🎙️Modern love is a sh*t show

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Episode Description
You’re having the same fight on repeat, the sex feels obligatory (or nonexistent), and somehow you’re the one carrying the emotional weight of the whole relationship. You’re not broken—and you didn’t choose wrong. In this episode, we unpack why modern love feels like a sh*t show, how we got here, and what’s actually happening underneath the exhaustion.

Topics We Cover

• Why modern relationships feel so hard

• Feeling like you’re doing all the work in a relationship

• Loss of intimacy and sex in long-term relationships

• Why women feel like their partner’s mother

• Emotional labor and resentment in relationships

• Why desire fades after the honeymoon phase

• Why love feels like work instead of connection

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modern love problems, relationship struggles women, emotional labor in relationships, loss of intimacy, sexless relationship, feeling like his mom, relationship resentment, long term relationship problems, why relationships feel hard, relationship burnout, unhappy but in love, modern relationship dynamics

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Transcript:
 If you've ever felt like your body's betrayed you like pleasure is something reserved for other people or something, you're always getting wrong. This little corner of podcast land is for you. I'm your radical rageful mama Bear here to defend your right to feel good in your body. Welcome to season two of the Nature of Pleasure.

This season, we're talking all about relationships and what it's like to love inside systems and family patterns that were never built for the kind of intimacy we're trying to have now, because here's the truth, pleasure isn't a side dish. It's not fluff. It's not a luxury. It's your body's way of saying, I'm alive, I belong, and I have power.

Welcome to the nature of pleasure. I'm Nicole Siegel, certified sexological body worker and creator of the Body Compass Method, and this is where we unravel the quiet codes of your body, the hidden intelligence beneath desire, and the organic rhythm of your erotic nature.

All right. All right. Today we are talking about how modern love is a total shit show. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You have the same fight on repeat about dishes or laundry or who's more tired, but what you're really fighting about is closeness, intimacy, sex, and the fact that you feel like you're carrying the whole damn relationship on your back and you have for years, or maybe you're lying in bed next to your partner, scrolling on your phone.

Pretending you're fine and pretending you're fine with the fact that sex has slowed to what once every couple months, and when it does happen, it feels like you're just checking a box so he doesn't get cranky about it. Or maybe it's the conflict. You start out wanting connection and two minutes later you're in full blown war saying things you don't even mean he shuts down.

You get louder. And then hours or days pass where you are living next to each other, basically like strangers.

If any of this hits, you are not alone. You're not broken, you are not being dramatic. You are a woman living in the middle of a cultural cluster. Fuck, where women are taught to over function. Men are allowed to under function. And even encouraged to do so, and no one is given the actual intimacy skills to make love last past the honeymoon phase.

This is why I'm here with this episode because love is supposed to be hard. Sometimes it's human, but it shouldn't feel like you're grading a group project where you are the only one who's shows up. So let's talk about why Modern Love feels like a shit show, how we got here and what's actually happening underneath the chaos.

Because intimacy isn't supposed to feel like a second job. It's supposed to feel like being met.

So how did we get here? How did love the thing that should feel like nourishment? End up feeling like you're grading a group project where your partner barely shows up. So, let's see. Zoom in. For most of history, marriage wasn't about love. It was about survival. Property alliances, children, love is a bonus if you got it.

Intimacy was barely on the table. Women were expected to be obedient, selfless, reproductive machines. Men were trained to be providers and protectors, not lovers or emotionally available partners. Fast forward to the 18th and 19th centuries, the rise of companion.

The rise of companion marriage for the first time, people start thinking, Hey, maybe I should actually like the person I'm legally tied to. But still, the roles stayed rigid. Women were the caretakers, the moral compass, the angel of the house. Men were the rational breadwinner winners, breadwinners, emotional, intimate.

Emotional intimacy was still not a skill either gender was taught. Then the 20th century explodes things open, feminism, birth control to sexual revolution. Women demand more pleasure, equality, partnership. We move from marriage as a duty to marriage should fulfill me, which was radical. But here's the problem.

The roles didn't evolve at the same pace. Women were told, yes, you can work, you can have sex, you can want more. But the cultural training of men stayed basically the same. Don't cry, don't need, don't talk about feelings. Be a man. So what happens? Women over-function carrying the emotional and erotic labor of relationships while men under function.

Not always because they're unwilling, but because they literally haven't been trained. Nobody pulled them aside and said, here's how you regulate your nervous system in a fight. Here's how you touch someone with attunement. Here's how you build safety so intimacy can grow. And you know what? Women didn't get that training either.

Instead, we got Disney, Hollywood, and Hallmark cards. We were told that love should feel like passion. That never fades sex. That's always spontaneous intimacy that happens naturally without work. So. No one said, Hey, after the honeymoon, your bodies will reveal more wounds. Your nervous systems will trigger each other, and the real work of intimacy will begin.

So here we are trying to build modern love on top of centuries of patriarchal conditioning, Victorian prudishness and Hollywood fantasy. And when it collapses, we think it's our fault. We think we chose wrong. We think we're broken. But here's the truth. Your body isn't broken. Your relationship isn't doomed.

What's broken is a story we inherited about what love should be and the complete lack of embodied intimacy skills we've been given to navigate real relationships.

So on top of all of that history, here's the other problem. The myth we were handed about what modern love is supposed to feel like. We were sold. This idea that once you found your person, intimacy should just work. That chemistry should be automatic, that sex should stay exciting. That conflict should make you closer, that if it's hard, you're doing it wrong or worse, you pick the wrong partner.

And that myth is absolutely wrecking people because what's actually happening is that you fall in love. There's novelty, there's desire. Your nervous systems are on high, your nervous systems are high on dopamine and hope and projection. You're seeing the best edited version of the other person and honestly of your self too.

And then time passes, stress enters, real life enters, bodies change hormone shift. Hormones shift. Old wounds come online. You stop performing and start revealing, and instead of being told this is the real beginning of intimacy, most of us panic you think, why don't I want sex the way I used to? Or Why does everything turn into a fight?

Or why do I feel like his mom more like his mom than his lover? Why do I miss him even when he's sitting right next to me? This is where the myth kicks in hard because the story says if love is right, it should just feel easy. But real intimacy isn't easy. It's exposing long-term. Love doesn't just bring closeness.

It brings up everything in you that learned how to survive by staying guarded, pleasing, controlling, or disappearing, and no one told you that. No one told you that desire changes form over time. No one told you that safety can kill spark and be the thing that allows deeper eroticism later. No one told you that conflict isn't a sign of failure.

It's a sign that something vulnerable is trying to surface. So instead, couples do what they know how to do. They manage, they cope. They lower expectations. They stop touching, they turn sex into a negotiation or a performance. They keep the peace instead of telling the truth. And especially for women, this turns into a very specific heartbreak.

You didn't stop loving him. You didn't stop wanting intimacy. You stopped wanting intimacy like this, obligatory, disconnected. Rushed untuned. That's not a libido problem. That's a myth of modern love problem because we were taught how to fall in love, but we were never taught how to stay intimate once the fantasy burns off.

So let's get specific about what.

So where the, so the part where most relationships, the part, so the part where most relationship advice goes wrong is where people say you just need to communicate better. Or have you tried date night? Or my personal favorite. You need to ask for your needs more clearly. And listen, communication definitely matters, but if communication alone fixed intimacy, you wouldn't be listening to this.

Listening to this episode, here's what's actually going on. Underneath your bodies are running the relationship, not your intentions, not your love, not how much you want it to work, your nervous systems. When a relationship is new, your bodies are relaxed, cur curious, open novelty gives you energy. Desire feels effortless.

You're regulated enough to be generous, but long-term intimacy does something different. It doesn't just bring pleasure, it brings exposure. The longer your're with someone, the more your body starts revealing the old survival strategies. How you learn to protect yourself, how you learn to stay connected, how you learn to keep the peace.

And for a lot of women, that strategy looks like anticipating and managing, softening, holding it all together. For a lot of men, it looks like withdrawing, minimizing, deflecting, or getting defensive when emotions get big. Not because either of you are not trying hard enough, but because those strategies once kept you safe.

Here's the thing most people don't realize. Your body does not experience emotional disconnection as a neutral. It experiences it as threat. So when conflict shows up, your nervous system doesn't go, oh great, an opportunity for growth. It goes, something isn't safe. Brace protect. Control is escape. And once your body is in protection mode, eroticism shuts down, not as punishment, but as wi wisdom because desire requires enough safety to let go, and you cannot let go when you feel responsible for everything.

That's why when you can talk about sex, that's why you can talk about sex endlessly and still not want it. This is why therapy can help you understand each other. And still not fix intimacy. And this is why date night doesn't touch the deeper problem. Because intimacy isn't a mindset issue. It's an embodied capacity.

This is where my work as a sexological body worker comes in. Real intimacy isn't created by insight alone. It's created when bodies learn over time that it's safe to soften, to feel, to want to reach. That conflict can be repaired. And that kind of somatic work is the exact work that I do.

So here is the shift I want you to try to internalize, because this is where a lot of women quietly give up. You're not doing all of this work just so love becomes slightly less exhausting. You're not here to build tolerance for disappointment.

You are not here to learn how to cope better with a relationship that's, that drains you. We can all raise our expectations for our relationships more. The thing you're actually longing for is possible deep, deep, deep. That deep longing you can only hear when you get really quiet, you're here because somewhere in your body, you know, love is supposed to feel different than this.

Not perfect, but deeply alive.

And that aliveness doesn't mean more conversations. It means more contact and more truth and more sensation, more responsiveness. When relationships actually evolve the way they're meant to, a very specific thing happens. You stop feeling like the emotional regulator for the entire relationship. You stop bracing before hard conversations and you stop having sex.

That makes. That leaves you feeling emptier than before you feel wanted again, not chased, not obligated, but genuinely desired. You feel met, not managed, not appeased, but actually responded to. You feel like you can soften without losing yourself. That's not fantasy. That's not exceptional couples. That's not what happens when intimacy, that's what happens when intimacy stops being performative and starts being embodied.

Because desire doesn't disappear in long-term love. It changes location. It moves out of novelty and into attunement, out of performance and into presence, out of tension, and into polarity that actually feels erotic instead of exhausting. And when that shift happens, love stops feeling like a constant negotiation.

It starts feeling like something you participate in instead of manage. Not because you lowered your expectations, but because the relationship finally grew into something you're capable of, something capable of holding you.

Okay.

So if you're sitting there thinking, yes, this is exactly it. And also we've tried so many things. We're already in couples therapy. We've read the books. I wanna say something gently, but really clearly, this level of relational change does not happen by accident or with more effort or with more information.

It almost. Never happens when the woman is trying to carry it alone, either because you are inside the system, you're trying to change. You can't be your partner's teacher and their lover. You can't be the emotional container and still feel, still feel desired. You can't re-pattern intimacy while you're the one doing all the regulating modern love needs something we were never given.

A container for learning intimacy together. That is why I created my program Reset Erotic Rhythm or R-Y-R-Y-E-R. It's not couples therapy. It's not communication training. It isn't about fixing your partner or teaching you how to ask more nicely. Like so many other couples programs I see out there, it is a structured relational container designed to do what our culture never did.

Teach intimacy at the level where it actually lives in the body, the nervous system, and the relationship itself in this program, women can stop being the ones dragging growth forward. We don't need to do that anymore. I will hold that path for you. Men are, men in the program are taught directly by me how to develop emotional and erotic capacity without their partner having to mother them through it.

It is no longer your job. And couples are guided through a process that rebuilds safety, desire, and repair together. At the end of the program, we do a couple's reset, where you really get to feel the change that's been made deep in your body, and your body actually starts to trust your partners again,

reset erotic rhythm exists because modern love is asking more of us than ever before, and we were never given the skills to meet it. And that's not a failure of love. It's a missing education. So if this episode feels like it's naming something you've been living inside of, if part of you knows there's more available than survival, resentment, or emotional distance in your relationship, then this is your invitation.

Just stop trying it. Stop trying to fix it alone. Love is supposed to evolve right now. That's the change that we're all living inside of. And living in the, and it can evolve with the right structure to support it. All of the details are in the show notes, and I hope to see you inside.

Okay.