Do men care about emotional intimacy?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do men care about building a long-term relationship with someone and really knowing them as a person? Do they value that depth?

Or is it really just about the sex and the woman being happy, compliant, and making his life easier?

I'm having a string of interactions lately that are making me believe it's the latter and that's depressing. If that's the case, I'd rather abstain.

Unless you met young and sort of grew up together in your 20's, for most couples developing emotional intimacy takes years. It comes once they are good with mutual feeling of happiness, satisfying sex, compliance, making each other's lives easier etc. You can't develop emotional bonds in vacuum.

Compliance ?

[Anonymous]

No, not at all.

[Anonymous]

Good partners absolutely do! F*** boys of course do not.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do men care about building a long-term relationship with someone and really knowing them as a person? Do they value that depth?

Or is it really just about the sex and the woman being happy, compliant, and making his life easier?

I'm having a string of interactions lately that are making me believe it's the latter and that's depressing. If that's the case, I'd rather abstain.

Unless you met young and sort of grew up together in your 20's, for most couples developing emotional intimacy takes years. It comes once they are good with mutual feeling of happiness, satisfying sex, compliance, making each other's lives easier etc. You can't develop emotional bonds in vacuum.

Compliance ?

Yes, a lot of insecure men want "compliant" women. Aka, ones who will do whatever they say without push back, even if it's against their best interests.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:PP here. I'll add that I think the only reason why men aren't just continuing to have sex with 18- 25 year olds their entire lives is simply that they don't have the opportunity. It's not aligned with women's preferences (not that many 18 year olds want to sleep with 50 year-olds) and it's also not socially acceptable. But if these constraints were removed, I think that's the direction men would go. Whereas if women's constraints were removed, they would probably stay with their same age partner (or slightly older) their entire lives. Or at least have serially monogamous relationships.

Or just be alone!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Emotional intimacy is great and I don't need a woman to make my life easier.

And yet, sex is far and away the most important part of any relationship.

ANY relationship? With your father? Your daughter? Your dentist?

You know they are talking about married relationship? Or are you really that dense?

What happens when your wife is pregnant or sick? Or when you get prostate cancer?

He's the exact person that leaves his wife when she gets sick. Or cheats. Low value men put sex and their needs well above their partner.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:PP here. I'll add that I think the only reason why men aren't just continuing to have sex with 18- 25 year olds their entire lives is simply that they don't have the opportunity. It's not aligned with women's preferences (not that many 18 year olds want to sleep with 50 year-olds) and it's also not socially acceptable. But if these constraints were removed, I think that's the direction men would go. Whereas if women's constraints were removed, they would probably stay with their same age partner (or slightly older) their entire lives. Or at least have serially monogamous relationships.

Not true. A lot of men 30+ consider 18 year olds still children. You need to surround yourself with better men if all of your friends are chasing teenagers.

But this post says a lot about you. Men who say that 18 year olds are the peak are pedophiles. You would go younger if it was legal. The only thing stopping you from committing child sex abuse crimes is the government. How sad for you to admit that.

[Anonymous]

Emotional intimacy is a basic human need. If you go years and years without it, you will be lonely and sad and miserable. You might come up with workarounds that keep you from feeling horrible all the time, but those workarounds are usually dysfunctional.

Now, the degree to which men feel comfortable admitting this is a basic need of theirs, and their willingness to engage in the activities that will enable them to have it (activities like: knowing how one feels, being able to acknowledge those feelings to another person, and being willing to listen to another person acknowledge their feelings) can vary widely. The men who absolutely cannot do these things usually have Issues and make bad partners. Often they are angry and don't know why (hint, their anger is actually a mixture of other feelings they refuse to acknowledge because anger is the only emotion they feel comfortable expressing). They may use sarcasm or humor as a guard against basic emotions like disappointment or sadness.

If they have kids, men like this will often have high conflict relationships with their kids, because they crave the love and affection of their children but don't know how to show love affection FOR their kids, so over time their kids will avoid them or become hostile towards their fathers. This will wound these men, but they won't be able to acknowledge the emotional wound, so instead they will lash out with anger or sarcasm, only further distancing their children from them.

But a lot of men are not this far gone and it's possible to facilitate them becoming more emotionally available and vulnerable. Now, the degree to which a woman wants to put the work into doing that is also going to vary. I think more and more women just don't want to deal with this, so a lot of these men end up single or divorced, and retrenched in their fear and loathing of feelings.

The ideal situation is to raise boys to understand that feelings are natural, human, not that scary, and okay to talk about. You can be masculine and manly and still be able to say "I felt disappointed today when I didn't get a work assignment I felt I had earned." In fact, being able to acknowledge vulnerable feelings is a sign of emotional strength and is a lot more masculine than getting really petty and doing a sarcastic imitation of your "stupid" boss and complaining for months about how dumb your job is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PP here. I'll add that I think the only reason why men aren't just continuing to have sex with 18- 25 year olds their entire lives is simply that they don't have the opportunity. It's not aligned with women's preferences (not that many 18 year olds want to sleep with 50 year-olds) and it's also not socially acceptable. But if these constraints were removed, I think that's the direction men would go. Whereas if women's constraints were removed, they would probably stay with their same age partner (or slightly older) their entire lives. Or at least have serially monogamous relationships.

Not true. A lot of men 30+ consider 18 year olds still children. You need to surround yourself with better men if all of your friends are chasing teenagers.

But this post says a lot about you. Men who say that 18 year olds are the peak are pedophiles. You would go younger if it was legal. The only thing stopping you from committing child sex abuse crimes is the government. How sad for you to admit that.

Fine. 25yos.

[Anonymous]

Even assuming a man could find a steady supply of 25 year olds to have sex with his entire life, he will in fact desire emotional intimacy at some point. They may be ill prepared to actually engage in reciprocal emotional intimacy, but they do crave it.

I do think one of the biggest tricks nature plays on men is not sufficiently investing them into their kids. You can create a close father-child bond with effort, but men don't get as much help from hormones as women do. Maternal hormones are SO pleasurable. Men also get this, I know (my DH and I talk about it all the time) but I don't think it happens as easily with men because they don't physically carry the child or give birth, and they don't breastfeed. My DH felt intense paternal love when our child was an infant, but it didn't seem to carry him through the tough toddler years as well, and then it kind of re-emerged when our kid was 6 or so and could carry on a real conversation and started to have interests DH could identify with. Whereas even though I found the toddler years hard, I always felt very emotionally bonded to my child, and could empathize more easily and it only deepened our bond during those years.

I think a lot of men become alienated from their kids when they are young, and thus don't experience that deep pleasure of parental love, and as a result go looking for sex with younger women in order to feel pleasure. In some cases, not to get too psychoanalytical here, I think these men are almost trying to recreate a father-daughter relationship with these young women, and get the adoration and affection from them that they don't feel they get from their kids. It's screwed up, and if men had more hormones associated with fatherhood, I think it would be less likely to happen and we'd have more lasting, happy families, instead of this splitting that sometimes happens where the woman because focused on the children and the man feels neglected and starts to focus only on himself.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do men care about building a long-term relationship with someone and really knowing them as a person? Do they value that depth?

Or is it really just about the sex and the woman being happy, compliant, and making his life easier?

I'm having a string of interactions lately that are making me believe it's the latter and that's depressing. If that's the case, I'd rather abstain.

Enjoy your cats.

Enjoy your ego.

Not a problem. It helps me get my dick wet on the regular.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do men care about building a long-term relationship with someone and really knowing them as a person? Do they value that depth?

Or is it really just about the sex and the woman being happy, compliant, and making his life easier?

I'm having a string of interactions lately that are making me believe it's the latter and that's depressing. If that's the case, I'd rather abstain.

Enjoy your cats.

Enjoy your ego.

Not a problem. It helps me get my dick wet on the regular.

"Enjoy your cats" is really not the insult you think it is. Women would rather be single and clean sh*t out of a litter box than be with you, and you want to insult them? LOLOLOLOLOL delusional.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do men care about building a long-term relationship with someone and really knowing them as a person? Do they value that depth?

Or is it really just about the sex and the woman being happy, compliant, and making his life easier?

I'm having a string of interactions lately that are making me believe it's the latter and that's depressing. If that's the case, I'd rather abstain.

No and no.
Yes, it really just about the sex and the woman being happy, compliant, and making our life easier.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do men care about building a long-term relationship with someone and really knowing them as a person? Do they value that depth?

Or is it really just about the sex and the woman being happy, compliant, and making his life easier?

I'm having a string of interactions lately that are making me believe it's the latter and that's depressing. If that's the case, I'd rather abstain.

No and no.
Yes, it really just about the sex and the woman being happy, compliant, and making our life easier.

You think no men want to build long term relationships with a partner? Ok lol.

[Anonymous]

Something in-between. Op, you shouldn't present it as 2 extremes.
But "getting to know you deeply"? Anyone, no. That sounds like a no without quite knowing what you mean by that.