The Starvation We Don’t Talk About

There’s a kind of hunger that most people won’t admit to. The kind that eats away at you slowly, without setting off alarms, until one day you wake up and realize—you’re starving. Not for food. Not even for sex, necessarily. But for touch, intimacy, the feeling of being held in a way that says, “You don’t have to do anything, you don’t have to earn this, you are simply worth it.”

I see it all the time.

Men who are exhausted by the expectation that they should always be fine. Women who feel like their bodies exist for everyone else—kids, work, partners—until there’s nothing left for themselves. Long-term couples who have spent years in logistical partnership but haven’t actually felt each other in ages.

It’s subtle, this kind of deprivation. It doesn’t hit like heartbreak. It creeps in like numbness.

Why We’re Afraid of Our Own Needs

We live in a culture that is deeply confused about physical connection. We set up long-term partnerships with the expectation that one person will meet every need we have—forever. And when that inevitably stops working, we have almost no tools to navigate it.

So we do what we’ve been taught.

We shut down.

We rationalize.

We convince ourselves that if we don’t think about it, we won’t feel it.

But here’s the truth: You can’t selectively shut down desire.

If you turn it off in one place, it dims everywhere.

I’ve seen men lose their aliveness not because they’re broken, not because they don’t love their partners, but because they’ve learned that desire itself is dangerous. They think that even looking at another woman is some kind of betrayal, so they repress every impulse—and in doing so, their whole system goes numb.

I’ve seen women pour everything they have into their children, their homes, their work—until there is no space left for their own needs. And when their partner reaches for them, they recoil, not because they don’t care, but because they have been touched all day in ways that ask something from them, and they have nothing left to give.

And this is where we get stuck.

Because men often don’t get to be held by other men.

Because women have been conditioned to see other women as threats, not allies.

Because we assume that longing for touch outside of sex is dangerous, when in reality, it’s one of the most basic human needs.

The Cost of Going Without

When physical connection disappears from a relationship, it doesn’t just affect the bedroom.

It affects everything.

• The way you interact with your partner—how much you see each other, how much you actually listen.

• Your ability to self-regulate—without physical connection, the nervous system struggles to stay calm.

• Your overall life force—because without touch, without desire, without some felt sense of aliveness, everything starts to feel flat.

I see it with my clients all the time. People who are starving for something they don’t know how to name. They don’t necessarily want an affair. They don’t want to betray anyone. They just want to feel held, seen, met.

And because we have no roadmap for this, people resort to the only options they can think of:

1. They deny their needs completely. (“This is just how it is. I should be grateful.”)

2. They look for it in places that could blow up their lives. Affairs, professionals, situations that carry shame.

3. They convince themselves they shouldn’t need it. But no matter how much they try to logic their way out of it, the ache remains.

What Needs to Change

We are not meant to live untouched.

We are not meant to be in long-term partnerships that feel like negotiated logistics rather than embodied connection.

We need spaces where men can hold and be held by other men without fear of what that means.

We need women to know that supporting their partner’s need for connection does not mean sacrificing their own.

We need new ways of thinking about physical connection—ways that don’t assume that every touch must lead to sex, that every longing must mean something is wrong.

Because when we don’t, we shrink.

We become less of ourselves.

We become people who go through the motions but don’t actually feel alive.

I have held men—physically, emotionally—who have spent their whole lives in their heads, who have never known what it feels like to fully land in their own body.

I have seen people dissolve into tears just from being held without expectation.

I have watched as, through the simplest form of touch, someone’s entire system finally exhaled after years of holding it all together.

An Invitation

This is not about free passes. This is not about justifying betrayal or dismissing the agreements we make in relationships.

This is about naming what is real.

We need connection. We need physicality. We need to learn how to hold and be held—without guilt, without fear, without feeling like we are failing at something.

Because the alternative is a life that is smaller, quieter, and lonelier than any of us deserve.

And I refuse to believe that’s the best we can do.