How Do I Figure Out What I Want From a Relationship?

Hey Doc. I’m sure this is familiar territory for you and many others, but here we go. I don’t know what I want out of my relationship. I suspect I never really have in past relationships either, but I always figured that either I would figure it out or some form of answer would just naturally present itself over time.

I’m now in a relationship with a wonderful lady, and she (rightfully so) has raised the issue. She feels her biological clock is ticking (which is fair) and wants me to figure out what I want (also fair). This woman is great, she’s a lovely person and I really like her. Have you got any insight in regard to how I can try and get in touch with what I want out of this relationship?

Indecision May Or May Not Be My Problem

I’m glad you recognized that this is an issue in your relationship, IMMBP because you’ve accidentally stumbled onto one of the biggest complaints women have about dating men.

No, I’m being serious here; one of the reasons why women hate the whole dating scene are the number of guys – on the apps, in the bars and just out in the world – who either don’t know what they want from a relationship or at least say that they don’t know what they want (because they’re afraid/ know that if they say it, their partner will dump them). There’s nothing inherently wrong with not knowing what you want, but it is important to be clear that this is where your head is at before you start dating and especially if you know your potential partner is going to want either exclusivity or long-term commitment. When you don’t, you run the risk of wasting everyone’s time; yours, because you’re in a relationship that isn’t a good fit or meets your needs, and your partner’s because they could have been off seeking someone who’s actually right for them and is on the same page.

Now, I want to give you and your partner credit for having a discussion about this and to you, specifically, for reaching out to try to figure things out. That’s a good sign; even if this relationship doesn’t necessarily work out, the fact that you’re asking this question and trying to find the answers is a mark of emotional intelligence. While I appreciate a “go with the flow” approach, hoping that you’re going to figure it out while you’re in it is generally a bad way of making a long-term connection last. It’s better, in my mind, to agree to something casual with the possibility of more (if that’s truly on the table) than to create a nebulous, neither-fish-nor-fowl situationship.

Now when it comes to figuring out what you want, what you want to do is focus on some core questions.

First and possibly the most important: what are your dealbreakers – the ones that are hard no’s, absolutely non-negotiable relationship-enders? Knowing these in advance is important, even if you’re a go-with-the-flow guy, precisely because “going with the flow” often means you may find you’re with someone who has those deal breakers at a time when you’ve become emotionally invested in them. You may, for example, be cool with long-term commitment with a partner. You may be cool with having kids together. But then you find that they want to raise their kids in a way that’s anathema to you… well, now you’re in a position where you’ve got a massive conflict at the heart of a relationship when you’ve tangled your lives together in a way that will make it that much harder to separate – both logistically but also emotionally.

The other benefit of knowing your deal breakers in advance is that you now have a list of qualities you do want – the literal opposite of those non-negotiables. This gives you a starting point in terms of things to look for in your potential partners.

Second: What do you value in life? What sorts of things are important to you for your overall emotional well-being and quality of life? Are you someone who needs stability and calm, or are you someone who finds too much structure and planning to be stifling? Are you oriented towards future goals or does your “figure it out as I go” include your life in general? Do you know yourself to be someone who falls in and out of love frequently, someone who finds their connection to their partner tends to fade over time or are you someone who finds Their Person and doesn’t waver unless and until the relationship ends?

Knowing these things about yourself, how well does your potential partner need to match those needs? Where are the areas of wiggle-room, where you might be ok with a partner who doesn’t line up perfectly with everything on that list? Are you going to be comfortable with someone who hits 50% of them? 60%? What about 75%?

Third: If you look around in your life, what relationship role models do you have? Who – whether in your family, in your social circle or even in pop culture – models the kind of relationship that you ultimately would want to have?

This one can be tricky, because often when folks have a hard time knowing what they’re looking for, it’s because they don’t have a strong reference point to compare things to. It can be hard to say “Yeah, I’d like that” when the most significant relationships you’ve seen have been full of strife or conflict.

It’s also important, when looking at those relationship role models to know what aspects of them don’t work for you. Some relationships work well because of the people in them are well matched for each other, but the way those relationships function might not be a good match for you because you’re not those particular people. Passion in a relationship, for example, can look very differently depending on the people involved. Gomez and Morticia are one example of a very passionate couple… but so are Han and Leia. The passion for them is often expressed in yelling and arguments; they may love each other to distraction and the passion they have for one another is intense, but it’s still one where the expression of it comes out in conflict. You can love someone to pieces and still want to toss them into the next convenient volcano half the time.

The same goes in the other direction; some people are less demonstrative in the traditional sense. It’s not that they don’t feel love or affection or pride for their partners or their family or friends, it’s just that they aren’t necessarily the type that express it outwardly or vocally. The “rough hands, soft heart” type or the stoic may be appealing to some, but may not work for you, especially if you’re someone who’s preferred form of communicating love and affection comes in the form of verbal affirmation or physical touch.

Fourth: what kind of partner are you looking for? Not in terms of long-term/short-term or monogamous/non-monogamous, kids/no kids, but the partner type who compliments you and fills in gaps, as you do the same for them.

Think of it like class types in a game. Some folks know they’re a support-class and like being the providing the logistical, emotional or technical support for their partner, rather than being the one who’s leading the charge, and so they often want a partner who’s going to be more take-charge. Some people want a tank, someone who’ll run interference with the struggles and trials and tribulations of the world, clearing the path for them while they pursue the team goal. Some people want a mutual DPS or battle buddy, someone who’s gonna be right in the middle of the fracas with them, watching their back as the two glide with and around each other like two gracefully lethal dancers (or mutual Tasmanian devil-style whirlwinds of destruction).

Battle couples (literal and metaphorical) get a lot of representation in pop culture – Buffy/Angel, Percy/Vex, Nick/Nora, etc. – but others are just as valid, just as real and just as desirable. Sometimes you want a Sam Gamgee more than an Aragorn or a Giles more than a Spike, an Essek to your Caleb.

Fifth: what are you willing to give up? What are you willing to sacrifice? What compromises are you willing to make in the name of making a relationship work?

This part is incredibly important, because every relationship is one of compromise. Every relationship you enter is going to require that you make significant changes to your life, make demands on your time and require investments of your energy and attention. All of that is going to have to come from somewhere.

One of the mistakes I see people make all the time is that they assume that getting A Relationship isn’t going to change their lives; they don’t recognize or make room for the ways that it’s going to change their day to day lives or the ways that it will force them to examine and adjust their priorities and goals. A lot of guys – especially guys with little relationship experience – often don’t realize at first that having and maintaining a relationship means that they won’t have as much time for some of the things they did when they were single. It’s not that they suddenly started dating Lady Killjoy, it’s that there’re only so many hours in the day and everything you decide to do comes at the cost of not doing something else. At the risk of an awkward metaphor, think of a relationship like owning a pet; there’s a need for care and feeding, for enrichment and ensuring that its needs are being met. They’re going to make demands on your time when it’s not convenient for you. There are inevitable emergencies that will cost you time, money and stress, and you can only prepare so much for these in advance. Not being ready for the responsibility and time costs can cause harm and damage the relationship, even if you don’t mean to.

Sixth: what do you see in your future? Do you see yourself living a life of travel and adventure? Material success? A member of a thriving and supportive community? Surrounded by multiple generations of family – children, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, cousins etc.? If you know you want kids, what timeline are you looking at? If you know you don’t, are you willing to be up front with that or to take steps to ensure that biological children aren’t in your future?

You want to make sure you have an answer to this because you want to make sure that you’re with someone who is actually in alignment with this future. Even if you know you both want kids, the timeline at which you may want them can be a deal breaker. Some people want to have lots of kids right away, for many reasons. Some want to wait to have them later down the line. This is one area where there really can’t be a compromise, especially the longer the relationship goes on and time, biology and entropy takes their toll. Someone is going to have to bend, or else the relationship is going to have to end so that everyone can find a partner who is in alignment with them.

Last question: Where is the desire for the relationship coming from? Not the physical, chemical desire for your partner or even the desire for connection and companionship but the desire for the relationship? Is it coming from a place of scarcity and worry, where you feel like you need to find a relationship or risk losing something? Is it coming from a sense of obligation – whether to the person you’re currently seeing or to some more nebulous concept? Or is it coming from a place of inspiration, connection and curiosity – a feeling of “this person brings so much to my life that my life would be poorer without them, even when things suck and we’re both grinding our teeth to powder?”

This is more significant than you may realize. A lot of times, people go into a relationship – even with someone they care for – for the wrong reasons. The reasons may be a fear of loss, a fear of future loneliness, a sense of obligation (“I have to get married because that’s what men do”), or having something to prove – to themselves, to former partners, maybe just to the universe in general. These tend to be bad reasons to get into a relationship; you’re coming to them not because the person is right for you but because they’re the person who happened to be there when you decided that this needed to happen. And while those relationships can last… that doesn’t necessarily make them successful.

I’ve seen a lot of couples who, while they loved one another deeply, were in a relationship for the wrong reasons. That disconnect often ends up creating a canker at the heart of the relationship and one that often ends up stealing their joy and connection over time. Making sure that you’re with someone for the right reasons, rather than trying to avoid negative outcomes or fears, is one of the most important parts of making a relationship work – whether it’s short term or for the long haul, casual or deeply committed.

Answer these questions for yourself, and I think you’ll have a much better idea of what you want… and if you want those things with this lovely lady in particular.

Good luck.

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Hi there,
I’m 47 years old. I left my sexless marriage ten years ago. I fully expected to have a rich sex life post marriage. I did not. The last time I had sex was years ago and that was an isolated incident.

How do I just accept my sexless life?

Chaste, Not Chased

OK, CNC, I promise you that I am actually taking your question seriously and that I’m not mocking you or dunking on you when I ask you this: what did you expect was going to happen?

I’m not asking this because out of a sense of “well you should’ve known you were unfuckable”, but because I’ve seen a lot of people who’ve made the same choices you’ve made, with similar outcomes. There was something in their relationship that they were unsatisfied with, made changes to the relationship or left it entirely with the hope and expectation that this would solve their problems… and then discover that now they had the same problem and also no relationship. Some guys, for example, pressure their partners to open up the relationship under the assumption that this means that they’re going to have hot-and-cold running sex whenever they want it… only to discover that finding women who were cool with sleeping with partnered men was far more difficult than finding men who were cool with having sex with partnered women. The same is true for leaving a sexless marriage; it’s one thing if there are people who’ve been making it clear that they’d love to jump a guy’s bones if only the obstacle of the wife was out of the way. But without that… well, the biggest difference is just that they’re no longer married.

Now this isn’t to say that leaving your relationship was wrong – far from it. You were unhappy and unsatisfied, your needs weren’t being met, those are all very good reasons to end a marriage. But this is where the question of “what did you expect was going to happen” comes in, because what you expected and what was likely can be very different. It’s generally a good idea to leave a relationship with some idea of what comes next, even if “what comes next” is “take some time to reflect on what happened and what I can do differently” or “I’m going to pursue my connection with X once I’m ready”.

An expectation without preparation can lead to a situation like the one you’re in now, where things spiraled out of control.

Now, a lot of people hearing that will think that what I’m saying is that you don’t leave a relationship unless you’ve got a cushion to land on, metaphorically speaking, and I’m not. What I’m saying is that leaving a relationship isn’t a guarantee of anything except the end of that relationship. And while leaving that relationship may be a net-positive in and of itself – and it sounds like it was – that’s no guarantee of what will come after.

Now part of the problem here is that you give me next to nothing to work with in terms of what happened and what you’re struggling with. I don’t know why the sex in your marriage ended, what you and your ex-wife did, if anything, to try to resolve it. This is important, not just for someone like me to give you advice, but also from a perspective of “what you need to do differently after you’ve ended the marriage”.

There’s a significant difference, for example, between your ex-wife suddenly deciding that both of you were done with sex for good, or you having a profound disconnect in the kinds of sex you needed and the kind of sex she did. Her desire could’ve tapered off because of boredom, or hormonal changes or medication. It could be a case of “she just fell out of love with you”, or changes in her life cratered her libido and ability to feel sexual. You might have let yourself go in a way that made it harder for her to feel attracted to you, or she might have realized that her sexuality and relationship to it was different than she had thought.

Similarly, an idea of what you and she did – again, if anything – to solve the problem can give an idea of where you might want to pay attention in the future. If you went to couple’s therapy and that didn’t fix anything, why not? Was the therapist not a good match for you? Did they not take the problem seriously? Were their suggestions not actually helpful? Or did you or your wife not put actual effort into trying the exercises? Was it a case where your wife was happy no longer having sex and so didn’t see a need to try to fix things? Or was it a case of she or you wanted things the other couldn’t give and so the compromise was “nobody has sex now”?

This is why having an idea of what went wrong and why is important: it gives you a path forward to fixing things, even if you don’t necessarily have people waiting for you to be single again. If you, like a lot of people in relationships, started to relax your standards of presentation and personal upkeep, then obviously the next thing you want to do is get yourself back into fighting trim, so you’re ready to be out on the dating market. If it was a case that you and your wife had mismatched needs, getting a better handle on what you need from a sex partner can make a difference as you try to find someone who’s more in tune with you.

You also don’t give me any information about what you’ve done since to try to have a rich and fulfilling sex life, what obstacles were in the way and what you’ve tried to do to overcome them or work around them. That would give a better idea of what you could do next and whether the only answer truly is “just give in and be ready for your monastic existence”. Throwing your hands up and saying “nothing worked” isn’t helpful if the issue was ultimately that you were trying to pursue relationships with people you weren’t compatible with, if it was a matter of not knowing where to look for the kind of relationship you want or even “the apps just suck”.

And since I don’t want to waste your time and mine with suggestions that you’ve already tried or that aren’t necessarily a good fit for you… well, that limits our options rather significantly.

I will say that, if nothing else, your lack of sex is a money-soluble problem. Escorts, massage providers who give happy endings and other sex workers exist, after all. Sugar babies are a thing too, if you are looking for a regular partner. If all you want is sex for the sake of getting laid, putting money aside for, say, a bi-monthly trip to Nevada is always an option, especially if you want to avoid possible legal issues.

But if it’s truly a case of “nothing works, nothing will satisfy you and you don’t want to put more effort in”… well, you can still have satisfying sex with yourself. Masturbation doesn’t necessarily need to be a five minute session with Rosie Palms and a browser tab open to Pornhub or Brazzers. Varying techniques, using lube of varying slickness or consistency, exploring things like prostate stimulation and the like can give you orgasms that’re very different from a quick knuckle shuffle.

There’re also a wide variety of masturbation sheaths from companies like Fleshlight and Tenga, with a variety of textures, levels of suction and friction to provide you with a smorgasbord of experiences. There’re even masturbation sheaths that’re licensed molds of specific porn stars, for a proxy experience. There are also human-sized and shaped toys like Real Dolls if you want to have the feeling of another body in bed (or the tub or the couch or whatever) with you; they’re not cheap by anyone’s measure, but they’ll provide a better facsimile of a sexual relationship than just your hand itself.

It may not be the same as having a regular partner, but that’s still different from an entirely sexless existence. You’re just adjusting your definition of what ‘sex’ is.

But like I said: that’s basically the best I can do, based on what you’ve given me. Next time, if there is a next time, if you find yourself in a similar situation, before you make the leap out, remember to ask yourself “OK… when I do this, what happens next?”

Good luck.

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This post was previously published on Doctornerdlove.com and is republished on Medium.

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