Why Men Fall Out of Love...

We stop touching them.  It is really that simple.  It starts with a withdrawal of physical contact which then grows to an emotional abandonment.  But it always starts with the absence of touch.

It isn’t really our fault, per se.  It happens usually quite organically.  We either have unresolved sexual trauma that makes touching for us something we either avoid, or over indulge.  Or then we get pregnant and then our bodies are taken over with all the blossoming motherhood.  We are not prepared for what it is going to do to us.  We are not prepared to have our entire bodies co-opted and altered.  We are just not ready for it.  So when we find ourselves in the throws of birthing aftermath, the last thing we tend to want is touch.  We are being touched, suckled, groped, engaged every single day.  And so our needs for physicality are met, and we forget that the men that helped us get to this place have needs too. That have now largely gone under met or unmet while we carried the baby for 9 months.  Upon the baby’s arrival, men tend to think the long dry sexual drought is over, but for many of them, it has only just begun.

It is a vicious cycle.  I have seen it in my own life and in the lives of my male clients.  They reach out for touch, proximity and contact, and we are like, “UM, I have just been overly accessed for the last 15 hours, I do NOT want you to touch me!”  And we both make the grave mistake that this sentiment is temporary.  For many, it is not.  It is like a slow erosion trickle that will one day have the expanse of the Grand Canyon, only it will not take thousands of years to carve.  Chasms in relationships and marriages happen much more quickly and tend to get very deep and very wide over relatively short periods of time.  Couple that with today’s societal inclinations towards the temporary and disposable, and well, right there you have the perfect explanation for today’s divorce rate.

Everyone thinks it will change as the baby gets older.  But valuable time has been lost in the couple’s timeline and it is hard to get it back.  Now the union of two is a family of three and there just doesn’t feel like there is all that much time for intimacy.  Men have two choices here:  become engaged, a doting parent and cosign their partner’s physical intimacy withdrawal or they become child like themselves always clamoring for more of our attention and contact.  Neither path leads to a lasting union.  Both paths lead to a complete breakdown in the couple’s fundamental DNA.  Men need contact.  And once we take it away, it is hard to give it back.  And just at the time it might start to come back, baby number 2 is on its way.

Women also have sexual trauma that interferes with their ability to be intimate and to withstand touch.  Something that is supposed to be pleasurable and fun, was previously tainted and compromised.  And without therapy and EMDR and a lot of work over time, women's sexual beings and attendant sex lives are kinda fucked. And not in a good way.  Which translate to the guy's sex life also being decimated.

And if you have a woman who has both sexual trauma AND motherhood override, then the costs are exponentially increased. And the relationship is over before anyone knows it.

So it goes.  We busy ourselves with careers, motherhood and all the details of family life and we forget that our partner, our co-creator of this whole endeavor, has needs.  And if we do remember, likely, their needs, become an added burden or obligation we would rather NOT have to deal with, so we don’t.

Many men just hunker down and grind.  They are good fathers, helpful partners, and hard providers.  They toil away all day every day being what they think a man, husband and father should be, and every day that passes, leads them further and further away from getting their needs met.

And so this persists for years.  And then one day, that woman at work brushes by them and touches them in some banal way but it ignites a spark that moves to a full conflagration in short order.  They try to get us to buy in, but often we are too busy, engaged in our lives, motherhood demands, careers and wifely duties that we fail to notice that our partners are starving for affection, touch, contact and sex.

And so one day at an afterwork happy hour, that brief flirtation from the office goes too far.  Or they sit, horny and alone while their wife puts the kids to bed for three hours.  And they get online to meet their needs with online chats or porn sites. Thinking that perhaps they can just take care of these physical needs for contact outside the marriage.  And perhaps, this just might work.

I have had male clients tell me the following, "I love my wife. She just isn't interested in sex. So I am going outside the marriage to get it and that will preserve the marriage." Sometimes I engage with questions like:

"Have you thought about addressing the lack of sex in your marriage with your wife?"

"Do you really believe your marriage is great when one very important area is completely cut off and dead?"

"How do you think it is going to go when she finds out you are getting your sex needs met elsewhere?"

And if you think this sounds more like a therapist than divorce lawyer, you are right, and wrong. I deal with people's still "in tact" marriages everyday. Often long before the D word is leveled and I try to help them find a way back to the people they pledged to do life with. I really do. And also to a qualified therapist.

The answers to my questions are usually as follows:

"I have addressed it with my wife. She said no. I tried a number of times but she just will not discuss it. What can I do?"

"Well, I mean, maybe this is just how married life is. Some of my friends just get it elsewhere and it seems to work for them..."

"I am going to be super careful, so she doesn't find out..."

Except they almost always do find out. Oh it may appear like a titilating solution for a little while.  But one day, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down and there will be a great deal of blame and finger pointing to go around.

We need to touch them and we need to appreciate them.  We need to see that while their role in this whole parenting adventure differs from ours, it is still lonely, anxiety provoking and alienating...just like our experience, just in perhaps different ways.

So for most men, (I am not discussing sex addicts, narcissist and the like, they have their own issues that only compound the above situation) this is how it goes.  An affair, a cheat or a lie isn’t what they want to do, it is a default position men are regulated to by our mutual ignorance.  We don’t know this is going to happen and neither do they.  It is a hard time all around. Which is why I raise it today in the hopes that men and women can have the needs and wants conversation earlier and thereby put me out of a job.  I would gladly give up my profession, to enable people who love each other to remain in loving unions.

Men fall out of love because they are starved for contact.  They need it and they will not live without it, forever. At some point, they will find it and the likelihood of it being with you, is super limited. Because you have your own shit going on over there and that allows you to believe that this man that loves you will just hang out indefinitely while you get on with it.  And most men will, for a while.  And then there will come a day that some other woman lights them up, laughs at their jokes, touches their back, desires them in ways you forgot to know how.  And that is where we lose them and they lose the love they have for us.

It is the cycle of the modern marriage: wife overly taxed with motherly duties, doesn't know how to manage her new role, needs space and time to sort it out, puts the man on ice, man tries, unsuccessfully, to re-engage her, fails (repeatedly), he becomes resentful and begins to withhold assistance, she responds with her own resentment and anger, the void grows ever deeper and leaves both people standing on the shores of their own misunderstanding scratching their heads as to why their marriage sucks. And both are terrified to continue but more terrified to quit and give up.

In my experience, most men, are not overly complicated.  They want to earn a respectable living, they want to participate in the lives of their kids and wives and they want to be appreciated for their relative efforts.  But more than any of that, they crave contact of a physical nature.  And every day that goes by without it moves them closer to finding someone else and father away from the woman they love and married.

We lose the men we love because we fail to see how our own issues impact them and their needs and then we fail to put language to this situation and it proliferates. And that is how and why men fall out of love...at least in my experience.