Should You Masturbate While In A Relationship?

All right, men, welcome back to the mantalk Show. I'm Connor Beaton, and today we're gonna be talking about masturbation and marriage or just masturbation in your relationships? I get asked this question, honestly, more often than I ever thought I would when I started doing this work a decade ago. But I recently got asked by a few people in an Instagram Q and A whether I thought that masturbation was, quote, unquote, okay, within a marriage and what role it would play. And so before I go any further, I'm very curious to hear your thoughts. Let me know what your thoughts are in terms of the. The role or the relationship? The role that masturbation plays within the context of a marriage or a relationship for you. So here we go. Here are my thoughts. All right? First and foremost, I get asked a lot about pornography, how to quit porn, and I'm going to be talking about that more. But I think there's a. There's a few avenues to this, okay? Some guys talk about no fap and no nut and preach it as gospel, right? That if you can not masturbate and not ejaculate, that you'll become some superhuman cyborg and it'll radically change your life. Now, I've done both of those things, and I've done them for periods of time, and they can be very helpful. And they can be helpful because for many of us as men, masturbation and pornography has become the means or the mechanism or the tool for. For you as a man to regulate your nervous system. So when you feel stressed, when you feel anxious, when you feel lonely or bored or angry or disconnected in your relationship or pissed off at your partner or whatever it is, porn, and subsequently masturbation, can become the tool that you use to get yourself back to baseline, back to homeostasis, right? You can de. Stress, you can get rid of some of the anxiety, you can know, blow off some steam and not feel angry, et cetera. And unfortunately, what this does is it creates a bit of a dependency for many men. And maybe this isn't you, right? So you can ignore this part. But for myself included, for a number of years, masturbation, and specifically pornography was the only way that I could feel like, back at a baseline, back at a space where I wasn't stressed, I wasn't angry, I wasn't sad, I wasn't lonely, I wasn't bored, right? Cause I used masturbation as a tool for whenever I was any of those things and didn't want to feel that way, right? It's like, I'm bored. I don't want to feel this way. I should just go jerk off, right? It's like it's 11 o' clock at night. I have a business meeting tomorrow morning. I probably should go to bed. I'm going to watch an hour worth of porn anyways and get off because that's fun and exciting. So for many men, masturbation, even when they're in a relationship, is a means for them to offload some of this energy, to release some of this energy and to get back into a baseline. Now where it can be helpful is, you know, if you're in a relationship where the relationship's going through a period of, of challenge and conflict and, you know, you still want to connect to your own sexual arousal and energy, masturbation can be great during that period. But I think for a lot of guys, what ends up happening is they over index masturbation, sometimes watching pornography. That's not the case for all men. But for some men, as a means of avoiding having the type of connection sexually that they want with their partner, which generally is going to take some effort and some work, there's really no effort or risk involved in going and watching pornography or going and jerking off, right? For the most part. I mean, unless you're like, you know, try trying to bust one out in public, which I don't recommend because that's against the law.

There's risk involved in that for sure, but for the most part there's no risk involved in you just masturbating and getting off when your girlfriend or your wife doesn't want to, or she's turned you down, or you're worried that she's too tired, or, you know, you're running some story about how she doesn't want as much sex as you. And what I've seen happen is that the more that a man turns to masturbation when he wants to engage in sex, when he wants to have some type of sexual intimacy with his partner, the more that the stories that he has about the relationship can begin to run rampant, right? So they can begin to become embellished. She doesn't want sex as much as me. She only wants it at certain times. There's all these excuses, right? I just have a much higher sex drive in her and it begins to infiltrate his relationship with his partner. And you can see this because a lot of relationships, you know, guys, and I've done this in the past as well, we'll start to complain to try and get sex, you know, and it's the number one killer in relationships. Killer. It will destroy intimacy over a long period of time, and it will actually erode your partner's respect for you. So just as a rule, generally, do not complain or criticize your partner for sex. That will destroy it. There's no faster way to turn a woman off than to complain or criticize her trying to get more sex on the other side of it. Okay, so that's just an aside. So where does masturbation fit in in a relationship? Well, you could masturbate with your partner, right? That could be an exploration that you. That you choose to take on. You can go for a period of time without masturbating to see what it feels like, to see if you can, you know, regulate and be with the volume and the intensity of your own sexual arousal and the energy within your body. Because for most men, what they realize is that a lot of their energy, a lot of their emotion, which is just energy in motion, right? Their anger, their anxiousness, their stress, their whatever it is, is. Is being channeled into their sexual arousal. And so it can feel very overwhelming for a lot of men. And for a lot of guys, it's like, well, I just need to get off. You know, I have to. Otherwise I'm not gonna be able to sleep, I'm not gonna be able to focus, I'm not gonna be able to concentrate, et cetera. But that's the training, right? The real training ground is to be able to see who do I become and what is revealed about me when that's not an option. When I spend 30 days with no masturbation and start to notice, how do you engage with your partner? How do you initiate sexual interactions? You know, do you become needy? Do you become like, you have to have it? Or are you able to work with that sexual energy and bring it into the relationship in a healthy way? And how does she respond? Right? Does it feel safer for her to engage with you sexually? Like, what I usually tell men when I'm working with them around this topic is, is engage in sexual intimacy without an outcome in mind, right? Without an outcome in mind. Because for most men, their intention when they go and make out with their partner or try and initiate some kind of sexual interaction is, I need to get off, I need to orgasm, I need to come. And so if you can have outcomeless. If you can have outcomeless arousal and bring that to your partner, it's much more enticing, because then they don't know when sex is going to happen or how Far it's going to go because what most men are doing is just bringing all of their sexual energy to their partner at once and saying, I have to get off right now. And for their partner it's like, oh, okay. That doesn't feel like there's a lot of room or space for their sexual arousal to be present. And it's more exciting for a woman because most women have responsive arousal. It's more exciting for a woman if she's kind of unsure about when that sex is going to happen, right? It's like, okay, it's Wednesday at 9 o', clock, you know, it's, it's business time, as Flight of the Concords would say, then that's not as exciting. There's not spontaneity there. It's not like you don't know when it's going to happen. So practice and discern for yourself whether or not masturbation has a role or a place in your relationship. Maybe you spend a month not masturbating at all and not orgasming, still having sex, still bringing sexual arousal to your partner and exploring whether or not that feels good for you, right? Because for a lot of guys, once they start to release this need to masturbate and this dependency that we can sometimes build up on masturbation as a means of feeling better, of reaching that baseline, what they have to do and what I had to do specifically was I had to learn how to actually stay grounded and deal with the intensity, to regulate the intensity of the energy that I was feeling in my body, right? This tremendous amount of energy that many of us men have. Like we are freaking power centers for most of us. And we have this abundance of energy that we haven't been taught or shown how to deal with. And so using something simple like breath or breath work and a few other different modalities, you can begin to work with that energy when you're not masturbating. And it might take practice, right? You might, you might try this for a month and fail, you know, and be only be able to go for a week or two weeks without masturbating. But it can be something fun that you can do within the context of your relationship. I don't think that masturbation is bad. It's not a bad or good thing. It's just something that we do that can be enjoyable and pleasurable. The really important part is to get very present to you as an individual man and start to understand is this act, is this behavior something that I've become dependent on to regulate my system. Is this behavior hindering the type of sexual connection that I know I could have with my partner? Because, you know, 80% of my sexual energy is going towards porn and masturbation, or 50% or 60% is going towards porn and masturbation. And I'm not actually bringing my sexual energy in a grounded way to my partner and initiating and creating spontaneity and creating opportunities for sexual encounters that don't always have to end in an orgasm. So I would love to hear your thoughts. Where do you think masturbation fits in to a relationship? Have you tried not masturbating for a period of time? Have you tried no fap or no nut? What's been your results within those expeditions, within those those treks into the unknown? Let me know what your thoughts are. And as per always. This is Connor Beaton signing off. We'll see you next week.