In this episode of the Dad Starting Over podcast, host Ralph Brewer first promotes the Help for Men Brotherhood, a support community offering forums, coaching, and events for men dealing with relationship challenges such as dead bedrooms, divorce, and loneliness. He then pivots to discuss the phenomenon of "lesbian bed death" and the notably higher divorce rates among lesbian couples, citing 2019 UK Office for National Statistics data that 56% of same‑sex marriages were between women, yet 72% of same‑sex divorces involved lesbian couples—about three times the rate for gay men. Brewer explores possible explanations, rejecting simplistic gender‑bias narratives. He argues that women, on average, exhibit higher levels of the personality trait neuroticism (a propensity for negative affect), which can exacerbate relationship stress, especially when combined with rapid commitment patterns common in lesbian relationships, the natural decline in sexual desire over time, and external stressors such as children and demanding careers. The host suggests that high‑neuroticism individuals need more self‑care, therapy, and lifestyle adjustments (e.g., limiting children, reducing work stress) to sustain long‑term partnerships. He acknowledges that neurotic men also seek his coaching, emphasizing that both genders can benefit from tailored support. The episode concludes that without recognizing and addressing these psychological and societal factors, the rates of divorce, sexless marriages, and relational dissatisfaction will likely continue to rise, particularly within lesbian couples where two potentially high‑neurotic partners are paired.
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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. So I tweeted this yesterday and took a screencap, posted it on Facebook and TikTok and so forth. And I got quite the reaction. If you want to go down an interesting rabbit hole, check out the phenomenon of lesbian bed death and the divorce rate in lesbian relationships versus hetero and gay male relationships. Interesting fuel for discussion. So let's flesh this out a little bit, shall we? When I'm referring to the stats around lesbian relationships, what am I talking about exactly? Here are some stats you can find via some Googling. According to data from the Office for National Statistics, in 2019, 56% of same-sex marriages were between women. However, the divorce rate for lesbians was much higher. 72% of same-sex divorces in 2019 came from lesbian couples, about 3 times higher than gay male couples. And then we extrapolate that further and we look at, you know, how is the sex life for lesbian couples? Well, that doesn't really look good either. For long-term lesbian couples, there is a phrase that they often use, and it is lesbian bed death. A menacing term. It basically means that if you have a lesbian couple that's together for years and years, they tend to have dead bedrooms. So much so that they create a term for it, lesbian bed death. So let's try to understand what the heck is going on. What we don't want to do is take the chicken shit easy way out, which is to say, "Eh, all women crazy." No, that's just mean and it doesn't solve anything. There's something to learn from this. Start with the lesbian bed death thing. There is something that may contribute to this phenomenon. And let's use a joke to illustrate. The joke goes, "What does a lesbian bring on their second date?" "A U-Haul." The inference being that Women tend to amplify the relationship really, really quick. They commit very quickly. They go from casual relationship to full-blown, I want to be with you forever and ever, really, really fast. Lesbian relationships are notorious for this. As a corollary, there's a joke for gay male couples. What does the— what does the gay man bring on a second date? What second date? Now, is there any connection between the the lesbian bed death thing and the divorce rate thing being so high within lesbian couples? I think so. Now we could go on and on about maybe women just aren't wired for commitment. Maybe serial monogamy is, you know, right up their alley as far as the way women are wired in relationships. There's a case could be made for that. You know, we see that women, when in hetero relationships, man and woman, the sexual desire within the relationship tends to go down over time. It does for men as well, but it's not nearly as pronounced as it is with women. And yes, even when all things are equal, even when your partner is the most egalitarian partner in the world, even if they take over every chore in the world, even if they're the best husband or best wife for that matter, and they do everything possible, your sexual desire as a woman typically is going to go down as the years go on in a long-term committed, long-term monogamous relationship. And we can say, doesn't matter who your spouse is, man or woman, you're probably going to experience that. Perfectly normal. Nothing evil or nefarious about it. Just is what it is. Now, if we want to look at the science behind personality and how that may contribute to marital satisfaction or relationship satisfaction, whatever, there is a personality trait that will undoubtedly color a relationship with another human being in a big way. All— it could be argued that all the personality traits will color a relationship with another person in some way, but this one very much so. And that personality trait is called neuroticism. It sounds terrible. It sounds like an insult to call somebody neurotic. You know, we all know that neurotic guy who's just, you know, spazzing out over everything. But technically, Neuroticism is one of the Big Five personality traits, and it refers to, to oversimplify it, a propensity for negative thought. People that are higher in neuroticism tend to be higher in depression, anxiety, etc., etc. Well, if we give everybody a test to test their personality traits and plot it, you know, with the bell curve, and we say, who is the most neurotic of this population? Look at the tail end of the bell curve, right? Who's the most neurotic over here on the, on the tail end? Um, that tail end of the most neurotic, uh, higher propensity for negative thought is basically all women. That's not an insult, that's science. If it makes you feel any better, ladies, we men have a monopoly on other things as well. We tend to be, uh, We tend to be serial killers, psychopaths. We have the, I know a lot of men will disagree with this, but the science shows us that men are more typically more narcissistic than women are. So for me to say, ladies, you tend to win the neuroticism battle, it's not an insult. Well, that doesn't bode well for a long-term monogamous relationship. Why? Let's think of the perfect cocktail for how to really poke at and aggravate a person who has a propensity for negative thought. What would I do? Well, I would say, here's one person that you need to live with for the rest of your life. Aggravating. Stressful. After you get over the honeymoon phase, what used to be cute and lovable is now so goddamn annoying and you just want to choke them. Okay, so now that you got to the point of being super irritated by them, now you got another 20, 30, 40 more years ahead of you with them. Wonderful, right? Oh, and by the way, I'm going to throw something else on top of that. Another— I'm going to throw a stick of dynamite in the whole thing. It's really going to, you know, push you over the edge. And that thing is kids. Let's put 3 or 4 kids in the mix, shall we? Oh man. Oh geez. I— okay, done. Now the neurotic person is just over the top stressed out, anxious, if not completely depressed. Now you got to work. Got to have a job. It's 2024. Sorry, neurotic person, everybody works. Some of us, couple of jobs. You got kids, you got bills, everything else. It's very expensive to live these days. You can see where I'm going with this. We created a perfect storm of issues that really push Mr. or Miss Neurotic over the edge. And as I've already mentioned, science shows if I had to put money down on which the man or the woman is the neurotic one of the couple, it's probably going to be the woman. And wouldn't you know it, uh, women tend to file the for divorce far more frequently than the men do, 70-some-odd percent of the time. So what are we to learn from all this? Do we just say, "Women, sorry, you ain't wired for this whole marriage thing. You better bow out now." Some people have taken that route. Whatever makes them happy. You know, if that's the route they want to go down, fine. But we could also take from this a lesson that women need a little bit more, or let's be fair, the more neurotic, stress-prone, anxiety-prone person needs a little bit more hand-holding, a little bit more care, a little bit more patience than your lower neuroticism person. So maybe if you are a person and you're honest with yourself, let's say you take a test and you're like, man, I tend to be prone to depression and anxiety, and I tend to ruminate on things and spiral out of control. I need a lot of self-care. I need a lot of timeouts to myself. And you know what? Maybe having kiddos isn't the best idea for me. Or maybe just limit it to one kiddo, not a whole litter of them. And you know what? Maybe I don't want to chase that big career that is so damn stressful that takes, you know, 80 hours a week of my time. These are all things that are very kind of a self-love, self-caring thing. And we kind of seem to push that all aside as saying, "No, those are all signs of weakness." Now, to be completely fair, I talk to a disproportionately large number of neurotic men, very anxious men. If we give them a personality test, they would rank high in neuroticism. They are in the minority, but they are attracted to my material and they talk one-on-one to me, and you can book time with me, helpformen.com/coaching, and I give them the same advice. You have to understand your limitations. You have to get help, therapy. You have to take care of yourself physically. You got to eat right, drop the alcohol, drop the drugs, all this other stuff. Your prescription for maintaining health is going to be way different than this person over here who has low to no neuroticism. So let's not just go to the whole women be crazy, haha, whatever, you know, men are better spouses, whatever it may be. That's not That's not fair. That doesn't paint the complete picture. But we can't ignore stats. We can't ignore science. We can't ignore the giant elephant in the room, which is with the way relationships are structured now, with the culture that we have, with the societal expectations we have of both men and women, it doesn't serve our highly neurotic people very well. And if we continue to ignore that, then we will continue seeing spiraling rates of divorce, sexless marriages, and on and on. So then what do we take from this as far as lesbian relationships are concerned? Well, to oversimplify things, we've already made the case of women tend to be more neurotic than men, and that neuroticism can lead to a lot of marital difficulties or a difficulty in staying together long-term. It's difficult to keep that stress and anxiety and possible depression, you know, keep it at bay, so to speak. So now with lesbian relationships, multiply that. Now you have two people who potentially are high in neuroticism, two people with waning libidos because they are now committed to each other, two people that may have a very difficult time coping with the inevitable downfall in emotions and connectivity that comes with the waning honeymoon stage. In other words, they're both going to feel super, super high during the honeymoon phase when they first get to know each other, hence why they commit so quickly, and then they're going to feel a disproportionate disconnection and stress and anxiety when that connection goes down. And then take two people who have a propensity for higher than average negative thought and put them in that powder keg of stress and anxiety and kaboom. It's not going to end well.
