Why Men Lose Themselves to Keep Her Happy (It's Time to STOP)
How to Stop Loving Around Someone and Start Loving With Them
Most men were handed a blueprint for love before they were old enough to question it. The locker room version of sex. The idea that chemistry alone carries a relationship. The belief that making a woman orgasm is what makes you enough. These blueprints weren't chosen. They were absorbed. And a lot of men are still tracing them without knowing it.
John Kim, therapist and author of Love Hard On Purpose, joined The Naked Connection to talk about what happens when you stop following the blueprint and start loving honestly instead.
The framework he keeps coming back to is simple. Most people love in one of three ways. Loving around someone means showing only the highlight reel, not saying what you actually want or need, walking on eggshells because you're afraid that being fully seen means being left. Loving at someone is control, demand, aggression. Loving with someone is what most people want but few have practiced. It's the armor down version. Full expression. Saying what hurts, what turns you on, what you need, and trusting that the relationship can hold it.
The reason loving with someone feels so hard for most men is that they were raised in environments where expressing themselves wasn't safe. The muscle never got built. So as adults, they show up in relationships and in the bedroom, defaulting to performance instead of presence, because performance is the only language they were taught.
John talks about this directly from his own life. In his twenties and thirties, sex was largely performative. Getting the most attractive woman in the room was how he measured his worth. Making her orgasm was how he measured his adequacy. It wasn't until his forties that he began to experience sex as something connective, something that lived in the body rather than in the scorecard.
He calls the turning point a corrective love experience. The idea is that the body needs to actually feel what healthy love feels like, not just understand it intellectually. If every relationship you have known has been chaotic, anxious, or toxic, your nervous system will keep gravitating toward what feels familiar. A corrective experience rewires that. It gives your body new data. And when stable, grounded, honest love stops feeling boring and starts feeling like medicine, that is how you know something has actually shifted.
The conversation also landed on what gets in the way of real sexual connection. Performance anxiety. The noise of two competing internal tracks, one that is insecure and one that cannot believe this is happening. Not being in the body enough to actually read your partner. The fear of introducing anything new, like toys, because it feels like a threat to your adequacy rather than an invitation to play.
Connection, not technique, is the foundation of all of it. And connection requires communication that most couples have never practiced. Not because they don't want it, but because nobody showed them how.
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