All Posts

Nashville runs on alcohol. Not in a hidden way — openly, culturally, as a defining feature of the place. I am not writing a temperance post. What I want to name is more specific and less discussed: alcohol has a direct, measurable, and consistently negative effect on sexual function and intimate presence. And in a city where drinking is this normalized, a meaningful number of couples are attributing to their relationship a problem that is substantially pharmacological.

There is a hesitation I encounter regularly: if the goal is intimate connection with my partner, isn't working on this alone somehow beside the point? I understand the logic. Intimacy is relational by definition. But the logic is wrong. The quality of connection available between two people is substantially determined by what each of them brings — and what each brings is developed individually, not relationally. You cannot give someone presence you have not developed.

Shame and reverence are not the same thing. They can feel similar from the inside — both produce a certain carefulness around sexuality. But they are different in origin, different in effect, and different in what they produce in a marriage over twenty years. Reverence says: this is sacred, and sacred things deserve care. Shame says: this is dangerous, and you are suspect for wanting it. One of those is a theological position. The other is a wound wearing a theological costum

There is a particular week in August in our house that functions as a genuine reset. The kids go back to school, and for the first time in three months Brittney and I have predictable, recurring hours we can actually see coming. For years we did nothing with them. They filled themselves. By October we were as depleted as we had been in July. The fall reset is one of the most underused intimate opportunities in the calendar year.

There is a specific thing Brittney does that I did not recognize the significance of for years. When I do something — genuinely anything — she names it. Not effusively. Just specifically, out loud, in a way that makes clear she noticed. For a long time I received this as a pleasant feature of her personality. What I did not understand is that she was operating one of the most well-documented mechanisms in relationship science.

The phrase carries an enormous amount of weight, and most of that weight is shame. A sexless marriage. The words land like a diagnosis. I want to take the shame out of this and replace it with information, because the information is genuinely more useful and considerably less bleak than the phrase suggests. You are not in a rare or catastrophic situation. You are in a common one — with a well-documented set of causes and a genuinely good recovery rate.

If you have been curious about guided audio intimacy but have not tried it, I suspect I know what is holding you back. It is not skepticism about whether it works or the cost. It is the specific discomfort of not knowing what you are walking into — and the reasonable reluctance to introduce something unknown into the most vulnerable dimension of your relationship. That is a fair hesitation, and nobody has adequately addressed it. So here is exactly what to expect.

Three kids, two businesses, and by the time the house is genuinely quiet, Brittney and I have somewhere between twenty and forty minutes before one of us falls asleep mid-sentence. For years our implicit position was that it wasn't enough time for anything real. The reframe that changed things was not finding more time. It was recognizing that twenty minutes is genuinely enough — and that our belief that it wasn't was the thing preventing us from using it.

There is a specific assumption embedded in almost every piece of intimacy advice available, and I want to challenge it directly. The assumption is that if you understand what needs to change, you will be able to change it. I do not believe this is true — and I say that as someone who has written roughly a hundred articles largely composed of information about intimacy. Information is necessary. It is not sufficient. Here's what actually fills the gap.

Something significant has happened in the intimacy space over the past several years, and I do not think most couples have registered what it means. Audio has become the fastest-growing format in sexual wellness — not video, not text, not devices. And the audience driving that growth is overwhelmingly women. I find this genuinely interesting, not as a market observation, but because of what it reveals about what people have been wanting all along and could not find.

When Brittney and I first started exploring guided audio in year seven of our marriage, I did not expect it to work. I am an analytical person by default, and the idea that a voice could meaningfully change the quality of connection between two people married for seven years struck me as something that works for other people. It worked anyway. And the more I have learned about the actual neuroscience of voice, the less surprising that has become.

Somewhere in year seven of our marriage, Brittney and I realized we had stopped touching each other. Not entirely, and not in any way either of us could have pointed to. But the casual, no-reason-at-all physical contact that had been constant early on had quietly disappeared, and neither of us had noticed it go. That discovery was one of the smaller things we addressed in that season — and one of the most immediately effective.

I'm forty-seven. And somewhere in the last several years I noticed what most men my age notice and almost none of us say out loud: the body I'm working with now is not the body I was working with at thirty. None of that is a crisis. What surprised me was how completely absent any conversation about it was — among friends, in the culture, anywhere. There is a growing public conversation about perimenopause. There is essentially nothing for men. So here's mine.

There is a specific thing that happens in intimate encounter that most people have experienced and few have named. Part of your attention leaves the experience and goes to your own body — not to what it is feeling, but to what it looks like. The technical term is spectatoring, and it is one of the most reliable ways to leave an intimate encounter while remaining physically present in it. Here's what the research shows and why partner reassurance almost never fixes it.

There is a specific kind of relationship pain that comes from being told, repeatedly and by well-meaning people, that your intimate difficulties are a matter of effort. For neurodivergent couples, this advice is not merely unhelpful — it is actively harmful, because it locates the difficulty in willingness rather than wiring. Here's what the research actually shows about what ADHD and autism change in intimate life, and what genuinely helps.

Brittney and I are not in this season yet — I want to say that plainly, because honesty about where you're writing from matters more in this territory than in most. But what I keep noticing is that the couples who struggle most through perimenopause are not the ones with the most severe symptoms. They're the ones who never had language for what was happening. She notices her body responding differently. He reaches for the only interpretation available to him. Both are wrong.

There is a framing of intimacy work that most people arrive with — and that most people leave coaching having revised significantly. The framing is this: my intimate life is primarily a relational problem. What needs to change is something about the relationship. This framing is understandable — and it is the primary reason that most attempts to improve intimate lives produce limited results even when both partners are genuinely trying. The research consistently shows somethi

Nashville has a specific singles culture worth naming honestly. Meeting people here is not particularly difficult. What is significantly less abundant — for Nashville singles and singles everywhere — is the specific preparation for genuine intimate connection that determines whether the meetings that happen produce genuine relationships or continue the cycling-through that so many intelligent, capable people experience with bewildering consistency. Here's what that preparatio

Consent is a word most long-term couples apply to the beginning of a relationship and then largely set aside as mutual understanding develops. This setting aside is understandable — and it misses something genuinely important. The gradual erosion of genuine ongoing consent — the quiet replacement of real curiosity with confident assumption — is one of the more significant contributors to intimate disconnection in long-term partnerships. Here's what the research shows and what

The intimate connection Brittney and I have now is not the same as what we had in years one through five. It is not better or worse in any simple sense. It is fundamentally different in character. The cultural narrative about long-term intimacy tends toward two equally inaccurate positions — inevitable decline or automatic deepening. The research supports neither. Here's what it actually shows about what changes after ten years together — and what direction that change takes.