Plenty of guys deal with problems with sex. From heavy porn use, to erectile dysfunction, to general intimacy problems with their wives and girlfriends, men struggle with what it means to be sexually intimate. Watch this 2-min. video on Men and Sex Problems, where Jason talks about some of the problems men have with sex.
Instead of the 40 hour workweek, somehow we ended up extending back quite a bit beyond those boundaries over the last couple of decades. We’ve become accustomed to working 45, 55, 60 and more hours a week. I even talked with guys who regularly clock in about 80 hours on the job a week.
Even though economic conditions have worsened in the last couple of years, and things are tighter overall, there seems to have been a pervasive cultural message to work as much as we can. I think that that’s changing the last couple of years, with people reconsidering their lives and trying to budget time for things that really matter to them, like family, hobbies, and other life experiences. And younger guys seem to have taken this heart: by seeing their fathers worked tirelessly, more and more guys are trying to find what work allows them to apply their passions, and doesn’t kill them in the process.
But, workaholism still runs rampant in our culture today. Plenty of guys they’re either head in the sand and press ahead robotically to get ahead. Some are so driven by power, success for money that it blinds them to the rest of the rose bushes that they’re zooming past.
Usually, the first thing that materializes as a problem is marital or relationship problems. I hear a lot of women complaining that their guy works too much or too hard, and doesn’t have time for them. They complain about not having regular date nights, not having sex regularly, or just generally feeling unattended to emotionally. Many guys don’t see this until it’s too late, and then come in to count and try to help to patch up what’s already broken beyond repair.
Is this you? I know I’ve been guilty working too hard sometimes, but moderation is definitely the key. Do you find that you’re able to create the kind of work life balance that’s needed to create an optimal life for you?
Here’s four things to think about if you may be a workaholic:
1. You probably aren’t attending to your self, whether it’s diet, exercise, sleep, or your own emotional state. Forging out a life in balance means investing some energy in those areas of your life. Start small, and make commitments each week to modify one or more areas.
2. Get feedback: ask those closest to you how they see. Are you accessible for people when they need you? Do they feel like they’ve “got” you when they need you, or is there experience that you’re always attending to other things?
3. For dads: to consider if you were own father was a workaholic, and if he wasn’t there. Ask yourself if you may be re-creating the same cycle each over again, and if so, take preventative measures to stop it. You wouldn’t want your son or daughter to grow up feeling like you weren’t there, even if that’s how you felt growing up. Would you?
4. Identify why you’re working so hard. Is it for the money? Is it because you’re avoiding something, such as wanting to be home? Are you a perfectionist, or just hungry to climb the ladder at work? Identifying your motivations is really the Ground Zero for making changes to your life, and understanding why you’re doing something is key. It may not be easy, but if you spend enough time meditating on this issue, you may come up with some surprising results.
Plenty of men turn to work to provide a variety of needs: sense of identity, sense of purpose, money, power, prestige, for since a family, whatever. But, like anything else, if you lose moderation and a work/life balance, it may be easy to get lost in work and not be able to find your way out.
Many problems that seem sexually based in a relationship or marriage are actually more interpersonally-based that would appear. Many times, conflict, fighting and distance between partners is often the basis for sexual problems that develop between lovers. We’re going to talk about some of those “behind the scenes” issues that negatively affect your sexual performance or connection. Here we go:
1. Fighting and conflict: When you’re engaged in fighting with your wife or girlfriend (or partner), and bad blood is generated, it’s really hard to feel connected to them on any level, including sexually. It may be easier for men to want to engage in sex, but for women, sex is much more than the physical act. Women need to know that their guy loves them, cares for them, and is emotionally attuned to them. Fighting and conflict dampen the sexual connection, and can leave a couple listless and uninspired for sex. Work on working out the issues you need to be for sex, so that the connection is felt on a deeper level.
2. Performance anxiety: For a lot of guys, this is fairly common, especially in new relationships and for younger guys. Guys set certain standards for themselves as sexual partners, and when they do that, they almost guarantee themselves for failure. We may want to be the most sexually adventurous person on Earth, or the best lover that she’s ever had, but by setting such high standards for ourselves, we end up disappointing ourselves ( and possibly her). Try to relax, practice breathing exercises, and try to stay focused on the present moment enjoyment of the act itself. If you focus on your performance, you’re actually not very present. The best sexual performance is being present in the moment, and your partner will appreciate that a lot more.
3. Lack of communication, inside and outside of the bedroom: Sex is all about communication, and if there is problematic communication or none at all, especially around sex, your sexual connection may wane. Communication is vitally important to the health of the overall relationship, but when it comes to sex, it’s critical. Learning to start communicating what you need sexually, and what you like, is important in developing the sexual connection with your partner. Without it, sex becomes perfunctory, uninspiring and, well, just plain boring. Knowing what you want, and like, knowing how do communicate that to your partner in a way that they understand will help ensure for a more satisfying (and varied) sexual life. Risk opening up and sharing some personal thoughts or sexual fantasies that you got, and in that risk just may pay dividends.
4. Sexual confidence: For a lot of guys, competence is a huge issue in general, not just sexually. Women want men to be overall confident, and sexual confidence is just an extension of that. Women specifically want men to step up the assertive factor sexually. Some women that I talk to in counseling say that they wish their husbands and boyfriends would be more sexually assertive with them, and learn to make more of the first moves towards them. They say that they get tired of waiting or feeling like they have to initiate sex first, and want to know that their guy buys in a little more. Again, sex is an extension of other things, and taking the sexual initiative is not unlike taking the initiative with cooking, cleaning, supporting your wife or girlfriend, or taking the initiative to take care of yourself. They all communicate to her that she’s wanted, loved, and still attractive to you. She needs your validation, love and affirmation, sexually and otherwise.
5. Energy problems: Plenty of things can chip away at our energy levels: kids, workloads, stress, alcohol, depression, marital problems, and just general fatigue. Learning how to keep your energy high is laying the foundation for sexual success. understanding your unique energy patterns throughout the day and making lifestyle changes will help keep your energy flying high consistently. Choosing the right foods, adding good sleep, staying away from alcohol and tobacco, practicing daily stress management and relaxation techniques, having a social support system of friends and family, and learning how to communicate when you’re stressed are all really important things that you can do to generate more energy that will positively affect you in mind and body.
These tips are designed to help tackle some of the possible sexual problems in your relationship or marriage. If you suspect that there are physical or medical problems that need attention, please consult your primary care doctor. Many sexual problems are medically based, and these tips won’t work for you if you’re having those types of problems. Learning how to develop a sexual relationship with your partner is a relationship over time. You’re learning what works, and what doesn’t, to stay at your most optimal and to develop a sexual connection with the woman you love.
Anger and nice guys don’t mix very well. Because nice guys are known to stuff their emotions, and anger is an emotion, the cycle of avoidance never gets broken. Nice guys get angry because their needs aren’t being met, and most times, nice guys don’t even know what they need. They’re swimming in the dark, yet live in a world that they need to interact with. Because life is a series of interactions and interplay between needs and need gratification, lack of awareness about what those needs are leads to a lack of gratifying them.
So what do I mean by “needs”? I think we can all agree on the general definition of what needs are, because we have many different layers of them. We have a need to eat, to sleep, to excrete, and to have sex. Higher order needs are also needs, and include needs for love, validation, understanding, compassion, and avoidance of pain. As people, we also have a need for pleasure. The list can be quite infinite, and will vary drastically between different people.
Whereas I have a need to be validated for my efforts as a relationship partner or as a business owner, the next guy may have very different needs. He may need power, and may seek that out through a variety of different channels. The basic motivation to get those needs met will be so different for each person, so it’s really hard to set one standard of needs for everyone. This is where it gets tough, because many mail clients that I work with who don’t know how to recognize their own needs, end up comparing and contrasting themselves and their needs to their friends, family, and culture in general. Although our culture and society has some generally universal needs, they vary by degrees.
How does anger factor into all of this, you ask? I think that when men’s needs to go unmet and unattended to, they do not goaway. Instead, they lie dormant and mutate into other types of feelings. Anger is a byproduct of not getting those needs met. Although there are other emotions underlying anger — like sadness, emptiness, helplessness or loss of control — those are emotions that are even more obscured with most men today.
If you can picture the cross-section of an Everlasting Gobstopper, you’ll see that it would be comprised of layer upon layer of coatings. Imagine emotions are like a Gobstopper: they are many in number and layer similarly. At the core, we have emotions that consists of sadness, emptiness, pain, loss of control, and other very basic emotions. Go out one more layer and we find the more “empowering” emotions, like anger. Anger empowers us to act, and yet is an outer layer that obscures the more basic emotions. For many guys — especially nice guys — continue to go out to one more layer and you’ll find a layer of fear.
Fear of anger is a whole different matter. Many guys are just simply too afraid of their own anger or rage, so they end up stuffing it and coating it with a layer of fear. The fear layer then translates into behaviors that communicate that fear when there are situations or people that trigger the anger. Instead of getting angry, a lot of guys are so disconnected from their own anger and go to the fear place immediately. They shut their whole emotional system down, and continue to compress their emotions and avoid them. This is a disastrous cycle, because these men are muzzling themselves every time they are provoked. I’m not suggesting that they fly into a fit of rage and put her fist through the wall. What I am suggesting is that getting in touch with that basic experience of anger is an important first step to recognizing that it even exists.
The whole thing for nice guys: they’re not going to express their anger because it will lead to devastating to actually express the anger to the recipient. Instead, nice guys will swallow their anger, where it ends up mutating into much worse problems for the host nice guy.
So what happens to the anger when a nice guy stuffs it? A lot of things. Because the anger is not being communicated directly to the people that need here at, it ferments within a nice guy. But anger needs to come out in some way, and it often comes out through the forms of sarcasm, criticism, self-criticism, superiority, judgmentality, and on the other end of spectrum, rage and acting out physically.
A lot of nice guys are also smart guys. Smart guys being who they are often reside in their heads most of the time. The very skills and abilities that smart guys have used to create success in their lives, such as in their professional lives, are the worst skills to deal with anger. Smart guys also have the unique ability to intellectualize their anger, and this is another form of fermenting that anger loves. When I talk to guys who come in because they can’t deal with their anger, we always end up talking about how they try to “think their way out of their anger”, but it never works. I was asked them “so how is it worked for you up until this point?” These guys usually say, “well, not to good. on here and counseling now aren’t I?”
This tendency to intellectualize our anger is a real problem. We become hamsters in our own mental wheels, spinning ourselves into a mental oblivion. We also try to apply those same election will skills to solving our marriage and relationship problems, and those skills and tools are about not very successful to fixing those problems.
When nice guys get mad after having said “yes”, they tend to stuff that voice within them that really doesn’t want to say “yes”. By not saying ‘no’, these guys swallow what they really want because they’re too afraid that and they’ll be rejected by saying ‘no’. And this phenomenon plays out in all sorts of areas of the guy’s life: work, friendships, intimate relationships, within family relationships and on and on.
Stuffing anger is a real problem, because anger slowly builds up over time when it gets stuffed. Each incident of stuffing one’s anger and not saying no creates a compounding effect, where people to comes more difficult to say no and anger festers even 
more. Others may even notice that we where anger on our faces or in our behavior, and not know why. We may not even know why we’re angry, and not connect the dots to know that by not saying no to others when we don’t mean it, creates this cause-and-effect relationship.
For a lot of men who can’t say no, they have to release their anger in some way. This often comes out in a variety of ways, that we’ll identify here:
It’s easy to see what a bad relationship looks like. You’re probably surrounded with plenty of anti-models everyday. But what about those really functional relationships that stick in your mind?
We all have severely idealized versions of what happy and healthy relationships and marriages look like. Sometimes, if we look closely, some people are more attracted to those fantasy relationships in their minds than they are to their actual partners. During our formative years, we are socialized in many ways (through schooling, religious institutions, friends, media) to come up with our private version of a good and healthy relationship. No one grows up thinking their marriage will grow cold and distant over time (at least I haven’t heard that in therapy).
But, what does make for a health relationship? What are the marks of a truly healthy relationship? What am I missing? I’m interested to hear your comments, and your perspectives on your version of a healthy relationship.
Here’s 15 of the most important (not necessarily in order of importance):
Creating a healthy relationship takes a lot of willingness, hard work and mutual love and respect, and each relationship could be optimized in its own way. There are myriad ways to relationship success, and many of the roads to relationship health are unique to each relationship, as is the uniqueness of each person. Finding what works – and what doesn’t – for your own relationship is part of the journey of awareness and growth for yourself, your partner, and your relationship.
Guys tend to identify strongly with the work that they do. We’re taught that the work we do is who we are. When we meet people, at parties or at networking groups, the first question we usually ask is “What do you do?”
The notorious workaholics we know are usually guys. It’s a masculine-themed issue in our culture. We’ve become a society that has seen a standard workweek increase from 40-hours a week to 50 and 60 or more. What happened to us? Isn’t there more to us? Fortunately, the recession – although devastating in any number of ways – has given us an opportunity to get back to basics, and invest in those people and experiences that bring value to our lives, aside for just work.
Work is a strong source of self-esteem for men, and provides us with different identities. When work is good, we see ourselves as a breadwinner to our families and children (or pets), a successful son or husband, and powerful. When it’s not so good, or we’re laid off or drifting between jobs, we might experience shame, powerlessness or “poverty mentality”.
Let’s put our eggs in a couple of different baskets, shall we? Good investors learn to diversify, to spread their investments among their portfolio for balance. I propose the same for developing better work/life balance. If work tips too far to one side of the scales in your life, maybe work on developing other, equally important parts of your life.
Learning to deal with stress is an important component, en route to better work-life balance. Here’s a free stress management worksheet for you to better assess and change your stress: http://phoenixmenscounseling.com/clinicalforms/stress-inventory.pdf.
