Separating Sex from Intimacy

Discrete Activities kill sex lives

Sexual attraction and emotional intimacy are completely separate facets of a relationship. I don’t know when people forgot this, but it doesn’t matter. Whether you are staying in your relationship or preparing to leave it it’s an important mental models. Women say otherwise, but you have to ignore that.

If you were a bit of a player before you settled down you already know this. Some of the most intense sex you had as a young man was from women you barely knew, didn’t much care for, and treated poorly. The sexual attraction was there, but the intimacy was not. If you are a type 2 captain you may know this too. Some of the best sex — or the only sex — comes after a major fight between you and your woman.

Many older couples, the ones who call themselves mom and dad, whom everyone looks at fondly. They love each other to death, but have 0 sexual chemistry between them and no sexlife either. They have emotional intimacy, but no sexual desire. Love but no lust.

While the two facets are separate, they do feed off each other. In a new relationship, there has to be sexual desire for a woman to even imagine having emotional intimacy. David Claire, author of Practical Female Psychology for the Practical man talks about this in his relationship roadmap: step 2, seeking validation. For a sexual encounter to have a chance at becoming a relationship, there has to be emotional intimacy.

In our space, we referred to the two behavior sets as alpha and beta. Alpha, or sexual desire, and beta, as emotional intimacy. They are part of a push and pull between men and women. It manifests in multiple ways:

• A nasty fight then awesome makeup sex

• Teasing a girl during a date then sexual escalation

• Cuddling on a Sunday morning then some spooning-sex

• The fear of losing her man and the wild sex of hysteric bonding

• Etc

At some point in the relationship, people assumed emotional intimacy was the only intimacy; probably because the women said so. It sounds good on paper: feels good, sounds nice. The problem is, it doesn't work that way. Sexual desire comes at the tail end of anxiety. The release of anxiety in a woman is the strongest sexual incentive.

It’s why the girl from college complained constantly about that man she was fucking yet kept going back to him. It’s why you mom constantly complained that your father was an asshole, only to have another kid. It’s why the women who is physically abused by her husband listens to everyone telling her to get out of that relationship, only to go back to him because no one else understands him like she does.

Desire is like fire, you can cook a steak and burn yourself. It’s not good or bad, it just is. There’s two ideas at play here. The first is that putting sex and intimacy together actually harms sexual desire. Secondly, that women don’t understand what makes them sexual, only what they feel in the moment. The Mental Model is:

Women contextualize sex — Archwinger

Your wife holds you to a higher standard than she holds other men, and if she feels resentment regarding your failure to meet that standard, this will keep her from fucking you even if the attraction is there. When you married her, you promised to fill the role of husband, not the role of random dick from the bar, and if your shit isn’t handled and you aren’t filling that role properly, the hate she feels for you for breaking your promise – that negative emotional intimacy – will cock block you worse than any nosy toddler. And all of the muscles in the world and all of the flirting with your neighbors imaginable won’t fix this.

What’s worse is that the next random dick at a bar she sees on girls’ night, who isn’t being held to the same standard as you, will seem a lot more emotionally close to her than he actually is, simply because all of that negative emotional intimacy isn’t there. The absence of resentment and hate will feel like love to her.

How you use this is up to you. The way I write about in here is to become a luxury brand, however others have just demoted their wife to a roommate fuck buddy and baby sitter. It’s the same tools, the same information, and two ends of the spectrum.

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The main drawback in a marriage with considering sex and intimacy as the same thing is sex becomes a discrete activity. If you’ve ever seen or been part of a sex schedule you’ll already know this. Sex is now like a game of Monopoly. Sure it’s fun, but every time you want to play you have to bring the board out, set up the pieces, it was put away improperly last time so you have to sort the cash. By the end it is more work than it’s worth.

So when you get intimate, the first thought isn’t to have fun sex, it’s all that work that goes into a discrete activity.