You’re Not Attracted to Masculine Energy—You’re Attracted to Adult Energy
If you’ve ever said, “I just want a man in his masculine,” this episode is for you—but we’re going deeper. In this juicy solo riff, Nicole unpacks the cultural confusion around “masculine energy” and what we’re really longing for when we use that phrase. Spoiler: it’s not chest-puffing dominance or stoic silence—it’s adult energy.
We explore what it means to be met by someone who is emotionally resourced, sensually attuned, and accountable—not performative. Nicole guides you into a deeper understanding of how attraction actually works when we grow up, heal, and reclaim our erotic power.
This is a call to move beyond polarity clichés and into erotic maturity.
🔥 In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
Why “masculine energy” might not be what you're truly craving
The difference between adult vs. adolescent energetics in attraction
How unhealed parts mistake structure for safety—and why that matters
What real turn-on feels like in your body when you're not outsourcing your power
How to recognize and embody adult energy in your own relationships
🧠 Key Takeaway:
Attraction isn’t about polarity games—it’s about nervous system resonance. The sexiest thing in the world? Someone who knows how to take care of themselves—and can meet you in the truth of your body.
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✦ Somatic context for things like low libido, pain, dissociation, and numbness
✦ Radical translations of what your body might actually be saying when it doesn’t follow the cultural script
✦ Alternatives to diagnosis culture that honor nervous system rhythms, safety, and truth over performance
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transcript
Okay. Today I wanna talk about something I hear all the time in sessions, in dms, in text to start with, okay, this might sound cliche, but it's this idea that I just want someone in their masculine energy, or I'm craving a man who can lead, or I need more polarity. Someone strong and decisive and dominant.
Like, you know what I'm talking about. And listen, I get it. That language is everywhere right now, but I want to lovingly rip that wide open today because here's the real talk. You're not actually turned on by masculine energy. You are turned on by adult energy. Yep. I said it. The sexiest thing about someone isn't their manliness or their yang vibes or their beard to shirt ratio, it's that they can hold their own emotional reality and not crumble when you set a boundary.
And maybe just maybe do their own damn laundry. So this episode is for you if you are over-functioning in your relationship, but blaming your libido. You're dating people who seem masculine but leave you feeling drained, confused, or like their mom. And you find yourself saying, why don't I want them?
They're everything I ask for. Or you've never actually felt safe enough in partnership to to full, to be fully turned on. And you're starting to wonder why. This is also for you if you've been scrolling through Instagram and TikTok, TikTok and seeing endless feminine energy coaches telling you to sit back, surrender, and let the masculine take the lead, and you've tried that and it felt kind of dead inside because here's what I've seen over and over again in my practice.
What most of us are actually craving isn't polarity. It's co-regulation, not fantasy leadership, but real emotional maturity. Not gender performance, but presence. Adult energy is what makes you soften. It's what makes your nervous system go, oh, I can let go here. I can relax. It's what turns the theoretical turn on and into actual body desire.
So in today's episodes, we're going, today's episode, we're going to myth bust. The masculine and feminine obsession, we're going to explore why your body shuts down when you're parenting your partner, and why emotional labor. Labor is such a turnoff and why no matter how hot they are on paper, your arousal knows the difference between someone who's posturing.
In someone who's present, and most importantly, we are going to walk you back to the most important compass of all your body's truth, because she's not confused. She's just waiting to be met by another adult. So let's get into it.
So let's talk about what's actually going on when we are talking about feminine and masculine energy and not being turned on by a guy that is too quote feminine. Okay. Taking care of someone and managing their emotional world, reminding them to book a dentist appointment or clean their toenails or notice your body language, that's not sexy, that's parental and erotic.
Self is not here to babysit. She's here to bloom. Erotic self is brilliant. She's not confused, she's not wrong. She's just tired of being a therapist. A calendar, a coping mechanism, and. Let's get something really, really clear here. You are not turned on by masculine energy. You are turned on by adult energy.
So let's break that down because masculine energy is often this weird soup of like vague traits like dominance and decisiveness and confidence, but also stoicism and aloofness and maybe, maybe even mystery or detachment. And so many women are told you just need a man with more masculine energy. Like that's gonna solve anything, but no one tells you this.
What your nervous system is actually craving is co-regulation. What turns you on is not a vibe, it's not a beard or a deep voice or a decisive dinner order. What turns you on is someone who feels safe enough to surrender with. And safety doesn't come from intensity, it comes from maturity. Adult energy says, I've got me.
I'm doing my work. I know how to name my feelings without exploding or disappearing. Adult energy is someone who can hold a boundary without punishing you for having one adult energy is erotic because it makes you feel like you can let go, and that's what opens the door to desire because here's a fact.
Arri arousal requires downregulation. Your brain literally has to turn off the parts responsible for vigilance and micromanaging in order to light up the arousal centers. You can't be turned on and emotionally over functioning. The brain will not let it happen, and it's not a mindset issue. It's neuroscience.
So let me take you into a client story. Let's call her Naomi. So Naomi came to me thinking she had a libido issue. She and her husband hadn't had sex in months. She said she just wasn't feeling it anymore. And the more we talked, the clearer it became that she wasn't dried up. She was depleted every single thing in her life.
She was carrying the social calendar, the kids' emotions, the finances, the therapy speak. He was nice, but he was also passive. He waited for her to initiate every repair, every deep top talk, every sexy moment. She wasn't turned off. She was actually tapped out because she had no one to fall into, no full grownup to lean on, and her body was doing exactly what it needed to survive it shut down, protected the system.
Don't get naked next to someone you don't trust to hold the container, and so I want you to really hear this. There is nothing wrong with you if your desire disappears when you're in a caretaking role, that's actually your body working perfectly. But we've been sold this fantasy or of polarity, this idea that feminine means surrender and masculine means taking control.
And I get it. I, it can feel good when someone leads, but that has to come from a place of, of sovereignty, not performance. If someone can't hold their grief or regulate their own fear or carry their part of the relational load, then what you're surrendering into isn't safety. It's a sinkhole, and the body knows.
The body always knows. So let's do a little reframe. What if you've never been too picky or too complicated, or too cold or too sensitive? What if your body has just been waiting for someone who meets you as a peer, not a savior, not a student, a partner? Because adult energy is someone who's done the shadow work and still chooses to show up.
Adult energy says, I can be your lover and your coil. I know how to hold complexity, and I wanna create a relationship where we both rise. Let me tell you something. It is magnetic when someone brings adult eroticism to the table, you don't have to fake desire, you don't have to script. Your sex life desire just happens because your bodily, your body finally feels like it has permission to feel again.
And let me be super clear about something that often gets lost in this conversation. Adult energy is not gendered. It isn't about. Men need to man up, or women want men to be dominant. Again, it's way deeper and way more liberating actually than that adult energy is available to anyone who's willing to mature emotionally to take responsibility for their impact and meet another person.
And mutuality. I've had clients who identify as women, non-binary men, all of them whom are carrying, all of whom are carrying the emotional weight of their partnerships. Who come into session whispering some version of, I just wish they'd do their work, or, I feel I want to feel held for once, or I want to be the one who gets to fall apart.
Sometimes you wanna know what a real, what real erotic polarity looks like. It's not gender performance, it's energetic, reciprocity. It's in knowing that when your needs, your grief, your bigness comes forward, there's someone across from you who doesn't shut down or disappear. It's someone who can hold the weight of being with you.
Not fixing, not fleeing, but being with, and guess what? I've also worked with men who are completely turned off in their partnerships because they're the only ones showing up with emotional maturity. They're constantly translating their partner's behavior, guessing their needs, absorbing unspoken resentment, and then being told they're not man enough.
That kind of pressure shuts men down too. Desire disappears when we're stuck in relational roles instead of connection. This is why the masculine energy trope can become such a trap because it flattens attraction into a two dimensional performance of roles. Rather than a living, breathing, mature dynamic that two people co-create adult energy says, I know myself, I honor myself and I can meet you as an equal, not as a fantasy or a fixer.
So if you've ever thought, maybe I'm just not into men anymore, or maybe I need someone more feminine, or maybe something is wrong with me because I don't feel turned on the way I used to, I'm gonna invite you to just pause and. Allow for the possibility that maybe it's not about gender, it's not about feminine masculine energy, it's not about energy at all.
Maybe just it's just about their development. So let's pause and take a breath because this part is so often misunderstood. If your turnon has dried up in the presence of someone who checks all the gender boxes, it's not because you are confused. It's because we've been taught to associate gender performance with erotic fulfillment when what we're really craving is something far more profound.
Adult energy is not gendered. You are attracted to men or women or masculine or fenner feminine energy. You are not attracted to men or women or masculine or feminine energy. In this simplified TikTok coach sense, you are drawn body and soul to the presence of someone who knows how to self-regulate someone who doesn't collapse into you when things get hard, or someone who doesn't vanish when you express a boundary or someone who doesn't weaponize their confusion or incompetence to keep you doing the emotional labor of the relationship.
That's adult energy and it doesn't belong to a gender. It belongs to the part of us that has done our work.
So let's talk about how gender scripts are actually a really big block to our desire. We've inherited these rigid, shallow scripts about attraction. If he's decisive, dominant, and takes charge, she'll be turned on. Or if she's soft, surrendered and stays in her feminine, sex will flow. These ideas are crumbs from a banquet.
We were weren't meant.
These ideas strip us of our actual desires and complexity, and instead ask us to perform identities that look sexy from the outside, but feel dead inside. I've had women clients who have said he did everything right. He made the plans, he paid, he opened the door, and I felt nothing.
Because when we're performing gender roles, we're often suppressing what's real and the erotic lives in what's real. So lemme tell you about another client and we'll call her Tasha. Tasha spent years dating men. She thought she would be attracted to masculine, confident, dominant. But she'd leave every encounter feeling exhausted and disconnected and vaguely ashamed like she was performing.
Enthusiasm when her body was actually really numb. And when we unpacked it, what she realized was that she didn't want someone who took control. She wanted someone who took responsibility. She needed someone who could say, I hear you. Let's repair that. That makes sense to me. Who could take ownership when they messed up and who could show their fear and still choose to stay in connection?
And when she finally dated someone who brought that kind of presence, who wasn't trying to lead or dominate, but just be grown, her body responded like a flower turning towards the sun. And all of you will hear me use this metaphor a million times. But we have this natural, organic, and innate tendency to turn towards that which nourishes us, which is exactly what our eroticism in is.
It's exactly what our turn on is. And as she was relating to this actual adult, her body turned towards it. And it wasn't about polarity play. It was just about developmental safety, the kind that comes from maturity and attunement and embodiment. So let's go a little deeper into this and talk about the nervous system.
Your nervous system does not care about gender stereotypes. It's not sitting there thinking, Hmm, I really. Feeling some alpha male energy today, your nervous system. What it's actually doing is scanning every moment for cues of safety or threat. And every time someone ignores your boundary or makes you feel unseen, or puts you in a parent role or expects you, expects you to emotionally over-function, it logs that as a threat queue and arousal shuts down in response.
So if your body goes quiet in the bedroom, if you can't find your turn on, no matter how masculine or feminine the other person seems, or if they don't seem masculine enough or feminine enough to you, I wanna break the myth that what your body is actually doing is protecting you from unregulated energy.
So we can't talk about this false polarity issue without talking about the people pleaser. Or the fixer archetype. Um, if you're someone who's always been the caretaker or the empath, the one who understands what everyone else is feeling before they've even said a word, or if you're the strong one or the stable one, or the emotionally intelligent one.
This next part is for you because I, here's the pattern I see over and over again in my clients, especially those raised as, uh, girls and socialized to be likable, kind, and accommodating. They are the partners. Everyone leans on. And they're the ones who are quietly starving for more turn on, and they love really deeply and they give generously and they're healing savvy, and they're good in a crisis and will hold space for you with an open heart and calm voice while inside they're screaming for someone to finally see them.
So. This is the myth of the high capacity woman. We're taught that being deeply resourced, emotionally literate, and self-aware means we should be able to handle more, that we can carry their trauma plus our own, that we can be the partner and the therapist, and the regulator and the initiator. And when we finally collapse under all that invisible labor, we blame ourselves for having a low libido instead of naming.
What's actually true is that we're turned off because we're over-functioning. That we're depleted, not disinterested, that we're exhausted and not broken. Because the hard truth is that you've spend your, spent your life playing the fixer, and if your sense of worth has been built around being needed instead of being met, your erotic body may have never learned what it feels like to be received.
I had a client like this once who was like a total powerhouse. She was a therapist, a parent, an organizer, and in her relationship she always dated deep feelers like artists, healers, sensitive people who described. Uh, she described it as like beautifully wounded, and without even realizing it, she became their emotional mother.
She validated their pain and coached them through their shame, translated their non-communication into gentle nudges towards growth.
But in the bedroom, she was totally, she was completely tense and totally checked out.
Because her nervous system was screaming, there's no room here for me to unravel. And there was no one holding her.
Because when you're, when you're always giving, always translating, always adjusting, your body doesn't have the capacity to enter the slow, luxurious, layered territory of desire because arousal can't live in hypervigilance.
And I know when we hear this, we might think like. What's wrong with helping? What's wrong with loving people through their pain? And there's nothing wrong with that. But when erotic energy becomes fused with the need to be needed when arousal is tied to performing emotional labor, and when your role in the relationship is to be the soothing presence, who always makes things okay, there's no space left for separateness, for tension for the unknown, um, for being mesh messy and selfish and wild.
The moment your partner collapses into their own chaos, you go into therapist mode. The erotic channel completely shuts off because it's not a dance anymore. You're not two independent nervous systems dancing together. It's more like a rescue mission, and your body can tell the difference.
And this whole dynamic is what I call the compounding cost of emotional labor. I. And it lives in your muscles and your jaw and your size.
It's the emotional labor debt, and it's one of the top reasons why your erotic system might be shutting down, not out of dysfunction, and not because there's not enough masculine energy in the room, but it's just your body saying no to the dynamic that's happening. Emotional labor isn't just comforting someone when they're sad.
It's the hundreds of micro calculations your body makes each day to keep things running relationally, emotionally, logistically, it's like noticing your partners in a mood and softening your tone preemptively, or remembering your mom's birthday, but forgetting your own pleasure. Practice is asking what's wrong for the fifth time this week?
Because you can feel the tension in the air. And being the one to suggest couples therapy again or holding back your truth because you don't wanna make it worse.
And things add up, not just emotionally but somatically because your nervous system doesn't separate relationship effort from stress. It feels the accumulation and senses the imbalance, and eventually says, I'm not safe enough to relax here.
And that's what we're often talking about when we have the urge to lean on these masculine and feminine tropes, that desire can't bloom in deficit. Desire is an overflow state. It emerges when your body feels resourced and relaxed and received. But if you are in emotional debt and you've been paying and paying with no return, your body goes into scarcity mode.
It tightens, it guards, and it says, we don't have the energy for turn on or in survival.
If you keep giving and giving and giving attention, empathy, self-regulation, and every time your partner doesn't notice and doesn't reciprocate, it doesn't take initiative. Another IOU gets stamped into your system. Not a conscious one, not one. You're even necessarily tracking, but your body remembers.
Your body stores every imbalance and every moment you felt invisible. Every time you carried more than your share. And the erotic is not interested in being generous when there's a pile of unpaid intimacy bills.
And what it feels like in the body when you're carrying this emotional labor debt is. Things like a tightening in your chest when they reach for you, or a quiet dread at the idea of intimacy. Maybe an extreme heaviness in your body, or a sense of guilt for not wanting to have set sex like a, a curling inward, a fantasy of being alone and kind of pushing people away and finding more space.
And none of that means you don't love them. It just means your body doesn't trust the current dynamic
and your bo, your erotic body, will never give you consistent turn on in a space that it doesn't trust. So what do we do with all this? We stop pretending emotional labor is invisible. We name the IOUs, we track the imbalance. Not to shame anyone, but to restore an equilibrium and to notice where there is work still to be done in creating a completely interdependent partnership.
We. We reclaim a vision of intimacy where you don't have to trade your turn on for peace, where you don't have to parent your partner to have connection, and where love doesn't cost you your pleasure. Because when emotional labor is mutual, when you're both tracking and tending, both initiating and owning desire returns because the system finally has room to breathe.
So if you're sitting there wondering, why do I feel so tired, so touched out, so unavailable for sex. Maybe it's not your libido that's low. Maybe it's not the masculine and feminine polarity issue. Maybe it's your emotional account that is overdrawn.
So this leads me into this next little bit that I wanted to cover today, which is weaponized incompetence. And the erotic dead zone of this like perpetual boy energy that we see, and many of us have experienced this and can't really name it something that kills desire, not with,
not even necessarily with a lack of attraction or chemistry, but with immaturity. With vacancy with Boy energy,
and this can look like I didn't know you wanted help, or you're just better at it than I am, or just tell me what to do, or I was waiting for you to take the lead or you didn't ask. This is weaponize incompetence. And it's not malicious. It's probably not even conscious, but that doesn't make it have any smaller of an effect on your eroticism.
It has a huge effect
because what's actually happening is that your partner is outsourcing emotional responsibility to you while you are expected to stay calm, sexy, and available. And your erotic body basically says, I'm not your mother, and it will not stay turned on. When she's asked to carry the role of teacher or planner, emotional translator, sensual muse, all at once, she'll not, she will not offer her softness when she's being treated like a living alarm clock, and she won't drip with desire when she's fielding yet another.
What's the plan for tonight or she? You know, won't hand over her pleasure to someone who refuses to grow up, because the erotic body needs reciprocity and that like perpetual boy energy. It doesn't give it weights to be led.
And
this dynamic is especially tricky when the partner is genuinely well intentioned. They're not yelling, they're not cheating, they're not. Stonewalling. They're just letting you do all the emotional work, likely because they don't know how to do it quite yet, and that kind of passivity creates an invisible drain.
You start to resent them, but you feel guilty about it because they're such a good guy, and you start to fantasize about being alone and you're second guessing your standards. You start to go quiet in your pleasure.
And you start to kind of gaslight yourself into thinking that it's not a valid feeling to have for your libido to start crashing. Because on paper the relationship is good. 'cause he's, he's a good guy. And you're not recognizing that you're carrying someone else's share of the emotional and erotic labor in your partnership and your body's just done with it.
So what does erotic maturity look like instead? What it can look like is things like, I noticed some distance between us. Can we talk about it? Or, I've been thinking about ways to deepen our sex life. Here's something I'd love to try, or I looked into that couple's retreat, wanna go?
Or you don't have to lead. Every time I've got this, it's initiative, it's ownership, it's showing up before being asked, and it doesn't mean being perfect. It just means being present
and so that there's a somatic toll.
On carrying that load for somebody else.
And it leads to your turn on going flat.
And this isn't an issue of polarity. It might just be the unpaid labor of being partnered. With someone who can't quite regulate themselves yet, can't quite lead themselves yet.
And can't meet you yet. So if right now you're sitting in a place of realization where you are.
Coming to the truth that you've never been fully met or fully safely seen, or been erotically received without effort or performance.
I just want you to know that your desire hasn't actually gone anywhere. It's just waiting for the kind of presence that doesn't make you shrink, or the kind of maturity that makes surrender feel like relief and not risk.
She's just waiting for congruence.
So let's go into a bit of visioning of what could actually be happening when adult energy meets adult energy. When two people show up as grown and regulated and self-responsible humans when no one is outsourcing their emotional work, when no one is waiting to be told what to do. And when no one is performing or pretending or placating, that's when something truly erotic opens something that doesn't have to be manufactured.
Something that's inherent in the space between two whole people who are actually there. And that is erotic reciprocity. And it isn't about keeping score, it's not tit for tat sex scheduling or trading orgasms like commodities. It's when both people show up with the intention to give and receive, and when both partners are equally invested in creating a space where desire can bloom and when arousal isn't someone's job, it's the result of presence.
And it sounds like, I wanna know what turns you on, not just so I can perform it, but because your pleasure matters to me and it looks like I've been thinking about something I'd love to explore with you. Do you wanna play with that together? Let's co-create this. Let's let it be different this time.
That's adult eroticism. It's not about dominance or surrender. It's not about polarity charts. It's not about endlessly healing or fixing. It's just about this simple act of co-creation, and that's actually what makes it so hot.
It makes it possible to navigate conflict without power struggles. To name a need without fear of punishment or collapse to explore edges because you trust the container of your relationship. It means sex that isn't about roles, but about the bond and the shared presence between the two of you.
Adult energy is what allows your erotic body to risk, again, because the risks are met with care and clarity and co-regulation. And this kind of dynamic isn't some cosmic accident. It's not reserved for the lucky or the highly evolved. It's available to anyone willing to take radical responsibility for their own aliveness.
It comes from knowing your nervous system, from honoring your boundaries, from doing the work, not not just to be desirable, but to be available for intimacy. And once you've experienced that kind of erotic safety, that kind of mutuality, you'll never settle, settle for anything you less. You won't settle for a performance of masculine or feminine energy or pseudo spiritual bypassing again because you felt the difference and you know what your erotic self is capable of when she's no longer hiding.
When she's no longer holding the whole relationship alone.
So after all this, here's the most radical and most ancient truth I want to leave you with. Your body has never been confused. She's never been longing for.
Simplify gender-based dynamic.
She's been leading you to exactly what nourishes you. And it's not about being dominant or submissive or a set of rules. It's about coming back to your internal orientation and internal organizing system, the one you were born with, the one that knows on a cellular level, cellular level, what feels safe, what feels delicious, and what feels like home when we spend years overriding the body's signals.
I'm trying to stay attractive, agreeable, wanted, spiritual, whatever mask we've had to wear to survive that compass doesn't stop working. It just starts whispering instead of shouting until you remember how to listen.
And so all those moments where your body said, I don't wanna be touched right now, or I feel like I'm managing this entire relationship, or I'm not turned on and I don't know why, or something about this dynamic just feels off. That's your compass. Guiding you towards real intimacy.
And when you begin to live by that compass, something major shifts, you stop outsourcing your turn on to other people's behavior and you stop trying to manufacture desire in places where. Your body feels disrespected. You start noticing what actually makes you melt and what makes you laugh. Mid kiss, what makes you wanna stay.
When you learn how to be in right relationship with the signals your body has been sending you all along, that's when you access this beautiful, amazing co-creation that we're all really longing for in our partnerships. So if this episode lit something up in you, if your compass is vibrating with recognition, it's not an accident.
It's just a call to come home to the version of you who never had to ask if she was broken, who knew how to feel, who knew what she was being drawn to, how to trust the yes and know how to honor the no who never once mistook emotional labor for love. Because the body's compass just doesn't lie.
So let her lead because she's not lost. She's waiting for you to follow.
