Joe, 35, is engaged but his fiancée says she doesn't feel a romantic connection anymore. They're intimate once every 5-6 weeks despite daily cuddling and dates. Ralph Brewer says this trajectory points toward a platonic partnership unless they have a serious conversation about what both of them actually want.
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All right. We have another Dear DSO entry on the website, and you can submit your own story or question to dadstartingover.com/dear-dso. And if it's a good one, I will record a video for the whole world to see. And this one comes from Joe Frazier. The subject line is, am I getting friend-zoned by my fiancée? Well, that doesn't sound good. He says after having, quote, the talk, my fiancée, who's 35 years of age, told me that she, quote, no longer feels a connection. She says that is the reason for their lack of sex over the last year, which is now, he says, parentheses, typically once every 5 to 6 weeks. Uh, he says, yes, we still cuddle multiple times daily. We have deep conversations. We go on dates. We go on vacations. We visit with family and friends, etc. Everything you would expect in a good relationship. She otherwise seems happy and counts on me to be there for her day after day. Am I missing something, or am I simply getting friend-zoned by my fiancée? And then he puts an asterisk here, additional info. The honeymoon phase lasted about a year and a half and was quite intense. All right, Mr. Joe Frazier, um, some key things here, my friend. Fiancé, you're not yet married. You haven't made the official commitment in a formal ceremony. Have you moved in together? Children? I assume no. Point I'm getting at is this. Your relationship is still in the early stage, pre-marriage and everything else, and you are seeing that the intimacy between the two of you has gone down. Not good. On top of that, when you go to wife and say— or pardon me, fiancée— and say, what's going on with us? She says, and I quote, I just no longer feel a connection. Joe, buddy, I don't know how much more obvious it can get. Here is the rule that applies to 100% of people, and that is this: intimacy between a couple is typically super intense at the beginning, and then when you have things such as commitment, cohabitation, and children, all things that remove uncertainty from the relationship, all things that bring in safety and security. On top of that, a lot of stress. That doesn't help. The intimacy between the two of you naturally peters down. Intimacy for, I say, 100%, 99.99% of us starts here and goes down to here later in the relationship. If your intimacy this early on before all that stuff I talked about— cohabitation, kids, marriage, all that other stuff— before all that, if it's already down here, it's not going to go up, dude. It's going to go further down, further down. So your every 5 to 6 weeks thing, eh, try once a year. That's what's in your future, dude. And her saying, sorry, I no longer feel a connection— first of all, She feels awful comfortable saying that to you. I wonder why that is. You guys are open, you're connected. You know, I wasn't there. I would love to be a fly on the wall to see where that— how it— what was the context of that comment? Were you guys having a nice, you know, tearful conversation and hugging, and she's like, I'm sorry, I just— I would love to be connected to you, but I just don't feel that connection anymore. Is she willing to work on that, to bridge the gap, as I often say, between the two of you? Or was she kind of flippant about it? "Sorry, dude. I just don't feel any connection anymore. Anyway, let's eat dinner." Two different things. Both, it could be argued, are not very good, but the latter is pretty bad, dude. In essence, have you been dumped as a romantic partner? It would seem, yeah. You got a friend. You know, you got the cuddles, the talks, go on trips together and everything else. You know. I don't cuddle with my friend Dave necessarily, but I've been on trips and things with Dave. I've done things with Dave, had big conversations with Dave. We've been there when, you know, people have died, family members have died. He was there for my divorce and everything else. But Dave, my buddy, is not my romantic partner. Dave's watching this. Sorry. You got a buddy, my friend. A good buddy. Possibly your best buddy. But not your romantic partner. You're on two different wavelengths here. Sit her down. What do you have to lose? Fiancée, do you see the current template, the direction of our marriage, the culture of our marriage, if you will? Do you see that as being a sustainable thing? In other words, can we be like this from now until we die and you're cool with that? This, you just don't have those kind of feelings for me anymore, every couple months we do it thing, you're cool with that? It may surprise you where she says, yeah, to her, normal, probably what she grew up with. And more nefarious take on this is actually she does yearn for that, but just not with you for variety of reasons, who knows. That's them. That's what— that's where a lot of the anxious guys go to first. That's where they think the, the resolution to all this is. It's just me. Sometimes, but not always. Sometimes it's just how they are. And to judge them based on that very early honeymoon stage— you talk about like the year and a half— it's not fair. We're all held hostage, if you will, by the, the hormones and the chemicals going through our brain and body that make us say, you know, mate with this person. We're hijacked by that. And then, uh, as time moves on, it kind of dissipates. And for some of us, when, when we see the, that phase come to an end, boy, it really just falls off a cliff. And we go, oh man, this is the real them. It's not sexy at all. Well, with others, it just gradually fades and it plateaus at still a healthy level. Men like numbers, you know, we're kind of engineers in that way. So if you go from 5 days a week down to 1 to 2 a week. That's a pretty sizable decrease numbers-wise, but it's still plenty good in, in the minds of most people. But again, that's not your scenario here, buddy. This is— this ain't good. I'm sorry. And, uh, the fact that you're writing to me and everything shows that you know it's not good. So back to the— my original point of why would she so flippantly say this to you? Does she feel safe in saying that to you? Is it for nefarious reasons, such as she knows you ain't going anywhere, buddy? Because you have shown her over the months and years that you're the type of guy that would put up with anything and that she feels safe enough to go, yeah, I don't have feelings for you anyway, moving on. That's not good. I would certainly welcome the opportunity to chat with you one-on-one about this. You go to help4men.com, go to coaching in the menu, book time with myself, any of the other guys on the team, or better yet, join our, the community we put together for men called the HFM, Help for Men Brotherhood, the HFM Brotherhood. We got all kinds of cool stuff there. Forums, live meetings, 900+ hours of audio content, just all kinds of stuff. And then big discounts on the coaching I mentioned, as well as you can go to our conferences and we have courses, all kinds of cool stuff. So check it out at help4men.com. And Joe, I wish you the best of luck, but from where I'm sitting, you don't look too good. All right, brother.
