There is a breaking that has to happen in order for sex to mean almost nothing. An emotional muzzle needs to be applied in order to stomach your partner looking at thousands of other bodies online. The death is so invisible, because it is so normalized. The one that makes it okay to get excited about someone and just let it drift off. To be bombarded with social images of your new lover with their past lovers. To take in a long, accusatory text and just keep working. To accept the unrelenting feedback and direct confrontation, even in friendships, that is part of modern therapized relating.
All of it drizzled with confusing news stories, mostly untrue, pepper spraying us with fear hourly.
People don’t talk about this.
They perform and normalize the breaking instead — follow the advice of influencers online who seem to have figured out how to walk away from pretty much anything feeling clean.
We hear slang like I don’t catch feelings and I know what this is and they were toxic and I didn’t need that job anyways then lie awake wondering why we are anxious spiraling over some small thing at work.
I have worked with women and men who have done it — who have genuinely shut their emotions down.
In some ways that works for them.
They’re disciplined. Productive. They date logically, check boxes and decide how to feel. They’re very good at this. Life is easier for them than it is for me. My feelings can still bury me at times.
And when I sit with them, something just isn’t there anymore.
They don’t know how they feel about the person sitting across from them at dinner. They have to think about it. They have to decide how they want to feel when they tell a story. The answer to what they want is accessed through the mind, not the body.
Sometimes on my hardest days, the ones my partner says something that I can’t shake. The ones where my mom-guilt becomes such a burden. I also wish I could free myself from caring.
But trust me, you might think you want to be like them. You don’t.
When a woman comes to me embarrassed because she got attached to someone who wasn’t offering her much. I do not see a woman who doesn’t value herself.
I see a woman who is still whole.
A woman who didn’t trade away the part of herself that makes a relationship possible in order to make indifference easier. Who had sex with someone and let it mean something, even when she knew it probably shouldn’t. Who wanted him to want more, even when she could see clearly that he couldn’t give it.
That wanting is not pathetic. It is not a wound. It is not the thing you need to fix before you can date as the healed version of yourself.
This tenderness is all your power.
Everything that makes you magnetic — the way you make people feel seen, the way you remember and curate — lives in the same place. You cannot surgically remove the part that gets hurt and leave the rest intact.
It is one thing. You cut the nerve and you cut the feeling, all of it, in every direction.
The content will not help you with this. The reels, the podcasts, the videos of women explaining how they stopped giving so much and the ones priming men to get value from body counts — pay attention to who’s making them. Mostly single. Mostly influencing from the absence of any relationships. They have figured out how to want nothing, and they are very good at teaching you to want nothing, and if you follow their advice long enough you will get their life.
When you are unhappy in any area of life you want to be told that your problem can be fixed in the mind. You want to be told how to numb so you can stop suffering. You want to be given specific instructions on how to never feel hurt again.
But relationships are rather hurtful at times.
The most popular relational advice assumes you do not feel. It is primed to people who live in their head. If you haven’t silenced yourself in this very specific way, it will make you feel like the problem. Like you are too open, too permeable. Like you need to harden. Like caring is blind spot.
It isn’t. It is just rare now.
Wanting someone who can’t quite meet you, feeling something you don’t want to feel, ashamed that something small moved you — only means this:
You didn’t break yourself. You stayed open. The world is organized to reward closure. Closure gets you through the day. Closure gets you into the next bed. Closure lets you move on quickly when your marriage is still dead and swipe right again when you are single and not lie awake.
But closure is also what you’re left with.
A very quiet absence of something huge that used to be there.
The practice is not learning to want less. The practice is learning to hold what you feel without following it around.
You can notice attachment forming and not act on it. You can feel the pull toward someone who cannot meet you and stay exactly where you are. You can hear an unconscious story where you are dropped into someone’s past relationship or past sexual encounters and just be in ache of it. You can be incredible dissappointed and just sit in it.
You can let it move through you — the wanting, the tenderness, the small grief of not knowing what will come next — and come out the other side still yourself.
That is different from shutting it down.
That is different from performing detachment until you actually believe it. Feeling your feelings and letting them complete, which takes ninety seconds if you don’t resist them and a lifetime of leaking them out sideways if you do.
The goal is not to stop feeling. The goal is to feel without it controlling you.
You are not of this time. Wear that with pride. Also know most people aren’t, they are just pretending. It will catch up with them sooner or later.
Your sensitivity is not a malfunction.
It is the thing that will make you an extraordinary partner, parent and friend. It is the thing that makes you present with your children in a way that will matter to them for the rest of their lives. It is the thing that makes sex worth having instead of just a transaction you complete and move on from.
Carry it. Protect it. Be with the pain of it. Be with the joy of it. Stop letting it get fed by people who cannot meet it just because it is hungry.
But do not kill it.
You will want it later.
And the people who gave it away are already starting to feel the cost.
I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com
I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.