🎙️The Relationship You Long For Is Possible
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Episode Description
You’re tired of having the same conversation over and over and still not feeling met. You can feel in your body that the relationship you long for should be possible—but you can’t tell if it’s fixable or if this is just what love looks like. In this episode, we talk about why that longing isn’t naïve, what’s actually breaking down underneath the fights, and what real intimacy is asking of us now.
Topics We Cover
Feeling stuck in the same arguments with your partner
Why communication doesn’t fix intimacy
Am I asking too much in my relationship?
Why I feel more emotionally mature than my partner
Feeling resentful but not wanting to leave
Why long-term relationships stop working the old way
What a healthy relationship is supposed to feel like
Search Tags
relationship problems women, feeling unheard in a relationship, am I asking too much relationship, emotional maturity gap, relationship resentment, constant fighting relationship, intimacy issues couples, long term relationship struggles, modern relationship advice, healthy relationship expectations
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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. This episode is for you if your relationship feels like a constant fucking conversation. Not one big blow up, but the same argument over and over with different wording, maybe different setting. You're trying to explain something that feels obvious in your body and somehow it turns into a debate about tone or timing or what you mean by that.
And I wanna say that the relationship that your soul is longing for is actually possible and. I will not be talking about you surrendering more into your feminine or embodying any specific archetypes. I'm not going to give you scripts to use. I.
To appease him or to get him to lower his defenses. We are going way, way, way deeper than that. ' cause I hear you. When you say you need more presence and then he hears criticism, you say you're tired. He hears rejection. You try to explain why sex doesn't feel good anymore and end up apologizing for hurting his feelings, and you end up Googling things like, why do I feel so angry at my boyfriend?
Am I asking too much? In a relationship? And depending on the day you land in one of two places, either you are in deep.
And the bells of breakup culture or watching videos that say if he wanted to, he would, and wondering if you should just burn it all down. Or if you're resigned telling yourself, this is just how men are, this is what long-term relationships look like. Or Maybe I'm the problem. What no one is helping you name is this.
You are trying to solve a structural problem inside a relationship using personal blame. You're trying to explain something that doesn't even have language yet, because what's actually happening isn't just about communication. It's about love languages. It's not about love languages. It's not about you being too much or him being not enough.
It's about two people who were raised inside a culture that split emotional development by gender and then
and then told to go figure out intimacy together with absolutely no training or guidance. So you are in fights that feel personal. But are actually developmental and they're not necessarily even developmental to you two as individuals. We are in
an early developmental stage culturally about relationships, and I'm going to explain more about that. Later on in the episode. So when you are arguing about dishes, sex and feelings, you're actually underneath fighting about who has to grow first.
And right now it probably feels like you if you're the woman in the heterosexual relationship, and that is why you're pissed off because no one told you that. Being emotionally mature in a relationship often just means women doing more work, more tracking, more naming, more, staying present while the other person shuts down or checks out.
And you are at the point where you can't tell if this is fixable or if it's just what love looks like when you are awake and he is not.
That's what we're talking about today. Not how to talk nicer, not how to be more patient, not how to communicate better. I'm not gonna sell you on some.
Spiritu Spiritualized version.
Of the same trap that we have ended up in for centuries
of the woman learning how to relax and surrender more. And the man being more masculine. I will not be giving you scripts for nonviolent communication. We're not doing tips and tricks here. We're gonna get straight to the heart of things
because there is another way to do this.
So here is the part that really messes with your head. I know that these fights feel personal. They feel like he's not listening to you, like he's choosing not to show up. Like you're explaining the same thing for the 10th time and somehow still speaking different languages. Of course it feels like a character issue, like he doesn't care enough or he's selfish, or he's emotionally stunted, or you picked wrong.
But if I told, what if I told you, but what if I told you that most of these fights aren't actually about you or him at all? They're about capacity, not desire, not intention, not love capacity to stay present when things get uncomfortable. Capacity to hear impact without collapsing or defending capacity to tolerate emotional intensity without shutting down or lashing out.
Capacity to repair without needing to be right. Most adults were never taught how to do that, especially men. And that's not a moral judgment, it's just a developmental reality because here's what's, here's what usually happens, girls were trained early to track emotion, to notice shift. And tone to smooth things over.
To explain, re-explain, adjust. Boys were trained early to manage performance, to stay composed, to avoid emotional overwhelm, to disengage when things felt confusing or threatening. So now you're adults trying to build intimacy and you're colliding right at the place where things where those trainings diverge.
You're trying to name the problem. He's trying to escape the feeling you are trying to push for clarity. He's pulling away to regulate. You are asking for connection. He's hearing failure, and the tragedy is this. You interpret his shutdown as indifference. He experiences your intensity as anger, as danger.
So the fight escalates, not because either of you is wrong, but because neither of you has the internal bandwidth to stay with what's actually happening.
This is why the same argument keeps looping. You're not stuck because you're incompatible. You're stuck because the relationship is asking for both of you to grow past the level of emotional development you were handed. And here's the part that no one tells women. When you're the one with more emotional range, more language, more tolerance for discomfort, it feels like you're dragging the relationship forward alone, which is why resentment builds.
It's why desire dies and why breakup culture starts to look tempting. Because from where you are standing, it feels like I'm already doing the work. Why do I have to do more? You're not wrong. The missing piece isn't effort. It's that you cannot teach your partner emotional capacity from inside the relationship.
And here's what's really important to understand about all this. The place where your relationship feels the worst is usually the place where it's asking for the most growth, but not growth. Read a book or learn better communication skills, growth like your nervous system, no longer getting to run the show the way it always has.
Because long-term relationships do something brutal and unavoidable. They take away your exits. In the beginning when things felt lighter, you could avoid certain conversations. You could smooth things over, you could fuck it out. You could keep parts of yourself tucked away. But over time, that stops working.
The relationship gets close enough that all old strategies start failing. The pleasing stops working. The explaining stops working, the shutting down stops working and just be chill thing. The just be chill thing absolutely stops working. And when those strategies fail, it feels like the relationship is breaking.
But what's actually breaking is the version of adulthood you were operating from. Adult relationships. Don't just ask for love. They ask for emotional adulthood. The ability to stay present when you're flooded, the ability to hear something hard without making it about your worth. The ability to self-regulate instead of outsourcing regulation to your partner, the ability to repair without punishing.
Most of us never had to develop those capacities before we could survive on attraction, on chemistry, on being nice people, on good intentions. Until we couldn't. So when your relationship hits this edge, when things get louder, messier, more repetitive.
That's not because it's doomed necessarily. It's probably because the relationship has moved you into a stage where unconscious patterns can't carry you anymore. And this is where people usually go wrong. They think this shouldn't be hard. Or if it were right, it wouldn't feel like this. Or maybe we're just incompatible.
But what's actually happening is you are being asked to grow inside love instead of outside of it. And that's so terrifying because
it reveals the depths of your guts. Everything is on display. Your heart, your lungs, your belly, all of it's out in the open. And especially for men who were never supported in developing emotional capacity, and for women who were trained to over function instead of receive, it's really, really scary. So you end up in this middle place, you don't wanna give up, but you can't keep doing it the same way and no one has shown you what comes next.
That's the gap. And it's not between you and him, it's between the kind of relationship you want. And the emotional skills you were never taught how to build.
So let me paint a picture for you for what it actually looks like when a relationship stops feeling like a constant problem to be solved. It's not perfect. It's not calm all the time, but it's workable in a way that gives you your life back and it looks like you still get triggered, but it doesn't immediately turn into a fight.
There's a pause, not because you're biting your tongue, but because your body actually has somewhere else to go, but don't have to convince him that your experience is real. You don't have to escalate to be heard. You don't have to choose between staying quiet or blowing things up. He can feel your disappointment without collapsing into shame or defensiveness.
You can feel his confusion without turning into the translator for the entire relationship and slowly, almost imperceptively. Sometimes something shifts because the relationship stops being the place where you prove yourself and becomes a place where parts of you finally get to land. This is the part people don't know is possible.
Intimacy can actually become the thing that grows you up. Not the thing that drains you. And I think we can all feel that, like our hearts and our souls are longing for that and grasping for that so desperately we know that we want it and we just don't have the path to get there. And this is the evolution that we are all asking to move through societally in relationships.
We know that we're transitioning from an old paradigm into the new. We don't quite know what the new looks like. We know that we need to compost the old, and anytime you move from one developmental stage to the next,
I'm gonna use a metaphor that my friend Wendy always uses with me with. It's like going from. A ladder one, the top of one ladder to the bottom of the A next ladder, and there's a gap in between where it feels like you could fall to your death. There's this space in between where you kind of have to leap and on a societal level, that's where we are with relationships right now.
The place we're moving into. Is this version of relationship where there's enough emotional capacity on both sides. Your partner doesn't reflect your wounds back to you. They help you metabolize them just by staying, not by fixing you, or being perfect. They just stay present. This is where your younger parts can come forward
because your pain is no longer a threat.
When a relationship can hold that kind of humanity, desire often comes back totally on its own, not because you worked on sex, but because your body finally feels safe enough to open again. You don't fantasize about escape. You don't numb out or emotionally leave to get through the week. You don't feel like you're parenting someone.
It starts to feel like two adults learning how to be in intimacy together.
And I wanna say that this kind of relationship is not rare because it's unrealistic. It's rare because most people were never shown how to develop the inner capacity that it requires because it's a lot of work, simply because we didn't have models of this growing up. And there are very few resources in general that can dream at this level of relationship and give you a path towards it.
We were never taught how to find true love, not how to grow it inside of us.
And here's the part most women don't get told or they can feel is true.
But they were not taught how to
set this responsibility down for good. You cannot be your partner's developmental environment. You can't be the place he learns emotional regulation, accountability. And presence while also being the person he's afraid of. Disappointing growth requires a separate container, a place where skills can be learned without the relationship being online in every moment.
And it's the same for you. I.
You can't alchemize this new relational paradigm as you are over-functioning in the relationship. You need a container.
That is why I created a structure. A structured relational container for couples. It's not therapy, it's not coaching, and it's not a quick fix. It's a journey, and it's called reset your erotic rhythm. It's something that I feel really passionately about, and it was born out of working with couples and individuals for years that were stuck in this very pattern.
What often happened in my work was that I was working with one part of a couple I. So let's say I'd be working with the woman in a heterosexual relationship and she's dealing with her side of the socialization and how she so shows up in a relationship because of it, and I was able to give her the tools to create more space for herself and have internal boundaries so that she wasn't over-functioning all the time, but that left her counterpart in the couple.
It left him. Without the relational and emotional and regulation, inter regulation skills to really meet her where she now was, or I was working with the man and he was changing how he was functioning in the relationship, but the woman couldn't see that he was updating, or rather she had not been given an opportunity for her body to learn to trust this new.
Self that he was bringing to their connection. And so this journey is an eight week course where I have wrapped in a beautiful little bow, every step of that process you get your own space in the her track too.
Finally learn the skills that you need to stop over-functioning. And I would bet that you are doing it in every single part of your life, not just in your relationship, because that's what women are taught to do. And. He will get his own space facilitated by me, not by you, where he learns the basic human relational skills that he needs to have to show up the way that he's really longing to in the partnership.
And the third track is you two, coming together and rebuilding somatic intimacy, not by giving you tips and tricks of how to do sex better or override your bodies in order to meet a standard. Of what a good sex life looks like. It's actually giving you the foundational tool so that your soul, your heart, your body, your nervous system, is all aligned with the physical connection that you two have Again.
It reset. Erotic rhythm is a place where men can build emotional and nervous system capacity without their partner carrying them, without you carrying them. It's a place where women can step out of the manager role and feel what it's like to stop holding everything together, and the relationship itself can reset out of survival mode and into something more alive.
And this.
Program is built on this one core idea that intimacy isn't just about attraction or communication. It's about whether two people have the internal capacity to stay present, regulated, and responsive inside of closeness. This program separates the work that can't happen inside the relationship and then brings couples back together once something real has shifted.
Not to perform better, but to actually relate differently, like all of the generations past in our lineage have been yearning for that, have been working for you. Get to be the first woman that. It learns how to love in this completely new way, this way that your body is already pulling you towards with the support of a facilitator and a community.
This is a live program where we meet for eight weeks, and I can't tell you the magic that happens inside of the group calls for the first. Four to five weeks, we meet separated. The women meet together and the men meet together and.
I know that this phrase is used all the time of connecting with like-minded people or connecting with people that are going through the same thing as you. I wanna breathe full life into that to convey just how. How necessary it is to have support as you are birthing this new relational paradigm. It is so difficult to do this in isolation, and it's really difficult to do this just by talking to your friends and you're hearing them experience all of the same relational pains that you are.
And I know this from being a woman myself, that we can get caught in these loops of just.
Feeling pretty
fatalistic about all of it and filling this gap, this skills gap between us and our partners, while also knowing that because we are. Self-improvement goddesses and EQ queens that we are also being invited into new growth, but not really knowing what steps to take and feeling like it's completely impossible to do with our current partners because they can't lead us either.
So like I, I can't express how just. Life changing. It is how world changing it is. How deeply relieving it is to be doing this work in a group container with a facilitator that's holding the bulk of the load. So you can find all of the details about this program, reset your erotic rhythm and the show notes. It's an eight week container and
we begin February 23rd.
If you are feeling curiosity about this, do not wait to sign up because the first 10 people are going to get a heavily discounted rate, which is a deal that I'm not announcing anywhere else. You're not gonna see it on my TikTok, you're not gonna see it on my Instagram. You're not even gonna see it on my website.
On my website. It's just gonna increase in price after the first 10 couples sign up. So if you are feeling curiosity about it, sign up now. Don't wait. Everything you need to know is on my website. It's a, it's really beautiful work. I'm super proud of what I've created. I've seen it change people's lives, and I can't wait for the next round.
So hopefully I see you there.
