You are there and you are not there. Your hands know the choreography. Your mind is on the ceiling, the calendar, the sound of the boiler. It fades halfway through. Afterwards you feel further away than before you started.
This is not a desire failure. It is your body managing a situation it never fully agreed to.
Within a minute of him reaching for you, you are expected somewhere your body has not arrived at yet. It is still at the sink, still running the day. It never got the chance to catch up. So it does the only thing it can do: it performs the motions, feels the disconnection, and files it away.
Why trying harder makes it worse
Every attempt to force presence teaches your body that its absence will be overridden too. The body does not open on command. It opens inside a container it trusts: clear walls, a way in, a way back. A guarded body will not let go in open space.
Small enough to stay for
In my work, touch starts at three minutes. One person gives. One receives. No switching, no expectation, nothing that escalates without agreement. People think I am joking. Three minutes is where capacity lives. A body that has performed for years cannot sustain thirty minutes of genuine presence, and three minutes of real contact is more than most couples have had in years.
The couple who had not touched in 23 years started exactly there. Three months later they took a second honeymoon. The love had been in the room the entire time. The container was what had been missing.
More than 980 women have sat across from me with this exact pattern. It is the one I know best.