Why the Love and Desire Died in Your Relationship (And How to Get Them Back)

Most people who've watched their relationship lose its energy have a story about it. The intimacy started fading around year three. The desire slowed down sometime after the kids arrived. The connection gradually started feeling more like a business partnership than a marriage.

And because we're wired to look for cause and effect, we point at something. The stress of life. Growing apart. Mismatched needs. We build narratives that explain what happened, and most of those narratives locate the problem somewhere outside of us.

What I want to do in this post is offer a completely different frame for what's actually happening when love and desire fade in a long-term relationship. Not as a theory. As something my wife Dawn and I have lived. We went from one of the most sexually charged, alive connections I'd ever felt to a dead bedroom, to a marriage where we both quietly suffered while carefully avoiding anything that might upset the other person. And then we came back from that. And beyond it.

What I'm about to share is why any of it happened. And why it doesn't have to stay that way.

This is Episode 137 of the Infinite Devotion podcast. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

Polarity Isn't Something You Do

The word polarity gets used a lot in relationship and intimacy spaces. So do "masculine energy" and "feminine energy." And most of the time, they're used in a way that makes people feel like they're supposed to do something with them. Deploy them. Practice them. Turn them on.

Polarity isn't a tool. It isn't a technique. It isn't something you apply to make your relationship work better.

Polarity is a description of something that is already happening. It's happening in your relationship right now. It's happening inside of you right now. In the same way that homeostasis is already regulating your body, in the same way that everything in nature finds a balance point between opposing forces, polarity is already at work in your life.

So this isn't a concept you need to learn from scratch. It's a framework for understanding what you've already been experiencing, so you can stop working against it and start working with it.

When things aren't working in your relationship, polarity isn't explaining what went wrong. It's showing you where something is out of alignment inside of you. It's diagnostic more than prescriptive. And that distinction matters, because it changes where you look for the answer.

Two Types of Energy

Before anything else makes sense here, you need to understand that there are two distinct types of energy moving inside every human being and between every couple.

The first is sexual energy. Not just sex as an activity, but the energy of aliveness. The feeling of being lit up from the inside, of being genuinely drawn toward someone with real pull. The energy that made you stay up until 3am in a new relationship, talking and laughing and touching, not because you decided to but because sleep felt like a waste. That's sexual energy. It's the energy of desire, of wanting, of vibrating with the feeling of being fully alive.

The second is emotional energy. The energy of love, of intimacy, of being truly known. The depth and warmth that make a relationship feel like home.

These are not the same thing. And this matters more than most people realize.

They don't always move together. A relationship can feel emotionally close but sexually flat. Or intensely charged sexually but emotionally distant and cold. That's because these are two separate channels, and they can be obstructed or inverted independently of each other.

This is why addressing one doesn't automatically fix the other. A couple who does therapy to improve their emotional communication doesn't automatically get their desire back. A couple who tries to force more sex doesn't automatically feel closer. Each channel has to be understood on its own terms.

When both are flowing well, you get what most people actually want: a deep, honest emotional love and a hot, alive, intense sexual connection. Not one or the other. Both. At the same time. They don't compete with each other. They can both grow over time. I know this because Dawn and I are living it.

The Battery and the Two Light Bulbs

The most useful way I've found to explain how polarity actually works is through electricity.

Any electrical system has two wires. A battery has a plus and a minus. Electricity flows out from the plus, through whatever the circuit is powering, and back to the minus. That's a complete circuit. Break it anywhere, and everything goes dark.

Positive polarity is the outbound energy. The plus. The energy that moves outward into the world. Negative polarity is the inbound energy. The minus. The receptive energy.

Masculine energy is the plus. The outgoing. Feminine energy is the minus. The receptive.

And here's the part that changes everything: every human being has both.

Every man has masculine and feminine energy inside of him. Every woman has masculine and feminine energy inside of her. The ratio isn't what determines how you show up in a relationship. The direction of flow is. Which way is the battery facing inside of you?

Now here's where this becomes important. There isn't just one place where energy moves out of you and into the relationship. There are two. The emotional channel and the physical/sexual channel. And that means there are actually two light bulbs between any two people.

The first light bulb is the emotional one. It represents the love, the closeness, the depth of intimacy between two people. When both people's emotional energy is moving in its natural direction, this bulb turns on. The love feels real and close and alive.

The second light bulb is the sexual one. It represents the desire, the physical aliveness, the intensity of attraction and passion. When both people's sexual energy is moving in its natural direction, this bulb turns on too.

Most couples have at least one of these dim or completely dark. Some have both.

When both are bright, the relationship holds deep emotional love and hot, intense sexual desire at the same time. These aren't in conflict. They're two separate circuits, and both can be fully alive. The brighter the energy inside each person, the brighter both bulbs get. That's the relationship most people actually want, and it's what becomes available when both people sort out what's happening inside of themselves.

Before I go any further, there's one more thing I need to land here: the light bulb is also you. Before any of this can show up between you and your partner, the circuit has to be running inside of you first. Your inner polarity comes before anything else. The relationship is the output. It's always showing you what's happening inside each person. You cannot fix the relationship by working on the relationship. You can only fix the circuit.

New Relationship Energy: The Proof You Already Have

Before going deeper into what internal alignment looks like, I want to give you the clearest example most of us already have of polarity in its ideal state.

New relationship energy.

Think back to the beginning of a relationship. Yours now, or one you remember clearly. The staying up all night. The feeling of being completely alive around this person. The desire that came without effort. The emotional openness, the ability to just say what you actually thought and felt without overthinking it.

That wasn't magic. That wasn't just chemistry. That was polarity running in its natural state, without obstruction.

When a relationship is new, energy moves freely. There's no fear of loss yet. No attachment in the anxious sense. You haven't connected this person to your interior wounds yet. The history isn't there yet. So the sexual energy and the emotional energy that live inside of you move without anything in the way.

I've watched this play out repeatedly in the people around me. Men who in long-term relationships were emotionally guarded become completely open when something is new. They feel things and express things and show up in ways that surprise even themselves. Women who inside long-term relationships had lost access to their sexuality find themselves fully alive again, adventurous, turned on, naturally open.

Dawn and I lived both sides of this. She was intensely sexually alive at the beginning of our relationship. Full of desire, adventurous, always wanting, and she wore me out. I've told that story on this podcast before. And I was emotionally open in ways I hadn't been in previous relationships.

Then, as we deepened, things shifted. She slowly closed back down around her sexuality, which she chalked up to the infatuation stage ending. That's the story most people tell themselves. I closed back down emotionally as the relationship started stirring up old patterns in me.

What we thought we lost was never actually gone. The energy that was moving so freely in the beginning was still in us. It had just gotten blocked or redirected.

This is the most important thing new relationship energy tells you: the capacity was always there. It still is. What changed isn't the energy itself. What changed is what's in the way of it moving freely. The goal isn't to recreate NRE. The goal is to find and remove whatever is obstructing what was already there.

Internal Polarity: Which Way Is Your Battery Facing?

Relationship polarity is what happens between two people when their internal energy is moving in its natural direction. The relationship is the output. The inner world of each person is the source.

The real question is always about internal polarity first. How is the energy moving inside of you?

You have the masculine (outgoing) and the feminine (receptive) in equal measure inside of you. It's not about having more of one. It's about direction. Which way is the battery facing?

Think about the two channels: emotional and physical/sexual. Each has a direction. Are you giving or receiving emotionally? Are you giving or receiving in the sexual and physical world?

When those directions are arranged in alignment with your natural state, you feel like yourself. Solid. At ease. Things flow relatively naturally. When they're inverted, or when the flow is blocked altogether, you feel that too, even if you don't have language yet for what you're feeling.

What the Natural Masculine Expression Actually Is

Most men have what I'd call a masculine essence. In a man's natural state, the battery is positioned with the plus facing down toward the physical and sexual world, and the minus facing up toward the emotional world.

He leads with action. He gives first. He initiates, moves through the world, makes decisions, creates structure, takes responsibility for the direction of his life and his relationship. His sexuality is generative. He brings desire to his partner as something he's offering, not something he's trying to extract.

Then, with the minus facing up toward the emotional world, he is genuinely open and receptive there. He feels the world around him. He's moved by things. He's sensitive to the experiences of the people he loves, to beauty, to what's happening around him. He acts first, and then he feels what the world sends back.

From the inside, this feels like solidity. Like groundedness. Not because he's performing strength, but because he's leading with the part of himself that's built to lead. The receptive half is fully alive and intact. It just comes second.

A man in this state doesn't feel threatening to the people around him. He feels safe. Not because he's been managed or contained, but because his presence is rooted in giving rather than getting. A woman who encounters a man genuinely in this state will feel something shift in her. Her nervous system recognizes it before her mind does.

What Happens When a Man's Energy Inverts

When a man's energy is inverted, the battery flips. The minus is now facing the physical world, and the plus is facing up toward the emotional.

He leads with emotional expressiveness, but his sexuality and physical engagement have become needy and taking. He's oriented toward getting before giving. He needs more affection before he can offer more presence. More appreciation before more leadership. He receives first and then decides whether there's anything to give back.

This is the man who feels unsafe to a woman. Not dangerous in an obvious way, but unsafe in the felt sense. She can feel that he's leading with what he takes from her. Her energy, her attention, her approval, her body. She has to fill him up before anything returns. So she becomes the caretaker. The manager. She starts doing and deciding because no one else is, and someone has to.

Inside, this man often feels like a victim of his circumstances. Like things happen to him. Like he can't get traction. Always a little behind, always a little desperate, even if he can't name it that way.

The inversion doesn't make him a bad man. It makes him a man who adapted. Something happened that made it feel unsafe to lead with giving, unsafe to be the one who initiates and directs. And so the battery turned around. He just doesn't realize yet that the adaptation is costing him everything he actually wants.

What the Natural Feminine Expression Actually Is

A woman in her natural state has the battery positioned with the minus facing down toward the physical and sexual world, and the plus facing up toward the emotional world.

She leads with receptivity. She receives first in the physical and sexual realm, and then she gives from how that makes her feel. She's deeply present and responsive. She acts from her felt sense in the moment. It's an inherently now way of being.

From the inside, this feels like peace. Like ease. Like being genuinely at home in her own body. A woman in her natural feminine expression isn't passive. She's fully alive and deeply responsive. She just doesn't have to initiate the direction. She follows the lead of someone she trusts, and from that place she gives everything.

Her sexuality in this state is open and alive. Not because she's available to everyone, but because her receptivity naturally responds to a man who is genuinely in his masculine expression. The desire doesn't have to be manufactured or coaxed or negotiated for. It moves through her.

Her emotional life, with the plus facing up, is expressive and generous. She gives love, warmth, depth, feeling. The giving flows naturally from a place of having already received.

A woman in this state is genuinely easy to be around. Not in a diminished or compliant way. Easy in the sense that her energy isn't fighting itself.

What Feminine Inversion Looks Like

When a woman's energy inverts, the plus goes down and the minus goes up.

She's now giving first in the physical world. Doing, managing, controlling, deciding, initiating. She can't sit still, because sitting still puts her in receptivity, and receptivity doesn't feel safe right now. She has to keep her hands on everything. Keep moving. Keep managing. Because the moment she stops, she'd have to feel what she's been running from.

Emotionally, with the minus now pointing up, her emotional life becomes receptive and hypervigilant. She's scanning constantly, reading every room, picking up signals, looking for anything that might need fixing, anyone who might be upset, anything that could go sideways. Gathering information to figure out the next thing she needs to do. She's locked into a loop of doing, checking, doing, checking, always trying to stay ahead of something going wrong.

This is why a woman in inverted energy can swing between emotional volatility and complete emotional shutdown, often with not much in between. The reactivity isn't natural feeling. It's pressure that's built up from the constant scanning, spilling over because there's no safe container for it.

She's exhausted. She's carrying the work of both the masculine and the feminine, because the man in her life is often running an inverted energy too, and she's filling the vacuum his absent leadership created. She doesn't control because she's controlling by nature. She controls because no one else is, and not controlling feels like standing on the edge of something terrifying.

If there's no space for her to lead with receptivity, if no one is actually leading her, she does what any capable person does: she adapts to survive. She takes the wheel. And then everyone wonders why she's so burned out and why he feels so shut out.

Two Inverted Batteries in the Same Relationship

Here's what I want you to notice about the inverted man and the inverted woman I just described: they create each other.

An inverted man, leading with his minus, taking before giving, waiting to receive before he has anything to offer, leaves a vacuum. There's no one leading. No one going first. No one creating the structure and direction that makes it safe for a woman to let her guard down.

So she fills it. She has to. She steps into the masculine role because the alternative is chaos. And the moment she does, there's no longer any space for him to lead. Her plus sign is pointing down toward him. His plus sign is pointing down toward her. Two plus signs pointed at each other don't complete a circuit. They short it.

So the man stays in his minus, waiting to receive. She stays in her plus, because someone has to run this thing. And both of them feel vaguely to acutely terrible, and neither one knows exactly why.

This describes, at least partially, every struggling couple I've ever worked with. And it certainly described Dawn and me for years.

The Ceiling Fan

I want to give you a metaphor that makes this more concrete.

Every ceiling fan has a reverse switch. In winter, you flip it and the fan starts spinning the other direction, pushing the warm air that's pooled at the ceiling back down into the room.

What that switch actually does is invert the polarity to the motor. The electricity runs through the motor in the opposite direction, and the fan spins the other way.

Most relationships are ceiling fans running in the wrong direction.

The energy is moving through the motor backwards. The man is leading with his minus. The woman is leading with her plus. They're both working hard, both genuinely trying. And the relationship is reflecting exactly what's happening inside each of them.

The ceiling fan spinning the wrong way isn't the problem. It's a symptom. Something flipped the switch at some point. The question isn't how do you fix the fan. The question is what flipped the switch, and what it would take to flip it back.

When you find that switch and start to turn it around, the fan stops first. This is the part nobody warns you about. If you've been living in an inverted dynamic and one of you begins to genuinely shift, things are going to feel worse before they feel better. The peacekeeping patterns, the routines that kept things functional even in their broken state, the ways you'd learned to coexist around the inversion, those all stop working. There's a moment of real disorientation, of "is this relationship ending?"

It's not. The fan is coming to a stop before it can go the other direction.

The late Trevor Moawad wrote in It Takes What It Takes that you cannot shift a car from reverse into drive without going through neutral first. Trying to skip that stop destroys the transmission. The relationship has to come to a kind of stillness before it can move in the new direction.

I still have moments of this, and I think it's worth naming because I don't want anyone thinking we've got it perfectly figured out all the time. Just recently, Dawn asked me a question and something about the way she asked it, a little bit of her own fear underneath the words, triggered a memory in me of being accused as a kid of stealing something my cousin had actually taken. She was just asking a question. But something in the delivery put me on the defensive, and I got locked up. She started trying to manage the situation, I started trying to justify myself, and we were both briefly inverted. Her trying to control, me trying to defend.

The whole thing lasted maybe an hour. Then we both caught it, sorted ourselves out, and moved on. This used to be how we lived all the time. Now it's a blip. We're not perfect at this. We're just way better than we used to be, and getting better still, because the moment either of us notices we're spinning the wrong direction, we go to work on ourselves.

Why the Battery Got Flipped

The inversion itself isn't the problem. It's a response to something deeper.

At some point in your life, something happened. Maybe many things. And somewhere in your nervous system, a decision got made: it isn't safe to give first. It isn't safe to be receptive here. It isn't safe to want this, or to be seen wanting this. And you adapted.

The inversion is a completely sensible response to an environment that wasn't safe. The problem is that the original environment changed, or you grew up and left it, and the adaptation kept running. It became your default operating system long after it stopped being necessary.

So the inversion isn't your fault. And it can't be fixed by addressing the inversion directly. You can't un-flip a battery by focusing on the battery. You have to understand what flipped it.

Almost always, what's underneath an inversion is something you decided to believe about yourself, or about love, or about the world, in response to what happened. Things like: I'm not enough. Love always leaves. If I give first, I'll be depleted. If I'm vulnerable, I'll get hurt. If I let go of control, everything will fall apart.

These beliefs operate below the level of conscious thought. You're not walking around reminding yourself of them. They just shape everything about how you move through the world.

Finding them is the real work. Not as an intellectual exercise, but as an honest investigation into where you're still operating from a story that isn't true, or isn't true anymore.

Blocked Energy

Alongside inversion, there's another thing that happens, and it's worth naming separately.

A block is different from an inversion. Instead of energy running in the wrong direction, a block is energy not running at all. Something shut down. A switch got thrown somewhere that stopped the flow.

Energy cannot sit still. If it can't move outward, it moves inward. And when it does, it causes damage from the inside.

I believe a lot of chronic stress, anxiety, and even physical health problems are the direct result of blocked energy. Dawn is my clearest example.

For years, she had serious digestive and intestinal problems. Food sensitivities, IBS, a standing Subscribe & Save order on Amazon for MiraLAX that felt like a permanent fixture in our life. No physical intervention touched it. Diet changes, medications, none of it worked in any lasting way.

When Dawn started doing the real work of understanding why she had shut down so thoroughly, why she had dissociated from so much of her own experience, why she had built such effective and thorough walls around her feelings and her sexuality, things began to shift. Not overnight. Over time. And now she has no food sensitivities. She almost never has an upset stomach. The same digestive system that was in constant revolt for years just works.

The only thing that changed is that she stopped blocking her own energy.

This is what blocked energy does. It doesn't disappear when we suppress it. It turns inward and finds a way to be known. The body keeps an honest account of what the mind refuses to feel.

What You Can Actually Do

The natural masculine expression is your default state as a man. The natural feminine expression is your default state as a woman. You were born into it. You don't have to construct it or perform it. It got scared out of you, or shamed out of you, or it became too costly to stay in it somewhere along the way. But it's still there.

The work is never about adding something new. It's always about finding what you're holding that can be let go.

What do you believe about yourself that isn't true, or isn't true anymore? When did you first start feeling unsafe to lead, or unsafe to receive? What happened that made it feel better to operate from the other half of yourself?

These aren't rhetorical questions. Sitting with them honestly, without rushing to an answer or retreating into analysis, is where the real movement begins.

For a man, the places to look are where you're waiting to get before you give. Where you're leading with what you need rather than what you're bringing. Where you're operating from scarcity and hunger rather than from genuine desire to contribute.

For a woman, the places to look are where you can't sit still. What you're managing or controlling that you could actually put down. What you'd have to feel if you stopped doing for five minutes.

The modalities that tend to help most here are the ones that go below rational thought, because rational thought is mostly what we use to maintain our defenses. EMDR. Hypnotherapy. Internal family systems. Somatic experiencing. A good practitioner in any of these can help you access what analysis alone can't reach.

None of them will work for someone who isn't ready to honestly look. Who's still insisting it's the relationship's fault, or their partner's fault, or their past's fault. Accountability, in the literal sense of being willing to take account of what's actually happening inside of you, is the prerequisite.

But for the person who's ready, the shift starts almost immediately. Not in the relationship first. In the felt sense of yourself. A man who begins leading with his plus, who starts going first without waiting to see what he's going to get back, feels different inside before the relationship reflects it. A woman who allows herself to stop running and feels what's underneath the constant motion starts to soften in a way that surprises her.

And when that happens in even one person, the other person feels it. Not as a demand. As a pull. The circuit starts to complete.

The Relationship Is Not the Problem

Everything in this post points to one thing.

You cannot fix your relationship by working on your relationship.

The relationship is the two light bulbs. The emotional one and the sexual one. Both are output. Both are always reflecting what's happening inside each person, not causing it. They turn on when both people sort themselves out. They don't turn on when you poke at them directly.

Dawn and I came to understand all of this through a dominance and submission dynamic, which has been the context for most of what we've taught over the years. But that framing isn't the point. You could remove those labels from us entirely, and everything I've described here would still be true. It's about how each of us straightened our own battery out. The D/s dynamic was just the context in which we learned it.

When both people do the honest work of coming back to their natural state, not by becoming different people but by releasing what was never really them in the first place, the relationship transforms without being engineered. The love and desire that felt like they died weren't gone. They got obstructed.

Find the obstruction.

That's the whole thing.

Episode 137 of the Infinite Devotion podcast covers all of this in full. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

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