I have long touted the position that sexual attraction and emotional intimacy are completely separate pillars of a relationship. This flies in the face of popular modern thinking. Women, marriage counselors, and modern society as a whole insist that for women, emotional intimacy is an absolute prerequisite to sex. That if she’s not in love with you, her legs are crossed.

Of course, female behavior flies in the face of this assertion. You need look no farther than your nearest bar to see women going home and having sex with guys they barely know. The sexual attraction is there, but emotional intimacy is not. Many married couples find angry sex, when the two of them are fighting, and even the subsequent make-up sex, to be some of the best sex they’ve ever had. At that particular time, sexual attraction is there, but emotional intimacy is not.

On the flip side, one need only look as far as the internet, any marriage counselor’s office, or even a modern sitcom, to see the opposite situation. People who love each other and are emotionally close, but the sexual attraction isn’t there, so sex is absent, infrequent, a chore, a fight. Emotionally intimacy is there, but sexual attraction is not.

Sexual attraction and emotional intimacy are two separate pillars of a relationship. While society tends to prioritize “love” and insist that a focus on sex is shallow and trivial, a relationship that lacks sexual attraction is every bit as much of a failure as a relationship that lacks emotional intimacy.

However, while these two pillars are separate, they are not unrelated. If a woman does not think you are sexually attractive, this often manifests in her behavior. A wife trapped in a marriage to a husband she doesn’t want to fuck tends to be disrespectful, bitchy, and downright mean. He may be the nicest and most thoughtful husband in the world, but if he’s an unattractive chump in her eyes, nothing he ever does will be good enough. Conversely, if a wife is married to a husband she, and every single one of her friends and neighbors, wants to fuck more than anything, she’ll respect the hell out of that man, even if he barely lifts a finger to do things for her. Most guys are somewhere between these two extremes.

If you’re a random guy at a bar, picking up random women, you don’t need to worry about emotional intimacy. You can just be attractive. But if you’re a husband, the relationship between sexual attraction and emotional intimacy is a factor you need to consider in your dealings with your wife.

The core of the issue is that women contextualize sex. A woman will have a random threesome in college, just to see what it’s like, with people she doesn’t even like. She will have six one-night stands with strangers from the bar, one of which included her only experience with anal, all of which included blowjobs. She will consider all of this to be positive, enriching experiences. She will be raped one night in the bar parking lot and consider that to be the worst experience of her life. She will date her husband-to-be and make him wait six months before having sex for the first time, marry him after two years, and have once a month, missionary-only sex, no blowjobs. And all of these different sexual standards for different experiences will all make sense to her based on the roles each of these guys played for her.

Women will hold different guys to different standards, based on the role that guy is currently filling in her life. When a woman goes to the bar looking for a random dick to have some fun with, it doesn’t matter if the guy is a bit of an asshole. He’s hot, he’s confident, so he’s good for a fuck. The lack of emotional intimacy doesn’t matter, because she’s not holding him to any standard of emotional intimacy.

Conversely, when a woman is with her husband, she’s holding him to a different standard. Her husband is expected to fill the role of husband, not the role of random dick from the bar. If her husband isn’t measuring up and fulfilling his role for her and for the family, she is going to feel resentment, anger, even hate. Essentially, negative emotional intimacy.

While emotional intimacy isn’t a prerequisite for sex, if your wife feels a whole lot of negative emotional intimacy – anger, resentment, hate, etc. – then this negative emotional intimacy may serve as a barrier to sex, even if she’s attracted to you sexually. Even when, had you been a random guy at the bar instead of her husband, she’d have fucked you.

Your wife holds you to a higher standard than she holds other men, and if she feels resentment regarding your failure to meet that standard, this will keep her from fucking you even if the attraction is there. When you married her, you promised to fill the role of husband, not the role of random dick from the bar, and if your shit isn’t handled and you aren’t filling that role properly, the hate she feels for you for breaking your promise – that negative emotional intimacy – will cock block you worse than any nosy toddler. And all of the muscles in the world and all of the flirting with your neighbors imaginable won’t fix this.

What’s worse is that the next random dick at a bar she sees on girls’ night, who isn’t being held to the same standard as you, will seem a lot more emotionally close to her than he actually is, simply because all of that negative emotional intimacy isn’t there. The absence of resentment and hate will feel like love to her.

The normal advice of “be attractive, don’t be unattractive” works just fine for random guys at a bar, but once you’re married, you have the added burden of owning your shit. Getting you shit handled. Keeping your wife comfortable that the shit is taken care of and that she doesn’t need to worry her pretty little head about the shit.

Married life is harder than single life primarily because you’ve agreed to additional responsibilities, for the same sex you could have had while single, usually because you’re planning on making some babies. Essentially, the transaction is that you promise to be better than a random guy from the bar and she promises to have your kids. If you’re cheating your wife out of what she thought she bargained for by not owning your shit, more muscles won’t help.

Unmarried guys can disregard emotional intimacy in a way that husbands can’t. Although trying to trade good behavior for sex is a huge error, handling your shit like an awesome husband so that your wife doesn’t hate your guts is critical to getting laid, and every bit as important as lifting weights.