I have known thousands of men intimately. I know their minds and their hearts, their situations and how they got there.
Over time, I started to see common patterns in the sexual journey of these men, things that they did at the beginning of their marriage that lead to sexual dissatisfaction and heartache later on. So now, when I come across a man that I suspect is similar, I can tell his sexlife journey back to him… and he thinks I’m some kind of sexual prophet. But no, it’s that a lot of men have the same story, they just don’t reveal it to each other.
Men are generally sexually adventurous and kinky. They like to explore and experiment. They wish to have as many sexual experiences – different types of sex – as they can to feel like they are making the most of their sexlife. And… a man’s sexlife is very important to him. It is part of his happiness and identity.
However, society downplays how important sex is to men, shaming them for needing it as much as they do. Not only that, society downplays how much control women have over a man’s sexlife. Talking about safe and healthy situations, the woman is the one who dictates the type of sex, the frequency and the mode. Women have got men by the balls – women get what they want, how they want it, or it is no sex at all. Men are typically afraid to voice their wants and desires, because not only will they get a ‘no’ to sex, but the woman often rejects him completely for being too ‘kinky’.
The situation is best discussed with an analogy of meat eaters and vegans. Why? Because it is not the actual sex that I am talking about, but the process of how a man creates his own sexual misery. So…
The man is a meat eater. He enjoys big, red, juicy steaks, honeyed-BBQ ribs every week, and especially grilled chicken to get the protein he needs for building muscle for his gym plan. He’s having a great time eating meet. But then, he meets a woman who he starts to fall for, but she’s a vegan.
To go on dates and get to know her, he takes her to vegan restaurants. And as he falls for her, he puts away his love for meat so he can be around her more, to please her, and to become a viable option to her for something more serious. He rationalises that he like vegetables too, so he’s not opposed to veganism, but if he wants a chance with her, he certainly knows he needs to become vegan too.
So… The man becomes vegan. The woman falls in love with him and they get married to live a vegan lifestyle. He is fully committed, but there is just something that he can’t put his finger on that makes him feel he is not completely satisfied. He loves his wife, loves being vegan with her, but all the vegetables just don’t seem enough. He notices that he can’t build the same muscle like he used to, and he has been feeling a little low emotionally. For the first couple of years, the man’s veganism is going strong, but one day he is walking past a grilled chicken takeout and smells the juicy smoked BBQ. His body has such a physical reaction that he has to sit down. All of a sudden, he knows what has been getting him down lately – he needs meat. He denies himself for the next few months, but the smell of that chicken is still haunting him.
He decides he needs just one little taste, just so he can stop thinking about it and move on to being vegan again. Secretly, he visits the BBQ Chicken takeout, ordering the biggest chicken burger you’ve ever seen and he scoffs it down in a few minutes. It makes his body feel amazing, healthy and vibrant, and for a moment his emotions are high. But then he starts to feel guilty for breaking his veganism. He cleans up so no trace of meat is smelt on him and returns home to his vegan wife.
The burger-cheat plays on his mind for the next week. He doesn’t like keeping a secret from his wife. So he decides to tell her about his little chicken-eating episode. The man expects her to only laugh at him for being so pathetic or perhaps be disgusted at him for a little while, but no, it doesn’t go so well and she gets rather defensive. His wife gets angry, throws a loaf a vegan bread at him and states the law, “This is a meat-free house and we have a meat-free relationship. If you don’t like it, you know where the door is”. It is very clear that if he wants to eat meat, he would have to leave her. This would be a tragedy because their relationship is so good, they are in love, and she is his life, so he could never think of doing that.
A couple of months go by and they are back to normal. The wife thinks his meat-eating episode was just a freak occurrence, but the man has been dreaming of meat every night since. He has no idea what to do. Soon he starts watching cooking shows and walking past beef restaurants. He realises he has been a meat eater all this time, but has just been denying himself. He believes he did it for a good reason – for the love of his wife – and that his heart was in the right place, but now his need for meat is just becoming too strong. It’s not just a mental thing, he feels his body craving for it. When he had the chicken burger, he can still remember the joy he felt in his body.
But, breaking up a perfectly good marriage just for the sake of needing meat is both silly and overly dramatic to him. Plus, doing such will likely make him a villain and create social suicide. It confuses the man because even though he loves his wife dearly, he now knows for him to be his best self he needs to be a meat eater. But his wife will not accept him being a meat eater, so what can he do? He does the most rational thing he can think of – to become a cheating meat-eater.
At first, he has one-off burgers on his way home from work, making sure he cleans up good from meat-breath. Then he finds a restaurant on the other side of town to enjoy full steak meals when he can escape for a few hours. One day he notices a meat-loving woman sitting alone at a table and he asks if he can join her rather than them both eating alone. And so the affair of the meat-eaters begins.
So really, there are two incidences that happened to create this situation:
- The meat-eating man tried to change himself to have an opportunity at a relationship with his wife. This might seem admirable and a demonstration of love but… it is a set up for disaster. Then when he built up the courage to tell his wife he was a meat-eater, it was too late for her to accept the real him.
2. The vegan wife only knew her husband as vegan, and didn’t know who he really was. However, when he tried to open up to her, she rejected him, creating an ultimatum. Such ultimatums make people keeps secrets and hide when they don’t want to change a relationship, but aren’t getting what they need from it.
By the man cheating, he is trying to keep the relationship for the both of them while getting what he needs to be his best self.
So now lets see meat as sex – either a lot of sex, kinky sex or at least a sexlife the wife isn’t interested in.
Breaking up an established marriage over sex is extremely controversial. Society frowns upon men specifically for valuing sex enough for it to be a thing to break up over. The ‘guilt’ of it has already been carefully constructed by social ethics. So, in such a situation, men try to keep a relationship, whereas women tend to ‘pull the ripcord’, as they do not have the same social discrimination for such.
Solution? Men, sexual compatibility is very important to you. Don’t disregard your needs – that’s like shoving a monster under the bed; you just know that sooner or later it will raise it’s ugly head.
