Are They Your Match?©

Are They Your Match?

I attended a panel discussion for people interested in becoming sex therapists. Afterward, I posed two questions specifically about men to a male friend.

This is an essay about male sexual silence. As I continue down this road, and perhaps learn more about sex therapy, I'm certain that I'll have a host of female perspectives to ponder. But for now, I want to sit with this one.

I decided to start simply — by asking him. First, do you think there are times when a man can become so focused on pleasing his partner sexually that he stops expressing what he wants? Not because he doesn't have desires, fantasies, or things he might want to explore, but because he worries that asking for them could lead to judgment, rejection, misunderstanding, or even change the way his partner sees him?

His answer was "Yes."

Then I asked him: Can a man be sexually satisfied in a relationship while still being sexually inhibited within that relationship?

His answer was "No."

His answers made me curious. If a man can stop expressing what he wants sexually because he is concerned about how his partner might respond, what happens to those desires?

Do they disappear?

Does he decide they aren't that important?

Does he become comfortable never exploring them?

Or does he find another place to express them?

And perhaps an even more interesting question is: Why doesn't he tell his partner?

Maybe he's afraid they'll say no. Maybe he believes he already knows the answer. Maybe the desire feels too vulnerable to say aloud. Maybe he's concerned that revealing it will change how his partner sees him.

She won't.

He won't.

Sometimes those words are based on assumptions.

Sometimes they're based on experience. And sometimes your partner has explicitly told you exactly what they will and will not do.

That's where the question of sexual compatibility becomes much more interesting than simply asking whether the sex is good. Or perhaps it isn't fear at all.

Perhaps you're simply tired of trying.

You've brought it up. You've initiated. You've asked. You've explained what you want. Maybe you've tried to make it fun, tried to compromise, tried to find something that works for both of you.

And eventually you think: I shouldn't have to try this hard. Not because your partner owes you anything. But because you don't want to spend your life persuading someone to be interested in something they simply aren't interested in.

Maybe "she won't" or "he won't" isn't resentment.

Maybe it's acceptance.

This is who they are.

This is what they want.

And this is what they don't want.

At some point, continuing to ask doesn't change the answer. It only makes both people frustrated.

And perhaps that's when the question changes. It is no longer: How do I get my partner to want what I want? It becomes: If this is who they are, and this is who I am, are we actually a match?

I once knew a man who was considering buying his child's mother an engagement ring. She wanted to get married and had been pressing the issue for some time. He was tired of arguing about it, and the ring seemed, at least temporarily, like a way to make the arguing stop. I asked him a simple question: "Once you buy the ring, do you think the arguments will stop?" In a moment of honesty, he said, "No."

That answer stayed with me.

Because the ring wasn't going to resolve whatever was underneath the arguing. It was simply going to change the title of the relationship. Girlfriend could become fiancée. Fiancée could eventually become wife. They could add a wedding, photographs, rings, anniversaries, and years to their history—and still be the same two people having the same unresolved conversations.

A new title doesn't create a match.

Neither does time.

Neither does having children together.

Neither does familiarity.

Neither does loving someone.

And perhaps that's why "Are they your match?" is a different question from "Do you love them?"

Sometimes the answer to both is yes. But perhaps sometimes it isn't.

Long before I became a mental health counselor, I was a sister, a little sister, a best friend, a confidant, and occasionally the keeper of secrets. In many ways, I suspect that's the path that leads a lot of people toward counseling: you become the person people feel safe telling the things they don't tell everyone else.

Over the years, men have trusted me with some very intimate truths about their relationships. One man once told me that he was deeply sexually frustrated in his marriage. His wife had made it very clear that she wasn't interested in having sex as often as he wanted. Her words to him were explicit: she was "not going to let him wear her pussy out."

He admitted he was cheating.

But what stayed with me wasn't simply the fact that he was having sex outside of his marriage. It was the incompatibility he was describing inside of it.

He wanted something his wife did not want to give. She had every right to decide what she wanted for her own body. And his desire didn't disappear simply because she didn't share it. So his mantra became: "If she won't, someone else will."

Hell, I can dig it.

Not because everyone has to agree with the decision he made, but because I understood the truth underneath what he was saying. He knew what he wanted sexually. He knew what his wife didn't want. Neither reality disappeared simply because they loved each other or were married. And perhaps that's the part we don't examine enough.

Can you love someone deeply and still not be sexually matched?

Absolutely.

Can you be happy with someone in many areas of your relationship while remaining sexually unfulfilled?

Perhaps.

Can you have satisfying sex with someone and still have parts of your sexuality that don't fit together?

That's worth thinking about too.

Because sexual compatibility isn't necessarily about finding someone who wants everything you want. But there is a difference between occasionally hearing no and constructing an entire sexual life around what you have learned not to ask for.

Not because his solution has to be anyone else's solution, but because the statement was honest. He knew what he wanted. He knew what she didn't want. And somewhere between those two truths was a mismatch neither truth could erase.

Years later, as a therapist, I met a couple who came to counseling because they were navigating a nonmonogamous relationship. One partner believed the other had violated the rules they had established for their relationship. On the surface, that was the problem that brought them into the room.

But during an individual session with him, the conversation went somewhere deeper.

He cried. Ultimately, he didn't want to share his wife with anyone.

And there it was.

Not judgment. Not a declaration that nonmonogamy was wrong. Not an argument that monogamy was better. Those were not my decisions to make for them. My responsibility was to offer a space where both people could speak honestly, understand themselves and each other more clearly, and hopefully develop the tools to determine what happiness could look like for them.

I would never have sat in session and announced, "You two aren't a match."

Privately, however, I wondered whether they were. Because sometimes the problem isn't that two people haven't communicated clearly enough. Sometimes they have. Sometimes one person says, "This is the kind of relationship I want," and the other person's truth is, "That isn't the kind of relationship I want." Neither person has to be wrong. But love doesn't automatically make those two truths compatible.

What struck me was how much of himself he seemed prepared to override to remain in the relationship. He wasn't merely adjusting to a partner's annoying habit or compromising about where to spend the holidays. He was attempting to live inside a relationship structure that appeared fundamentally different from the one he wanted.

And that raises another question:

How much of yourself should you have to override in order to make a relationship work?

This isn't an argument for marriage, monogamy, lifelong partnership, or any particular way of constructing a relationship. I'm not interested in deciding what a successful relationship should look like for anyone else. I'm interested in something much simpler:

Does the relationship you've chosen allow you to be who you actually are? And does it allow the person beside you to do the same?

Because perhaps a match isn't determined by the structure of the relationship at all. Two people can be beautifully matched in a marriage, in a committed partnership without marriage, in a monogamous relationship, or in a consensually nonmonogamous one.

And two people can be miserable in any of them.

The structure doesn't determine the match. The people living inside it do.

Familiarity and the length of time you have known one another do not, by themselves, constitute a match. Knowing someone for ten, twenty, or thirty years means you have history. It means you may know their habits, their stories, their family, their routines, and perhaps even know what they're going to say before they say it. But knowing someone for a long time is not the same as being well matched. History tells you how long you've been connected. Compatibility asks how well the relationship fits the people you've become. History can create attachment, comfort, routine, and familiarity without necessarily creating compatibility.

Sometimes familiarity can make incompatibility easier to live with. You know what they won't do, so you stop asking. You know what they don't want to discuss, so you stop bringing it up. You know what doesn't interest them, so you find someone else to do it with—or you simply go without. Eventually, you can become incredibly skilled at navigating the relationship without ever asking whether all that navigating is evidence that the relationship actually fits.

How many times in life have we experienced or watched someone else experience a breakup, only for them to look back at the relationship from the outside and think:

What the fuck was I doing?

Suddenly, things that once seemed normal don't seem so normal anymore. The compromises look different. The things you tolerated feel different. The excuses you made no longer make as much sense. You remember how often you went without, how frequently you adjusted, how many things you stopped asking for, and how much energy you spent trying to make something fit.

From inside the relationship, it was simply your life. From outside of it, you can finally see the relationship as a whole.

And sometimes the most surprising realization isn't that the relationship ended. It's wondering why you worked so hard to stay in something that required so much work just to be yourself.

Sometimes two people love each other and aren't a match. Sometimes the sex is incredible, and they're not a match. Sometimes they've been together twenty years, and they're not a match. Sometimes everybody around them thinks they're perfect together and they're not a match.

And sometimes the relationship doesn't fit anybody else's idea of what a relationship is supposed to look like, but they are absolutely a match.

Sometimes you don't realize the difference until you're standing outside of something you once fought like hell to stay inside.

Isn't life too short?

Too short to spend years being sexually frustrated, emotionally unseen, intellectually unstimulated, or constantly negotiating away pieces of yourself just to maintain a relationship.

Too short to keep saying, “She won't.” “He won't.” “They don't like that.” “We don't talk about that.”

Too short to have dreams you pursue alone, desires you never mention, conversations you know better than to start, and parts of yourself that only get to breathe when your partner isn't around.

At some point, you have to ask yourself how much of your life you're willing to not live because the person beside you doesn't want to live it with you.

That doesn't make them a bad person. And it doesn't make you one either. Maybe they're simply not your match. Because the goal shouldn't be to find someone you can tolerate for the rest of your life. It shouldn't be to become so skilled at compromise that eventually you compromise yourself.

You get one life. How much of it are you willing to spend being less of yourself just to keep somebody? Maybe they are your match. Maybe they're not.

But isn't life too damn short not to know the difference?

This is  some real-life shit.

You are allowed to be true to yourself.

Not the version of you that survives by staying quiet. Not the version that shrinks to fit. The actual truth of who you are, what you want, and what you refuse to keep negotiating away just to be kept.

That's the work this comes from. That's what Seven Threads Collective was built to hold — the truths people are still learning how to say out loud, and the stories brave enough to say them first.

Pull your thread. Say your truth.

Seven Threads Collective, LLC™