Men Often Struggle to Feel Fully Alive In Relationships

A lot of men find it challenging to feel fully alive when in a long-term committed intimate relationship.

Some men, who perhaps enjoyed being single, who felt lively & dynamic without the responsibilities a relationship brings, may struggle to maintain that vitality while settling into long-term relationship. Being in a two-person system (relationship) requires different skills, behaviors, choices than the one-person way of singledom.

Despite popular advice, you just don’t get to be the same person in relationship as you were when you were single.

That can be tough for a man to make peace with, or even figure out in the first place.

Of course, many men don’t particularly enjoy being single, and so seek out the “right” partner to inspire and invigorate their lives. Inevitably, that man crashes into the painful reality that it’s actually not another person’s responsibility to make him come alive. Yet he hasn’t learned how to consistently breathe vitality into himself, so he dreams of all the ways he might cleverly (if unconsciously) manipulate his partner to love him better, or at least more enthusiastically.

Meanwhile, the man who enjoyed being single begins to dream of the freedoms he could once again enjoy if only unencumbered by limits of relationship.

Here’s the problem:

We men aren’t taught much during our formative years of life, or during adolescence or young adulthood, or ever, about how to foster genuine closeness and connection.

Nope.

What we’re predominantly taught is how to be independent, to rely only on ourselves, and that the proper aspiration of a man is to achieve power over everything and everyone (including over himself, his feelings and emotions).

We are not taught how to be genuinely relational.

If a man ever truly desires to succeed at intimacy, he has no choice but to learn relational skills. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a man who sought such a thing out voluntarily or proactively.

Take me, for example: I’m a man with an insatiably curious mind and a passion for human behavior and psychology, yet even I only finally came sincerely (and humbly) to real relationship skills work because of one ruined relationship after another.

That’s how it tends to be for most men.

Only after being repeatedly confronted with the harsh reality that he sucks at intimate relationship does a man finally become open to set himself to the task of learning essential relational skills, like how to share power, speak to and respect boundaries, effectively repair conflict, and manage emotions – both his partner’s and his own.

It’s not easy.

Many men in the face of relationship problems we can’t solve soon give up, check out, descend into hopelessness, or grow cynical.

But we can’t give into that.

Thriving in a committed intimate relationship can be immensely rewarding and nourishing. I find a couple’s challenges so often stem from simply not knowing how to consistently, meaningfully, connect with each other, or how to navigate disagreement and conflict in ways that bring them closer together.

These are skills any man or woman can absolutely learn.

For the man who struggles to feel alive in relationship, what he must come to realize is that his fight isn’t with the relationship, or with his partner.

His fight is against his own ingrained patterns of non-relational thinking and behavior.

In other words, his fight is with himself … and that’s a fight worth fighting.

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