Love and Sex in Relationships Can Be Easy

This post is a full written exploration of Episode 144 of the Infinite Devotion podcast, part two of a two-part series. You can listen to the episode on the podcast page, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on YouTube. Part one covered abundance and scarcity as general ideas. This one takes you into how these concepts affect love, sex, and relationship, which is where they actually decide the shape of your life.

Most couples who have been together a decade or two are not fighting. They are holding their breath.

From the outside it can look like peace. Two people who have been together fifteen years, still married, still sharing a house and a calendar and a life. Look closer and you find two nervous systems working very hard to keep the surface calm. There are subjects they do not raise. Tones they do not use. Whole rooms of the relationship they have quietly agreed to stop entering.

I want to show you how that happens, why it kills desire, and what becomes available on the other side of it. Because the thing almost nobody tells you is that love and connection are not supposed to be hard. Fear makes them hard. Trust makes them easy.

A quick recap, so this stands on its own

Last week I laid out abundance and scarcity as the two lenses you look through before you make any decision at all.

Picture yourself driving through your life with the accelerator pressed to the floor. Your other foot is jammed on the brake, and the emergency brake is pulled all the way up. When you want to get somewhere, when you want something in your life to be different, the instinct is to push the accelerator harder. Try harder. Force more.

The accelerator was never the problem. You already have everything you need to go where you want to go. The only real question is why you are riding the brake.

Scarcity is the belief that life is zero-sum. A limited supply of money, time, love, desire, and attention, and never quite enough to go around. From inside that belief you have to grip what you have, because losing it means it is gone, and you have to fight for what you want, because someone else getting it means less for you.

Abundance is trust. Trust that there is enough, that there is more where that came from, that the supply does not run out, and underneath all of it, trust that you are going to be okay and that life is fundamentally working out for you rather than against you.

I also said this: reality is undefeated. The way things are, in any given moment, is one hundred percent of the time exactly the way things are. Your disapproval of what is, your insistence that it be different before you can feel okay, is where your foot lands on the brake. You put your entire inner state on the far side of a reality that is not going to move, and then you wonder why you feel stuck.

And scarcity is a self-fulfilling loop. Whatever you brace against, you tend to build. The partner so afraid of losing love that they grip too hard, smother the other person, and drive away the very thing they were terrified to lose. Look anywhere in your life where it feels like there is not enough, and if you are honest, you will usually find your own gripping quietly holding that thing at arm's length.

All of that was about you alone in the car. Now put another person in the passenger seat.

What scarcity does to a relationship

The first thing scarcity does is change what your partner is to you.

When love and desire and attention feel like they exist in limited supply, your partner stops being a person you get to love and who gets to love you. They become a resource. A thing to be secured and managed. A supply line.

Once someone is your supply line, everything they do gets measured against a single question, running quietly under every interaction: is my supply safe, or is it on the way out?

For a man who cannot handle his wife having big emotions, her feelings stop being her feelings. They become evidence about the state of the relationship, or a threat to the supply of sex and desire. Her having a hard day registers as a problem to be solved rather than a woman to be held.

For a woman afraid of losing love, his bad day becomes a threat. Something feels off, so now she needs to fix it, to manage him, to help him be different so that he can be okay, so that she can finally be okay. His mood is no longer his. It is a job she did not ask for and cannot put down.

Two people, two brakes, one car

Put two people in scarcity into one relationship and you get two people riding the brake in the same car.

The relationship is the car. It is the vehicle you both got into because you wanted to go somewhere together. But now it is like one of those driver's training cars where the instructor has a second brake pedal on the passenger side, and both of you are standing on your own.

So you look across at each other and you each reach the same conclusion. If you would relax, we would be fine. If you would stop being so needy, so pushy, so cold, so clingy, then I could finally let go. If you were happy, I could be happy.

Neither of you is wrong that there is resistance in the car. You can both feel it. What neither of you has landed on yet is that your own foot is on the brake too. As long as the story is "the problem is you," nothing moves, because the one brake you actually control is the one you refuse to look at.

Getting out of this requires a shift from blame into responsibility. And that shift takes trust, which is exactly why abundance has to connect back to relationship. You cannot take your foot off the brake in a car you believe is about to crash.

The landmine map

A relationship built on scarcity turns into a landmine map.

There are subjects you do not talk about. If you have been together long enough, you both know where they are. Men, there are things you have learned not to bring up, maybe at certain times, maybe at all. Women, there are things you know will make him shut down or make his temper flare, so you route around them. There are days you do not talk about money. Tones of voice that are not okay to use. A whole terrain the two of you have quietly learned to tiptoe across.

It was not like this at the beginning. When you first came together there were no landmines. You were just there with each other, saying whatever, wanting whatever, unguarded.

The map got drawn one buried thing at a time. Every unhandled moment, every suppressed feeling, every argument that got shoved under the rug instead of resolved, became a place you stopped stepping, because stepping there caused pain. And every year the safe ground got a little smaller. A little less room to move. A little less space to be honest. A little more of the relationship marked off as territory you cannot enter without setting something off.

You can live an entire relationship this way. Most people do. That is what a lot of long marriages actually are underneath the calm surface: two people holding their breath, standing on a shrinking patch of safe ground, both exhausted from the effort of not stepping wrong.

And it is no mystery why desire dies in that environment. Desire needs room. It needs both people out of their heads. When both of you are constantly calculating what is okay to say, what is safe to bring up, what you are still quietly resentful about not being able to name, there is no attention left over for wanting each other. The head is full, so the body goes quiet.

When a long relationship goes cold, and when the sex fades, it is almost never that you stopped loving each other. You did not stop wanting each other. You ran out of places to stand.

The way out is not more careful tiptoeing. It is a shift out of fear and into trust. So let me show you what that trust looks like, first in a man, then in a woman, then in the two of you together.

Abundance in a man

You will hear a lot about men needing an abundance mindset if you spend any time in the manosphere or the red pill world. Drill into what they usually mean by it and you find something small. Abundance, in that framing, is about options. How many women could I have. How replaceable is she to me. The whole strategy is to make yourself seem so valuable that the people around you are afraid to lose you, so that you can extract what you want from them.

That is not abundance. That is scarcity in a nicer suit. It is still built entirely on the take, and it rests on the lie that you get to decide you are high value. You do not. The world reflects your value back to you. You cannot declare it into being.

Real abundance in a man starts from the opposite direction. We are built to give first. What we receive back from what we give is how we fill ourselves up. A man on the take, guarding his value and collecting leverage, has the whole engine running backward.

Living from your masculine core is not a list of behaviors

Masculine essence usually gets taught as a checklist. Be decisive. Hold frame. Lead. Take charge.

You can run that list and watch it fail. I know because I have done it. The behaviors are downstream of something you either have or do not have yet, and no amount of performing the behaviors installs the thing underneath.

The thing underneath is the ability to live in your body, in the present moment, from a state of trust. A man who does not trust that things will work out will always feel he has to control, force, or manipulate his way to the outcome he needs. And control, force, and manipulation are the opposite of presence.

Control is always the tell

No man thinks of himself as controlling. Ask one and he will tell you he is a good guy. So let me show you what control actually looks like, because it is subtle and it is almost never the caricature.

It looks like needing to set the parameters of a conversation before it starts. When do I bring this up. How do I phrase it so she does not get upset.

It looks like monitoring her mood and working to cheer her up, not for her sake but so that you can feel okay again.

It looks like engaging in the argument at all. There is no reason for a man to get into a disagreement trying to win, to be right, or to make her understand his side. Every one of those is a thing you are trying to achieve, and the need to achieve it is control.

It looks like laying out a plan for how something in your life should go, having it not go that way, and getting thrown off or upset. That is your need for control meeting reality, and losing.

Every one of those is a man managing his own fear by managing his environment. It feels like leadership from the inside. It is bracing against loss. It is scarcity.

What changes when a man trusts he will be okay

An abundant man is not the guy who could go get another woman. An abundant man is one who trusts that he will be okay no matter how the night goes, whether or not she wants him tonight, whether or not the plan holds.

He may still want things to go a particular way. He has simply stopped requiring it, because he can see reality for what it is and meet it. This is where we are now, even if it is not what I pictured, so this is where we go from. That small, stark difference is the entirety of abundance, and it changes everything visible about a man.

He can be present. Presence is only possible when there is nothing you have to secure. A man who needs the outcome cannot be here, because half of him is already out ahead of the moment, arranging the environment so he lands where he thinks he needs to land. Drop the need and you come back into the room.

He can hold her. All the energy that was going into bracing, into avoiding the bad outcome and forcing the good one, comes back to you when you step into presence. Now you have the capacity to be with her on a hard day, to actually listen, to learn something about her experience that makes you a better leader precisely because you were there for it instead of using it to get somewhere.

He can lead without gripping. Leadership is not getting behind her to push her toward what you want, and it is not getting out in front to drag her there. It is standing beside her, arm around her, saying let's go. From there you can be with her when she hesitates, and you can be with her when she wants to bolt. Sometimes leadership even means gently holding her back when she is getting ahead of herself. None of that is available to a man who is white-knuckling the wheel.

He can hear no. This is the big one. A man in scarcity cannot receive a no. Not about sex, not about a plan, not about anything, because the no does not land as information. It lands as a verdict. You are bad. You do not deserve it. Something is wrong with you. A man in abundance hears the same no and it stays what it is. She is tired. She is not here tonight. Something is going on that he does not fully understand. It is about her, and he can let it be hers.

Why this is attractive, and why you cannot fake it

Here is the mechanism, because it matters more than any technique.

A woman's nervous system is reading your nervous system. She feels what you feel. She is an emotional being and she is good at this, better than you are.

When your inner state is scarcity, fear, control, the need to force an outcome, you are broadcasting that something is wrong and that you are not okay. Her system picks that up and reads it as a threat somewhere in the environment. Sometimes she reads it as you treating her like the threat, which is what is happening when you get defensive. Either way, her body cannot locate the danger, so it goes looking. She starts scanning you, scanning the room, dropping into her head, going vigilant. That state is many things. Desire is not one of them.

A man settled in himself broadcasts the opposite. No threat here. I am relaxed because I am okay. When she feels that, she can stop scanning. Her system can finally come down. And from that ground, desire has room to rise. This is why real confidence is attractive to women. Not the performance of confidence, the real thing, which requires a genuine inner peace underneath it.

Neediness pushes desire away, and not because it is weak. It is unattractive because it puts her in charge of whether you are okay. No one can surrender to, follow, or let go around a person who is depending on them for stability. When your energy is aimed at getting her to want you, at getting her to feel a certain way about you, you have handed her the job of holding you up, and she cannot feel desire for someone she is holding up.

The man who does not need her to want him is the man she can actually want.

This is going to sound like a trick, and some men will try to run it as one. Do not. Performed indifference is scarcity in a costume, and she will read it instantly, because the thing she is reading was never your behavior. It is your energy, and underneath the performance the energy is still fear. You cannot change what you do and get there. You have to change who you are. That is harder, slower, and far more demanding, and it is the only thing that is real. You cannot fake this. You have to build it.

Abundance in a woman

Almost every woman I talk to wants to be able to let go. To surrender, to relax, to stop running everything. And it is often the thing she feels furthest from, because letting go feels like the moment everything falls apart.

It is almost never that she does not want to surrender. Surrender requires trust, and she is holding up a guard she built for good reasons. Something in her life taught her to protect herself, and that protection kept her safe, and now dropping it feels like walking into the open unarmed. The guard is the very thing standing between her and the freedom she is reaching for, and it is also the thing her whole history is telling her not to put down.

What scarcity looks like in a woman

A lot of it looks the same as it does in a man. Control, and the fear of releasing control. In a modern household that often shows up as running the budget, the calendar, the plans, the logistics. It also shows up as managing the emotional temperature of the house, the endless quiet negotiation of everyone's moods.

There is also a facade, and this one runs deeper in women than in men. She does not let even her partner see her all the way. She will not come fully undone in front of him. She cannot let herself be truly wanted, because being wanted requires being seen, and being seen is exactly what the guard exists to prevent. The thing she most wants is the thing she is quietly pushing away, because openness once cost her something and now openness itself feels dangerous.

Then there is testing. Poking at him, questioning him, pushing to find out whether he is strong enough to hold. Women do this naturally, and underneath it is a genuine and reasonable need: she has to feel safe before she can let go. But the unconscious testing often pushes away the very thing it is searching for. On the surface it reads as blame, as criticism, as distrust. And there is distrust present, even when he has not yet done anything to earn it.

Trust has two sides. There is trustworthiness, whether the other person can be relied on, and there is the capacity to trust, whether you are able to receive reliability when it is offered. You need both. A perfectly trustworthy man gets nowhere with a woman who has no capacity to trust, and a woman full of trust gets nowhere with a man who keeps proving untrustworthy. Most couples work hard on the first side and never touch the second.

And there is comparison. Measuring herself against a standard, against perfection, against other women. Perfectionism is comparison pointed inward. Seeing other women as threats rather than as people is comparison pointed outward. Both come from the same belief that there is not enough, that her worth is scarce and has to be defended.

What changes when a woman trusts she will be okay

She can drop the wheel. Trusting that things will work out means she does not have to run the entire operation, and it does not all have to go her way for her to believe it will be okay. Her fear will tell her that what she needs is a man to take this off her hands and do it for her. Maybe. But he cannot even begin to do that while she refuses to let go of it. The wheel has to come free before anyone can take it.

She can stop catastrophizing. From scarcity, the worst case always feels one step away. The truer thing is that it will most likely work out fine, and even when it does not go the way she pictured, she will handle it. That is the abundant read on the same uncertain future.

She can drop the guard. The persona, the false self she holds up in front of her, drains her of her own aliveness. A woman living in control is spending most of her attention protecting herself, and every unit of attention spent on protection is a unit not spent on feeling. The guard is not free. It costs her exactly the vividness she is trying to get back.

She can surrender without fear. Surrender is not submission to a man. It is the willingness to stop bracing. That is only available when the belief underneath is I am going to be okay, and no man can install that belief for her. He can make it easier. He cannot reach into her inner world and put it there. A woman waiting for a man to hand her a security that only she can generate is stuck in a loop she cannot exit, because she is asking the wrong source for it.

She can want out loud. Abundance around desire means knowing what she wants and being able to ask for it without pre-negotiating the disappointment. His no, or his not yet, does not get to mean something about her. She can want fully, trust that there is enough to go around, and let a no tonight be a no tonight rather than a verdict on whether she gets to be wanted at all.

She can receive. This is the biggest one. Many women are deeply practiced at giving, doing, controlling, managing, and much less practiced at receiving. A man is built to give first and be filled by what returns to him. A woman is built to receive first and to give back out of the fullness of what she has received. Receiving means being open, and open means exposed, and if the belief underneath is that there is not enough to go around, exposure feels like danger. Letting your guard down before you know you will get what you want feels reckless. It is not. It only means things might unfold differently than you expected.

You are already all the way there

Women, you do not have to try to be more feminine. Men, you do not have to try to be more masculine.

You already are, completely. The masculine is already yours. The feminine is already yours. What blocks access to it is the false belief that you are not going to be okay, that things will not work out, that you have to force and control to keep the world from falling apart. That belief pulls you up out of your body and into your head, and everything essential lives in the body, in the present moment.

Come back to now, from a place of trust, and what you have been trying to manufacture turns out to have been there the whole time.

The couple: from negotiation to partnership

Two people sitting in the car together, both watching for a threat, both riding the brake, do not have a relationship. They have a negotiation. An ongoing argument about how fast to go, when to slow down, who is doing it wrong.

When you are turned toward each other looking for the threat, your partner becomes the source of the problem and the place you go for the solution, both at once, which is an impossible thing to ask of one person.

There is a different arrangement. Sitting on the same side of the table. Standing shoulder to shoulder. Facing the same direction, out toward the life in front of you. That is a partnership. Scarcity puts you face to face, hunting each other for causes and fixes. Abundance turns you both forward, toward the horizon and everything that might be waiting on it.

Shared trust is a different thing than individual trust

Individual abundance says: I am going to be okay.

Shared abundance says: whatever happens, we are going to be okay. We will handle it.

That second sentence is the most valuable thing a couple can own, and reaching the place where you can both stand side by side and actually mean it is worth whatever it takes to get there.

A couple who truly believes it no longer has to prevent problems. They can stop pre-negotiating every possible failure. They can stop assigning blame every time something goes sideways, because nothing that goes wrong has to be litigated or figured out or defended against. They just keep going forward. Avoidance stops even occurring to them, because avoidance was only ever necessary if getting hit meant being destroyed, and they have stopped believing that.

This is how the landmine map actually clears. Not by tiptoeing around the buried things forever, which gets you nowhere. Sometimes you do have to step on one on purpose, blow it up, have the conversation you have been suppressing for years. But often, once the internal perspective has really shifted, once the relationship itself is being held in trust rather than fear, those old landmines stop being landmines. They turn back into ordinary things you get to talk about, or things you find you do not even need to talk about anymore.

What becomes available when the map is gone

Step out of the world where everything is a potential problem and your partner is a potential threat to the supply, and what is left is each other. The way it was at the beginning, before the two of you accumulated all of this weight.

You can play. When was the last time you really laughed together? You cannot play on ground you think might explode. Safety is the precondition for play, and play is one of the first things a relationship loses and one of the surest signs of one that is alive.

You can adventure. Take the trip. Make the move. Start the business. Take the risk. From trust, each of these is an appealing possibility rather than a terrifying threat, because failure is survivable and you both know it.

You can explore each other. You can bring up a fantasy, a desire, a thing you have wanted to try and been afraid to name. Seven and a half or eight years ago I asked Dawn a question that changed the whole shape of our marriage, and I did not know how she would answer when I asked it. What let me ask was an abundant posture I could not have fully explained at the time. I trusted that speaking the true thing was right, regardless of the answer, and that whatever came back, we would be okay. When you trust that things will work out, you stop needing to avoid the real conversations, and the real conversations are where the aliveness is.

You can be honest. In a relationship running on fear, the truth is dangerous, so it gets managed and shaded and withheld. In a relationship running on trust, the truth is necessary and welcomed, even when it is hard to hear, because you both know the relationship can hold it.

You can repair. When something does go wrong, when the fantasy does not land the way you pictured, when one of you fails at something, you are both still facing forward. You help each other up and keep walking. Couples without shared trust do not repair. They manage, and store, and add another spot to the map.

Not just better. Easier.

This does not only make a relationship better. It makes it easier, and easier is the part almost nobody promises you.

Being in connection with another person does not have to be hard. Fear, lack, control, and force are what make it hard. A struggling relationship generates an enormous amount of labor: the constant reassurance, the talking everything through, the damage control, the careful engineering of how you phrase things and when. Remove the scarcity and most of that labor simply has nothing left to do.

You do not have to fix the relationship. The relationship gets easier because you stop manufacturing the problems that fear was creating in the first place.

And it spills. When the relationship gets easier, everyone relaxes, and a whole set of previously hard things get easier too.

Money conversations get easier. Two people in scarcity cannot really talk about money, because it was never a conversation about money. It was a conversation about safety, with both people braced to defend. The same two people in trust can look at the same numbers, including bad numbers, and talk about them like weather. What is true, what do we want, what do we do. The numbers did not change. The belief that they will be handled did.

Sex conversations get easier. In scarcity, "I want more" lands as an accusation and "not tonight" lands as a verdict, so nothing true gets said and nothing changes and the silence becomes its own evidence that something is wrong. In trust, desire can be spoken plainly, a no is information, and a mismatch is just a mismatch to talk through. The couples who talk most easily about sex are rarely the ones with the fewest problems. They are the ones who trust they can handle the problems.

And it keeps going. Time, capacity, health, creativity, family. Wherever your life feels like a struggle, look underneath and you will usually find the same scarcity running the show. Shift the root and all of the branches ease at once.

The sentence to sit with

Can the two of you sit down together and say, and mean, "if that happened, we would handle it, and we would still be okay"?

This is close to what I mean when I talk about devotion as a permanent, non-revocable commitment. Part of that commitment is this: whatever you say, whatever you want, whatever you bring up, whatever you do, I am not going anywhere. We will deal with it. I am going to accept you no matter what.

People often hear that as a red flag, like you are throwing the door open for someone to walk all over you. The opposite is what happens. That kind of commitment takes all the pressure off, and when the pressure is off, nobody is getting walked on. The walking-on, the manipulating, the controlling, all of it comes from fear. Take away the fear and there is no reason left to do any of those things. Total acceptance does not invite the worst in someone. It removes the conditions that were producing it.

An honest word before you go trying this

This does not resolve in a week, or in a single conversation.

There are places in you, I can almost guarantee it, where you have felt unsafe, where you have been afraid, where you have gripped the wheel hard for a long time. You may badly want to trust that life is going to work out, that you are going to be okay. And the honest truth is that right now, in those places, you are not there yet.

Wanting to get there is itself a beautiful thing, and there is going to be an in-between. A stretch of time while you loosen the grip and gather actual evidence, experience by experience, that you really are okay when you let go. When you drop control. When you speak the thing. When you surrender.

The first times you try, you are going to feel unsafe. Vulnerable. You may reach for it and snap right back into shutdown, into whatever your old survival pattern was. That is okay. Take it as information about the size of the fear, not as proof that you cannot do this. It will feel reckless and exposed and dangerous, and you are going to need practice, and you are going to need to give yourself and each other a lot of grace.

Women, let him learn what it feels like to step into trust. Men, let her learn what it feels like to let go of control. Give each other the room to do it badly at first, because doing it badly is how anyone learns what it feels like at all. You have to let each other start, and neither of you is going to be good at it right away.

Abundance is trust. In a relationship, the trust that matters most is the trust that you are going to be okay, that you will be there for each other no matter what, and that whatever happens, you will handle it together.

Last week you were riding around with your foot on the brake, alone in the car. When the two of you take your feet off the brake together, you get to look through the windshield at a life full of possibility, of pleasure, of adventure, of everything you wanted out of being in a relationship in the first place.

That is the whole thing. Not a harder relationship you are strong enough to endure. An easier one you are free enough to enjoy.

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Go deeper

The section on the man, on trading control for presence and building the capacity to actually hold her, is the heart of Becoming a Dominant Man.

For the woman who recognized herself in the guard, the testing, and the fear of dropping the wheel, start with Submissive Foundations.

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