Dear DSO: "I Feel Like I'm Stuck in a Dead Bedroom!"

Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching, courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person. Real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting. Hello everyone, DSO here from dadstartingover.com, and we have a new Dear DSO entry on the website. If you'd like, you can submit your own question or story or whatever you want to call it to dadstartingover.com/dear-dso. And if it's a good one, I will respond here for the world to see. And this one comes from, uh, Where Next is what he calls himself. And the subject line is Stuck in a Low Sex Relationship. Again, I've mentioned before in plenty of other videos, if you're wondering why a guy is talking about sex in his relationship and reaching out to somebody called Dad Starting Over, it's because I've written several books and one of those books took off, and the book was called The Dead Bedroom Fix. It's a book for men, and just what it sounds like, it talks about the lack of sex in a relationship and what you can do to possibly help alleviate and fix the situation. And again, it's a very popular book. I get emails pretty much on a daily basis from guys who've read it with questions, and this is one of them. And he says, Dear DSO, I am struggling to get my needs met in my marriage. It has been almost 3 weeks since our last session, and I'm sure it will go well beyond that. I am in good shape, and I avoid arguments about sex as much as possible, but today I messed up, he says. I have been propositioning my wife via text. This sometimes works. Normally when I get turned down, I just say, don't worry, and I move on. But the rejection and the physical element got to me today. So when I was rejected again, I replied with my exact thoughts. He says, quote, I need to, need to have a think about things. Sorry, I'm not liking this. Kind of goof there. I think he means to say, I don't like the way things are going. I need to think about this. Kind of passive-aggressive on his part. And she replies with a very aggressive, aggressive reply on her part. She replied with, is that it? So should I pack you a bag? I called her and I made amends. He says amendments, I think he means amends. But I feel I have set myself back and probably damaged the work that I put into the relationship. I am only human, so surely she understands why I am so frustrated. I'm 37 and she is 36. We have 2 kids. I am in good shape. He's twice— he's mentioned this— and I enjoy training and cooking for a hobby. I try and make her feel valued, but my gut tells me that doing all this extra stuff like dinners and fun is cool, but it makes her too comfortable. So maybe I should dial the stuff back. To make things worse, I have been having ED— he means erectile dysfunction, unable to get the old, you know, Johnson up there— due to low testosterone. Is that diagnosed or are you just guessing? But he's using Cialis/Viagra and it usually gets things working, but last time I had to take a couple extra pills— be careful— as things were not functioning. Any advice? Should I give her the healthy version of the talk? Eventually I feel my patience is going to run out. All the best, Mr. Where Next. Well, Mr. Where Next, If you don't know, this is why I wrote the book, The Dead Bedroom Fix. Did you read it? Did you try everything outlined in it? Because I pretty much just addressed this, you know, through 300-some-odd pages of a book, step by step. If you wanna look at this from psych terms, I am not a psychologist, I am not a mental health professional of any kind, I am just bald dude with microphone who likes to hear himself talk, One of many out there. Welcome. But if you want to use it in psych terms, if you want to look at this from what they call the old attachment theory, which is basically psychologists have known for decades, wow, if you take a kid who was raised a certain way with a certain type of attachment to old mom and dad, sure enough, that's going to impact how he attaches to, he or she attaches to people later on in life, in romantic relationships, for example. And what we see here is you are exemplifying, via your description here, a guy who is what we call anxious, and you're exhibiting anxious attachment. Why would I say this? Because you are really trying to figure out what buttons to push to get this woman going. You're talking about, you know, heaping on this reward, but maybe I should pull back reward. Maybe she's too comfortable, as you say. Maybe, um, I need to do this, not say this, but damn it, I can't hold it back anymore. I gotta say this. And, and what does she do in turn is that she does one of these, like, whoa, dude, and kind of pushes you away. And, uh, she— boy, she was blunt about it. Oh yeah, so I should pack you a bag? In other words, um, she is what, what we've seen again in psych terms with guys and gals who are anxious, is sure as shit they are matched up with their opposite, which is— pardon me— which is Mr. or Miss Avoidant. Anxious, avoidant. It's funny how that works. And Mr. or Miss Avoidant, what they typically do is just like, can you leave me the eff alone? Stop talking about the relationship. Stop going on and on about it. Stop trying to push my buttons. Stop trying to figure out a way to get me going. I'll let you know when I'm going, dude. And in fact, the more you back off from me, the more comfortable I'll be, and the more apt I will be to come to center and come more towards you. The more you push and pursue and everything else, the more you're just gonna drive me away. Very succinct. There's different gradations of that, different, oh, severities of that. You get up somebody who's super duper avoidant, and the second you back off, they say, oh, thank God, and they're out the door, they're gone. And they seem to want nothing to do with touch or sex or anything like that, like in any shape or form with anyone, unless they're in like the honeymoon stage of the relationship and they go, you know, start up anew with somebody, then they suddenly ignite. But that's for a different story. And then the anxious person just hangs on and hangs on, tries to figure out what's going on. I, you know, and this is exacerbated when you're adooed by a very normal, healthy thing called the male libido. Boy, we sure do want it a lot, don't we? Especially when compared to our female counterparts. It seems like our libido outpaces theirs quite a bit. See things such as adult entertainment and sex workers and all these things on the marketplace to help fill that void and that need that many of us dudes have. We gotta get that energy out, right? And that's what you're saying. I'm just so frustrated and I'm just, grrr, doesn't she realize, you know, what I'm feeling in here? Not necessarily. In a way, yeah, she knows. I mean, she's a girl, right? Any woman will tell you, ever since I, you know, went through puberty and I started, you know, my body started changing to that of a woman, yeah, I can see that men have a libido. I can see how I've been, you know, creepily stared at by that older dude dude, and I've been, you know, bluntly hit on by so many dudes this week, and so on and so forth. So they're aware that the male libido is a thing. What they're also aware of is their own innate, oh, stress personality traits. You know, again, she may be very avoidant in nature. In fact, I would bet that she probably is. Um, in her past resentments towards you, you know, over the years of learning this, it of talking over the years, of talking to guys like you, I've learned that these situations are not simple and you're no angel. I know I'm making a lot of assumptions here, but after doing this for so many years and talking to, you know, at this point thousands of guys, hundreds, well over a thousand, dude, a thousand dudes at least, is that there are two sides to every story. And sometimes I do talk to the women in these situations and sure as shit they will say, oh, let me tell you about something old hubby didn't tell you about. And you just sit back wide-eyed and go, yeah, he should have mentioned that. And that's pretty big. Um, you know, I've heard things like, did he tell you about his secretary and the affair that I caught them in? Like, no, he did not. Interesting. Or did he tell you about the time he did this terrible thing and that terrible thing, which I remember 15 years later? Dude, who knows? But it could very well be that there's something going on that's causing this rift, this divide between the two of you, and she doesn't wanna cross that bridge over to where you're at, Mr. Horny. There's these situations again, they're complicated, multifaceted. Who knows exactly what's going on? If you wanna talk to me, you can do so, dadstartingover.com/coaching, and you can chat with me one-on-one and we can kind of try to hash this out. I can even talk to her. I'm not a marriage counselor, you know, certified marriage counselor. Just been a dude who's been doing this for quite a while now, talking to a lot of people and having experienced some semblance of this myself to the point where I wrote a book about it, Dead Bedroom Fix. So I would say if you haven't read that book yet, check that out, The Dead Bedroom Fix. The healthy version of the talk, for those wondering, he talks about that. You may be saying, what's he talking about, healthy version of the talk? I did a podcast on this. You can check out the Dad Starting Over podcast and search for healthy version of the talk. It's basically a nice, normal, healthy, by my estimation, way of going to the wife hat in hand saying, can we work on us, please? I value us. I love you. I'm not coming to you as Mr. Needy trying to manipulate you and get you to do things you don't want to do. If you don't want to do anything, blah, blah, blah, I'm a big boy, you know, tell me and we can go on to plan B, do something else. And that plan B may involve you two not being a couple anymore. That's something that a lot of anxious-y guys are like, whoa, timeout. I don't want to go there. Well, eventually you're going to have to go there, either she or you. Want to cross that bridge, but that bridge is going to need to be crossed at some point, um, at least verbally. And you know, you have to put it out there as a possibility. Um, so, and then you talk about ED. I want to go back to this. I want to make sure I don't miss any of your points here. I'm looking at your email again. Um, you've been having ED due to low testosterone. That's kind of— really? Are you sure? You've gone to the doctor and got a blood test and you can, you know, point to your test showing that yes, you have low testosterone. Don't assume that if you haven't done a test. This could be all in your head. Anxiety is a big ED cause for a lot of men. Everything could be perfect on the blood test. Everything's great. You're a very high testosterone dude. But if you're stressed out, if you've been repeatedly rejected, but you know, you got fired from your job, whatever. Sure enough, the body's just like, "Meh, we're not gonna do anything right now." So, it could be a lot of different causes. And be careful about popping an extra couple of pills. These drugs are, you know, these vasodilators, they open up your blood vessels to let more blood into other areas, and it could cause some problems, especially if you, you know, blood clots, stroke-prone, who knows. But I think any doctor would say, whoa, easy buddy, don't just pop pills because things aren't working. Let's look more to the, uh, the root cause of what's going on here, trying to figure that out. So if you haven't done so already, get to a doctor. You're youngish, 37, and ED is not good, dude. Something's going on. I could be up in your head. You talk to somebody about some stuff, anxiety, who knows what. But so my advice would be Dead Bedroom Fix if you haven't read it already, possibly book time with myself to talk about this further. Go to the doctor about the ED thing. And lastly, leave the wife the F alone. Because in a lot of these cases, she's not the issue right now necessarily. I know she is, takes two to tango, but I have a feeling that you got some stuff you need to work on before we can point over to her and say, "What's wrong with you?" All right, brother, best luck to you.