Are Hetero Relationships Doomed from the Start?

Can we ever come together when we’ve been programmed to want different things?

Men of the world, those of you who are attracted to women, I need to ask you something. Something I’ve been struggling with for a while now.

Are we doomed?

For those of us who are attracted to one another (whether exclusively or in addition to attraction to other genders), are our heterosexual partnerships destined to fail?

Surely, you must be thinking about this, too.

This isn’t about monogamy versus polyamory. It’s not about marriage versus hookups.

I’m talking about man versus [gulp] woman.

Do you ever think about this? Please don’t take the Beginner’s Loop here. I’m not talking about how many ex-girlfriends tried to trick you into marriage, or how your ex-wives always lost interest in sex after having a baby. (Although, ironically, this is kinda what I’m talking about…)

Take the trail marked “Difficult” with me, please. The one that heads straight up that mountain and is covered in scree. The one that will make our legs groan in protest and will have us wishing for a masseuse, by the end of it.

This is gonna take a while. And we need to be able to see the whole picture from as high up as we can get.

Will you come?

Early last year, I found myself in a relationship in which things got tough early on. Information was not being freely shared in a way that made me increasingly suspicious and uncomfortable.

Despite trying to confront it head-on, nothing changed. I finally felt so hopeless that I amicably ended the relationship. It wasn’t easy. I was crazy about him, and his behavior had hurt and disappointed me.

He initially accepted the breakup, but returned a few days later to ask if we could hold off until we had a chance to talk more the following week. He wanted to make one more try, once his schedule had cleared up.

During that week, he tried to stay in touch via text messages, which I found encouraging. However, when he messaged me with a sexual advance, I bristled. We hadn’t yet talked through our issue. We were literally putting a pause on a breakup until we could have that conversation. I wasn’t in a place where I felt safe or connected enough to share loving sentiments, let alone engage in text messages of a sexual nature.

And I respectfully told him just that.

I was shocked by his response. He was frustrated and angry, accusing me of pushing him away and rejecting him when he was trying to build intimacy between us. He later told me that he felt that I had rebuffed him and that it had devastated him so severely that he had lost his feelings for me.

As you can guess, we didn’t make it as a couple.

The reason I’m telling this story is not to vilify this man, or rehash painful memories. I’m telling it because it’s a scene that has played out for me countless times in a relationship.

It seems an endless dance. Men guarding their thoughts and feelings to the detriment of any intimacy outside of the bedroom. Rifts being formed. Women asking for emotional triage and communication that might heal these rifts. Men making a sexual advance, instead, believing (presumably) that is what is actually needed to heal the rift.

And everything going straight to hell after that…

Please understand that there are so many stories I could share here — that I want to share here — to make my point. I suspect we have all been through them in an endless cycle of well-worn dramas. But I feel the need to stick with just one example. I know we’re taking the “Difficult” trail, but we’ve got to keep up a good pace, even on this challenging terrain.

So let’s focus on the scenario I shared above. Guys, I am certain you have experienced this, too, and perhaps felt entirely justified in your assertion that your sexual advance was an authentic expression of love and connection, and that you were legitimately wronged by your female partner’s disinterest in that gesture.

Okay, are you ready? Please hear me out. Really take this in.

The story we will reach for here is the story we’ve been taught to reach for: the alleged inherent differences between men and women. You know the one I mean. Men are from Mars; women are from Venus. Men connect through sex; women connect through love. And neither can come together, unless we learn to speak the other’s language.

But I just don’t believe this anymore — despite the frequency with which this scenario (and other supposed “Mars/Venus” scenarios) play out.

I get so tired of saying this, but apparently, it hasn’t gotten through to the world yet. Women like sex. Yeah. I know. Crazy, right? We connect through touch and pleasure, too. We build emotional intimacy through sex, too.

And here’s an even bigger bomb: I fully believe that men deeply need and want emotional connections built through exchanges that aren’t limited to sex. I think they want and need to build intimacy through conversation, through loving gestures, through time in one another’s company (yes, even while clothed).

Hopefully, you saw this coming. You must know by now that I’m deeply questioning gender stereotypes, roles, and biases that have been perpetuated by our culture. You can’t convince me that all this isn’t pure propaganda, designed to edify the oppressive power structures in our patriarchal system. After all, little is more effective in achieving that than emotionally infantilizing men and sexually amputating women.

It’s not the gender stereotypes, roles, and biases that are of concern to me, however. It’s the patriarchal system that created them in the first place.

Tell me: Do you not see an issue here? Is there any hope for us?

I have to admit that I picked a pretty innocuous example to illustrate my point. In truth, there’s so much more to it than those simple disconnects when a man (thinks he) wants to fuck and a woman (thinks she) wants to talk.

Have you ever thought about the way our culture has set us at odds from the beginning? You must have — I hear from so many men lamenting about these seemingly inexplicable disconnects.

She doesn’t want to make the first move. She seems a little disinterested in sex, or loses interest in it, entirely. She only seems to care about marriage and babies and can’t even seem to recognize that the man she’s targeted for the Husband and Baby Daddy position is an actual human being with wants and needs of his own.

I hear these complaints all the time and I don’t understand why men are so confused by this. Do you all not see that we were given two very different sets of marching orders?

We women were told not to be sluts. It’s immoral for us to like sex too much. A woman’s value lies in her “honor,” her “goodness” — and she can’t have honor and goodness while expressing her sexuality. We have literally been cut in half — the virgin and the whore. We only get to choose one or the other, and only one of those options promises some level of safety and security.

Meanwhile, men are taught to sow their wild oats. They are taught that being a true man means collecting as many partners as possible. They’re taught emotional connection is weakness. They want the whore in the bedroom and the virgin in the kitchen, having no understanding that a woman cannot exist in pieces.

Do you see what I see? That we are fundamentally groomed in ways that directly, purposefully, and specifically prevent deep connections between men and women?

If I didn’t explain it well enough, maybe social scientist Dr. Riane Eisler can do it better:

“…the final irony for women — and tragedy for both women and men — is that the cultural messages from the ads and stories that fill …[the media] are precisely the formula for unsatisfying male-female relations. Men can never meet the exaggerated expectation that they will provide all meaning, content, and purpose in women’s lives. Women can never meet the exaggerated expectation (their own and those of men) that they will be eternally beautiful, young, pliable, and pleasing.”

Clearly, I’m not alone in having this realization, if Eisler made this observation decades ago. But she is also a woman, and therefore, her acknowledgement of this issue doesn’t really solve my problem.

Guys…do you see it? Because if you don’t, then I fear we’re even worse off than I thought.

If I’m right — and I think I am — then, guys, we are fucked. Or rather, we’ll be far from fucked because how the hell are we supposed to make it to the bedroom when we’ve been taught to carry out roles and exhibit behaviors that fundamentally oppose one another? It’s a goddamn miracle that we’re having sex, at all, and no mystery why our relationships so easily crumble.

How do we make our way out of this mess? Because you know what? I desperately want more sex in my life. I desperately want to give and receive more love. With men. To men. From men. And yet, I’m standing here alone, absolutely frozen in fear at the thought of pursuing any further romantic and sexual connections with men because not a single one that I’ve taken this journey with has seen any value in me beyond my ability to sexually gratify them.

I’m afraid that the system has set us so violently against one another that that’s all I will ever experience.

I don’t want to feel this way. I don’t want to have had these experiences. I don’t want to experience this ever again. I want something different, something like what author Clayton Barbeau describes in his book Deliver the Male:

“Healthy sexuality finds expression as a free gift, not as a compulsion, and arises out of the desire to give and receive pleasure in union with the beloved. …I cannot express tenderness in my love relationship if I am — because of my miseducation in the male mystique — afraid of showing tenderness. My sexual love-making cannot be a total communication of myself, if I am unwilling to give myself away in intimate sharing.”

I’m not sure I’d agree with all of Barbeau’s life philosophies, but in this case… Yes, Clayton! Fuck, yes! Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, yes.

I want a tender lover. I want tenderness from a man, period. I want to fuck a man so hard that I strike a path straight into his goddamn heart. I want it to open and flood its contents all over me.

And just as I long for men to be able to access and share their emotions with abandon, I also want women to be able to fiercely pursue their sexual desire with the same shamelessness as men do. I want the virgin and whore split to be healed. I want men to recognize my humanity and inherent goodness no matter where or how often I spread my legs. Let me be a slut and a saint in all the rooms of the house.

And maybe you don’t know it, guys, but trust me, you want this, too. That alone would turn this world upside-down.

And god(dess), how I want to turn it upside-down.

I just don’t know how. Do you? Can you even hear me? Can you see this, too? Or is our conditioning just too strong?

Tell me.

No, show me. Show me the world you want.

If we’ve done right by each other, we’ll meet somewhere in the middle of all this mess. And then, finally, we can write a new story. Together.

© Yael Wolfe 2022

Yael Wolfe is a writer, photographer, and creator of Howl. You can find more of her work at yaelwolfe.com.

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