale because they act as the discriminator in sexual relationships, whereas men act as initiators. You need to be able to say no and feel less pressure and be pickier if you’re going to do the work of figuring out who’s a worthy mate and father for your children. So women are a bit more responsible and selective and less driven than men when it comes to sex.
Women also have a narrower and earlier-starting reproductive window. But men reach maturity later and have a far, far more extended reproductive window. And our role in reproduction doesn’t really hold an immediate risk for us, so there’s no need to have it diminish. So long as we’re secure and competent enough to have a mate, there’s no reason we couldn’t be fathering children. So we’re not really designed to lose our sex drive.
It’s funny, if I had to rate “compared to before you got married fifteen years ago, how eager you are to see your spouse naked, how eager to touch them, see and hold their special bits, kiss them, and have sex are you? By what percentage has that eagerness declined?” The answer would have to be, about as eager as the day before my wedding. It hasn’t declined much, if at all. You change, I change, time marches on, I’ve seen and touched you a lot, I’ve done a lot with you. But give me a few days and I’m pretty much as eager and desperate as that first day. And that’s pretty typical for a man. Time and familiarity do not blunt our desire for our wives. If anything it’s even harder, because we know what we’re missing out on.
Back to the subject of thirst and the progressive nature of men’s hormones now. I don’t know what it’s like for women, but for men as your hormones build it’s eventually like a burning in your chest. Your adrenaline starts getting more and more keyed up, especially if you get actively excited by looking at or touching your wife. You start to feel a bit crazed. The world starts to narrow and other things become irritating, a distraction, insignificant until this thing is settled.
You start to feel sort of intoxicated, and like nothing else matters. I know that sounds crazy, but look at what your own hormones can do and have done to you. It happens slowly, but it builds and builds. And if it’s long frustrated, it’s like all that tension just sort of explodes inside. It’s like a rocket building up to launch, and it’s supposed to drive you to your wife and take you there and bring you into the gravity of your relationship. But if it stays locked down and those engines are firing it starts burning you up.
If that goes on for a long time, it’s very easy to get depressed and angry and distracted, and even resentful. I know that’s dumb, that’s just what it does. It’s powerful, its potential for good is great, but it can mess you up inside if it goes wrong. All that potential energy meant to drive you to your wife and bind you to her, to delight in her and feel satisfied by her, turns to frustration and chaos. I think a lot of men know those feelings. We don’t like them. They make us terribly unhappy. But they happen.
When you’re feeling the burn, it seems very clear to you that the need for sex, the need for a woman to unite with you, is a basic, fundamental physical need, like for food and water and air. Your desire is like a thirst. It can become desperate. It’s object becomes the most precious thing in existence. As soon as you’ve had a drink, though, suddenly you feel fine again and it’s like, hey, no big deal. Back to normal, human again. Won’t turn back into that beast again until the next full moon.
So imagine if you had a basic physical need, like water. It feels that real and urgent and persistent and necessary to you. Now imagine that you lacked the basic ability to fulfill that need, and it was in someone else’s power instead. That’s a pretty crazy situation. That’s a setup for a very weird, unequal relationship. And it can make men feel resentful to be in someone else’s power like that. To need something that badly and not be able to have or control it. It gives that person a huge amount of leverage and power over us. It can feel like slavery.
It’s not hard to feel resentful toward myself. If only I didn’t have this desperate need, if only fulfilling it were in my own power, I wouldn’t have to do all that or be all that or risk all that. I could just pleasure myself. And, in practice, that’s what a lot of people do. They find ways to free themselves from their need for a partner. It makes you feel more independent, but at the cost of subverting one of the most powerful urges and needs in our nature. That sort of thing can’t come without a cost (in addition to the potential good you’re missing out on).
As I believe I mentioned before, the realities of sex predate all biological structures except existence itself and cellular organization (having specific parts of a cell to do specific tasks, organelles). Even multicellular life itself doesn’t come along for a few more hundred million years. So you can’t mess with sex without it having some deep, inescapable, 1.2-billion-years-in-the-making consequences.
Anyway, it can feel like slavery. To an insane urge within yourself. Knowing that the ability satisfy that thirst is in the power of someone else is like being told you can’t get a drink unless your master says you can. That’s hard to swallow. So people look for ways around it. We seek to use technology to free ourselves from our need for one another. Pornography, casual sex (a temporary stand in, like junk food instead of a meal, Snickers stops the hunger), sex simulators of a thousand kinds. All ways to return the means of production to the workers, to find your fulfillment in yourself and not need to seek it in someone else (especially someone who is strange and different from you and whose feelings and appetites and desires don’t match up identically with your own).
So some men resent women for all this, for holding hostage something they feel they must have to live, for not understanding, for making things hard, for demanding things they don’t want to do or don’t understand; and they seek a way around it or forcibly through it (sometimes in a way that hurts women a lot, it must be said). We’re slaves to our need, and the only proposed freedom for us is to enslave ourselves and trust our needs to someone else who might not even understand them, much less appreciate or fulfill them.
So, we see a lot of anger and confusion and lots of men doing really stupid things. They look for and find ways to make the object of their need something they can possess and control. Either by finding some substitute, something simpler and easier than voluntarily submitting themselves and their needs to someone else; a real, complex person with their own differences, identity, needs, and expectations (pornography will always give you exactly what you want, whenever you want it, because it’s just a reflection of your own desires, a mirror), or they may seek that security and freedom by turning the other person themselves into something they can possess and control.
I don’t think men turning women into possessions is the result of the assertion of male sexuality, it’s the result of the subversion and corruption of male sexuality by selfishness, refusing to submit to its demands, trying to sieze and control its objects and make them into something less than what they are, trying to cheat the system. It’s not submission to the male sexual urge that causes rape and objectification, it’s refusing submission, refusing to let it take us beyond ourselves, refusing the call and the cost, and choosing to instead sieze it for ourselves that causes it.
It is the nature of sex that the closer it comes to seeking itself as its object, the further it gets from its intention, and the more likely to go wrong it becomes. It’s very easy for sex to drive us toward ourselves. It’s a big carrot, a powerful tool, and the thing it’s trying to accomplish (go find the other and submit yourself to them, care for their needs as yours, love their difference, give up your precious needs to their uncertain care) is hard, unpleasant, weird, disempowering, frightening, risky, confusing, with endless complications and demands and challenges.
But the true call of sexuality in a man is to rise, to prove yourself worthy of the object of your desire, to become the thing that their esteem declares you to be. You can’t be that great, powerful, beautiful thing you could be if you don’t let them be as great, powerful, and beautiful as they could be, if you try to make them anything less than what they are. Reducing them will only reduce you and what you could be, in the end. It will strangle one of the best means to becoming what you could be for the sake of what you are.
Selfishness, safety, indifference, and power are the enemies of love. They may not destroy it, but they will subvert and deform it. The fire will still be there; its demands can’t be easily removed. So forcing them into subversion will likely lead you to harm either yourself or someone else. That fire will eat you and eat the object of your desire alive.
On the positive side, men can be positively motivated and energized by their need and their hormones to great activity. Harnessed properly, tamed and made useful, civilized, they can accomplish great things for others (instead of turning those energies in onto or even against themselves or others). When they are motivated by their desires and their fulfillment, but let them rest in the hands of another, they gain great energy. Men who have had that energy taken away through prostate cancer treatments often feel aimless, ineffective, helpless, purposeless, and depressed.
Because of the overwhelming power of that desire, that attachment, it can make all other things seem insignificant, meaningless. And that can be good. That beast can be sent out to battle the world. It will be willing to go die for the object of its worship, for their needs and safety and welfare. The sexual urge has a history of making men throw away their lives for very stupid reasons, but it’s also what’s responsible for making men, as a group, able and willing to sacrifice their lives for very good reasons. The same power that can be used for destruction and selfishness and betrayal and oppression can be used for unity, faithfulness, production, and sacrifice.
So, the sexual urge in men is very powerful. It’s an opportunity, for sure. It can be used as an amazing way to motivate men, to make them feel important and satisfied (I’ve already talked about that before so I won’t go on about it), to drive them on to great things. But it has an obvious difficult side, and it’s not always a fun experience for us. And the temptation to say, “Why bother looking to someone else or involve them, why do I have to use this for that purpose, why control and direct it to build something, when I could just get what I want in a second easily without getting into any of that?” is always there.
The point is, we’re in a bit of a bind, us men. We’re a desperate lot. And desperate people do some dumb things and act a bit cray cray sometimes.
I’m such a cowardly and fearful person. It’s so hard for me to actively declare my need for someone else or any vulnerability, or deep feelings, without worrying that I’ll be rejected or misunderstood or seen as bad. So if I do open up and ask for something, it’s really an opportunity, because it’s a chunk in my armor. I like to be emotional invulnerable, separated from everyone. I can feel like I don’t need to need anyone, don’t need to depend on anyone. I can just survive on my own. But this is one area where I just can’t shake it. And when I have tried to suppress it and trap it up inside, it tears me up inside and mangles my mind and emotions. I get depressed, angry, resentful, distracted, disconnected, impatient, all kinds of bad effects.
It may be a source of great evil among us, but I also think it’s good that men were given this need and vulnerability. Otherwise, it would be too easy to disappear into ourselves and despise and be disconnected from others and simply use them as tools and never be vulnerable or have to submit to another’s needs or desires, and a lot of the evil we’ve done is when we’ve rejected our vulnerability and are trying to live and force the world to operate without it. When we’re trying to find a way around it. It’s when we subvert and try to sieze the reins of our need for our own control, when we reject our true manhood, that we become the worst version of what we can be.
Toxic masculinity isn’t an embracing of the worst aspects of manhood, it’s a rejection of the best aspects, those most oppressive to selfishness and least selfishly pleasant aspects of manhood in favor of something far more simple and self serving, which distorts and defies and subverts the essential “other seeking, other needing, other submitting” nature of true masculine sexuality.
When we view corrupted masculinity, what we truly see is a man who has tried to sieze and conquer his sexuality for himself. By contrast, a man who has truly surrendered himself to his masculinity has also had to surrender himself to a higher ethic, something greater than himself, and all its claims upon him. A man who is willing to give in to the true nature of his masculinity must also, by its nature, be willing to give himself for another. He must surrender to and depend upon and learn from and prove himself to her. He must lay down his life for her.
Us men are a bit conflicted about that. We would prefer to be perfect and sufficient unto ourselves and not need you. Especially not the real you, the different, complex, difficult, demanding thing that demands us to grow up a lot to please and serve and deserve and understand and work with and love you. We would much rather have a mirror of our own desire, as pornography offers, than have to bridge that vast gulf between us and within ourselves.
I’m getting too philosophical now, and I meant this to be more practical and about what it’s like to be a man so you can understand better. And I’ve already written in my earlier letter about swimsuits a lot about the positive aspects of why sex and beauty make men unreasonably happy. But I think the philosophy was relevant. Still, I should get more personal. I think I just ran out of ideas much quicker than expected about what I actually thought it would be useful to say.
It doesn’t help that I started writing this before we had had sex, and now it’s after. So I’ve reverted to my human form and can’t remember exactly how the world looked just a few hours ago. I was at the high water mark of hormone madness, and now I’m down at the low ebb. I was actually thinking at the time that I should write everything down first, because I would forget it if we had sex.
It’s so strange; when the fire is in you it changes the whole way you see the world. It defines it. It’s the most important thing about existence. It becomes all consuming. Its object becomes the most astounding, desirable, significant object in the universe, a transcendent beauty you long to unite yourself with and will die if you don’t. And then you get a drink, wake up, and look around at a world where all that fire and desperation is suddenly gone. It’s very disconcerting.
When the madness is on me I could write reams of raving, elevated poetry about sexual love and what it means to me (and even now I can obviously write a lot). Like Song of Songs, I could write page after page about how every part of you contains the beauty and significance of the whole world and how I want to prostrate myself before your glory. Afterward, at the absolute low ebb of the flame after fulfillment, it’s easy to feel just a little foolish. Like a zealot whose god was suddenly revealed to be just a (wo)man behind a curtain. But you know that it’s not over. You know it wouldn’t take much to feel that fire inhabit you again.
It’s strange that sex should have such a direct link to emotional and relational health with men. It’s such a strong link we can confuse it for the substance of the relationship, for the goal, instead of the means to it. It’s an avenue, but it’s easy for us to see it as the destination. The destination is being pulled out of ourselves into love for the other, learning to stop being just us and relating to the world as just us, acting for just us, and becoming invested in the good and beauty and value of another. To see and act in the world from the position of difference, of unity between two and the seeking and loving of the other, rather than identity. The tool to drive us to it and help us invest in it and reward us for that venture and attachment is so strong, though, it’s so easy to worship the tool itself.
The significance of sex to men (especially), the way it opens a crack into our emotional weak points, presents a lot of dangers and opportunities and burden. It’s something we have to manage. And if we are in a relationship, it becomes something our spouse has decided to invest in and manage too. Is that a burden for them? Heck yes. But I think that’s the whole idea. Taking on the burden of what your spouse needs and desires, so that by lifting it for them (instead of leaving them to lift it), we are lifted out of ourselvea into something greater, and it makes out of us and our needs something far better than if we sought them inside ourselves.
As I think I’ve mentioned, I struggle with the fact that my feelings of inadequacy in providing for you or being attractive and life-giving as a spouse for you trouble me deeply. And that makes me feel unattractive. And that depresses my sexuality, which depresses my love. I don’t want to speak to your experience and feelings, I can only talk about mine. The whole cycle can work against itself. The road can run backward. But, because it’s always there, there’s always a potential to fight the flow of traffic.
If I can find any decent means for increasing the order and provision you feel in your life, it will make you feel better, I’ve found, regardless of how everything else is going. Conversely, even if things are otherwise pretty good, a perception of chaos and lack of safety and order and provision in your environment will make you feel unhappy. Having a picked-up and vaccumed house or being given some eggs and bacon seems like a pretty shallow thing for you to find significant existential comfort in (from my point of view), just as spotting the generous curve of your cleavage at the neck of your shirt or admiring the contours of your butt through some lacy underwear probably seems like a pretty shallow thing for me to find significant existential comfort in (from your point of view).
Everything else aside, some things just make you feel better or worse. Those things have objective significance to us about about the state of our lives. And your things are (relatively) different than my things. We each get more, relatively, from the avenue that means more to us and impacts us more deeply, we get it more easily. And if I start pushing some good things through that avenue, if I lift a bit of that load for you (even though I may not see the value or find it that meaningful) it will start to lift you. And often, then, you’ll start to lift me in return, as your own burdens ease and your capacity increases.
For me, because the avenue of sex and affection and attraction and intimacy is always open, if you start pushing some good stuff through that channel, no matter how bad everything else is, I’ll feel a bit better overall and have more to give. Life can be awful, but if your amazing wife is willing to %@#& your brains out, that means you’ve got something going. There’s something to you. You two have something. You must have something good to give, because you have been proved worthy and valuable.
So here’s one question. Why is it so hard for me to ask about sex, or ask for sex? Well, lots of reasons. Partly, I’m a lazy coward, as I’ve said. Fear of rejection, fear of being a burden, fear of showing my need and not getting it met, resentment over the unequal nature of our sexual relationship, needing you so much more when you don’t seem to need me, and not being able to understand that, feeling unneeded and unwanted and undesirable. All that is in there.
I don’t like that you don’t need or desire me the same way that I need and desire you. And it’s especially not clear, with how technology has changed things and how our lives have gone, how you need me. I need you in many ways, but as a mate and wife specifically in a way that is as demanding to me as hunger and thirst. But you don’t need me like that, and thanks to advances in technology and society you don’t really need me to protect or defend you from wolves or raiders any more, or need me to perform hard physical tasks for you. You can provide for yourself and take care of yourself. You have friends and family already. You don’t really need me in my capacity as a man, as a husband, that much. The modern world has removed, or offered to remove, our need for one another. You can get by on your own these days, without your extended family, without a spouse, without the other half of humanity and its capacities. You can find a way around most obstacles if you’re determined.
But I’m still clinging to and placing my bets on the idea that needing you is good for me, that there’s something better to be found than just myself. I think that’s one reason I was so disappointed by the song “Show Yourself” in Frozen 2. The idea of discovering that the thing you’ve been looking for, that will add to you and make you more than you are, the meaning you’ve been waiting for your whole life, is just yourself, is so terribly disappointing to me. That’s such a small world, nothing bigger or better or more complete in it than me. I already had me. I was hoping to find something new. And all Elsa discovered was worship of herself and fulfillment in the exercise of her own power, free from the rules and concerns that apply to others. Sounds like a narcissistic, psychopathic nightmare to me.
So since I’m still placing my bets on needing someone else being good for me (not that being dependent is good, seeking all my meaning and happiness from you isn’t good, but needing and being driven toward something more than myself is good), I’m left vulnerable by my choice. I’ve chosen to enslave myself to someone else and seek my good in relationship with someone else. I’ve laid my bets on it. That takes my fulfillment out of my own hands and puts it in yours. And that makes me nervous. I hate to feel like I’m imposing on anyone. Maybe because it makes my needs and vulnerability too real and present. But that fear of imposing, that fear of asking, is very strong for me, and hard to overcome.
I’m not sure how to ask about sex stuff specifically. It’s a very vulnerable and private and risky area, and I don’t like exposing myself. Also, because so many men and women have used sex so poorly, a lot of very good stuff gets a very bad rap. Yes, us men act like idiots about sex. We can be monsters, we can be gross. But our relationship is the place where that monster (that power) gets tamed and turned into something useful, something constructive, something great. But the good, powerful creature and the monster are still made from the same stuff.
So yeah, prostitutes and club girls wear things they know have an objective physical appeal, they know what works, and because their approach to life has them going all in on sexual attraction, they’re going to use what works. And those bad associations can get tangled up in your mind, the memory of the bad uses of sex, which we see far far more than the good ones (you’re pretty likely to see single men and women being provocative toward one another, but you’re not likely to see a husband and wife doing it, because theyve already found a use for it; it’s internal to their relationship, it’s not still wandering the earth like a werewolf, looking for a use).
Our relationship is the good version of that creature, the version that is there to value you and appreciate you and pull me closer to you and make me feel valued and help our relationship grow. Treating it like it is a monster, like it’s guilty of all the things that other men have done purely by being made from similar stuff, makes me feel especially fearful and shamed, in a very unjust way that stokes my resentment and makes me feel more monstrous (because if you’re going to get treated like one even when you’re striving so hard not to be, what’s the point?).
That creature, that primordial sexual carnivore, is an important part of me. It’s there for a reason. It only has the power it has because there’s something good and real about it (often being abused, admittedly). Men like sexy clothing not because we’re gross, but because we’re supposed to. It’s a tool. And it can be used for good or for bad, to build relationships or to destroy them. Swearing off the tool won’t only prevent harm, it will also prevent all the good that could have been done with it.
So, in a word, that’s why crotchless body stockings are actually objectively and morally awesome. Because they’re just a tool. Their power is objective. Their value depends on how they’re used. The same goes for swimsuits, makeup, clothes, hair, underwear, perfume, sexy voices, silky skin, sultry walks, erotic talk, and all that stuff that men just naturally like. They’re all objectively effective because they connect to fundamental realities in how men are designed. Men respond to those things. That doesn’t make those things oppressive or reductive or destructive or demeaning, or any of that. How people have used them has done that. Their power is simply neutral, pure moral potential.
People being people, we’ve often used these tools to hurt or devalue one another. But that’s not what they’re for. That’s not their destiny. They’re meant to be used for good; they belong to the good; to build us up and draw us closer and humble us and lift up the other. We’ve subverted that power for selfish ends. We’ve turned the sword on ourselves, and now we fear it. The solution isn’t to hate the power, but rather to hate its abuse, and to retake it for its proper use.
All those things that men like in women, and also the things women like in men, are simply facts. It’s up to us to decide how to wield them. If we wield them for the purpose of giving value and pleasure to our spouse, if we use them to bind us tighter to one another, if we use them to reinforce our intimacy and relationship, then we should be proud of them. We honor one another and our relationship through them. That’s the good version of those things.
The reason it can be scary to use those tools is that it’s so easy for them to go wrong, and we’ve seen it happen so much, because they’re very powerful. Even with losing weight, I did it to feel better and be healthier, so I could live better for others and be around longer for my kids and look better for you. But it also pleased me. It was tempting to make it about myself and start finding my value in it (instead of in what it meant for those I care for), to make it about me and self-worship. Even though I was still objectively pretty fat and just okay looking, it was so easy to imagine myself becoming an object of worship and desire and pride and falling in love with that idea of myself.
That’s the price of any encounter with things that possess a lot of inherent power, I guess. You have to develop character and negotiate your way through the challenges of being a good steward of that power. I’ll be honest, I’m so unused to having any attractive power to women that even now I’m not sure what I bring to the table. So the idea of having anything is a bit intoxicating. I feel bad for you often. You get the benefits of a more hermaphroditic man, but my (comparative) lack of manliness deprives you of the opportunity to be more feminine. I’ve not succeeded as a traditional provider, depriving you of the opportunity to explore being a more traditional caregiver.
So, to get back to my earlier point, yes, I probably need to be more bold and direct about sex, even more than I am. I have learned to just ask. I used to think I could make things happen naturally, but sex just doesn’t seem to occur to you as a possible outcome or motivation or intent of mine unless I get really explicit. I’ve sometimes wondered if we should come up with some sort of signal. Putting a flag up (metaphorically), so it’s known that it’s on the table. I don’t know.
It’s a hard adjustment for me, I’ve always been a “soft power” sort of person who has tried to get what they want by indirect means (negotiation, suggestion, manipulation), rather than just asking for or demanding it. The direct approach was always a non starter for me, a road to failure. I’ve always been a “sneaky male” and a beta male and a runt and a youngest child, so I never found that I could succeed by those means. So I went all in on finding soft power ways to get what I wanted.
You could always give extra help to me by treating me with kid gloves a bit, encouraging me whenever I get up the courage to be honest a bit (I’m not saying you don’t already, just that it means a lot when you do). Whether anything can be done or not, a bit of praise and thanks and positivity understanding for making the effort, a reward for the attempt to connect, helps make it more likely to happen again. What did that marriage institute call them? Bids. We all make bids for connection. Recognizing when your partner makes one and responding positively increases connection.
The four enemies of a marriage (according to the research of that institute) are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Men are most likely to stonewall; 85% of the time it’s the man who does it. The hard, impenetrable front. The denial of need, of significance. But you don’t put up walls to defend rocks, you don’t put up protections for things that don’t matter or aren’t vulnerable. You put up walls because there’s something soft and sensitive that you think needs protecting behind them. Only people who are afraid put up fences.
I can’t say for sure why I’m not as aggressive or willing to assert myself. Personality, lower testosterone, being a bit more hermaphroditic in both hormone and personality balance (caught in the middle a bit between the dueling aspects of my nature), learned behaviors from being a last-born or being radically small and weak as a child (some learned helplessness), a certain natural selfishness and protectiveness and cowardice (I’m brave about things I believe in, things outside me, but not brave about myself), all of these are probably part of it.
I also feel a lot of guilt about being me. Including about still needing all the usual guy stuff like sex and respect (the definitive top two needs of men in relationships, which kind of go hand in hand; having sex with someone is a way of demonstrating that you have judged them worthy; that’s certainly how sex makes men feel). I used to think that those two things didn’t matter as much to me, but I think on balance they do, people just experience them differently, in different ways. Men want to be judged, and they want to be judged and found worthy. They want to prove themselves. Against other men, to women, to themselves. And sex and relationships are one area that’s especially prevalent and drives a lot of behaviors.
I sometimes feel like I don’t deserve to be happy, because I haven’t proved myself in many ways I had hoped to, and naturally would like to. Any person who tries things and experiences failure gets knocked down a peg and gets a little smaller and a little depressed and less actualized. Those defeats pile up. I’ve always felt like, if I just had a good relationship with my wife, including a good sex life, that wouldn’t matter though. Because sex with someone you value and esteem makes you feel like you just won at life. How amazing your spouse is and the fact that they are pleased with you (and demonstrate it with affection and desire to offer and make themselves sexually pleasing to you) makes you feel like there must really be something to you. You’re willing to take your spouse’s interest as surety against whatever else the world might claim or hit you with.
And it doesn’t connect directly to sex, although it is a powerful tool to push things toward either better or worse states, but my most depressed times have coincided with when I’ve felt unworthy of your esteem, when I’ve felt that I’ve failed you and become not what you wanted, unattractive. Not so much physically, because many men, and certainly me, are a little unaware of their own actual bodily states and attractiveness. Our idea of our attractiveness seems to come more from an internal than an external assessment of value, from those mediating factors I talked about earlier. If a man believes he’s smart or successful or rich or funny or cool or really charming or relationally adept, he’ll think he’s super attractive and hunky, regardless of how he actually looks. And often you see some comically silly looking men who believe they’re pretty hot.
Me, I had my intelligence, my skill with relationships to women, my ability to talk, my ability to do and know many things, my humor. But I lost a lot of my forums for expressing my abilities. I failed to make good at a lot of the things I tried. I stopped seeing value in the things that I believed demonstrated my value. And I got depressed. Things like having kids, which caused a marked increase in stress along with a big decrease in sleep and sex coincided with tough times in my life as a businessman, friend, and church leader. Those things sort of fed off each other, making me feel worse by taking away my various means for me to feel good, making me feel even worse, making me even less able to find or produce value in those areas. I lost my vision of myself as an attractive or successful partner, friend, businessman, thinker, leader, Christian. I felt unloved and unwanted and that led me to closing down my opportunities and efforts even more, which created even less opportunity and more negativity.
So I felt unattractive and undesirable to the world. The world didn’t like me, didn’t find me interesting, didn’t care what I had to say, didn’t see value in me. But I decided I could live with it as long as you were still into me. Then, at various times, for many reasons, I felt like I didn’t even have that, and didn’t deserve to have it. I felt like I didn’t deserve to be happy. Partly that was my own pathology. Partly that was the result of negative feedback from my environment. The two fed on each other.
Quite possibly I also picked up on some of your attitude about yourself and how you see the world and imputed it to myself. You relate to yourself through a structure of judgment and proving yourself and needing to validate your worth and existence, through guilt and shame. And it’s kind of clear, from the outside, that that’s how you relate to yourself. So I think it’s pretty easy to make the leap to assuming that that’s how you relate to the rest of the world, including me. (I’m not saying that’s correct, just that based on the evidence provided it’s an easy assumption to make.) And because my avenues for positive feedback had been shrunk or were giving bad feedback (friends, work, church, family, etc) I spent more and more time just trying to live outside them, not caring about them so they wouldn’t hurt me, which meant I was really just living more and more in my own head, which wasn’t a great place to be. So good things weren’t reaching me, because I had to shut down those channels to avoid the pain and failure and worthlessness I felt from them.
I’ve clearly gotten a bit off topic. I’m not sure what my point was. All that stuff has gone on with me. Sex isn’t directly related, it’s just a powerful tool in situations like that. It made me feel better. And when there was less of it, I felt worse. And feeling bad about myself made it hard for me to do anything to increase the quality of our sexual relationship because I lacked confidence in myself; felt shame and fear that I didn’t deserve it. It’s a whole complicated thing.
In a way, I suppose bothering to write about any of this (and I know I’m so annoying verbose) is a hopeful bid. There was a time I got you interested in me, despite all my other disadvantages, by just using my brain and my writing. Maybe the whole world didn’t like what I was or what I had to say, but you did. You were attracted to me, you thought I was something special. You were my audience of one. But depression erodes all kinds of confidence in yourself. And I wasn’t impressed my myself, frankly. I began to feel that you didn’t think I had anything to offer any more, anything special or worth listening to (and that was kind of all I ever had to attract you, really), and I felt that you were justified in thinking that. I was a failure, a ruin. I had nothing to offer and my wife knew it and despised me and would find other, better, smarter people to listen to and want to live inside their world instead of mine. As a result, I felt immense jealousy toward your interests. Most recently, your podcasts. I know it wasn’t a reasonable way to feel, but I felt immense, violent jealousy and resentment of them in principle. Because I felt left behind and worthless and replaced in the only area I’d ever had to offer and was now a failure in.
OK, I’m done talking about depression now. I didn’t have any point or agenda for any of that. I wasn’t saying anything about you or what you should have done or known. I was just being honest and revealing my inner workings a bit that I normally keep shut up. So you can decide how you want to use all this knowledge.
Returning to the subject of sex, I wanted to make a quick aside and mention that I do have sources and reasons and arguments and evidence behind my ideas. Many philosophical, some religious, some based on psychology, some based on science. I like to interconnect. One thing I mentioned is this idea that the power of sex is there to bind us to our spouses, so that that power can be tamed and used for good, to build something. That’s primarily a philosophical and psychological theory, but I have lots of scientific evidence to back it up too. One small example is a double blind controlled study they did on the affect of oxytocin on men. Oxytocin is the hormone that makes women give birth, it’s also what causes lactation. It’s the cuddle hormone. It’s a reward pathway, it’s supposed to make you feel nice. It increases feelings of comfort, closeness, kindness, and altruism. It’s also connected to sex and is released during orgasm. It’s a complex thing, how it works and what it does isn’t well understood.
Things like pornography and drug and alcohol addiction can subvert that structure and take it over as part of an addiction. In those cases, according to the literature, what’s usually going on is there’s some failure to find fulfillment through more normal reward structures, so people find something else that can be used to manipulate that reinforcing reward structure (it’s meant to build your attachment to those structures, but if you can’t make the attachment you still want the reward, so you cheat, you train yourself to respond to something else in its place; there’s some very interesting research on rats that strongly confirms this). So it isn’t really about the alcohol or the sex or the food, they’re just a maladaptive means for subverting our body’s hormonal reward structure when we can’t make it work the way it’s supposed to and attach to what it’s supposed to (so says the literature about various addictions).
That oxytocin system was built into us to help attach us and reward us for that attachment to our children, spouses, family, tribe, etc. For men, it’s meant to literally addict us to our wives and keep us coming back to them. Not just any woman. Our partners specifically. The study I mentioned found that dosing men with oxytocin made them find their spouses more attractive and have more positive feeling toward them. It did not make them find women in general more attractive, or familiar women more attractive. It didn’t have a generalized effect. It worked specifically on their feelings toward their partners. That’s the reward system operating the way it was meant to.
The practical upshot of this is, the more a man has sex with his wife, the more attracted he becomes to her. The more they let us love them, the more we do love them. The relative attractiveness of women doesn’t matter. And oxytocin won’t push a man toward a more attractive woman instead of his spouse. Its function is to bind a man to and create a reward structure in his mind with his spouse. If a woman is a man’s partner and they have sex, he will find her more and more attractive and have more and more positive feelings toward her. He won’t be able to help it. So you don’t need to be super attractive or perfect to make a man find you lovely. He will find you lovely if you let him.
Men are looking for someone to treasure and worship and be addicted to, and they’re equipped with the hormonal structures to help make that happen and make it easy and reward it. Powerful structures. So powerful they can be subverted to create maladaptive attachments and destructive addictions that isolate peope instead of connecting them. But connection is the goal, is the right purpose. That’s just an example of some of the science that supports my philosophical and psychological assertions.
On a random side note, the quality of women’s orgasms, which have some interesting differences from men’s (men’s are not repeatable and have a built in delay before its possible to have another one, women’s are repeatable and have no delay) are most affected by non-physical elements. They are most affected for the bad by feelings of fear, shame, and insecurity, and they’re affected very positively when the woman feels confident and secure in her relationship. The reward of stability and security for women is literal pleasure. Relationships where they feel insecure or unstable, they will have a much harder time orgasming. So they’ve got their own reward structure that sort of works as in inverse of men’s. Or rather a complement, forming a circle of reinforcement between them.
Pleasure makes men feel more in love, more attached. More attachment makes women feel more pleasure.
Neat, huh? It’s like a circle that goes round and round between them, building the relationship as well as the reward systems that reinforce and encourage it. On another side note, they’ve also found that hugs and massages also raise oxytocin levels. Generally oxytocin levels also go up during the establishment of a new family relationship (new romances in the first six months, new babies and their mom).
Making Nobody Happy 