In earlier posts, I’ve described sex as a woman’s primary source of leverage in long-term relationships. By giving or withholding it, she can shape a man’s behavior, especially if he’s a Nice Guy.

What I hadn’t fully appreciated is how early this dynamic begins. We tend to associate sexual leverage with marriage, something that emerges once early passion has burned off and commitments have been made. The fact is that it’s already present on the first date. Sex—its possibility, its reality, and what it represents—shapes a relationship from the very start.

Most women aren’t open to sex on the first date, perhaps not even the third. As Mark Manson observes in Models: Attract Women Through Honesty:

Typically a man knows within a few seconds if he’s willing to meet and even sleep with a woman or not. Women aren’t like that. They spend a lot of time being unsure about a man and need to be swayed one way or the other.

In this pre-sex period the man tries to demonstrate his worth, while the woman decides whether to grant him access. Questions swirl in the minds of both: Are the feelings mutual? Does this person genuinely like me? Is this real, or an invention of an overactive romantic imagination? Am I somehow being used or manipulated?

We might think of this stage as a spectrum, with intoxication at one end and skepticism at the other. Some moments call for surrender. We put our doubts aside and bask in the bliss of new love. For instance, on many nights over the last week I’ve found myself simply savoring my euphoric feelings and appreciating their rarity.

But having recently exited a marriage where my love and efforts weren’t reciprocated, my skeptical side gets its say. It aims to cut through all the romantic haze with a single pointed question: Is this real?

The Nice Guy wants to believe that it is. He wants to keep investing, keep fanning the flame with more attention, more affection, and more effort. He sees the potential and wants to nurture it. But the skeptic in me has his doubts. He’s wary of getting fooled or burned. He prescribes caution: don’t get ahead of yourself, preserve your independence, and notice whether she reciprocates or merely capitalizes on your generosity. Is she really interested, or are you just a temporary landing place, a convenient source of companionship, or a financial cushion until something better comes along?

There’s also a third voice. It asks something different: Even if she’s not fully into me, do I really care, since being with her feels so good? Perhaps I should simply relish it, even if it ends tomorrow or turns out to be an illusion.

All of these questions point to the inherent ambiguity of new love. There’s a lot of hope, but also no shortage of anxiety. And it’s precisely this uncertainty that engages the romantic imagination and fuels the intoxication. The possibility of winning someone’s affection, of learning that the feelings are mutual, produces an excitement that’s hard to replicate.

The Question of Restraint

When it comes to sex, many men claim to want “the sooner, the better” approach. But deep down, I’m not sure that’s what they want. They want a woman with standards and self-respect. Indeed, I would argue that a woman’s caution and discretion actually enhance her desirability. At least to a point.

There comes a time, however, when her restraint, however initially alluring, starts to raise questions. After several dates, or after spending considerable time together, continued withholding reawakens the skeptic. Will she ever sleep with him? Perhaps she sees him more as a friend than a lover. Manson doesn’t mince words about the much-dreaded “friend zone”:

The Friend Zone is the biggest possible time sink because most men who are stuck in it entertain fantasies of romance and destiny… they are the perfect man for her and one day… she’ll realize that the love of her life had been sitting right there by her side all along. This never happens. Ever.

There’s a point at which each additional sexless date erodes a man’s hope, and his self-esteem along with it. If he’s not too naïve and has some self-respect, he’ll start asking questions to determine where he stands. But even then, he may not get the clear answer he’s looking for. For instance, she might say something like, “I really enjoy spending time with you, but I’m just not ready.”

But what does that mean? Is she attracted but needs time to feel comfortable? Is she working through reservations or complicated circumstances? Or is she offering a gentle explanation that lets her keep enjoying his attention and companionship without having to make a decision?

Frankly, it can be hard to tell. It often feels like the more a man tries to resolve the ambiguity through conversation, the more elusive the answers become.

This can be especially challenging for the Nice Guy who reads her hesitation sympathetically, gives her the benefit of the doubt, and keeps investing, hoping that his patience and devotion will eventually pay off. The skeptic, on the other hand, cares less about what she says than about what she does. As Rollo Tomassi put it in The Rational Male:

We get frustrated… because women communicate covertly. [They] tell the complete truth with their actions. They communicate it in a fashion that men can’t or won’t understand. As a behaviorist, I firmly believe in the psychological principle that the only way to determine genuine motivation and intent is to observe an individual’s behavior…

The Sexual Hinge

Women understand, perhaps more acutely than men, that sex is a critical hinge point in dating. Before deciding to sleep with a man, it’s typically the woman who holds most of the cards. After all, she’s yet to give him what he wants the most.

After sex, however, the dynamic shifts. He feels validated—desired, accepted, and welcomed sexually. Assuming he proved to be a decent lover, much of his earlier anxiety about the relationship subsides.

But what for him is a moment of triumph can feel for her like exposure. Part of it stems from the post-sex disinterest phenomenon, namely, once the curiosity that fueled his desire is satisfied, his motivation to pursue her plummets. Granted, this isn’t always the case, but it’s common enough that women, especially those who’ve experienced it before, consider it a real concern. She knows that opening herself sexually leaves her more vulnerable to his withdrawal or rejection.

The first sexual encounter thus marks a transfer of vulnerability. Before sex, the man wonders whether she’ll choose him. Afterward, the woman wonders whether he’ll keep choosing her.

Lest you believe we’ve reached the end of the story, there happens to be a time-tested answer to a woman’s post-sex vulnerability. Perhaps you’ve already guessed it: marriage.

The Marriage Reversal

In marriage, the pendulum swings back again. For all intents and purposes, the question of whether he’ll stay has been settled. And with this assurance of his commitment and resources, she can now relax.

The issue of sex, however, remains an open question, and this is where her leverage lies. No longer worried about whether he’ll keep pursuing her, she finds herself well-positioned to regulate the relationship through sexual access. For a man who cares a lot about sex, this can quickly prove frustrating. While he’s secured her commitment, he hasn’t necessarily secured sexual access or enthusiasm.

Consequently, Nice Guys can sometimes feel they’ve been relegated to the friend zone in their own marriage. They have the companionship and the commitment, but they aren’t getting the sexual validation they desire. Just like the single guy in the friend zone, they find themselves working harder and harder, hoping that more affection, helpfulness, or devotion will eventually awaken her desire. They’ve effectively gone from auditioning for the relationship to auditioning for sex within it.

Sex, Love, and Validation

The last week has reminded me just how powerful and all-consuming love can be. Even apart from sex, connecting with a lover can feel transcendent. In a way, it’s a bit surprising how much of romance’s symbolic power gets tangled up in sex.

Men and women tend to seek different forms of validation. For men, a woman’s sexual interest and responsiveness represent a powerful confirmation. For women, love is often the more powerful symbol. They want to feel cherished, valued, protected, and secure in a man’s devotion. For many, marriage is its ultimate institutional expression.

Because these confirmations aren’t always secured simultaneously, relationships involve a toggling of vulnerability and leverage.

In times of scarcity, this toggling can turn relationships into power struggles, with each partner vying for what they feel entitled to and aren’t getting. In better times, the differences settle into something like a dance, with each partner alternately asserting and yielding.

Like many Nice Guys, I’ve struggled most with self-assertion. So while I relish the intoxication of new love, I’m also wary of surrendering the independence I’ve worked hard to reclaim. I’m still not sure whether the two can coexist.

Questions? Push-Back? Comments are open.

I don’t fall in love very often. But when I do, it’s nearly instantaneous, and I’m always struck by the speed at which it happens. Despite being middle-aged and having analyzed love and relationships for years, I can apparently fall as hard and fast as ever. In a way, it’s comforting to know that this capacity for intoxication never fades.

Awash in love, I was reminded of its pull toward constant togetherness. Even my passion for writing, usually a reliable counterforce to my desire for companionship, was no match for this tidal wave. Independence may fuel desire, but in the early stages of love, the yearning for union feels insatiable.

Fortunately, I’m seasoned enough to know that new love rarely remains new for long. The novelty eventually fades, the fever subsides, and something more ordinary takes its place. That’s when love and desire begin to part ways and respond to different things. It’s also when more intentional ways of being and relating become relevant. Cultivating desire, for instance, may require keeping some distance, resisting love’s pull toward constant togetherness.

This week also got me thinking about the Nice Guy. I noticed myself wanting to serve this woman, take care of her, and make thoughtful gestures. It all felt perfectly natural, a heart-led way of building the relationship, and none of it dampened the passion between us. I found myself feeling more sympathy for the Nice Guy and recognizing his rightful place in love.

Of course, my present-day Nice Guy isn’t the same man he used to be. He’s now balanced by someone more confident, decisive, and experienced. I have a better sense of the sweet spot between receptiveness and assertiveness, between responding to her desires and maintaining a will of my own. The problem isn’t that the Nice Guy wants to please a woman. It’s that he can become so preoccupied with her needs that he loses touch with his own agency.

This is where the less mature Nice Guy struggles. While often quite autonomous and assertive at work, he’s more tentative and indecisive in relationships. He tends to put women on a pedestal, almost treating them as gods. So when he finally gets to be with one, he feels inferior, like he’s lucky to be there and must respond with humility. Filled with both gratitude and unworthiness, he hands over his power.

Not wanting to screw things up, the Nice Guy plays it safe—he asks for her input on everything, defers to her preferences, and lets her make the decisions. He thinks he’s being considerate, and some women may even find it endearing at first. But over time, his deference can curdle into a turnoff as she’s asked to perform what is ultimately his role. How can she be the sexy, seductive free spirit he desires if every decision lands on her? It’s no wonder so many dating profiles include some version of: “Seeking a man who isn’t afraid to take the lead.”

I haven’t written much about masculine leadership in relationships, but if women are clamoring for it, there must be something to it. Leadership strikes me as a kind of middle ground between niceness and assertiveness. It allows a man to be thoughtful and receptive without becoming passive, to exercise his will without becoming domineering.

Take the man who plans a date. He puts thought and care into something he believes will be mutually enjoyable. He considers her interests, but he doesn’t make her responsible for planning the whole evening. Leadership isn’t merely a thoughtful gesture, however. It also entails risk, a fact implicit in the “man who isn’t afraid to take the lead” notion.

So what are men afraid of? On the surface, they worry about disappointing her, failing to impress her, or making poor decisions. At a deeper level, they fear being rejected and deemed inadequate. By taking initiative, a man puts his judgment and competence on the line. He opens himself to criticism, and to the possibility that he might not get a second chance.

Yet the upside is just as real. He puts himself out there. Things go well. She relaxes and enjoys his company and initiative. He gains confidence, she wants more. Crucially, none of this happens without first stepping into risk: planning the date, having the hard conversation, taking her to bed. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, relational fire means embracing risk at every turn. Doing so is rarely easy.

Leadership also connects with our recent discussions of independence. A good leader is receptive to her input, but he doesn’t automatically surrender his judgment whenever their preferences diverge. Sometimes he’ll make a decision that disappoints her. She may protest, complain, or push him to reconsider. At times she’ll have a good point, and he should be willing to change his mind. But the man who always acquiesces in order to please her or avoid conflict relinquishes something essential. He does a disservice to both himself and the relationship. As David Deida writes in The Way of the Superior Man:

You should always listen to your woman, and then make your own decision. If you choose to go with her suggestion even when deep in your heart you feel that another decision is more wise, you are… saying, ‘I don’t trust my own wisdom.’ You are weakening yourself... You are weakening your woman’s trust in you: why should she trust your wisdom if you don’t.

The Nice Guy’s deference is rooted in something deeper. It often reflects an insecurity: the suspicion that he’s not really a man but more like a scared boy, one who’s too weak or unworthy to assert himself. So he plays it safe and lets her call the shots. For some men, this may be enough. But for those who feel called to something more, it keeps them stuck. The way out, as far as I can tell, involves taking one small risk at a time.

That said, I can’t claim to have fully outgrown any of this. I’m still in the middle of it. Whether I can stay grounded in myself when love threatens to sweep me away remains an open question. The prophet of independence has been humbled. The Nice Guy lives on.

Comments? Push-back? Comments are open.

One thing both the seduction gurus and the relationship therapists tend to agree on is the value of independence. Namely, maintaining a healthy degree of independence helps kindle and sustain desire. This means having a life outside the relationship, with interests and friendships of one’s own.

In this vein, author and therapist Esther Perel advises couples to set aside one night a week where each is free to do their own thing. For some of you, this might sound like a dream come true, a chance to finally break out of the routine and breathe some new air. For others, the thought of one’s partner out alone or with friends every week can elicit anxiety and insecurity. It’s therefore unsurprising that many couples end up playing it safe by doing everything together. Constant togetherness comes at a cost, however. When we become so fused with our partner that we lose our separate identities, the erotic tension that fuels passion can quietly dissolve.

There’s another, more subtle aspect of independence, one that’s less about what we do and more about who we are, and how we engage, in the relationship.

For the Nice Guy, loving means constantly pleasing and accommodating his partner. She’s the center of his orbit, the person around whom he organizes his life and measures his worth. He may love her deeply, which is no small thing, but his mode of engaging often signals neediness rather than independence. Perhaps he’s insecure. Perhaps he’s anxious. Perhaps he’s living out an internalized moral script about what a “good partner” does. Perhaps it’s all three.

The problem is that niceness, especially too much of it, isn’t terribly sexy. As the saying goes, “there are men you marry and men you sleep with.” Many women will marry a Nice Guy, but they’re not lining up to sleep with him. So if he wants more sex (and more fire generally), he’ll need to look beyond the typical relationship advice and take a closer look at himself: at his assumptions, motivations, insecurities, and habitual ways of relating. Becoming more assertive and confident, building a life of his own, and learning to tolerate disapproval will do far more for his sex life than people-pleasing ever could. For the Nice Guy in particular, self-growth and better sex go hand in hand.

I was recently rereading Perel’s Mating in Captivity when I came across another means of cultivating desire. There Perel advises a shift in perspective, or what she calls seeing our partner with “new eyes.”

She tells the story of Adele, a woman in counseling looking for more passion in her marriage. Adele described attending a work function with her long-time husband, Alan. At one point in the evening, she noticed him talking with his colleagues and, to her surprise and delight, found him unusually attractive. In fact, it caught her so off guard that she likened it to an “out-of-body” experience.

So what changed that night for Adele? After all, this was the same man she’d been living with for years. A few things stand out.

First, the work function offered a departure from the familiar routines of their domestic life. Also worth noting is that Adele and Alan weren’t sequestered in a corner together. They were on opposite sides of the room, interacting with different people. There was physical distance between them, but also a psychological distance that their daily life rarely afforded.

If we speculate further about Adele’s experience, perhaps she saw Alan as she might a stranger across the bar: an intriguing man with a healthy social life. His ease and competence with his colleagues may have reminded her that he possessed an identity and stature beyond his usual roles of husband and housemate.

Taken together, the scene contained a number of erotic precursors: novelty, distance, independence, confidence, unfamiliarity. Perel draws another lesson from it, one focused less on external circumstances and more on inner perspective. In particular, what if Adele could learn to see Alan this way more often? What if she could look past the familiar, everyday version of her husband and reconnect with the qualities that drew her to him in the first place?

Adele may not have been fully aware of it, but the Alan she saw at the work function wasn’t the “safe” Alan she knew at home. In perceiving his independence, she realized that his presence in her life wasn’t guaranteed in the way she typically assumed. He was his own man, with his own life and his own agency. She didn’t possess him. She couldn’t fully know him, nor could she control what he’d do next. And this uncertainty, however uncomfortable it may be, can restore some of the erotic tension that domestic life tends to slacken.

Two Kinds of Uncertainty

Of course, where there’s risk, fear isn’t far behind. Seeing our partner as a separate person, as a free agent if you will, can be unsettling. This discomfort drives many couples to cling to security and forgo relational risk. Indeed, for Perel, the fear-driven quest for security may ultimately be a bigger passion killer than familiarity. She writes:

Love, by its very nature, is unstable. So we shore it up: we tighten the borders, batten down the hatches, and create predictability, all in order to make us feel more secure. Yet… the verve of the relationship collapses under the weight of all that control.

As we’ve discussed elsewhere, uncertainty and desire are inextricably linked. But as a reader recently pointed out, not all uncertainty is created equal.

Adele and Alan illustrate one kind of uncertainty: the realization that our partner is a separate person whom we can never fully know or possess. The more independent and self-actualized a man is, the less his happiness and security hinge on the state of the relationship.

In polyamory circles, the term compersion is sometimes used to describe the experience of feeling joy in our partner’s happiness, even if that happiness happens to come from outside the relationship. Although the concept is often applied to non-monogamy, it points to a broader challenge: learning to make room for our partner’s independent desires, interests, and choices rather than treating these things as threats to the relationship.

There’s an interesting paradox here: the more independent and self-secure a man becomes, the less secure his partner may feel. The implicit concern becomes: If you don’t need me to be happy, what assures me that you’ll stay?

There’s another kind of uncertainty, one that arises not from independence, but from instability—from volatile, impulsive, or unpredictable behavior. There’s little doubt that a man who swings wildly between affection and hostility, or makes impulsive decisions that threaten the relationship, will keep his partner guessing. But this type of uncertainty often kills desire rather than fueling it. It makes a woman anxious in the wrong way. In this case, her anxiety isn’t about a man’s independence or his ability to attract other women. It involves her physical and emotional safety, which can undermine the basic sense of security that intimacy demands.

The Independent Man

Reading between the lines of Perel’s account, I suspect Alan may have been something of a Nice Guy. It wasn’t until Adele saw him acting with autonomy, with almost no regard for her, that her desire reignited. Compressed into that seemingly trivial scene were some crucial insights about desire and attraction. The more independent a man becomes, and the less he relies on her approval, the more desirable he generally becomes.

Some women like Adele will respond to signals of independence with renewed interest—a relational win on all counts. Yet others may find precisely the same signals threatening. When a man stops orbiting his life and happiness around her, she may feel rejected or fear abandonment. So instead of leaning in, she may resist like hell, clinging to the familiar arrangement. This becomes a critical test of his independence, one that many men fail to pass: can he remain true to himself while making room for her concerns, or will he revert to accommodating and keeping himself small to restore her sense of security?

All that being said, we should remember that independence is always a relative concept. A man who feels whole and happy apart from his partner may be mostly independent of her, but he remains dependent on other things: his job, his hobbies, his friends, and whatever else sustains him.

So maybe it’s better to see independence as a kind of rootedness: a life rich and resilient enough that a man’s well-being doesn’t revolve around any one person. He has things that sustain him, and he can reliably cultivate those things for himself. He can enjoy intimacy without staking his entire sense of worth or happiness on it. He can love a woman deeply while also recognizing that she’s free to choose her own path.

That may be why independence is erotic. It restores something essential that love obscures in its search for security: the reality of two separate people who continue to choose each other—or who might not. The risk is real. Not a comforting thought, to be sure. But it’s where much of the desire lives.

One criticism, voiced by both the AI and another reader, was that I might be over-correcting and reacting defensively: a man burned in his marriage, building a philosophy out of scar tissue.

I can’t entirely rule that out. Over-correction is a common human response, in love and elsewhere. But when I look back at my state of mind while writing those posts, I find little in the way of defensiveness or animosity. Of course I’ve felt angry and resentful toward my wife at times. I just don’t think anger was the primary driver in this case.

That said, perceived injustice can generate a rebellious sort of energy, an urge to push back and set things right. It’s a potent source of fire, and many writers harness it as fuel. I’m certainly no exception. But the heat of an idea doesn’t make it false any more than it makes it true. The writer’s job is to step back and examine what the fire illuminates, and what it leaves in shadow.

Whatever the role of my own experiences in shaping these ideas, the critiques raise a more fundamental question:

Does strategy have a place in intimate relationships?

The Manosphere says yes. So does author Robert Greene in The Art of Seduction. Most others, however—men and women alike—tend to recoil from the idea. For them, applying strategy to love seems to undermine the very thing that makes it meaningful.

I suspect this resistance stems partly from an age-old distinction between head and heart. Relationships, we’re told, belong to the heart, and the head is the trespasser. One reader sharpened this further, affirming “the natural spontaneity of the heart.” Real intimacy is spontaneous and authentic. It stands apart from, and perhaps even opposed to, the intellect.

I have considerable sympathy for this ideal. There’s clearly something wonderful about open-heartedness, about giving and receiving affection without reservation or ulterior motives. I personally wouldn’t want a relationship where every gesture was calculated, or every evening optimized.

Still, I stand by my assertion that spontaneity and authenticity aren’t always reliable guides. Sometimes our most natural responses are the ones we most need to outgrow.

Consider the man who regularly loses his temper and snaps at his wife. If we could peer inside him mid-outburst, we’d likely find his emotions to be genuine and spontaneous. Nothing calculated. He’s simply reacting to what he feels. But the spontaneity of his response doesn’t make it a healthy one. And if he wants to change, he must learn to step out of the stream of his emotions in order to find a better response. He has to create some space between what he feels and what he does, to bring his head to bear on his emotions.

Like the parent who calmly steps in to assist a tantruming child, most of us welcome the cooler, more measured ways of the head when it comes to regulating runaway emotions. But the moment someone proposes a role for the head in the realm of attraction or desire, red flags go up. There’s a sense that employing anything resembling strategy is not only inauthentic but potentially manipulative.

The Conflation

In my view, much of the misunderstanding stems from our tendency to conflate two things that are related, but not identical: love and desire. We assume that love begets desire, and desire begets love. Chemistry and love are two faces of the same flame.

In time, however, the two can part ways. More often than not, love holds steady while passion fades. But even then, we tend to treat them as one thing. We continue to believe that what’s good for love must also be good for desire. Unfortunately, it often isn’t.

This is what my recent writing on unpredictability and restraint was really about. Some readers seemed to take it as an affront to love, perhaps a move toward emotional gamesmanship at the expense of openness and connection. I understand this reaction, and perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. My point was never that we should become less loving or less honest, but that we might need to think differently about how desire is sustained once the early heat of a relationship has passed. It may be hard to hear, but some of the qualities that help love flourish—reliability, familiarity, safety—can flatten desire.

Few understand the distinctness of love and desire, and the tension between them, better than therapist, author, and podcast host Esther Perel. In her international bestseller Mating in Captivity, she writes:

Nearly all of these patients reported satisfaction with their relationship—just not their sex life… Love and desire, it seemed, came from different sources, and flowed in different directions. They relate, but they also conflict.

Perel’s thesis isn’t that love and desire are enemies, but that they respond to different psychological conditions, and that the conditions supporting one can sometimes starve the other. Love draws us toward security, familiarity, and closeness. Desire wants something more: novelty, anticipation, uncertainty, someone who remains mysterious and beyond our full possession or understanding. Hence Perel’s invitation to introduce “risk to safety, mystery to the familiar, and novelty to the enduring.”

As long as we keep conflating love and desire, security will usually win out. It feels safer and easier than risk. For many couples, love plus security becomes the default mode, while desire is assumed to be something that inevitably fades, like a summer tan. Those who reject this script and crave more passion and aliveness go looking for someone like Perel to help.

Untangling love and desire seems particularly relevant to men for whom a healthy sex life feels essential. I suspect it’s also the driving concern for much of the Manosphere. The logic is simple: We want to have sex. We’re not getting enough of it. Let’s figure out what isn’t working and how to fix it. Many of the strategies discovered through this line of inquiry can be effective for kindling attraction and desire. The problem is that they’re often deployed with little regard for love or commitment. This can make the entire enterprise seem shady and manipulative, even when some of its insights have practical merit.

The Bridge

To bridge the divide between the romantics and strategists, between the heart and the head, it’s necessary to give each side its due. The romantics are right that love can’t be reduced to technique. But if we assume that love conquers all, we’re apt to miss the distinct conditions under which desire flourishes. Meanwhile, the strategists are right that attraction has its own set of laws, some of which have little to do with good intentions. In particular, being loving and dependable doesn’t automatically make us desirable. Nevertheless, those fixated solely on getting laid have failed to give love a seat at the table.

Perel offers a useful bridge here. She isn’t part of the Manosphere. But she also takes sex and desire seriously without reducing relationships to a strategic game. Her work invites us to examine the tensions between love and desire rather than siding prematurely with one or the other.

Let’s consider one more insight from Perel before wrapping up:

When intimacy collapses into fusion, it is not a lack of closeness but too much closeness that impedes desire… Too much merging eradicates the separateness of two distinct individuals… When two people become fused—when two become one—connection can no longer happen. There is no longer one to connect with.

This echoes our example of the man who snaps at his wife. When we fuse with our emotions, we lose perspective and the freedom to choose our response. We become captive to whatever we feel in the moment. When we fuse with our partner, something similar happens, only more gradually. We can become so absorbed in the relationship that we lose touch with the separateness that makes desire possible.

Both emotional regulation and passionate relationships depend on maintaining some measure of distance: from our feelings in the first case, from our partners in the second. There can certainly be moments of fusion, of deep love and immersion, when the boundaries of the self seem to dissolve. But there must also be enough space for each person to remain distinct, creating room for mystery, anticipation, and desire to grow.

Balancing closeness and separation rarely happens by accident. It requires us to question familiar assumptions, recognize patterns that no longer serve us, and sometimes behave in ways that feel awkward or unnatural at first. It can mean letting a silence stand, leaving a question unanswered, or resisting the urge to merge at every opportunity.

None of this calls for manipulation. Nor does it require us to become guarded. The challenge is to create the conditions for desire without turning distance into a weapon, or making our love contingent on whether it produces the response we want. The point isn’t to replace all spontaneity with strategy, but to recognize that what comes naturally may not always be enough.

Thoughts? Push-back? Comments are open.

In my last post, The Unredeemed Token, I argued that too much predictability in a relationship can be anti-erotic. I cited Rollo Tomassi’s advice against being perfectly dependable, and the way excessive doting can make a woman less responsive to it. I also discussed intermittent reinforcement, namely, how inconsistent rewards increase motivation. Here’s what ties these observations together: some measure of withholding, insofar as it introduces unpredictability, can be more erotic than the people-pleasing habits of the Nice Guy.

The AI took issue with most of this, objecting to what it called the “instrumentalism” of my argument. This didn’t surprise me. Most men, myself included, have a predictable first response to these ideas, that they’re cunning, manipulative, or otherwise morally suspect. They also stir up guilt and cast doubt on some of our ideals and assumptions about love. As a result, most men simply disregard them and continue doubling down on their Nice Guyism which, as we’ve discussed ad nauseam, can mean a life of unmet needs and compounding resentment.

Most Nice Guys are simply naïve. They don’t see the tacit bargains they’ve struck or how much their unmet needs are breeding resentment. They’re still sleepwalking. But once a man awakens to his predicament, he’s faced with a choice. He can work to rectify the situation, taking steps to get more of his needs met. Or he can dismiss the diagnosis as too instrumental and try to recover his former naïveté—choosing self-deprivation dressed up as love over the harder work of standing up for himself.

Perhaps society prefers this kind of self-effacing man. He’s easier to predict, easier to control, and, at least on the surface, less threatening to others. We’re perfectly comfortable talking about the empowerment of women. Talk about empowering men, however, and we tread more carefully, as though we’re suddenly playing with fire.

Consider, for a moment, the kid who’s trying out for baseball but isn’t a natural athlete. His stance is awkward, his swing is even worse. Only occasionally, by sheer luck, does he manage to make contact. He has no idea what he’s doing wrong. He’s watched the game his whole life and is trying to do the right things, but nothing is working. Our poor youngster has a decision to make. He can keep doing what feels natural and continue failing. Or, he can find someone to show him what he’s doing wrong and how to fix it.

The kid and the Nice Guy are in the same boat—both are falling short at something that matters to them, and both must choose between the comfort of the familiar and the short-term discomfort of learning a new way. The difference is that a kid learning to hit a curveball is socially acceptable. A Nice Guy learning about seduction and power is not.

Indeed, the mere mention of seduction and power can set off alarms. We worry that seduction is deceptive and power is oppressive. My AI critic might say the baseball analogy doesn’t hold for that very reason—that the content of what’s being learned matters. So even if the Nice Guy ultimately gets more of what he wants, the way he gets it deserves scrutiny. Fair enough.

So what might this AI counsel our beleaguered Nice Guy to do?

The AI endorsed a point I closed my last post with: become a more complete man—self-sufficient, spontaneous, a man with a life outside the relationship. Having made those recommendations myself, I don’t disagree. The AI’s objection, as I understand it, is that a man can get what he wants without artificially manufacturing risk and unpredictability within the relationship—that a fuller life naturally makes him more scarce, and thus more desirable. Again, point taken. The only problem is that this solution is built for extraverts, for those who enjoy spreading themselves thin.

What, then, is the introverted version? How does a man who genuinely prefers staying home generate the same tension, novelty, and desire from inside the relationship itself, rather than from the outside?

One way is by changing how he engages with his partner—learning the arts of flirtation and seduction, which can include certain kinds of withholding. But “withholding” is a loaded word, one which often carries a negative connotation in relationships, as it did for the AI. But consider the husband who constantly hovers, who smothers his wife with praise and affection to the point where it becomes a turnoff. Would it not be better for him, for her, and for the relationship if he learned to rein some of that in? Obviously.

Perhaps the real issue then, isn’t withholding so much as self-control. A man may find his partner intensely attractive and want to touch her, praise her, or dote on her constantly. But that doesn’t mean that acting on every impulse will serve him well. Changing this requires two things: knowledge and self-discipline. He has to recognize that, however genuine his feelings may be, over-expressing them can end up undermining the very thing he values. He thus needs enough awareness and self-control to let some of the tension build before acting on it. Regardless of whether we call it withholding or self-control, it’s not manipulation. It’s knowledge applied through discipline—it’s maturity.

The AI also seemed to meet any talk of leverage with moral suspicion. But I would argue that leverage is only exploitative when it’s used by someone who already has the upper hand. For someone starting from a position of disadvantage, however, it’s a tool—not the only one, but a legitimate one—for leveling the playing field. Again, I wonder whether the same objection would be raised if the person in the weaker position were a woman. Perhaps it’s because many men have historically proven untrustworthy stewards of power that we approach them with greater caution. Of course, this is little consolation to the man who believes himself trustworthy and doesn’t deserve to be punished for the transgressions of other men.

Another point that needs clarifying is what it means to become a complete man. The AI endorsed the idea of a man “striving to become what he believes he ought to be, and surrendering control over the outcome.” This tracks with what I wrote about men organizing their lives around their own growth rather than constantly catering to a woman. But there’s an important caveat.

Part of what a man believes he ought to be, and part of what he wants for his life, often involves women: sex, marriage, children, companionship, and so on. So while it’s certainly advisable to have a life and interests outside the relationship, the relationship remains part of the larger vision; the two can’t be fully separated. This means there will always be some tension between a man’s independence and his partner’s needs.

A man could, in theory, take the AI’s advice and surrender all control over outcomes in the relationship. But not only is this unrealistic—it’s arguably foolish. I do believe in prioritizing the intrinsic value of one’s actions, what I’ve called Acts of Alignment. But that doesn’t mean outcomes are never worth evaluating, or that we should never shift our behavior in response to them.

For example, I can write because the process of writing itself feels meaningful—that’s an Act of Alignment. But I can also notice that some approaches produce better writing than others, and adjust accordingly. Paying attention to consequences doesn’t necessarily corrupt the intrinsic value of the activity. The same is true in relationships.

In the end, I think the AI’s criticism mostly mirrors conventional moral assumptions about men in relationships, including its red-flagging of words like withholding, leverage, or power. What separates my views from the more extreme realms of the Manosphere is I still make room for things like love, kindness, sensitivity, and tenderness. I’m not at war with my wife, or with women in general. I’m not trying to turn relationships into strategy games.

What I’m ultimately after, in my life and my writing, is some blend of fire and wholeness. I’m still not sure exactly what that looks like, though I think I’ve made progress on both fronts. I’ve spent more time on things like leverage not because they’re objectively more important, but because they’re what recovering Nice Guys like myself—men who “think too much and risk too little”—most need to reckon with in our quest for a more complete and vibrant manhood.

Thoughts? Push-back? Comments are open.

Not just any effort will do, however. Naïve effort—effort untethered from real knowledge—can be as useless as no effort at all.

Take the Nice Guy. He has good intentions. He tries to love, respect, and do right by his partner. He listens to her, anticipates her needs, asks her what she wants, and does all the nice and gentlemanly things he’s been taught to do. Yet somehow, despite all this effort, he still doesn’t get what he wants. His sex life remains flat. His partner seems impossible to please. The harder he tries, the more baffled and frustrated he becomes.

Nothing about the Nice Guy is necessarily bad. He doesn’t suffer from a lack of effort—if anything, he tries too hard. And because a lot of women experience sex as optional rather than essential, plenty of them don’t mind being with a Nice Guy. He’s loyal, hardworking, and dependable, providing the support and stability she wants.

But this is where resentment enters the picture. When the spark is gone and nothing seems to revive it, it’s easy for a man to feel used. Beneath this resentment is an assumption carried by many men:

If I work hard to please and provide for her, she’ll eventually reward me with sex.

Married men are especially prone to this. They provide, carry their share of the household load, and try to be good husbands. So when their wives don’t reciprocate sexually, it’s only a matter of time before resentment rears its head.

It’s not that men are necessarily wrong to think of relationships as transactional. Partners are constantly tracking each other’s efforts whether they admit it or not. Where the Nice Guy goes wrong is assuming that all forms of effort and investment have the same erotic value. A paycheck is valuable. Reliability is valuable. Helping around the house, emotional support—also valuable. But none of it’s erotic.

Men want their efforts at work, their reliability, their niceness, to function like currency—like tokens deposited into some kind of relational account, accumulating toward a future payout. But when, time and again, the tokens fail to redeem, frustration mounts. Only then does he start doubting the validity of the bargain he thought he’d struck.

The reason paychecks and standard Nice Guy behavior don’t translate into sex is simple: they’re predictable, and predictability kills passion. When there’s no risk or uncertainty, there’s no charge.

Think about the early days of a relationship. It’s tempting to credit the intensity to novelty alone. But it isn’t just the novelty doing the work—it’s the not-knowing. You don’t know if she really likes you. You don’t know if you’ll see her again. You’re hopeful, but you’re not sure. Dorothy Tennov, in her work on limerence, located passion precisely in that mix of hope and doubt. It’s part of why making the shift from dating to commitment is hard: once the uncertainty is gone, so is one of the things that made it burn hot.

The Manosphere has also registered this connection between uncertainty and desire. Rollo Tomassi, for instance, counsels men to stop being so predictable. If you’re reliable and conscientious by nature, let it lapse now and then. Stop doting on her constantly. Stop being available all the time. Affection, like anything else, dulls when it’s overused.

This tracks with what we know about intermittent reinforcement. Research suggests that unpredictable reward is typically more motivating, and harder to extinguish, than reliable reward. The slot machine is the classic example: most plays produce nothing, but the occasional win, or the prospect of it, keeps us coming back.

This is why men who are unfailingly nice or affectionate become uninteresting. Flirting, teasing, spontaneity, playful resistance—all are more seductive because they put risk and ambiguity back into the equation. A woman reads a man’s capacity to tease as evidence that he’s confident enough to take risks, sexual and otherwise. He’s not afraid of her rejecting him. He’s not afraid of unreservedly expressing his desire.

There’s a real difference between men who merely get aroused and those who know how to embody and express desire. Arousal is primarily physiological and localized. Desire is more global and integrated—a channeling of head, heart, gut, and body toward a single aim. Desire carries a weight that arousal lacks: strength, command, conviction. A woman can easily dismiss an aroused man. It’s harder to brush off a man of desire whose resolve doesn’t bend to her resistance.

And yet none of this negates a woman’s desire for safety, which sits paradoxically alongside her desire for risk. One part of the female psyche responds to unpredictability and edge. The other wants long-term security. Passion needs risk; attachment needs security. Research on shifting attraction across the menstrual cycle bears this out, with one window favoring the edgy type of man, another the reliable sort. This can be a source of confusion for men seeking a simple formula for dealing with women. But since both sides of her are real, they must find ways of bringing both edge and stability to the relationship.

For men who default to playing it safe in relationships, becoming more alive means becoming more assertive, less deferential, less conflict-avoidant, and more willing to act on their own desires. Less neediness, more independence. Less doting, more flirting. Less accommodation, more self-possession.

This sort of shift invariably produces some friction. But there’s no way to a fire-filled relationship without it. As long as a woman believes she’s got you on a leash—that you’re not going anywhere no matter what—she won’t respect you, let alone desire you. There’s no real consequence in taking you for granted.

I learned this the hard way. I had to separate from my wife before she started taking me seriously. All of my earlier warning shots registered as empty threats. I could say I was unhappy and that things needed to change, but nothing ever did. Once I actually left, however, the shift was almost immediate. Suddenly she was treating me with respect and admiration, flirting with me, and wanting me again. For the first time in years the relationship contained real risk. She could lose me. And I could lose her. The separation didn’t magically solve our problems. But it definitely changed the dynamic between us. The relationship was no longer something either of us took for granted.

The point isn't to become a man who threatens to leave whenever he doesn't get his way. It's that commitment given freely is desirable, and commitment given out of dependency isn't. Learning to seduce is half the challenge. Learning to need her less is the other half.

This is also where I part ways with the Manosphere’s more extreme corners. The answer isn’t to return to some imagined golden age of machismo. Nor is it a rejection of the empathy and relational sensitivity men have built over the last few decades. It’s not the bully of old. But it’s also not today’s Nice Guy. It’s a man capable of both force and sensitivity. One who can commit without dependency, listen without deference, and love without self-erasure.

Maybe that’s the real lesson buried in all this talk of effort. Not effort spent becoming who she wants. Effort devoted to becoming a more complete man—and then finding out what happens when you bring that man to the relationship.

Thoughts? Push-back? Comments are now open.

The problem is that relational grievances run both ways. While men complain about not getting enough sex, women have their own list of concerns. As I discussed in The Manipulated Man, women aren’t necessarily eager to dole out sex freely—do that and a man gets everything he wants with nothing left to bargain for. It’s one reason relationships are power struggles, with each partner withholding something essential the other wants. We often think about relationships in terms of love. But they’re also about leverage.

The key to leverage is knowledge—not just knowledge of one’s partner as an individual, but of the broader cultural and evolutionary forces shaping what each sex wants. This post is about what women look for in a man, and where those preferences come from.

In The Evolution of Desire, David Buss argues that women’s mating preferences aren’t random or arbitrary. The genes of modern women have survived tens of thousands of years of selection pressure, and still, to this day, sexual selection unconsciously steers them toward mates best suited to pass along those genes. Because women historically bore the greater biological and parental costs of raising children, the consequences of choosing badly were especially high. Men, by contrast, could father numerous children with comparatively little investment. Women couldn’t afford to be cavalier in this regard, which is why they became the deciders when it comes to sex, and why sex remains their chief source of leverage.

From this perspective, it follows that women wouldn’t merely be attracted to fit men with good genes, but to those who could also provide the necessary resources and protection for her and her children. Status, wealth, strength, competence, social standing: all become relevant. Of course, the modern woman isn’t consciously thinking, This man appears capable of providing resources that would increase the survival prospects of my offspring. She simply finds certain men attractive, without needing to understand why.

In fairy tales, women fall for handsome princes. We generally read this as the triumph of pure feeling. But beneath these stories are other signals: the prince is attractive, powerful, healthy, wealthy, high-status, and capable of protecting and providing for her. Evolutionary psychology explains why these qualities became objects of desire in the first place.

In this light, we might understand love as an idealized symbol and embodied experience of a person’s potential as a mate. It’s a classic Red Pill insight: beneath love’s veneer lies a stack of ancient evolutionary forces shaping that attraction. Some might find this deflating, the way evolutionary science seems to deflate the mystery of creation. But understanding the machinery underneath an experience doesn’t necessarily invalidate the experience itself. Love can be real and profound while still being influenced by forces neither partner chose.

The useful part, for men, is realizing that women aren’t innocent creatures animated by love alone but are subject to many of the same ancient forces underlying his libido. Both sexes run on a host of incentives operating beneath conscious awareness.

Which brings us to another layer of women’s sexual psychology. A man of status and wealth can evoke real interest, even intoxication, for a woman. But if she’s looking for a long-term partner, there’s a final test, arguably the most important of all: can he commit?

Without commitment, a man’s resources and protection are worthless promises—at risk of being withdrawn and redirected at any time. This creates an obvious incentive for a woman to determine if a man is merely attracted to her or if he intends to invest in her specifically over time. So she tests him, usually unwittingly, in hopes of casting light on his true intentions.

Taken together, we might say that women want a desirable man with sufficient status and resources who is also committed enough not to jump ship and reinvest elsewhere. Being loved and wanted isn’t enough. For her to commit, his love must be exclusive and durable. She has to be his one and only.

This is where romance enters the picture. I’ve recently come to see romance—a man’s willingness to devote real time and resources to her—as a proxy for commitment. Gifts, gestures, undivided attention, an expensive dinner, each repeats the same message: I am investing in you. Knowing a man is committed also signals safety, a scarce resource in an otherwise dangerous evolutionary past.

Once a woman has secured the requisite safety, security, and resources in a long-term relationship, her sexual calculus shifts from who she’s willing to sleep with to when. Barring a high libido or a desire to conceive, she may feel little urgency about sex at all. That urgency drops further if she’s unhappy, in which case she may withhold sex until things improve, or until her partner remembers how to romance her.

This is why even after formal commitment, a woman keeps testing for it. Contrary to what most men assume, a wedding ring and a paycheck aren’t enough. If romance serves as her primary signal of commitment, then a man who believes that hard work alone should earn him unlimited sexual access is setting himself up for resentment. I already do so much, he thinks. Look at everything I provide.

But a paycheck doesn't prove where his discretionary attention is allocated. For all she knows, those long hours could be devoted to another woman. What she wants to see isn't just that he's fulfilling his obligations, but that he's still choosing—freely, with nothing forcing his hand—to invest in her.

Romance takes time and effort, and Buss’s logic explains why it feels unnatural to most men. Men were historically incentivized to maximize their opportunities while minimizing investment in any one partner. Women were thus incentivized to differentiate between a man who was merely interested and one who was genuinely invested. The same asymmetry shows up in the bedroom—she wants extensive foreplay and buildup; he’d rather get to the point. In long-term relationships this produces a familiar standoff: he wants more sex, she wants more romance, and neither wants to cave first.

Wealthy or high-status men may get away with skipping the romance—the exclusive lifestyle does the work for them. Most men don’t have this option. For them, a poor showing in the romance department invariably carries over into the bedroom. So however burdensome it may feel at times, if a man wants a passionate relationship, he has to do the romantic work.

Granted, romance isn’t a man’s only lever for getting more sex. The fact is he can do all the right romantic things—the flowers, the dinners, the thoughtful messages—and still miss the deeper need: knowing how to be the kind of man she wants to surrender to. Simply put, he can learn the rituals of romance without ever learning how to inhabit desire.

Most women don’t merely want kindness. They want to feel that a man genuinely desires them. They want to feel his interest, his confidence, his erotic presence. They want a man who knows how to channel his desire in a way that allows them to let go in his arms.

This is why men like to accuse women of being overly complicated. The pathway to getting her primed for sex can seem labyrinthine indeed. Especially after a long week at work, her need for romance can feel cumbersome, even unreasonable.

But once we see romance as a proxy for commitment, and commitment as a time-tested evolutionary strategy, her desires start to make more sense. While that doesn’t eliminate the need for romantic effort, it does make it more intelligible and, in some ways, more palatable.

Even if our ideals around love are sticky, the reality of love is often more fleeting. Early passion and intoxication fade, and something else moves in. Sometimes it’s a warm, tender companionship. Sometimes it’s disappointment, frustration, resentment, or betrayal. The flame that once burned so hot goes cold, and we’re left wondering how something that once was so good turned sour.

When romantic needs go unmet, and every attempted remedy falters, couples reach for something else. They start acting more selfishly, determined to get more of whatever they believe they’re entitled to. Instead of leading with love and generosity, they resort to keeping score, strong-arming their partner into acting more fairly and reciprocally.

It’s then that we’re confronted with a relational reality we never saw coming: power.

Our cultural obsession with romance keeps most people from noticing that power dynamics don’t suddenly emerge once passion fades. Rather, they’re there from the start, quietly steering the relationship in ways that are more predictable than we might care to admit.

In his book, The Evolution of Desire, psychologist David Buss reveals how, despite their shared longing for love, men and women have evolved very different mating priorities and strategies. While it may be comforting to assume that both sexes want the same thing and are taking the same path to get there, the evidence, Buss argues, suggests otherwise. Like it or not, men and women invariably compete for the satisfaction of their own desires, and they do so on their own terms. And wherever their desires and tactics diverge, power enters the equation.

A man’s desire for sex, and how long a woman withholds it, is one of the earliest and clearest examples of this dynamic. For many men, sex can never come soon enough. And because it sits at the top of their priority list, the moment a woman sleeps with him, the power dynamic can shift. He’s achieved one of his primary objectives, and in some cases, may promptly lose interest in continuing the relationship.

Women, by contrast, tend to prioritize commitment and long-term partnership, which makes consenting to sex too early a potential risk. Delaying sex until commitment is secured—a strategy religious traditions have formalized for centuries—is one way a woman protects her position and attempts to mitigate her risk of abandonment after sex. This leverage doesn’t disappear once the relationship is consummated either. Sex, and the ability to withhold it, remains her most powerful card throughout the relationship.

None of this is necessarily sinister. Nor is it fully conscious. Leverage is simply a byproduct of one partner having something the other wants and the option of whether to provide it. Importantly, love doesn’t change this reality. If anything, it makes us more vulnerable to it. My previous post, The Manipulated Man, explains why men, in particular, can be susceptible to giving away their power in relationships.

There’s a growing body of literature—commonly known as “Game”—devoted to mapping these dynamics and showing men how to use them to their advantage. When I was first introduced to these ideas, I pulled back, as most men tend to do. We like to think of ourselves as good and decent people, and there’s something inherently distasteful about treating relationships as a strategic contest. Game also threatens our ideals around love. Reducing love and attraction to a set of mechanics can feel like a desecration—like spoiling the very thing that makes them meaningful.

For these and other reasons, most men steer clear of Game altogether, preferring to remain naive about the undercurrents of power in their relationships. The ones who don’t—who choose to see and accept reality as it is, whatever the cost—are said to have taken the “Red Pill,” a term borrowed from the 1999 blockbuster film, The Matrix.

Over the last decade I’ve read a handful of books on Game and absorbed some of their teachings. It’s sharpened my confidence with women and shown me the value of cultivating polarity—the tension between masculine and feminine energy that keeps sexual attraction alive. I’ve been especially interested in how Game’s principles might keep the flame lit in long-term relationships and counteract some of my own self-effacing Nice Guy habits.

Understanding Game wasn’t enough to save my marriage, but recent events have given me a firsthand appreciation for some of its tenets. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, over the last year of our separation, my wife has treated me very differently living apart than when we lived together. It’s a shift so dramatic that love alone couldn’t explain it. Viewed through the lens of leverage, however, it made considerably more sense.

The moment I moved out, my wife lost many of her usual control levers. The proximity, the routine, the relational pressure—all of it was gone. She was thus forced to rely on an entirely different set of behaviors to regain my favor. She became more playful, seductive, engaging, and attentive—things I’d been requesting for years with little response.

In The Rational Male, Rollo Tomassi discusses the importance of controlling “the frame” in a relationship. For much of my marriage, my wife held it—she called the shots while I, in true Nice Guy fashion, capitulated. Tomassi notes that many men make the mistake of believing that “commitment necessitates, and is synonymous with, handing her frame control.”

After moving out, I discovered what it was like to hold the frame myself. Suddenly, she was catering to me rather than the other way around. Tomassi offers a blunt explanation: “Moving in with a woman implies commitment, and whenever you commit to anything, you lose your two most valuable resources: options and the ability to maneuver.”

He also argues that sexual tension runs on unpredictability. Familiarity, he writes, is “anti-seductive.” Once things settle into a routine, the passion can quickly fade. And while it’s theoretically possible to avoid this when living under the same roof, in practice it’s much harder. We like our routines. We don’t want to constantly perform. So eventually, we stop dressing up, we stop flirting, we stop creating anticipation. To some extent, we’re simply lazy. As I discussed in The Indifference Threshold, we struggle to avoid the ruts of complacency and to act with intention, even when our own aliveness depends on it.

Personality complicates things further. For introverts, living together and being perpetually “on” can feel nothing short of impossible. For extraverts—especially those who thrive on engaging with and eliciting responses in others—it comes more naturally. Introverted men often try to solve this by partnering with an extravert who can bring the outward energy they struggle to consistently produce themselves. This can work, but it comes with a potential downside: it puts them in a receptive role. She brings the energy, he absorbs it. Over time, this dynamic can readily drift into Nice Guyism. And because casual dating can also feel taxing for introverted men, some may find the Nice Guy option attractive. Even without much heat, they may appreciate the comfort and companionship. There’s less uncertainty, less social effort, and less need to continually put themselves out there.

The problem is, once the Nice Guy arrangement is established, it’s hard to reverse. The relationship is satisfying enough that walking away feels irrational. But for men seeking real aliveness, the mediocrity and unmet needs of the dynamic can become increasingly hard to ignore.

I keep wondering if there might be another path for introverted men—for men who want more fire in their lives but aren’t sure how to find it given the limits of their own temperament. Game offers real insight, but much of its literature is too polarized for men who want to integrate their masculine and feminine sides rather than simply amplifying the masculine. Its principles also skew toward extraversion, toward relational breadth—more women, more sex—rather than greater depth.

These are complicated matters, too complicated to sort out here. But we’ll continue to chip away at them in future posts.

When we were together, I felt taken for granted, unseen, and disrespected. When apart, I felt affirmed and desired, as though I was suddenly worth taking seriously.

Same woman. Same marriage. Different behavior entirely.

It came down to one thing: leverage.

Living together, she had it. She could disregard my needs without much consequence. Living apart, the cost became real—potential divorce—and her behavior changed accordingly.

I found it remarkable that changing this single variable could produce such a dramatically different outcome.

What I wanted to understand was how this imbalance got there in the first place. Why had I ceded so much power? Why had I tolerated the inequality for the better part of a decade?

I found part of the answer in an unlikely place: Esther Vilar’s The Manipulated Man, a controversial 1971 book that hasn’t aged particularly well. Her characterizations of men and women are broad, dated, and often overblown. But I still couldn’t put it down.

Vilar thinks like a behaviorist. She’s less interested in what people say they believe or value than what they actually do. Her claim is that men are conditioned to orient their lives around pleasing women and, in doing so, unwittingly surrender an enormous amount of their freedom.

Of course, few men would admit that pleasing women is the organizing principle of their lives. But Vilar’s point rests not on what men believe or are willing to admit to themselves. It rests on how they behave.

Sex is the hinge point. Men want it. Women control access to it. So the question becomes: what will men do to get it?

According to Vilar, nearly anything. They’ll work long hours at a job they don’t love, put their friendships on the backburner, shoulder enormous responsibilities, bend over backwards to care for their wives and children. And often, they still don’t get what they want. Yet they continue giving more, believing their efforts will eventually be recognized and rewarded.

The tacit bargain, on Vilar’s account, is a familiar one: men trade resources for sex, affection, and validation.

In theory, such an arrangement should remain stable as long as both parties hold up their end of the bargain. But Vilar claims that women frequently don’t. They’re happy to receive a man’s resources without feeling obligated to reciprocate. More importantly, men respond not by renegotiating the bargain, but by doubling down—working harder, providing more, and waiting for a recognition that never comes.

The result, in Vilar’s deliberately provocative formulation, is something like a master-slave relationship. It isn’t necessary to accept this sweeping characterization to recognize a deeper point beneath it:

Power doesn’t belong to the person who has the most to offer. It belongs to the person who can, and if necessary is willing to, walk away.

I had plenty to offer my wife. I worked hard. I provided. I cared for her and my daughter. I became a better lover. I stretched myself in countless ways. But none of it earned me power.

What I lacked wasn’t effort. It was the ability to imagine—or the courage to pursue—a viable life outside the marriage. Without that possibility on the table, my needs carried little real consequence. And without consequences, there was little incentive for anything to change. My wife held all the cards because she believed I wasn’t strong enough to quit the game.

This is the part of Vilar’s argument I keep returning to. Men generally pride themselves on their rationality, independence, and fairness. Why, then, do we routinely trade away so much of our power, freedom, and happiness for the sake of a relationship?

Part of the answer is that the mere structure of marriage provides something men crave but rarely admit: the sense of being needed. A family comes with built-in responsibilities, someone to come home to, and a ready-made role in the world. Even a marriage running on fumes can confer these benefits: purpose, identity, companionship, and comfort.

As I discussed in Beyond the Precipice, what scared me most about divorce wasn’t really losing my wife. It was waking up without anyone seeing or relying on me. No one to live for but myself. So despite all the freedom-lust in my writing, I was existentially dependent on, and effectively trapped by, the marriage. It took a full year of separation, self-work, reflection, and watching the relationship continue to unravel before the spell finally broke and I filed for divorce.

Ending a long-term relationship isn’t just about letting go of a person. It’s a fight against a set of unexamined assumptions about marriage, manhood, and what a meaningful life is supposed to look like. For instance, if a man sees a particular woman as his primary source of sex, meaning, validation, or purpose, then he’s already ceded much of his power before the relationship has even begun.

And once he’s committed to the relationship, fear takes care of the rest. Even when he’s mistreated, he gives her the benefit of the doubt. He works harder and tolerates more, hoping his efforts will eventually be rewarded. Robert Glover coined the term “Nice Guy” to describe this sort of man.

What can be confusing is that society often paints men as the more selfish and power-hungry sex. And while it's true that their initial aims—sex, affection, validation—may be self-interested, something strange happens after commitment: their self-interest curdles into self-erasure. Afraid of upsetting the balance, they defer their own needs and swallow their anger. They tell themselves that wanting more makes them selfish. They avoid confrontation. They keep the peace. They continue to wait.

Meanwhile, the imbalance continues to compound.

This is the useful core of Vilar’s argument. Not that women are manipulators and men are dupes, but her insistence that beneath the sentimental language of relationships lies an actual distribution of power that deserves more daylight.

Who needs whom more?

Who loses more if it ends?

Who’s more afraid to leave?

Who can ignore the other’s needs without consequence?

Who keeps adapting while the other stays the same?

These questions are uncomfortable because they cut against the stories we like to tell about relationships. Love, commitment, sacrifice, loyalty—all are real virtues, under the right conditions. Under the wrong ones, however, they become the exact mechanism by which one person quietly hands over their power.

Commitment isn’t the same as dependence. Sacrifice isn’t automatically love. Staying isn’t automatically strength.

Vilar casts women as the manipulators and men as the manipulated. Feminism tells us the opposite story: men and the patriarchal structures are the offenders. Today, we’re at something of a standstill. Plenty of women are convinced they’ve been exploited by men and male-dominated institutions, while plenty of men are convinced they’ve been short-changed by women and the cultural norms, narratives, and practices surrounding relationships.

There’s obviously a great deal of subjectivity on both sides, which makes it difficult to sort out where the actual truth lies.

But perhaps the overarching question—who’s the greater victim, men or women?—isn’t the most important or productive one.

The more useful question is smaller and harder to avoid: what’s actually happening in this relationship?

Who has the power? And what’s keeping the person with less power from reclaiming it?

In my case, it took years of reading, wrestling, and conversations—with friends and chatbots—to clarify the dynamic in my marriage and my own role in creating it. It would have been easier to conclude that my wife simply took my power from me. The harder truth was that I gave much of it away.

Deep down, I was worried that I wouldn’t be okay on my own. That I couldn’t find enough meaning, companionship, and validation if the relationship ended. That whatever was waiting for me outside the marriage might be emptier than what I already had.

As long as those fears outweighed my dissatisfaction, I was never actually free to choose. That’s why it took so many false starts before I finally filed.

Perhaps this is the deeper meaning of Vilar’s title. The manipulation of a man doesn’t necessarily start with a woman. It starts earlier—in our insecurities, our conditioning, our unexamined beliefs.

We enter relationships hoping our partner will provide a host of things—sex, love, meaning, validation, security, identity, purpose—that we’ve never fully learned to produce for ourselves.

But when a relationship is built on that foundation, it’s remarkably easy to hand over our power in exchange for whatever it is we fear we can’t live without.

One reason I moved out in the first place was I felt ignored—not just sexually, but entirely unseen, as though I didn’t exist except when she needed something from me. But each time I moved out, her behavior changed.

Almost like the flip of a switch, she’d start treating me with respect and admiration. She’d flirt and banter. She’d open herself sexually. She’d get out of her head and be present with me.

But whenever I decided to give the relationship another shot and moved back in, the switch flipped back. Her self-absorption returned. Moments when she claimed to be “trying” were half-hearted at best. More than once I told her as much—that she was reliably more intentional with me when we were living apart.

The Security Paradox

In many ways, the difference resembled that of dating versus marriage.

When we’re dating, we don’t assume the other person will automatically like and accept us. We don’t feel secure enough to rest on our laurels. Instead, we put forth maximal effort to make a good impression. If we’re really interested, there may even be times when it feels like we’re performing.

Marriage changes the equation. Once we feel secure in someone’s love, the incentive to perform diminishes. We can relax. Let down our guard. Show our partner our less savory sides—our exhaustion, irritability, selfishness, boredom.

And there’s something healthy about that. No one wants a relationship in which both people are perpetually performing. We want to be accepted as we are, not merely as the best version of ourselves we can manufacture on a date.

But this creates a paradox. The very security that fosters vulnerability can also make us complacent, giving rise to a perennial complaint from husbands and wives alike: “My partner has changed. They’re not the same person they used to be.”

Whenever I brought this to my wife’s attention, she’d say that her unwillingness to perform, to put on a happy face, was actually a sign of respect and vulnerability—that she trusted me enough to show her true colors, struggles and all.

There’s certainly some truth in that. But the argument has its limits. When every day is so hard that there’s never anything left for one’s partner, it starts looking less like vulnerability and more like disinterest or self-absorption.

And this is where my marital problems intersect with a much larger problem—the problem of effort.

The Problem of Effort

Relationships are just one instance of the problem of effort. More specifically, it’s the problem of mobilizing ourselves to do the things we supposedly want to do.

How many times have you looked forward to something, and when the moment finally arrived, suddenly felt lackluster? The thing you wanted so badly in the abstract is sitting there, right in front of you, yet somehow all the energy and enthusiasm you previously felt has disappeared.

Colin Wilson described this phenomenon in The Outsider:

I had always wanted freedom—freedom from the dreary need to work for a living, freedom to live a life of the mind. Yet if I woke up in my room on a Saturday morning, with a weekend of ‘freedom’ in front of me, I might find myself trapped in a curious lukewarm state of indifference.

Wilson’s word for this was indifference.

It’s what I experienced from my wife whenever we lived together. But it’s also what can keep us from going on the date, taking the risk, starting the novel, or chasing the dream. In theory, we want these things. But when the time comes to actually do them—to muster the necessary effort—we can’t seem to get out of the starting gate.

Of course, there’s an important possibility we shouldn’t overlook: perhaps we don’t actually want what we think we want. In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, Mark Manson describes years of wanting to be a musician. There was one small problem, however: he never got around to practicing, to actually learning the craft. For a while, he called it laziness. Eventually, he considered a more unsettling possibility: perhaps he didn’t want to be a musician badly enough. He later tried his hand at writing and discovered something different: he didn’t merely like the idea of writing, but found he could sit down and do it, day after day.

This is a worthwhile insight. Sometimes our failure to act is telling us something about what we really want (or don’t want). Unfortunately, indifference doesn’t always give us a clear answer. Sometimes we’re genuinely interested in something but can’t find the energy to pursue it. Sometimes we’re depressed, exhausted, or afraid. Sometimes we want something but don’t yet know how to cross the divide between wanting it and doing it.

This was part of my confusion with my wife. Was she simply indifferent to sex generally? Or was there a harder pill to swallow—that she lacked romantic interest in me? Did she lack libido altogether, or did she simply require someone with a different key to unlock it?

The Threshold

Manson’s insight is valid, but we shouldn’t over-apply it. It’s always tempting to externalize the cause of our indifference—to blame our circumstances, our partner, our job, our chosen pursuit. But this can lead us to surrender prematurely. Indeed, Wilson thought most people give up too quickly. We feel that initial resistance, take it as evidence that something’s wrong, and retreat.

He called it the indifference threshold—a threshold because indifference isn’t a permanent condition, but something we can pass through. And if we manage to cross it, we often discover a wellspring of fresh energy and meaning on the other side.

Unfortunately, just as we’re apt to externalize the cause of our indifference, we often rely on external circumstances to push us across the threshold. When my wife senses that our marriage is on the line, for instance, her indifference gives way to intention, quickly and reliably. Suddenly she’s attentive. She’s engaged. She’s motivated.

Or consider something more mundane. When the fuel light comes on and there’s no gas station in sight, we immediately wake up. We stop daydreaming. We start calculating distances, looking at the map, considering our options. We become vigilant. Why? Because suddenly something real is at stake. Indifference is no longer an option.

Paradoxically, despite the inherent stress of marital conflict, an empty fuel tank, or any other genuine crisis, such situations can make us feel more alive. The day no longer feels ordinary. Something is happening that actually matters. Our energy surges. Our thinking sharpens.

We’ve crossed the threshold.

Two Ways Across

Thrill-seekers take full advantage of this. They take up risky hobbies—motorcycling, skydiving—and riskier lines of work: day trading, the ER, criminality. They instinctively understand that risk cuts through indifference. Indeed, I’ve written about the value of adopting a risk practice as a means to more aliveness.

But Wilson, being more of an intellectual than an adrenaline junkie, sought another way across the threshold. Instead of physical risk, he looked for psychological solutions. He believed that, armed with the know-how and determination, crossing the indifference threshold was a skill that could be mastered. Not only that, but because indifference stands in the way of greatness in every field, learning how to navigate it may be one of the most important skills we can develop. It’s often the first—and perhaps the tallest—hurdle we face.

Think about almost any creative or athletic pursuit. Getting started is always the hardest part. We sit down at the piano and don’t feel inspired. We lace up our shoes and don’t feel like running. We open the blank document and have no idea what to write. At that moment, it’s tempting to interpret our lack of enthusiasm as information. Maybe this isn't the right activity? Maybe I’m not cut out to be a runner? Maybe I’m not meant to be a writer? Maybe the idea isn’t as good as I thought?

But sometimes nothing is wrong.

We’re simply standing on the wrong side of the threshold.

If we’re lucky, something shifts. We play the first few notes. We run the first mile. We write the first paragraph. And suddenly, as if by magic, it no longer feels forced. Struggle gives way to ease. We catch a rhythm. We’re suddenly coasting downhill.

I was reminded of this today. I had a whole day set aside to write, and I wanted to take full advantage of it. I’d been circling a few topics all week but woke up unsure which path to take. I started a couple of drafts, but something was off. They felt forced and uninteresting. Nothing was flowing. So I took a break and walked to a coffee shop. Once I sat down and wrote the first couple sentences, I knew something had changed. The energy was suddenly there. So was the momentum. What had felt laborious a few minutes earlier began to feel effortless. I had crossed the threshold.

Wilson, much like Nietzsche, saw indifference, boredom, and complacency as the defining problems of our age. When our comfort, safety, and basic needs are all but guaranteed, it’s easy to sleepwalk through life. Vigilance is no longer a prerequisite for survival.

We appreciate our insulation from the dangers and uncertainties of the natural world, at least in theory. But it doesn’t come without a cost. Deep down, we sense that something’s missing—the intensity of living with something critical at stake. It’s why we’re drawn to the suspense of crisis, drama, and romance.

There's another way across the threshold, however. It may sound simple, but it’s actually harder. It involves not retreating the moment indifference shows up—just doing what we're called to do, again and again, with no fuel light forcing our hand. On the other side, we may find that the interest, energy, and meaning we were seeking weren't missing after all. They were just waiting for us to cross.

Recent circumstances have made it painfully clear that my wife and I need to part ways. There were moments of profound frustration and despair that left no doubt about what needed to be done. But as I wrote in The Emotion Nice Guys Don’t Trust, once I calmed down and my rational brain took over, my old friend anxiety would get to work, chipping away at the conviction until some justification was found for giving the marriage another shot. I could never quite tell if it was fear or reason steering the ship. Either way, I ended up walking back from the precipice every time. Call it weakness, cowardice, co-dependence—whatever the cause, it was a trap I couldn’t seem to escape.

It wasn’t a lack of self-awareness, per se. I knew what I was afraid of: that divorce would leave me lonely and empty. In the thick of midlife, the thought of being alone felt like staring into a void. I worried about social exile—about losing the web of people around me, most of whom were my wife’s friends and family, not mine. I worried about not feeling needed, about being reduced to a paycheck. I worried about loneliness and the self-destructive habits men fall into when they lose their sense of connection and purpose.

Having always been a bit of a loner, I didn’t trust myself to make or sustain new social ties. And for good reason. My friendships had always been sporadic or temporary. At some point, I’d lose touch with people and rarely bother to reconnect. The same was true of social groups. I might attend a few times, but it was rarely long before I found an excuse to stop going.

I’d always lived among people, but I never considered them the center of my world. They were there, in the background, providing me with something I was reluctant to name—comfort, perhaps, or validation, or a sense of belonging. The thought of that disappearing rattled me to the core.

I felt like I was being forced to choose between two veritable hellscapes: stay in a volatile, emotionally-exhausting marriage, or walk headlong into a midlife exile. Not every man will face this particular binary, but anyone who’s contemplated or weathered divorce will recognize the dilemma. It’s easy to see yourself as independent until you actually walk to the precipice and look down. That’s when you discover you’re not nearly as strong or self-sufficient as you imagined.

That said, mindset also matters. Believe you’re merely trading one hell for another and you’ll stay stuck. When neither option looks promising, it’s hard to act decisively. What we’re really after is a more hopeful vision—one with enough clarity and pull to get us moving. Man of Fire is my attempt to build such a vision.

We tend to think of a vision as one clear idea or image. What gets lost is everything underneath it—the prior ideas, insights, and lessons that made it possible. Nevertheless, we call it a vision because it feels like the sun has finally broken through the clouds, revealing a way forward we couldn’t see before: a third way.

About a week ago, I had a revelation. It might seem ordinary to some, but for me it felt revolutionary. It revealed the third way I’d been looking for—an alternative to the binary of miserably married or sadly divorced. Combined with other circumstances pushing me in the same direction, it gave me the courage to finally file for divorce.

A little more backstory. I knew that if my wife and I divorced, I didn’t want to just dive into another committed relationship. I wanted to build a life where I wasn’t dependent on a woman to be okay. But I also knew I needed people in my life. Indeed, Man of Fire was born out of a desire to become more interconnected, not less.

The problem was that I didn’t trust myself to create those connections—and, again, for good reason.

Part of that was priorities. I simply cared more about my work than anything else. But there’s another factor at play: when we’re married, our basic need for human contact is largely met by default.

You come home from work and someone’s there. There’s noise, energy, life. If your spouse is even halfway social, you inherit her friends and her family as part of the package. So even if the marriage itself is on the rocks, there’s not a lot of room for loneliness. Consequently, many men, myself included, get complacent. We let our wives run the social calendar, and as long as it meets our basic needs, we’re content to sit back and ride along.

Compare that to the life of a single man living alone. Even if he works long hours, there are a lot of empty hours left over, especially on weekends. At minimum, he wakes up alone and goes to bed alone. No one there to notice him. No one depending on him. In those stretches of aloneness, negative thoughts creep in, and the inner battle begins. That’s what scared me most: spending the rest of my life fighting loneliness, emptiness, and whatever else lives in the dark corners of my mind.

Fortunately, those weren’t my only two options. Finally, after no small amount of hand-wringing and head-scratching, it dawned on me:

Why not live with other people?

It sounds obvious. But in that moment, it felt like a revelation. The future opened up. I was no longer doomed.

I no longer worried about being lonely and unseen. I wouldn’t have to rely solely on my own willpower to maintain a social life. I wouldn’t wake up to nothing but the contents of my own head and the same four walls.

That said, I know I’m not off the hook. My living arrangement is one piece of a much larger project of reinvention. I’ll still have to contend with more unstructured hours in the day, and that amount of freedom can be frightening—especially for someone who resists killing time with passive stimulation on principle.

Keeping my fire alive in this strange new world of bachelorhood will take real experimentation, planning, and self-discipline. Otherwise, all that open time could drag me somewhere dark.

If I can pull that off—if I can build a truly integrated life as a single man—the particulars of my living situation may ultimately prove less consequential. Still, given that humans have spent the vast majority of our existence in bands and tribes, it’s fair to say that living alone is the exception, not the rule.

Discovering that I have a third option, should I need it, has shifted things. The precipice is still there, and crossing it will still involve loss and uncertainty. But I can now see beyond it. What once looked like a void now looks like open ground—a place to start building.

Erich Fromm referred to this as “freedom-from.” It’s achieved through subtraction, namely, by the shedding of constraints. The kid who’s no longer grounded. The man whose wife is out of town for the weekend. The accused who’s found not guilty. The tumor that turns out to be benign. The first day of a week’s vacation. Such scenarios ignite our sense of freedom and possibility, filling us with exhilaration and anticipation.

We generally see political freedom the same way, that is, as a form of freedom-from. Americans (the more libertarian sorts especially) seem particularly adamant about defending their freedoms. Nothing ignites them more than perceived threats to their rights or liberties. The reason for this, at least in part, is that acts aimed at securing freedom-from are often deeply meaningful. Few things are more invigorating than fighting against whatever, or whoever, is oppressing us. Fighting for freedom is itself an exercise of freedom—an act of will that channels our vital energies toward a meaningful aim.

Defending freedom is an act of pushing away, of preserving one’s desired territory. It’s clearing enough space to breathe and move, to live without constantly tripping over our neighbors or looking over our shoulder. The attendant emotions are often negative: anger, frustration, irritation. It’s how we feel when others violate our boundaries or encroach on our freedom.

But these emotions are energy-rich. We’re rarely bored or listless when we’re fighting or defending. We’d rather be in that state—what Camus called “revolt”—than mired in low-energy states like guilt, boredom, or aimlessness. It’s why we’re suckers for a good cause. Better to be up in arms than down in the dumps. Anything to feel more alive.

Those with a strong personal need for freedom-from—often the more introverted, anxious, or disagreeable types—tend to make regular use of the word “No.” It’s the linguistic form of pushing away. This powerful word helps us procure the time and space we need to thrive. Struggling to say it can stifle our growth, as we can only know who we are after first separating from others. Men generally find No easier than women do, though many men lose the ability if they adopt the Nice Guy mentality in their relationships.

For some men, fighting for ever more freedom-from is enough to keep their fire lit. They spend their lives in perpetual opposition—interpersonal conflict, job-hopping, political animus, and so on. In most cases, they believe they’re aiming at something better. In reality, they may simply enjoy a good fight. Wittingly or not, it keeps life interesting.

For most men, however, freedom-from is just the beginning. It clears the land. What we build on it—what we do with the freedom we’ve secured—Fromm called “freedom-for.” Instead of stripping away constraints, it acts additively. Instead of overseeing self-preservation, it aims at self-expansion. Instead of defending ground, it seeks to realize a vision. Whenever we ask, “Who might I become?” or “What should I do with my life?” we’re asking what our freedom is for.

The freedom-for questions are considerably harder.

Freedom-from runs on fight-or-flight, on instinct. When we feel threatened, pushing back comes naturally, often without much forethought. And as long as there’s something worth resisting or fighting, freedom-from remains a viable path to meaning.

Freedom for, by contrast, means saying “Yes” to something. But saying yes to one path means saying no to countless others. We see this in the winnowing that comes with finding one’s purpose. And for many men, narrowing their options can feel threatening, whether in their careers or relationships. In other words, acts of decision and commitment can feel a lot like surrendering our freedom, and that makes many of us uncomfortable, to say the least. We worry about making the wrong choice, about ending up stuck—unfree—in a job or relationship we no longer want.

Most men claim to want a purpose—to devote their lives to something meaningful. Yet they also want to feel free. Both are essential to their aliveness. But how can we reconcile them?

One way is to consider what kind of state allows us to feel simultaneously free and purposeful. The first thing that came to my mind was creativity.

Creativity rarely occurs apart from some purpose. Perhaps we’re trying to solve a challenging problem, navigate an obstacle, or realize a vision or goal. In none of these cases is the path to doing so pregiven. We have an objective, but exactly how we get there remains unknown—which means there’s still real freedom in how we get there.

So in saying they want both purpose and freedom, what men are really after is a way of bringing their creative faculties to bear on something that matters.

That’s the sweet spot.

Without freedom, the goal feels uninspiring. Without purpose, freedom degrades into aimlessness.

One way to find our sweet spot, and thereby potential directions for our creativity, is to notice when we’re in “flow.” We’re “in the zone.” We lose track of time. We feel deeply aligned and engaged with what we’re doing.

Flow is powerful precisely because of its ability to harness the energies of both purpose and freedom. We’re not wandering aimlessly, but we’re also not merely following instructions. We have somewhere to go, but we’re free to discover the way there.

The catch is that flow takes skill, and skill takes practice. If we fail to invest the time required to hone a skill, flow will be harder to come by. So we often must start from sheer interest or curiosity and trust that, in time, the challenges of learning will give way to competence—and eventually to flow.

That was certainly true for me in the early days of my writing journey, when finishing a single paragraph could feel like an eternity. But the challenge of learning the craft eventually became part of the reward. What once felt laborious became increasingly fluid, and eventually writing became one of the primary ways I experience both freedom and purpose simultaneously.

A common difficulty in clarifying our freedom-for is assuming that our purpose must also serve as our primary source of income. That’s a heavy bet. It asks the world to recognize and reward our path, which, for creative types especially, is never guaranteed. I’ve found that a semi-meaningful day job alongside my creative work works better for me. It relieves the pressure of monetizing my work and lets me write with impunity. Even more importantly, I’m no longer basing my self-worth on the world’s response—likes, comments, income, and so on—which has freed me to explore and develop new capacities in midlife.

Life is always a mixture of freedom-froms and freedom-fors. We don’t want to be unduly oppressed or constrained. We need space to breathe, move, think, and become ourselves. But once we’ve secured that basic degree of freedom, we’re faced with the harder question: Now what?

That question is difficult to answer in a world that declares technology as the solution to our boredom and, by extension, our meaning problem. But is external stimulation, however interesting and impressive, really what our freedom is for? Does man’s search for meaning culminate in consumerism? Was our evolutionary history—millions of years of struggle—ultimately aimed at ushering in a golden age of passive entertainment?

I don’t think so.

There has to be something we can do, or become, or move toward that gives us a deeper sense of purpose as men. Something that calls forth our agency rather than merely distracting us from its absence.

Only then will we experience freedom in its fullest sense—not merely as the absence of constraint, but as the fire that comes from knowing what our freedom is for.

The seed was planted early in my religious upbringing. Both at home and in the church pew, I was inundated with a simple proposition: believe in Jesus and your life will have meaning, now and for eternity. There it was, reiterated in various guises every Sunday, a final and definitive solution to the meaning problem.

For many believers, that’s enough—a chance to participate in a grand cosmic drama where good ultimately triumphs over evil. But when I lost my faith and knew there was no turning back, the problem of meaning surfaced immediately. It’s been a reliable companion of mine ever since.

Part of me was unsettled by the destruction, as though the rug of meaning had been yanked out from under me. But another part of me felt strangely exhilarated, eager to undertake the massive rebuild that lay ahead. I knew the journey would be long, perhaps even lifelong, and there was a real risk of coming up empty-handed. I believed a life without meaning wasn't worth living, so a lot was at stake.

But there was an upside too. I felt that searching for meaning was, ironically, one of the most meaningful things I could be doing. If meaning was all-important to me—what Tillich might call my “ultimate concern”—then the pursuit itself would be meaningful. Looking back, it was as though part of what I was seeking was already present from the outset, inherent to the process. It almost seems like fate.

Most people seek meaning indirectly. They engage in work, relationships, leisure, ordinary life—and meaning emerges as a natural byproduct. This is surely the oldest and most reliable path to meaning. It assumes that simply living well and appreciating life’s basic features is enough.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to see the wisdom in this approach. It’s helped deepen my capacity for appreciation, for finding meaning in the ordinary routines and rhythms of daily life. I can now run on indirect meaning much longer than I used to, which has made it easier to embrace a more conventional life of work and family.

Still, there are times when I need something more. When I start feeling restless or dissatisfied—when I keep circling back to the Why of my life—I know it’s time to confront the meaning problem more directly.

Direct approaches split in two directions: objective and subjective. The first looks outward, posing questions like: What is the meaning of life? What is the ultimate source of meaning in the cosmos? Traditionally, we’ve turned to religion, philosophy, or mysticism for answers to these questions.

Recently I’ve noticed that many secular people (myself included) seem to scratch this itch by reflecting on the mystery of consciousness. There’s something extraordinary about conscious experience that resists easy reduction to matter or mechanism. It can thus evoke many of the same feelings religion inspires, such as awe, mystery, and reverence. Consciousness is also the stage upon which everything meaningful unfolds. Without it, there’s no beauty, no love, no suffering, no joy. In that sense, it occupies a place in the secular imagination not unlike God’s in the religious one. Alongside art and nature, it’s become one of our most cherished objects of contemplation. My recent essay on Eros was an attempt in this direction: a reflection on the lifelike nature of reality itself.

The second, more subjective path to meaning turns inward. Instead of looking for meaning in the universe it asks: Who am I? What’s my purpose in the world? What kind of life am I meant to live?

Here we enter existentialist territory. Thinkers like Kierkegaard were skeptical of externally-derived meaning. In their view, the world—science, organized religion, and the rest—can’t be trusted with the problem. Science tells us almost nothing about meaning; it’s the wrong tool for the job. Religion comes closer, but its stories no longer hold up, at least not literally. So the burden of meaning, the existentialists tell us, falls on the individual.

If meaning is subjective, and each of us is our own meaning-maker, then the search for meaning becomes inseparable from the search for self—finding oneself, finding one’s purpose. Indeed, this is why I spent decades studying and writing about personality psychology. If meaning is rooted in self-understanding, why not build better tools and maps for navigating that territory?

Eventually I realized that self-knowledge, however valuable, can only take us so far. Analysis can reveal the path, but it can’t walk it for us. At some point, reflection must give way to action.

That realization was a central force behind Man of Fire. After decades of trying to understand my life, I felt called to spend more time actually living it. The experiences that followed—the collapse of my marriage, our separation, dating other women, and ultimately finding my way back to my wife—taught me things no amount of introspection ever could. They not only reshaped how I understand relationships, but also myself. They’ve made me a better man, a better husband, a better lover, a better father.

That said, if the search for meaning has taught me anything, it’s that every summit eventually becomes another starting point. There’s no final answer, no finish line.

Meaning isn’t merely an inspiring idea. It’s an experience that must be continually renewed. We can ponder it endlessly, but unless we’re also living fully—loving, risking, creating, struggling—it slowly evaporates.

Reflection is essential too though. It’s how we weave our experiences into a coherent story. It is how we discover patterns, revise our identities, and adjust our course. Meaning thus lies at the intersection of ideas and experience.

Some of us lean naturally toward experiencing life, others toward reflecting on it. Either way, we eventually discover gaps in our approach and feel pulled toward the opposite. This works for a while until dissatisfaction pulls us back to where we started. We swing from one side to the other until something like a balance is achieved.

But even then, meaning is not guaranteed.

Just when we think we have it, it slips quietly through our fingers, leaving us restless once again. It’s rarely long, however, before it summons us back. Perhaps this time, we think. Perhaps this time we’ll come a little closer. And so we follow—not because we expect to find it once and for all, but because its mystery won’t let us go.

Perhaps that’s what it means to stay alive.

Hesiod’s Theogony—written around 700 BCE—is one of the oldest surviving works of Greek literature. It tells the story of how the cosmos came into being: the emergence of the earth, the birth of the gods, and the generations that followed. It’s here, almost at the beginning of the Western tradition, that we encounter a figure who may hold the key to understanding both sex and purpose. His name is Eros.

Hesiod introduces him with these words:

First there was Chaos, then broad-chested Gaia, the steadfast seat of all immortals who live upon the snowy peaks of Olympus, then murky Tartarus in the depths of the wide earth, and Eros, most beautiful of the immortal gods, who loosens the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels in the breasts of all gods and men.

More than four hundred gods and mythical beings appear throughout the Theogony. But Eros is not one among the many. He arrives almost immediately—after Chaos, Gaia, and Tartarus themselves. Hesiod is telling us that desire isn't a late arrival in the story of the world. It’s woven into its very beginning.

And yet he tells us remarkably little about Eros. Unlike later writers, Hesiod offers no elaborate mythology or psychological analysis. Instead, he leaves us with only a handful of clues: Eros is beautiful, he loosens the limbs, he overcomes the mind and its wise counsels.

At first glance, Eros is the god of intoxication and desire. He captivates. He seduces. His beauty eclipses reason. He’s the Eros most of us recognize—the god of erotic love.

But that’s not the whole story.

Beneath the enchantment lies something more foundational. Eros isn’t merely the god of charm and surrender. He does more than “loosen the limbs.” He’s the force that draws one thing toward another—the principle of attraction itself.

Whenever things are drawn together, something new emerges. Cells become organisms. Individuals become communities, then civilizations. Creation, then, depends on attraction. Without attraction there’s no union, no unfolding world—only a collection of isolated things.

This is why many scholars see Hesiod’s Eros as playing two roles at once. He’s the god of desire, certainly. But he’s also a driver of union and creation—what Alfred North Whitehead, millennia later, would call the “creative advance into novelty.”

Earlier I suggested that masculine life tends to orbit around two powerful concerns: sex and purpose. Eros’s connection to sex is obvious enough. His role in purpose is subtler, and perhaps more profound.

Every meaningful purpose begins with attraction. Sometimes we're drawn toward something specific: a vocation, a work of art, a scientific mystery, a vision of the future. Other times we don't yet know what we're looking for—we only know that something is missing. In those moments, the search itself becomes our purpose.

That impulse to search is born from dissatisfaction, from the sense that life, as it stands, is somehow incomplete. We seek food because we are hungry. We long for companionship because we’re alone. We strive because we sense a gap between what is and what could be.

Absence, then, becomes an invitation. And once we accept it, once we start pursuing what we want, something remarkable happens. The lack doesn't vanish so much as change shape—into direction, into focus, into aliveness. The pursuit, we discover, carries its own reward.

Perhaps this is desire’s deeper role. Not merely to captivate, but to animate. To kindle meaning through creative advances into new pursuits, new unions.

Maybe that’s why Eros, for Hesiod, stands at the beginning.

There must be a first fire.

I used to think sex and purpose belonged in separate boxes. In college, I chased sex, not purpose. Once I got married, the script flipped: purpose came forward, sex went to the back burner. But after years of a sexless marriage and the confusion of midlife, sex reemerged—not merely as something I wanted more of, but as something deeply connected to my search for identity. I wanted to discover who I was, and who I could become, sexually.

As Man of Fire slowly took shape, I began noticing a pattern. Looking back over my life, I realized that two things had consistently animated me: women and creative work. Sex and purpose. For years I thought they were separate passions. What finally dawned on me was that they were actually expressions of the same underlying force.

That common source is what the Greeks called eros.

This was a surprisingly liberating discovery. I realized that my deepest aim was neither sex nor purpose, but to connect with the force that gives rise to both. Sex and purpose became, in a sense, secondary. They were manifestations of something more fundamental.

The deepest, most foundational ideas are often the most powerful. So when two seemingly unrelated experiences are revealed to share a common root, something clicks into place, unlocking new sources of meaning and energy. It’s not because anything in the external world has changed, but because our understanding has deepened. What once felt fragmented now belongs to a larger whole.

Discovering the thread between my desire for sex and my desire for purpose was one of those moments. The appropriate response to an idea like this isn't analysis so much as contemplation. Not to master it, but to allow it to slowly reshape us.

Contemplation has a long history among philosophers and mystics, yet it’s mostly absent from modern life. Most people would say it’s too vague, too impractical.

But some ideas aren’t valuable because they’re practical. They’re valuable because they awaken us. They restore a sense of wonder. They reconnect us with mystery. They remind us that beneath the routines and obligations of daily life lies a deeper reality worthy of exploration. We don’t contemplate great ideas simply to understand them. We contemplate them because of their capacity to move and affect us.

Over the coming weeks, I’d like to explore the strange and fascinating idea of eros more deeply. We’ll begin with the ancient Greeks, who first gave it a name, and gradually trace its philosophical evolution before eventually arriving at another closely related idea: the will.

There’s no overt goal for this series beyond following the ideas wherever they lead. And if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably discovered that what transforms us isn’t always a new technique, habit, or piece of advice. Sometimes it’s a single insight—a seed planted quietly in the mind—that grows, almost unnoticed, into a new way of seeing the world.

Then, somewhere along the way, the newness starts to fade. The world starts to feel familiar. Memory and generalization play larger roles in how we perceive reality. The more we’ve seen, the more likely we are to experience life as familiar rather than fresh.

Places we’ve visited. Conversations we’ve had. Holidays we’ve celebrated. Even the people we love. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, life loses its luster. We start treating things as predictable until proven otherwise.

This is useful, to a point. We want some things to be givens—solid ground beneath us so we can focus on what matters. Life would no doubt be exhausting if we had to renegotiate reality each morning.

For some personalities, this isn’t much of a problem. They genuinely enjoy the familiar—life’s rhythms, traditions, and routines. Stability itself is satisfying. So instead of reinventing life, they settle into it.

But for other types—the Man of Fire among them—familiarity can feel flattening. It’s like being handed a video game you’ve already mastered. The challenge is gone. Restlessness sets in.

The same capacity that creates predictability also dulls perception. Once something is registered as “known,” we stop truly seeing it. We approach the holiday already knowing the script—who will be there, how the conversations will go, how the day will end. Instead of experiencing wonder, we simply go through the motions.

Time can also have a narrowing effect, the sense that our scope of possibilities and experiences is gradually shrinking.

In childhood, the future is wide open. Everything exists as pure potential. But with every major choice—a career, a partner, a home—the field of possibility shrinks. The open horizon slowly narrows into a familiar road. Possibility gives way to memory, to knowledge, to settled assumptions. The future begins to feel less like discovery and more like repetition.

For me, the narrowing looked like too much time in my own head.

In my twenties I read widely but had little idea what I wanted to do with my life. By my mid-thirties I’d founded Personality Junkie and begun writing my books. By my mid-forties, however, the writing was running out of gas. The very activities that had long fueled my fire no longer carried the same charge.

More ideas no longer felt like the answer. After decades of consuming and producing them, ideas started feeling strangely depleting, as if I’d thoroughly exhausted that region of life.

What I increasingly craved was more experience. Not a new philosophy, but a new way of being and acting in the world.

Ironically, the path I’d spent years cultivating had also taught me to distrust its opposite. I hadn’t merely chosen ideas over experience—I had quietly built a case against experience itself. It was too messy. Too hedonistic. Lacking in depth. My introverted temperament, my anxiety, maybe even my religious upbringing all reinforced the same belief: that lasting meaning came primarily through thought, not through direct engagement with life.

Those beliefs helped me focus on my work. Years later, they became the walls of my own prison.

Perhaps this is inevitable. To pursue any calling wholeheartedly means turning away from almost everything else. But every path we reject is still part of life. And the narrower our identity becomes, the narrower life can begin to feel.

Eventually, the narrowness stops working. Not because it was wrong, but because it’s taken us as far as it can. And when we hit that wall, we’re forced to turn back and revisit what we’d written off.

For me, that’s required loosening my attachment to constant analysis. Instead of treating every experience instrumentally, that is, in terms of what it might be used for—a future article, a future insight, another project—I’ve tried to simply experience it. Let the moment exist before interpreting it. Appreciate before analyzing.

I’ve also had to question my own generalizations. As long as I believed I already understood women, marriage, family life, or myself, those parts of life felt predictable. And once an outcome feels known, there’s nothing for curiosity to sink its teeth into.

There was also the intensity problem.

Like a lot of men, I spent the first half of my life chasing intensity through ambition, pursuit, and achievement. Those experiences can be exhilarating, but they eventually become familiar too. The highs no longer feel quite as high, making it easy to mistake the loss of intensity for the loss of meaning.

But novelty doesn’t arise only from performance. It can also arise from presence.

Many men instinctively equate aliveness with challenge. Presence seems too quiet, too ordinary. So after one ambitious path has run its course, we frantically search for the next mountain to climb, hoping to recreate the same intensity. The problem is that when the intensity proves harder to come by, life can start to feel pointless.

My own midlife transition has meant a different relationship with novelty: less chasing, more attention. I haven’t abandoned pursuit. I just don’t expect it to save me anymore. Where I once equated meaning with intensity, I’m beginning to wonder whether meaning has always been available, hidden beneath the habits of my own perception. Whether that’s true, or just what a performance-weary man tells himself, I’m not yet sure.

One of the first decisions I made was to conduct a small experiment.

For years, one of the biggest sources of tension in my marriage was my insistence on protecting large blocks of time for writing. My work has always felt deeply meaningful to me, and I guarded it accordingly. But this time around I decided to do something different. I let go of my usual expectations. I stopped insisting on writing time. I stopped trying to optimize every moment.

Beyond showing up at my day job, I allowed myself to simply respond to whatever life brought my way. When I felt like resting, I rested. When my wife wanted help in the garden, I worked in the garden. When my daughter wanted to play, I played. Instead of organizing the day around my ambitions, I organized it around being present. In many ways, I relinquished everything I thought I needed in order to feel like myself.

The result surprised me.

Within a few days, most of the tension I’d carried for years simply disappeared. My body also seemed intent on recovering from something I hadn’t fully realized it had been enduring. Several times each day I felt drawn to rest, almost as if my nervous system recognized a long-awaited chance to recuperate. When I followed those promptings, the rest felt unusually deep and restorative. I slept soundly. I felt calm. Peaceful. Content.

It wasn’t merely the absence of anxiety though. It felt like the presence of something new. I began to see how my compulsive habits—the endless striving, the self-imposed obligations, the internal “oughts”—had been quietly feeding both my anxiety (see my post, The Hidden Hand of Anxiety) and many of my relational struggles. Once I loosened my grip on those patterns, another way of being emerged. It felt less like an achievement than a homecoming. I wondered whether I’d stumbled onto something I’d been searching for my whole life.

For about ten days, I lived in a way that would have terrified my former self. I wasn't producing much. I wasn't chasing anything. And strangely, I didn't feel like I was wasting my life.

Then Sunday night arrived.

Looking ahead to the work week, my anxiety started creeping back in and I slept poorly. By morning I felt tired, irritable, and dissatisfied.

What struck me most wasn’t simply that my tranquility had disappeared. It was that I no longer wanted it. Peace suddenly felt too ordinary. What I wanted was intensity. To break free. To escape the mundane. To feel the fire.

It was the same impulse that’s fueled much of my life—the desire to throw myself into work, to hit the gym, to chase a difficult goal, to seek novelty and adventure. It’s a movement away from ordinary responsibilities and toward something that feels more alive.

I’ve come to call this part of me the Rebel.

I was raised in a fairly strict religious home—church three times a week, a vocabulary policed against words like darn for their proximity to profanity. The rules weren’t the problem so much as what I perceived as a disconnection from genuine spiritual life—from joy, vitality, and curiosity. Dogma and obedience were prioritized over emotions and experience. Logos mattered more than pneuma.

The Rebel arose in response to that discrepancy.

Its first task wasn’t to build anything—it was to separate—to create enough psychological distance that I could begin discovering who I actually was.

The social philosopher Erich Fromm described this as “freedom from.” Before we can individuate, we must free ourselves from whatever feels false, oppressive, or deadening. This negative freedom—the freedom of saying no—is an essential stage of development. It pushes away even if it doesn’t yet know what it wants beyond the pushing.

For some men, this phase never really ends. They spend decades in perpetual opposition—interpersonal conflict, political rage, job-hopping. There’s enough fire in the resistance, enough hope for something better, to keep them going.

But resistance alone rarely builds much.

Eventually, “freedom from” must become what Fromm called “freedom for.” Once we’ve escaped whatever was constraining us, we face the harder question: What am I moving toward?

For most of my adult life, the Rebel found an ideal partner in another part of me: the Creator.

When I felt restless or dissatisfied—when I felt the Rebel stirring—I poured that energy into writing, developing ideas, building my business, or pursuing projects. The Rebel supplied the fire; the Creator gave it direction. For nearly twenty years, this duo served me well.

But somewhere around forty, things started shifting. My creative fire gradually diminished. My marriage did too. In need of a new source of intensity, I redirected my Rebel energy toward the relationship, hoping it might furnish the fire my work once had. I became increasingly focused on what was missing in the marriage and after years of struggling to resolve it, insisted that we separate.

I began dating other women. I rediscovered some of the novelty, intensity, and validation I’d been craving. However, it wasn’t long before I began growing tired. Not physically tired, but tired of the performance.

Looking back, I can see that the Rebel had always carried another agenda. It wasn’t simply seeking fire. It also wanted to be seen.

I realized that much of my striving had been fueled by an imagined audience. I had always wanted to distinguish myself, to accomplish something worth admiring. Even my most meaningful work hadn’t been free of performance. Behind every achievement stood an invisible observer whose approval I was unconsciously seeking.

Living that way can be exhausting. Constant self-monitoring. Constant calibration. Constant striving. Eventually, I couldn’t sustain it anymore.

The defining question of my midlife became:

What is life without the striving?

If achieving has lost its appeal, where will the meaning come from?

About seven months into my separation, something changed.

It wasn’t the result of careful reasoning. My wife hadn’t suddenly become a better partner. There was no dramatic breakthrough in our relationship.

Instead, something quieter happened. As I let go of my compulsive striving—my need to optimize, improve, control, and constantly become—something opened up in me, and I began hearing a different voice.

I started feeling called home. Back to my wife. Back to my daughter. Back to the ordinary life I’d spent so many years trying to transcend.

And in returning, I discovered a long-forgotten part of myself—the Appreciator.

Where the Rebel seeks aliveness through intensity, the Appreciator finds it through presence.

It enjoys working in the garden with my wife. It delights in my daughter asking me to play. It finds satisfaction in preparing dinner, sitting on the patio, watching the evening settle. It doesn’t experience these moments as interruptions to life. It experiences them as life itself.

Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me. For most of human history, men alternated between periods of pursuit and periods of return. Hunting required courage, risk, and intensity. Coming home required something different—presence, care, rest, and the capacity to appreciate what was already there.

Modern culture glorifies the pursuit. Modern masculinity especially so.

I certainly did.

For decades, I knew how to chase. I never really learned how to arrive. In many ways, it took the fading of my ambitions—and the exhaustion that came with it—to reveal the quiet richness that had been available all along.

The Appreciator hasn’t overthrown the Rebel. I doubt it ever will. Nor would I want it to.

The Rebel reminds me that I need challenge, creativity, adventure, and freedom. Without it, I would have never become a writer.

The Appreciator reminds me that I already have a home, and that learning to savor it isn’t a retreat from masculinity.

Perhaps maturity isn’t about abandoning the Rebel.

It’s about bringing him home.

As a kid, I was shy and carried a few nervous tics. But I was also a class clown and a decent athlete—not entirely opposed to the spotlight. My ego was robust enough that, despite my anxious tendencies, I rarely felt inferior or abnormal. I didn’t think of myself as an anxious person.

It wasn’t until I was approaching forty that I started noticing anxiety’s fingerprints everywhere—in my work, my relationships, my sexual functioning.

I was surprised to discover that anxiety doesn’t always announce itself as anxiety. Sometimes it operates underground.

Like other unconscious forces, it can quietly influence what we pursue, what we avoid, how tightly we cling to our routines, and how much freedom we allow ourselves. Looking back, I can see that much of what I called discipline, preparation, and self-control was actually anxiety wearing a more respectable mask. What felt like conscientiousness was, on closer inspection, fueled by fear.

Recently, I’ve been reading Rollo May’s The Meaning of Anxiety, which opens with an extended discussion of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Dread. Given my longstanding admiration for Kierkegaard, and my current interest in anxiety, I was eager to revisit his thinking on the subject.

For Kierkegaard, anxiety is inseparable from possibility.

One of the defining features of human beings is our ability to imagine futures that don’t yet exist. We can envision different careers, relationships, identities, adventures, and ways of being. We aren’t limited to the present moment in the way other creatures seem to be. We live partly in possibility.

But this comes with a price.

A possibility is, by definition, not yet actual. Its outcome is uncertain. It can lead to growth, fulfillment, and self-expansion, but also to disappointment, loss, and regret. And it’s precisely this uncertainty that gives rise to anxiety.

Whatever its risks, Kierkegaard championed possibility. As he famously observed, “Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.” Possibility is a critical gateway to the spiritual life, furnishing opportunities for growth, freedom, and transcendence. Yet because every possibility contains risk, we can’t move toward it without also encountering anxiety.

This got me thinking about Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice. Schwartz argues that while we assume that having more choices will help us find exactly what we want, it often leaves us feeling less satisfied, more anxious, and more prone to regret. Every new possibility expands our freedom, but it also increases the burden of responsibility.

Similarly, Robert Sapolsky notes in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers that many uniquely human stressors arise from our capacity for reflection and choice. Howard Liddell put it bluntly: “Man alone can be worried and anxious.” We’re aware of our own mortality, which means our choices carry more weight. We don’t get an infinite number of second chances. Every major decision closes off certain paths while opening others.

In that sense, we face a double burden: an abundance of possibilities coupled with the knowledge of our finitude.

That said, I suspect the relationship between possibility and anxiety isn’t the same for everyone. Some of us are more sensitive or anxiety-prone than others. Moreover, those who are highly conscientious, self-conscious, and prone to doubt may experience important decisions as significantly more stressful than easy-going types do. Likewise, those disposed to existential reflection—to constantly appraising how their choices fit into the larger story of their lives—may experience more anxiety than those content to live in the moment.

This raises an interesting philosophical question: If wisdom is our aim, how seriously should we be taking life? If seriousness goes hand in hand with anxiety, we might suffer less by lightening up. Yet for some people, approaching life with the sense that something important is at stake is precisely what makes it meaningful. They’re willing to shoulder additional anxiety because intensity of meaning matters more to them than comfort.

This is one thing I admire about Kierkegaard—and why I consider him a Man of Fire. Despite his sensitive temperament and chronic struggles with anxiety, doubt, and melancholy, he continually stepped toward possibility—into the fire of risk—rather than away from it. Anxiety could be endured in service of meaning and growth.

Yet, I think there’s another piece of the story Kierkegaard may have underappreciated.

The Hidden Hand

Sometimes anxiety doesn’t merely accompany our choices. It quietly shapes the architecture of our entire lives.

This was true for me. For much of my life, I was too busy functioning to recognize how much anxiety was governing my behavior. I was productive, industrious, and responsible. I expended enormous energy trying to control and manage my life—thinking, planning, preparing, troubleshooting.

These traits served me well. They helped me build a career, write books, run a business, and generally stay out of trouble.

What I didn’t see was how much of this activity was serving another purpose: managing my anxiety. As long as I remained engaged in my projects, goals, and routines, I didn’t have to confront the anxious machinery running beneath them. My attention was directed elsewhere. I was absorbed in doing.

But when parts of my life began unraveling in midlife, I finally started seeing what had been there all along.

I noticed how tightly I held myself. The constant vigilance. The urgency. The energy spent anticipating problems. The endless replaying of the past and rehearsal of the future. The difficulty relaxing without mentally preparing for the next thing.

Anxiety isn’t just mental. It’s equally physical. The word “tense” is revealing because it captures both the psychological and the somatic. We tense up. Our breathing shallows. The body braces against dangers that may never arrive. We become prisoners of our own tension—a sort of internal straitjacket.

The compulsive controlling tied to my uptightness helped me cope and function, but it also made me more one-sided. The range of activities where I felt comfortable had gradually narrowed. More and more, I retreated into thinking, writing, reading, and working at my computer.

The irony is that I always thought of myself as disciplined and self-controlled.

In hindsight, much of that control was illusory.

I wasn’t always in control. The anxiety was.

Eventually, however, that way of living reached its limits.

What I needed wasn’t simply new ideas. I needed a new relationship with anxiety itself.

Loosening the Straitjacket

Kierkegaard writes that “freedom is precisely the expansive.” I love that phrase because it captures the opposite of anxiety’s constricting grip—that feeling of exhaling when you get home from work, when it finally feels okay to let go.

To experience more of that freedom, I first had to become more aware of my anxious habits. As I touched on in The Other Side of Fear, this meant noticing the tension in my body and the repetitive loops in my mind. Then—instead of my usual compulsive responses and mental spirals—learning to let them go.

As I got better at this, a new way of being opened up. Less urgency. Less compulsion. More patience. For perhaps the first time in my life, I began to experience moments in which I didn’t feel the need to be anywhere else, or to do anything else. There was a growing sense of okayness—a feeling I’d long wanted but had struggled to access. Nothing needed fixing. Nothing needed solving.

Just as importantly, other forms of meaning became more available to me—family, intimacy, rest, pleasure, spontaneity, connection. This had been one of my biggest concerns in midlife: Where would the meaning come from in the second half of my life?

I had assumed it would require a new idea, a new project, a new line of work. Instead, it came in a different way—through the back door. As the background anxiety that had quietly organized so much of my life began to recede, meaning seemed to emerge on its own. It wasn't that I found a new source of meaning so much as addressing what had been obstructing my experience of it.

Other factors certainly contributed to that shift. But bringing anxiety—the hidden hand—out of the shadows and into awareness has made a profound difference.

It’s helped me recognize that many of the things I once took to be personality traits were, in fact, accommodations to a chronic, largely unconscious tension. What I assumed was "who I am" was, in many respects, a way of coping with the underlying disquiet.

The more I’ve let go of the compulsive controlling that anxiety triggered in me, the more freedom I’ve experienced. As the straitjacket’s loosened, I’ve found myself moving through life with greater ease, openness, and confidence—less preoccupied with managing every possibility and more engaged with life as it unfolds.

I know that feeling well.

For most of my life, I’ve treated it as a signal—a sign that I wasn’t yet living fully enough, creating enough, becoming enough. The restlessness pointed toward something. It demanded movement.

I’m not so sure anymore.

But before I explain why, I want to explain why that feeling mattered so much in the first place.

The Case for Fire

Peace has never fully satisfied me. Even when I’ve managed to achieve it—and there are times when I definitely want it—it hasn’t been enough. It’s felt too static. Too much like a room with no windows.

What I’ve prioritized—and what Man of Fire has focused on—is the fire.

Of course, fire needs tending. Allowed to rage unchecked, it burns everything down. That’s where peace has felt most useful: not as the ultimate goal, but as a tool for regulating the burn.

One of the best expressions of healthy fire is the flow state. You know it when you’re in it—that sense of total immersion where time dissolves and self-consciousness falls away. A delightful paradox about flow, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent his career demonstrating, is that the same experience in which we lose ourselves is also where we feel most ourselves. The noise drops away and something like a unified stream of consciousness emerges—so satisfying that Csikszentmihalyi called it the “optimal experience.”

Cultivating a life of fire is, in many ways, cultivating a life of flow—pursuing and embracing what we’re called to do.

But there’s a gap between aspiring to such a life and actually living it. And one of the less-recognized forces maintaining that gap isn’t fear or laziness—it’s self-analysis.

I say this as someone guilty of it. The temptation to keep examining, questioning, and refining our self-understanding is real—especially now, with AI making it increasingly easy to go another layer deeper. Two hours into these deep dives, you may have gained something. But you haven’t made anything. You haven’t done anything. There’s a peculiar vertigo in that—the feeling of motion without movement.

And at some point, that loop has to close.

Insight without action is just a more sophisticated form of avoidance. To feel fully alive—and especially to feel fully masculine—we need to know that we’re capable of acting on the world, not merely interpreting it. We need to assert ourselves, to exercise our will, to build something. We need to become, as Nietzsche suggested, active creators of our own lives.

And central to that will—the animating force beneath it—is what the ancient Greeks called eros: not merely erotic desire, but the life force that drives us toward what we love, what we want to build, what we want to become. It’s the current beneath ambition, creativity, exploration, and aspiration itself.

When we become disconnected from it—through passivity, excessive self-monitoring, or the domestication of our desires—we grow restless. We feel diminished. And we often start looking for fire in the wrong places.

Many men are experiencing this today. There’s a widespread sense that something has been stifled—that the river of eros has been dammed, leaving a reservoir of unused energy with nowhere to go.

Whether or not our culture is truly hostile to masculine energy, the feeling itself deserves to be taken seriously. Men want to channel their drive in ways that are both personally meaningful and socially valued. They want to do work that matters. They want to feel useful and needed. But when those channels close or narrow, the pressure, the frustration, continues to grow.

I felt this in myself.

My own version arrived in midlife: my business collapsed, my marriage nearly did, and my sense of purpose dried up. Despite my efforts to revive things—to keep pushing—a chapter of my life was ending. Eventually I stopped trying to resurrect what was gone and began exploring new possibilities. I decided I needed less time circling inside my own head and more engagement with life itself.

Out of that period, Man of Fire was born.

And Yet…

Yet, as I write this, I find myself questioning whether my relationship with fire is beginning to change.

This weekend I did very little.

I spent nearly all my time with my wife and daughter. I read. I rested. I let go of every ambition.

There was very little fire in it. But there was also very little anxiety.

For most of my life, I’ve assumed that the alternative to fire was stagnation—that without striving, intensity, purpose, and forward motion, some form of deadness would eventually follow.

I’m now starting to question that assumption.

What surprised me about my weekend wasn’t that I felt peaceful. It was that I didn’t feel dead. I didn’t feel depressed. I felt quietly content.

I’ve long treated peace as secondary—a recovery tool, a way to keep the fire from burning out of control. Fire was the goal. Peace was maintenance.

Now I’m not sure that’s the whole story.

Maybe the first half of life is about igniting the fire—figuring out what calls to us, finding a channel for our eros. Maybe the second half is about learning to tend it differently. Not extinguishing it. Not abandoning eros. But no longer demanding that every day justify itself through intensity or forward motion.

I don’t have the answer yet. But I find myself sitting with this question:

Can a man remain fully alive without perpetual restlessness?

I suspect the answer won't come through analysis. It will come the way most things worth knowing ultimately do—through living the question.

Stepping back, the central question Man of Fire keeps circling is this: how can thoughtful men—without abandoning their natural capacity for reflection—learn to quiet their anxious, compulsive thinking and open themselves to other ways of being that lead to a fuller, more vibrant existence?

Over the years, I’ve found myself returning to one question in particular:

How can I come to know that I will be okay, no matter what?

Part of me believed that if I could know this deeply—not intellectually, but in my bones—everything else would fall into place. I was looking for a way to live that wasn’t constantly undermined by fear, doubt, and second-guessing.

The Spiral & the Shift

In The Accusing Mind, we explored how a single negative thought, left unchecked, can spiral into something far darker—a character indictment, an existential crisis, a sense of inescapable doom. What might otherwise be a fleeting mood can quickly become, in the hands of an anxious mind, a veritable catastrophe.

I’ve recently noticed that catching these thoughts early—recognizing them as transient weather rather than permanent climate—led to a shift. I felt more hopeful. Less afraid. Things that once sent me into emotional freefall could now be taken in stride.

What surprised me most was the feeling underneath this shift. It felt a lot like the okayness I’d been searching for all these years, although I wasn’t really looking for it this time. I was just trying to escape the traps of my own mind. And once I managed to do so, the okayness simply emerged.

When Caring Becomes Controlling

This reminded me of Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. There’s a real overlap between okayness and the relinquishing of control that “not giving a fuck” points toward. It isn’t indifference. It isn’t not caring. It’s more that, for the anxious mind, caring has become distorted—worrying, anticipating, preemptively controlling.

A less anxious mind still cares, it just doesn’t overextend. It doesn’t overpredict. And when we stop “over-caring,” we often discover a peace we weren’t expecting and didn’t know to ask for.

There’s something else worth highlighting: anxious people often carry what I’d call a fear of not listening to fear. Fear is what’s familiar. It’s the air they’ve always breathed. So even when it’s making them miserable, letting go of it feels dangerous. They keep replaying conversations. They keep rehearsing future scenarios. They keep trusting every alarming thought that surfaces.

This has led me to rethink what courage actually looks like.

The Courage No One Sees

When I’ve written about embracing risk, I’ve typically focused on external actions that build capacity—holding eye contact a beat longer, stepping into conflict instead of avoiding it, striking up a conversation with a stranger. But increasingly, I’m realizing that some of the most important acts of courage happen internally.

Instead of replaying a conversation for the third time, we let it go.

Instead of catastrophizing about a mistake at work, we trust that we’ll handle what comes.

Instead of clinging to a relationship out of fear, we loosen our grip.

From the outside, nothing has changed. No dramatic action. No visible risk. But releasing the mental life raft we’ve been clutching for years requires real courage—an acknowledgment that we can’t control outcomes, and a willingness to accept them anyway.

This is what faith points toward, whatever your preferred tradition. Not naive optimism, but a cultivated trust in the process of letting go—and the discovery that we don’t merely survive without constant worry, but we’re actually better off without it.

Moreover, as our inner relationship with fear changes, the external world becomes less menacing. A spouse’s disappointment stops feeling like a verdict on our worth. A problem at work no longer feels like a career-ending blow. We begin to see that many of the things we braced against weren’t catastrophes. They were products of an anxious imagination running on overdrive.

As we become more aware of this pattern and more willing to step outside it, fear gradually recedes. Okayness moves in. And from that place, actions that once required enormous courage begin to feel, almost mysteriously, natural.

Life offers evidence of this more often than we notice. We’ve discussed before how introverted men often arrive at a long-anticipated first date convinced they’ll say the wrong thing, come across badly, or somehow fail. But eventually something shifts. They settle in. They stop monitoring themselves. They stop overthinking. And suddenly they’re fine—more than fine. Afterward, they may even wonder what they were so afraid of in the first place.

Experiences like these point to something important: beneath our compulsive thinking lies something deeper that can be trusted. A quieter intelligence. A intuitive responsiveness. Yet we often miss it because we’re caught up in endless cycles of worry, control, and prediction.

Why the Future Feels Different Now

I’ve been navigating midlife struggles for over a decade. There were many mornings when I’d awaken with a sense of dread, convinced that the day would be yet another rerun—nothing new, nothing interesting, nothing that mattered. Low moods would snowball into self-condemnation. A difficult week would cast a dark shadow on the future.

I’m more hopeful now. I can see how I was largely responsible for my own suffering—not because of character flaws, but because I got lost in the spiral. The negative thoughts got the best of me, and I mistook their potency for truth.

However, once I began paying closer attention and stopped merging with trains of negative thoughts, something opened up. Not only did the okayness I’d been searching for finally appear, but the future began to feel different. Less dark. Less closed. More alive. More mysterious.

What’s remarkable is that this shift stemmed from just two skills: noticing and releasing. Noticing is a matter of training attention. With practice, thoughts become easier to catch before they spiral.

Releasing is harder. It asks us to trust that our anxious troubleshooting isn’t actually what’s been holding our life together—the clenching, the vigilance, the relentless effort to stay on top of everything isn’t the load-bearing wall we thought it was.

What holds things together is something deeper. Call it life. Call it God. Call it the ground of being.

Whatever name we give it, I’m increasingly convinced that things often go better when we stop trying to micromanage life and learn to trust the okayness that emerges when we finally loosen our grip.