Every woman in your group chat can diagnose him.
A glass of wine, a Tuesday, you all meet up and somehow it all lands in the same conversation you’ve all had before. “It doesn’t turn me on anymore,” someone says, “not the way he touches me now.”
Someone else says the thing you all say eventually. “We should book a Touch Reset. Map how we actually like pleasure.”
The table goes quiet for a second. Everyone nods. “Great idea” you hear.
Let’s be brutally honest for a moment…
You already know none of you will do it.
Part One: The Swap Nobody Clocks
Here’s what happens next, in pretty much all the conversations in women I have been in. It happens so smoothly that nobody notices the trade being made…
Someone explains his attachment style. The story, the past.
The dad who left. Why he flinches when you raise your voice….
All valid.
Full history, delivered like she’s presenting findings at a meeting she didn’t know she’d prepared for, chest puffed out, slightly proud at her findings, righteously so she believes.
Ask that same woman one question: “Tell me how you want to be touched”, and watch the silence land, the uncomfortable fiddling with her hands. The downward eyes, or more often than not, the change of subject altogether.
That’s the swap. His inner world becomes the whole project. Hers goes unexamined, sometimes for a relationship’s worth of years.
I see this pattern constantly. A woman arrives fluent in her partner’s nervous system and can’t tell me the last time she checked in with her own.
It’s just where the attention has been trained to go, on him, always on him, because examining him feels like doing something, and examining herself feels like admitting something.
Part Two: What The Explanation Is Actually Protecting
The trauma explanation you’ve built for him isn’t protecting him. It’s protecting you. Your status-quo.
It’s protecting you from finding out what a real look would actually show…. which may be that nothing new is wrong with him at all…. and the thing that’s been quietly changing is what you want now, at this age, in this body, and you haven’t asked yourself that question in years.
Another anniversary photo. Another holiday away. Another dinner out, pretending to be interested..
Same fight, filed under “we’re just tired.”
Five years pass and neither of you has touched the actual pattern once, only talked around it, at dinner, in the group chat, never in the room where it actually lives.
You’re not protecting the relationship by staying in the analysis. You’re protecting the version of your life that doesn’t require you to say, out loud, I don’t feel this anymore, and find out what happens after that sentence leaves your mouth.
Part Three: What Actually Moves It
I worked with a couple who hadn’t had sex in twenty-three years. They had their second honeymoon three months after starting.
We took actual penetrative sex off the table for 6 weeks. They laughed at the homework I gave them. Both shrugging their shoulders and both said “Well that’s easy, it’s been decades.” Instead I gave them structure. A timed container. Rules. Slowly refocussing from what is WRONG with the other, to what is right. I introduced something to them, which I call “the Third”.
I explain it as each of the outer circles is one of you. The circle in the middle is your relationship. You are both 100 % responsible for it. Not 50%, 50%, 100%!
They paused at that, and pushed back with a few, “but”. I stopped them right there:
“If you want to continue the same way you have always done, I am not your person. So it is up to you to decide.”
“Do you want to be right or are you ready to have a beginners mind? See things afresh?
I asked one simple question:
“What would happen if this does work? What would it mean?”
That was enough structure for them to be convinced to want to give this a shot. Not later, but now.
That kind of buy in is what I expect from my clients. (Yes hello former Domme)
What it does is create safety in both of them, a new way forward, the pattern interrupt we so often need- and think we may be applying already- but really it does need someone else to see your blindspots.
So here’s where you actually start, tonight, before you explain one more man’s psychology at a wine night out with the girls.
Notice one place on your own body you’d actually like touched, before anyone touches you. Don’t say it out loud yet.
Just notice it.
Then, when you’re ready for the version with structure behind it: Touch Base®, thumb resting on forefinger, two minutes, nothing else required. Not a metaphor, not a warm-up. Just data about your own body, collected on purpose, maybe for the first time in years.
The group chat conversation changes after that. Nobody needs to be fixed. It stops being a psychology seminar about him and starts being an honest report on what you want.
Try it, you may be surprised!
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette