Will a Vasectomy Kill Her Desire for You?

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. The vasectomy. Is there more to it than what you think? Should you do it or should you not? The old snip. Let's talk about it. Hello everyone. We have a new Dear DSO entry on the website and you could submit your own story at deardso.com. Fill out the form and if your story is a good one, I will create a video out of it for the whole world to see or for the podcast listeners to listen to on the Dad Starting Over podcast available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you may listen to your podcasts. And if you're watching this on YouTube, please, If you could do me a favor, click on subscribe down below, click on like, share, leave a comment. You know the drill. I would greatly appreciate it. That will help me out a great deal. Thank you so very much. Now on to today's submission. This one comes from Matt, and the subject line is, "To snip or not to snip?" Sounds very Shakespearean. He says, "DSO," that's me by the way, stands for Dad Starting Over, you get it. He says, "I've been listening to a lot of your podcasts lately." And I also finished the audiobook version of The Dead Bedroom Fix. Well, thank you. He says, man, it all just makes so much sense. Honestly, when someone like you lays it out plainly without all the overcomplicated narratives, it really does just sound like common sense. I recently finished your podcast episode titled DSO Reacts: You Want Me to Go Watch the Kids While You Go Out with Other Guys? And wow, that one hit hard. It shows exactly what society now expects of men. She's allowed to go out and sleep with other guys, and if you have a problem with it, suddenly you're controlling. You push back even slightly and it's, quote, you don't own me. But if the roles were reversed, totally different rules. Your take was spot on. This is bullshit. Just leave her. Now, my marriage— not my marriage, he says. That's not my marriage. But I can absolutely see how it's becoming the norm out there. Let's just talk about that one later. He says, that brings me to my question. A lot of what you talk about boils down to this: women are wired to procreate. Well, I mean, they're human animals. He says, that means they want sex, but with the best man that they can get— someone strong, capable, protective. That way her kids are more likely to be good-looking, strong, and able to reproduce too. All basic biology. Makes sense. So here's my concern. If her DNA is telling her, quote, have sex to make babies, does that desire start to drop if she knows that you can't make babies? I've been married 5 years. We've got 3 kids. Dude, you don't waste any time, do you? Um, we're both in our late 30s and totally done having more. I bet you are. She doesn't want to go back on the pill. Good for her. He says, I don't want to wear condoms. Don't blame you. So I'm seriously considering getting a vasectomy, but will that kill her desire for me on some primal unconscious level? Will I slowly drift into a dead bedroom territory just because my swimmers are out of the game? Please God, let your wise DSO answer be, go get the snip and keep getting some. Oh, Matt, I don't know if you know it or not, but the overall tone of your message is one of a lot of anxiety. You, my friend, are very anxious about your relationship, relationships in general. You're making a lot of broad assumptions and jumping to conclusions here, conspiratorially almost, if you want to use, you know, for lack of a better word. Let's talk about the episode that you're referring to here, DSO Reacts, You Want Me to Go Watch the Kids While You Go Out with Other Guys. That was a response, and this was years ago that I did this, That was a response to a podcast episode that Esther Perel, the psychotherapist, did. She has a podcast where she, and I apologize, I don't remember the name. Probably should have looked that up, been more professional of me if I looked that up prior to doing this, but eh, you know. Esther Perel, look her up. And she brings couples into her office and records it and puts it on the podcast. And this one that she did, it was a two-parter. She actually did talk to them, and I think like a year or so later she talked to them again. Reacted both times to it because it was so interesting. But basically it was a very codependent, meek, pushover kind of guy was married to a woman who basically said, I've lost all attraction to you. Sorry, dude, I want to go have sexual relations with others. And what you're missing here is that she told him, and you can go do the same, dude, go. And she encouraged him like, go meet gals, get some new girlfriends, have fun. You are my primary partner, we're primarily with each other, but we will do things on the side. Because she had a very feminist take on it. You're not going to constrict me and I should be free to do all these things. And he was kind of like, I don't really like the But okay, whatever. And she had all the luck in the world, some long-term sexual relationships, all kinds of fun. He, on the other hand, eh, not much. He basically was looking for another girlfriend type, and all the women he ran into were basically like, if I remember right, I just want a casual sexual relationship. I don't want to be with you in that way. Sorry. So he wasn't having much luck. It got to the point in part 2 where the, the wife was basically, if you listen to her, very disgusted by him. And she goes, we're not even primary anything anymore. I want nothing to do with the guy. He's very childish. He's very ugh. And he was still hanging on to this woman who was basically like, you know, booting him in the face saying, get out the door, leave. Anyway, very codependent dude married to a very arguably abusive woman, if you want to look at it that way. Um, not unheard of, but it is by no means the norm, nor is society out there saying, hey, this is what all women should do and this is what all men should do. You're taking Your very acutely emotional, I don't know if that's the right word, response to what you heard in that podcast pisses off a lot of guys, especially a lot of anxious guys. Like, I can't believe there are women who are like this. Not all women are like this. A very small minority of women are like that. But, and then you extrapolate that and say, and that must be all of society. All of society rewards women for doing this. It's a very anxious take on it. It's like, no, dude, there are just shitheads out there of both genders. Shithead men do things to their women, and women— shithead women do things to their men. And Esther just happened to talk to this woman. Now, Esther is very, um, progressive in her, her thinking and everything, so she wasn't necessarily, um, oh, um, bad-mouthing the woman or, or painting it in a negative light. She was just sitting back and listening to their story, basically. I, on the other hand, was telling that guy, get the hell out of Dodge, yank your head out of your butt and grow a pair, dude. You You know, have some sense of self-love enough that you say, "Oh, obviously I'm not wanted here. See you later." That's, you know, that's a very non-anxious abundance kind of— abundance-minded kind of take on the whole thing. That's what that guy needs more of, and kind of you do too, dude. But you go on, that doesn't really apply to your situation at all, but hearing that has put you kind of this ruminating, frenzied, anxious thought pattern, so much so that something as innocuous as a method of birth control, a vasectomy— millions of men have had this procedure, and most will report the opposite of what you're talking about here. The whole— let's just put this to rest— the whole notion of, will the fact that I am now infertile make my woman not want me sexually anymore? There's no basis in science to that whatsoever. There's no scientific data to back that up. I Googled after getting your message saying, I wonder if there's— I've never heard of this. And sure enough, no, there's nothing that backs that up. In fact, the opposite seems to be true, especially for people in your situation. 3 little kids in 5 years, dude, the stress. I, I imagine your wife is under a tremendous amount of stress as a result of all this. So to say like we now have no worries or issues with potentially getting knocked up and making child number 4. When that is eliminated and she doesn't want to do the hormonal birth control thing, good for her. There's a lot of nasty, you know, side effects and repercussions from doing so. You don't like the whole barrier method with condoms and so forth, don't blame you, who does? And so really, you could— she could get her tubes tied, which is far more surgically invasive than your option, which is the old vasectomy, the old snip. And so, um, If you do that procedure, then she will be able to engage sexually with you with no worries of getting knocked up again and basically causing even more stress and compounding the stress that she's already under. So your chances of reaching that level of, oh, libido and desire, responsive desire from her, I would think, be more so after vasectomy. I could be wrong, but that seems to be when you Google and research this, that seems to be the predominant thought pattern from a lot of women is, no, actually, after he got that done, I was like, well, thank God, now we can do this without worry again. But here you are, you know, please God, don't tell me this. And if everything about your message is very, very anxious, something you need to work on. It's not healthy. I don't like the general tone of this. I think somebody needs some help here with a lot of stuff. Therapy can help with that for sure. Working one-on-one with a guy like myself can help with that. And like a mentor coaching kind of relationship, joining our support community, the Brotherhood, where you can have access to myself and live meetings, one-on-one mentoring on the discussion forums. Check it out, helpformen.com/join, or go to helpformen.com and navigate to Brotherhood in the menu. We would love to have you. I think you'd be a great fit for our group to talk some of this stuff out and work through it with other dudes and, and see what's really going on under the hood there and what you can do to become a more secure individual so that stuff like this just doesn't really doesn't really bother you, doesn't really occur to you. All right, so check it out. But thank you so much for your very thought-provoking question here. I really appreciate it. And guys, thank you for watching, and we'll catch you on the next one.