What Nobody Teaches Men About Desire
I went looking for ways to spice up my marriage.
What I found instead was how truly ignorant I was about human anatomy, sexual desire, deep connection, and the importance of honest communication in intimate relationships. Not a little ignorant. Profoundly, completely, embarrassingly ignorant. And I was in my late forties when I figured this out.
This is the first post in a series about shame and desire in long marriages. I’m starting here because I think the ignorance has to be named before anything else can be addressed. You can’t fix what you haven’t identified. And most men have never been given the language to identify any of this.
I wasn’t either. Here’s why.
The Generation That Raised Me
My parents loved me. I never doubted that. But they came from a world in turmoil, and that world shaped everything they understood about sex, desire, and emotional life.
My mother’s formative years, ages seven through fourteen, were spent in Germany during World War II. Religion, shame and more importantly danger were the framework she was raised in. The message she carried, and passed forward without meaning to, was that sex was shameful, that men were brutes who only wanted one thing, and that women who craved desire were something less than respectable. And, for those that indulged, bad things happened to them. That was the framework she had. It was the only one she’d been given. My wife carried a version of that same message into our marriage. I wrote about it in What I Never Told My Wife.
My father’s formative years were spent in an ethnic section of Los Angeles during the same period. He came out of that time with a strained relationship with his own father, an 8-year stint in the military and a conviction that toughness was the primary virtue a man could possess. Accessing his emotional life was nearly impossible. He saw war coming and raised me accordingly. Sports from an early age. Physical toughness. No room for vulnerability, tears, or the kind of interior life that intimacy actually requires.
My father was deeply intellectual. He could discuss almost anything with academic rigor. But emotional expression was nearly impossible for him. The feeling was there, I never doubted that either, but accessing it and naming it out loud was so hard for him that it was usually accompanied by tears. I told him I loved him in my twenties. It was the first time I remember saying it to him, and the first time I remember hearing it back. We were both undone by it. He struggled with that wound for years.
If saying I love you was that hard, every other conversation about the interior life was next to impossible. The door to emotional expression was closed before it was ever opened.
What the Schoolyard Taught Me
With both parents effectively unable to speak about sex and desire, I was left to the schoolyard, the streets, and my older siblings to piece together an education.
The schoolyard was the blind leading the blind, and my much older brother introduced me to porn inadvertently when I found his stash hidden underneath his bed.
High school sex education in the 1980s covered basic anatomy, procreation, and how to prevent it. That was the curriculum. Nothing about pleasure. Nothing about the differences in how desire works between bodies. Nothing about the clitoris, the g-spot, nerve endings, or the gap in activation time between men and women. Nothing about what it actually means to be present with another person in an intimate moment.
Then came college in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the AIDS crisis arrived with it. Whatever thin conversation existed about sex before that was replaced almost entirely by fear and lethality. The message delivered to my generation of young men was about the danger of our penises being inserted into places they shouldn’t be without a protective sheath. Not education. Not understanding. Fear, prevention, and the suggestion that desire itself was potentially lethal.
A generation of young men whose sexuality arrived at exactly the moment it became something to be afraid of.
The Competition
Perhaps most damaging of all was what sex meant in my male peer relationships.
It was a competition. Part of a broader hierarchy that measured men against each other in intelligence, earning potential, and virility. Success with women created a pecking order. The language we used reflected it. Conquest language. Scorekeeping. I banged this girl. I got a hand job. The dehumanization of women was built into the vocabulary and I recognized even then that it never sat right with me.
There was a joking refrain common among my peers in those years, going fat and ugly early, meaning you pursued women beneath your standards to avoid competing for the ones you actually wanted. It was a way of opting out of a competition you weren't sure you could win.
I did not subscribe to this dehumanizing viewpoint, but most nights in my early twenties I was alone anyway, having consumed a twelve pack of Miller Genuine Draft, angry at the women who didn’t notice my good qualities, and more importantly angry at myself for not being enough. The scorekeeping and conquest language was a world I observed and participated in out of survival, but never fully bought into. What I actually wanted, underneath all of it, was deep intimacy. Real connection. Something none of that competition had any room for.
What Men Are Expected to Know
Here is the thing that strikes me most, looking back.
Men are expected to know about sex. It’s assumed. Nobody teaches it, nobody discusses it honestly, and nobody admits to not knowing it because admitting ignorance is its own form of failure in the competition. So men perform knowing. They fake expertise they don’t have in bedrooms with people they care about. They make it up as they go, hoping their partner won’t notice the gap.
This is why so many of us jackhammer our lovers, ejaculate and then fall over into a heap thinking we accomplished something, while our lovers are left empty and unfulfilled.
I did this for years. The gap was enormous and I had no idea how enormous it was until I started actually looking.
What I didn’t know about the female body could fill a library. What I didn’t know about the psychology of desire, about shame and its effects, about the difference between physical readiness and emotional arrival, about communication and what it actually requires of two people who want to be genuinely close, was staggering. And I had been married for more than twenty years before I started figuring any of it out.
What I See Now
I work in a heavily male-dominated environment. Most of the men I work with under forty have opted out of relationships entirely, or are on the margins of them, for one reason or another. Their private needs are met by pornography without the challenge of communication, vulnerability, or the sustained work of maintaining a real connection with another person. Why compete for something so hard when the need can be met without any of it?
I find it depressing. Not judgmental, just genuinely sad. Because I know what’s on the other side of that work. I know what becomes possible when two people start telling the truth to each other about desire and shame and what they’ve been carrying. I wrote about the long way around in The People We Share Our Bed With. I know because I’m living it now, in my fifties, with a woman I’ve been married to for twenty-seven years.
It took me this long to get here. It didn’t have to.
The Beginning of the Answer
I started this post by telling you I went looking for ways to spice up my marriage.
What I found was the size of the gap between what I knew and what was actually true. About the female body. About desire. About what shame does to two people who love each other and can’t figure out why something that should be natural feels so complicated.
That discovery was the starting point. Not a solution, just the first honest look at the size of the problem. The recognition that I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and that finding out was going to require something I had never been taught to do: ask honest questions and sit with uncomfortable answers.
The next post in this series is about the conversation most married couples are avoiding. The one that has to happen before anything else can change.
If you’ve been reading along here, you already know it’s possible. It just takes longer than it should because nobody teaches us any of this.
Nobody taught me. I had to go find it myself. If you want to know where I found it, start with Three Voices That Changed How We Think About Intimacy
A note: This series addresses long-term committed marriages where both partners are approaching their intimacy journey with honesty and mutual respect. If your relationship is navigating something more serious, please seek the support of a professional. No blog post is a substitute for that.
If anything in this post resonated, I put my five most important insights about long-term intimacy into a free guide — including five action steps you can take right now to move the needle. It's short, honest, and written from 27 years of real marriage. No fluff. Just the things that actually worked for us. Download it free below.
