I’m Grateful He Didn’t Feel It With Me. Thoughts On Ways I Have Crashed Men Out.

What if I was drowning my partners and calling it intimacy?

My stream is flooded with all the ways men are failing in relationships. We are all struggling relationally it seems. Men are only half the story. Every relationship in your life is an equal and opposite mirror. This essay is about my half.

There is a familiar way that men become unattractive in long relationships. You have probably watched it happen to someone. We focus often on the external metrics of this. The dad-bod and the hobbies that become obsessive. The man who stops seeking promotions at work and who shrinks back from a life he used to be hungry for. He takes on a familiar physical appearance. In truth, I don’t think most women care all that much about the video games and larger bellies that make up the memes.

It’s the child-like internal dynamics that kill the attraction.

Internally, this guy goes from a man who was excited about his life to a man who is perpetually annoyed by it. Everyday life is his burden. Things men in earlier decades saw as privileges, he just sees as less time to spend gaming or watching sports or looking at online models.

Driving the kids to school is a weight around his neck. Fixing the thing in the house he was once proud of is something he avoids until he is forced into doing it. He wants more screens, more drinks, more time alone. He vents and complains. Everything in his life is being done to him. Everything is at him.

We have a name for this. Man-baby.

But stay with me, men. I am not going to write the essay about what men do to themselves to create this. I have written that essay many times. There is a real conversation about purpose, wounding, somatic work, discipline, the dignity of caring for things, the difference between pride and complaint.

None of that is a woman’s job to install in a man.

What I want to write about this time is how I have added fuel to this fire.

Because if all relationship dynamics get co-created, and I believe they do, then there is something I have been doing. Something a lot of the women I work with have been doing. And I am only now beginning to see it in a way that can be expressed.

I have been trying to make men feel what I feel, the way I feel it.

The other night something I had wanted didn’t happen with my partner on a trip. A phone call. Not a phone call about anything important. Just one I had been looking forward to during the day, that didn’t end up happening the way I had pictured it.

I noticed the story start to land in me. He didn’t make plans to do this with me. He doesn’t think about this the way I do. He doesn’t care.

Which if you look at the facts of our dynamic is completely untrue. He perpetually initiates and shows up well. The reasons for the call being missed were more than valid…but even if they weren’t… even if he was less consistent…even if he was being selfish for a moment… the narrative my mind was reaching for was so victim-like. It was so full of internet garbage.

I am pretty good now at recognizing my stories in this relationship. I can usually get to: I am upset. Not, I am upset because of what he did. Just, I am upset. Which is a big win of my somatic work. I can often move into my body and out of labels and stories.

But there was a second thing I noticed, something I haven’t heard anyone express from a woman’s point of view before.

The next move I would have made, in another version of my life, was to try to get him to feel the way I felt about it.

Not consciously. I would have called it talking. I would have called it sharing. I would have called it being honest. What I was actually doing was trying to drag him into my emotional weather so that I would feel less alone in it. So that I would feel seen. I was taught to do this.

I think some men even intentionally do this after a lot of therapy. It’s called repair.

If he could feel the disappointment the way I was feeling it, then I would feel met, then he would learn to never do that again and I would be safer from my own disappointment. I emote, he emotes.

I did not do that. I just expressed and ended the conversation. He had a good night.

I took space, I held the feeling in my body, which was enormous, and I kept asking myself if any of this was actually about him. It mostly wasn’t. I was tired. There was something else underneath it I had been pushing away and that came up in full force for me to look at.

My emotions are kind of a pain in my ass honestly — I can see why so many women just sort of turn them off and become stone cold single ladies. Alas — my inner child is important to me and my emotions are the most valuable thing about me to everyone in my family so I persist.

Yes, I was disappointed about the call not working out, and I said so. I did not make him explain it. I did not ask him to feel it the same as I felt it. I did not text a long thing when he obviously didn’t feel my feelings on the matter. Trust me, I am completely capable of texting long things, but I didn’t.

So therefore — he didn’t crash out.

He just felt sort of normal about the whole thing. The specific call time was just not as important to him as it had been to me. Any other day he probably could depend on me not caring that much either. He trusted we’d catch up in the morning and we did. He said sorry for the mix up causing some schedule issues, but he did not apologize for hours. He did not get scared of my feelings either. He didn’t say I should calm down or make me feel crazy. It didn’t blow up past what it was. It was pretty much nothing.

The next morning everything was fine.

My biggest gratitude was that he had not felt the way I felt.

I want to be careful here, because the obvious read is wrong.

The obvious read is that I am praising emotional disconnection in men. I am not. There is a different essay about men who cannot feel anything, who go cold when you talk about your childhood, who overshare about exes, who are sealed off, who are leaky, who gaslight, who treat sacred things like an email that didn’t get sent. That is not what I am describing.

I am describing a man who already gives you what you need, and what you might could do to him over time if you need to pull him into a storm with you or agree to your version of events in order to feel safe.

If his dysregulation becomes your proof he loves you.

What happens to men who are constantly being pulled into the sticky and fearful emotions of another person? What happens to someone when you want them to match the size of your disappointment. To match the temperature of your fear. To listen until you “get it all out.” To match the weight of your frustration. To prove they love you by demonstrating they can be exactly as upset and worried as you are, on cue.

This was the gift I had not been able to see: he did not feel it the way I was feeling it. He felt fine.

Because he did not feel it the way I was feeling it, the night did not collapse. We did not move all the plans around. We did not stay up processing it together. I did not get pulled into a long performance of being met. I didn’t create a text monologue.

He energetically stayed the size he already was, and I came back down to my own size, and we had a shorter call where he was steady and chill and reconnected again the next morning, and it was lovely. He found a way to give me everything I had wanted. I had needed to go into my own self for other reasons and getting latched into a big thing would have just been self-avoidance.

If he had drowned with me, we would still be in the water. I never even would have seen my own part if I had clung, instead of released.

I have watched women I work with drown their partners. I have done this too.

Not on purpose, and not because I am cruel, but because I had been taught that intimacy was a state of mutual saturation. That if we both felt the same thing at the same intensity at the same time, we were close. If he didn’t, he was withholding, or shut down, or emotionally unavailable, or going to do this again in a pattern, or any of the other terms I had read in books or been told.

I think a lot of women and men have been taught this.

I think it is one of the dominant inheritances of therapy culture. The idea that the proof of a man’s love is whether he can feel your feelings on command. The idea that if he is calm while you are not, he is failing you. The idea that the goal of intimacy is shared dysregulation.

But what if it produces, over time, the man-baby?

Because when he does start to feel what you are feeling, he tends to get stuck in it. Men, in my experience, do not move through the kind of large feminine emotional weather I move through with the same fluency that I move through it. Probably because my emotional weather is tied to an enormous amount of hormone fluctuation. I have been sobbing into my pillow for literally no tangible reason since I was about six years old. I can navigate this.

When he gets pulled in, he gets soaked. Especially if he’s also dealing with shame from disappointing me. He gets clumsy. He gets indulgent. He starts to complain, and to vent, and to sink into the same heavy water you keep flooding the house with.

And then suddenly the man you were attracted to, the one with his own life, is a damp child you have to manage.

The path out of this, in case it is useful, is something like this.

Feel your feeling. Do not numb it. Do not perform it. Notice if you are reaching for him as the cause. Tell yourself the truth about whether he actually caused it.

Express what part is true. I am disappointed. I am tired. I expected something different.

Do not require him to feel it with you. Do not test him on whether he is feeling it correctly. Do not interpret his calmness as betrayal.

Let him stay solid. Let him be a different size than you in this moment. Notice what happens to his presence when he is not being asked to drown.

Notice what happens to your own feeling when it has nowhere to land except in you. Notice the texture and intensity of your own emotions as they are held in your own body with no story.

This is not the same as not talking. I have long talks. I share difficult things. I cry. I have large emotional fluctuations.

What I am describing is a specific demand, often unconscious, that the other person mirror your inner state in order for you to feel loved.

That demand is what I am no longer making.

What I have noticed, since I stopped making it, is that he gets to have his own register. He gets to find some things small that I find big. He gets to find some things big that I find small. He gets to be calm when I am not, and I do not punish him for it, and he does not have to flatten himself into my weather to keep me happy.

He stays attractive to me, is the smaller and more honest way to say it.

And I get to be the woman who can both fully express and fully hold her own emotion. Which turns out to be the partner I wanted to be, all along.

I write primarily to support my small business. You can meet with me about 1–1 coaching or join my self study courses for men and women using these links.

*Christina Lane is a somatic coach, writer, and founder of Radiance and Embodied membership communities. She writes about the interior life of modern relating at christinalanecoaching.com and in the Somatic Sunday newsletter. She publishes first person essays from men in Mutual Terrain and writes from a more feminine voice on Substack. Christina also owns a tutoring company Connected Tutors and is a parent to three teens.*