There are certain things a man expects to be blamed for in a marriage.

Forgetting anniversaries.
Loading the dishwasher incorrectly.

Possibly the collapse of Western civilization, depending on the tone of the evening.

What one does not expect to be blamed for is romantic initiatives launched while one is entirely unconscious.

Yet there it was.

Confession is good for the soul, so here it is.

In my first marriage I was occasionally clocked—quite literally—for unconscious but unwelcome advances. Not metaphorically clocked. Physically corrected. The sort of sharp elbow that arrives with the moral clarity of a church bell.

From my perspective, I had enjoyed a peaceful night’s sleep.

From my wife’s perspective, a man had attempted to initiate intimacy at an hour normally reserved for raccoons, burglars, and existential dread.

The conversation went something like this:

“I was asleep,” I would say.

“You were persistent,” she would reply.

And thus began my introduction to a curious neurological phenomenon known as sexsomnia.

It turns out the sleeping brain is capable of a surprising number of things.

Occasionally, however, it attempts courtship without supervision.

Every era invents its own experiment in domestic life.

The Victorians built quiet marriages inside heavy drawing rooms and hoped no one noticed how bored everyone was.

The 1970s experimented with communes, shared houses, and the vague conviction that everyone could simply love everyone else if the music were good enough.

The early twenty-first century appears to have settled on a new structure:

the legally protected polycule.

Recent reporting from the Pacific Northwest suggests that cities like Seattle, Portland, and Olympia are considering ordinances that would extend nondiscrimination protections to people living in polyamorous or otherwise “nontraditional” household arrangements.

Moral Offloading (n.)
A psychological defense in which a person participates in behavior that conflicts with their values and preserves their moral self-concept by relocating responsibility onto their partner.

In a recent study published in Sexual and Relationship Therapy, researcher K. Doan and colleagues examined women in committed relationships who had viewed pornography within the past six months.

Here is what they found:

• For women who did not morally object to pornography, watching it with a partner did not increase sexual shame.

• For women who morally disapproved, mutual viewing predicted increased sexual shame.

• Increased sexual shame predicted lower sexual satisfaction.

• Lower sexual satisfaction predicted lower overall relationship satisfaction.

• However, when these women externalized blame — attributing the viewing primarily to their partner — the decline in satisfaction softened.

In other words:

If the behavior violated her values, shame rose.
If she relocated responsibility, the shame’s impact on satisfaction decreased.

That is not hypocrisy.

That is psychology.

Let’s begin with a small linguistic mystery that turns out not to be small at all.

A recent study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior used the Google Books Ngram corpus—more than five million English-language books spanning 1800 to 2022—

to track the phrase “feel sexy.”

Out of 28 qualifying constructions (appearing in at least 40 books):

25 referred to women.

Across matched male/female equivalents, female versions appeared about ten times more often than male ones.

This pattern emerged in the late 1970s.
It accelerated after the 1990s.

And it showed up overwhelmingly in heterosexual romance fiction—written primarily by women.

Now, that might sound like a publishing quirk.

It isn’t.

It’s a sexual script.

A kiss is not primarily a tactile event.
It is a cognitively mediated arousal test.

For decades, evolutionary psychologists have proposed three core explanations for why humans kiss:

1. Mate assessment — evaluating compatibility and health.

2. Pair bonding — reinforcing attachment and commitment.

3. Arousal initiation — acting as a catalyst for sexual activity.

The third explanation — the arousal hypothesis — has historically struggled to gather strong empirical support. Studies measuring lip sensitivity, saliva exchange, and sensory intensity failed to show that kissing reliably triggers sexual arousal on its own.

But perhaps researchers were measuring the wrong variable.

Perhaps the catalyst isn’t tactile.
Perhaps it’s cognitive.

A recent peer-reviewed study in Sexual and Relationship Therapy found that partners who frequently engage in daytime romantic or sexual fantasy place significantly greater importance on arousal and physical contact when defining a “good kiss.”

“Twice in a lifetime.”

It sounds poetic. It sounds scarce. It sounds like something you would confess near the end of your life.

But according to a large U.S. survey published in Interpersona, most Americans report experiencing passionate love an average of 2.05 times across their lifespan (Gesselman et al., 2024).

Two.

Not every decade.
Not every partner.
Not every time someone makes your pulse quicken.

Two.

If that number is even approximately accurate, then much of what we casually call “falling in love” is something else.

A recent population survey finds that exhaustion is the most commonly reported reason couples have infrequent sex, outweighing conflict, dissatisfaction, or loss of attraction.

Recent survey research examining sexual frequency among couples finds that exhaustion is the most commonly cited reason for infrequent sex, surpassing explanations related to relationship dissatisfaction, conflict, or loss of attraction.

Approximately one quarter of couples report having sex once a month or less, yet many of these couples still describe their relationships as satisfying.

The findings suggest that low sexual frequency is more strongly associated with physical and mental fatigue than with relational breakdown.

There are few bedroom moments more capable of turning two grown adults into confused interns than squirting.

One person thinks, “Did I break something?”
The other thinks, “Was that… pee?”
And suddenly intimacy becomes an emergency staff meeting.

Let’s rescue this from the internet.

Squirting is a real, documented phenomenon in some women.

It is also wildly misunderstood, routinely pornified, and commonly used as a silent “grade” on sexual performance—usually by people who should not be trusted with clipboards.

This post is the clean, calm explanation: what squirting is, what it isn’t, why it happens for some bodies and not others, and how couples can talk about it without turning sex into a competency exam.

There is a superstition baked into modern intimacy that power is corrosive.

That if one partner feels influential, the other must be diminished.
That equality means nobody pulls harder on the rope.
That desire survives only when no one risks wanting too much.

The research keeps refusing this story.

A multi-study paper published in The Journal of Sex Research arrives at a quietly disruptive conclusion:

when life partners feel they have real influence in their relationship, sex tends to improve—for them and for their partner.

Not because they dominate.
Not because they control.
But because influence stabilizes erotic life.

That distinction matters more than we admit.

Here is the Sexual Timing Paradox:

When intimacy arrives before structure, attachment forms without infrastructure.
When experience arrives before stability, embodiment outruns containment.

If containment comes too late, attachment overwhelms discernment.
If information comes too early, embodiment overwhelms structure.

Timing matters—but capacity decides.

Here is the Sexual Timing Paradox:

When intimacy arrives before structure, attachment forms without infrastructure.
When experience arrives before stability, embodiment outruns containment.

If containment comes too late, attachment overwhelms discernment.
If information comes too early, embodiment overwhelms structure.

Timing matters—but capacity decides.

This essay is not about whether sex is good.

It is about when sex begins doing relational work you may not yet be ready to carry.

In my clinical work, I rarely meet people who regret wanting intimacy. I often meet people who regret how quickly intimacy accelerated before character, temperament, and long-term intention had time to reveal themselves.

What follows is not a purity argument. It is a timing argument—grounded in attachment science, relational dynamics, and what couples quietly discover years later.

If you already disagree, you may stop here.

If you are curious why so many modern couples feel emotionally bonded, sexually entangled, and yet oddly disposable—read on.