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I’ve had a few reels go viral over the last several months, and every time it happens, the comments fill up with the same story told by hundreds of different men.

“She was different before we got married. She couldn’t keep her hands off me. She was the one pushing the line. She was the one who wanted to be alone together. And then we got married and it stopped. Now I’m the problem. Now I’m the pervert for wanting my own wife. I got bait and switched.”

Some of these comments are angry. Some of them are heartbroken. A lot of them are both. And under almost every one of them is a man who believes his wife sold him something she never intended to deliver.

I want to take that seriously today, because I think it gets dismissed a lot. And then I want to turn it around, because women say the exact same thing from the other direction, and they say it to me on Zoom calls every single week.

“He used to ask me questions. He wanted to know what I thought about things. He’d ask about my job, my family, what I wanted my life to look like. And now the only time he comes looking for me is when he wants sex. I married a man who was interested in me and I ended up with a man who is only interested in my body.”

Two people. Same marriage. Both convinced they were handed something different than what they signed up for.

What Naomi and Emmett Brought Me

Naomi and Emmett came to me about four years into their marriage, and they had already had this fight probably two hundred times.

Emmett’s version: they dated for a year and a half, they were both committed to the Law of Chastity, and holding that line was genuinely hard for both of them. Naomi was the one who initiated most of the making out. She was the one who said things like “We have to stop” while not stopping. He remembers a specific night in his car outside her apartment where she said, out loud, “I cannot wait to marry you so we can finally do this.” He has held onto that sentence for four years.

They got married. And by month eight, he was hearing “no” more than he was hearing “yes.” By year two, he had stopped asking most of the time because he could not stand the way she’d stiffen up when he touched her shoulder. By year four, she had told him, in the middle of an argument, “You only see me as a body.”

Naomi’s version: she felt wanted before they got married. Emmett used to plan things. He’d ask her what she was reading. He drove two hours once to sit in a hospital waiting room with her while her grandma was in surgery, and they talked for four hours straight about her family. She said, “That was the moment I knew.”

And then they got married and she felt like the wife slot got filled and the interest stopped. She said, “He asks what I want in bed but he doesn’t ask about anything else that’s going on for me.”

Both of them were sitting there believing they got the bait and switch. Both of them were partly right.

They Were Both Telling the Truth Before the Wedding

Nobody ran a con here.

Naomi meant it in the car. She wanted him. She wanted to be married to him and she wanted sex with him, and she was not just trying to lock him down. Emmett meant it in the hospital waiting room. He wanted to know her. He was not asking about her grandmother as a down payment.

We assume that if something was true then and it isn’t true now, somebody must have been lying then. That’s the part that keeps couples stuck for years. Because if you decide your spouse was lying, there’s no work to do. There’s only someone to blame.

Behavior is always driven by what we’re feeling, and what we’re feeling comes from what we’re thinking. What we think about something is the meaning we’ve given it. And meanings change. We are meaning makers, all of us, constantly, mostly without noticing that we’re doing it. The same act can mean one thing on a Tuesday in 2021 and something completely different on a Tuesday in 2026, and nothing about the act itself has to change for that to happen.

So the useful question is not “Were you lying to me?” The useful question is “What does this mean to you now, and when did that change?”

What Sex Meant to Naomi Before, and What It Means Now

Before Naomi and Emmett got married, sex was forbidden.

Forbidden drives desire. Wanting something you’re not allowed to have is one of the most reliable ways to keep wanting it.

Some of you are listening to this and thinking it doesn’t apply to you, because you were having sex before you got married. And a lot of you saw the same drop-off after the wedding, which tells me forbidden was never the whole story.

Forbidden is one very loud way of making sex optional. Nobody can be owed a thing that isn’t allowed. Sex was optional for the couple who was already having it too. Every time was still a choice, nobody had a standing claim on anybody.

Marriage is where sex stops being optional, and that happens whether you waited or you didn’t. It goes from something given to something expected.

Naomi had something else working for her during those months. Look at what she and Emmett were actually doing. They were kissing for an hour in a car. That’s it. There were no other expectations attached to it.

Emily Nagoski writes about spontaneous desire and responsive desire in Come As You Are. Spontaneous desire shows up in anticipation of pleasure. Responsive desire shows up in response to pleasure, after arousal has already started. Neither is better and neither is broken, and a lot of women experience desire primarily the second way.

That’s what dating gave Naomi. An hour of buildup. That is close to a perfect setup for responsive desire. Of course she wanted him. She was getting exactly the conditions her body needed.

Then they got married, and in one afternoon sex went from forbidden to expected.

Expectations kill desire.

The buildup, the very thing that got her so turned on and wanting him so much, got shorter too, because now you can get to the destination.

Same woman. Same husband. Completely different meaning.

Before: sex is the thing I can’t have, I want it, and my wanting it is proof I love him.

After: sex is the thing I’m supposed to provide, I might not be getting what I need to get to the destination, and how much I want it is now evidence about what kind of wife I am.

That will shut a person down. It shuts down anyone. The moment something becomes a measurement of your worth, your body starts protecting you from it.

And Naomi had ten years of training sitting underneath all of that.

The Part Nobody Warns Them About

Naomi spent about a decade being told that her body was a thing that men wanted and she was the one responsible for what happened with that. I did a five part series on this back in July, Episodes 428 through 432, so I’m not going to lay the whole thing out again here.

What matters for today is what it left her with, and it isn’t what you’d think. The training was never aimed at her wanting him. She could want him all she liked, as long as she was the one who stopped it. And for a year and a half she stopped it every single time. That was the job and she was good at it.

Then they got married and there was nothing left to stop. So when Emmett reaches over in bed, some part of her is still braced for the moment she’s supposed to say no, and that moment never comes.

Naomi hated that about herself. She wasn’t sitting there deciding to feel that. It was happening to her.

And I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this that goes further than that, and it’s real. Sometimes a wife does start treating her husband’s wanting with contempt. Sometimes she rolls her eyes. Sometimes she says things like “Is that all you think about?” or “You’re disgusting” or makes a joke about it in front of other people. Sometimes she uses his desire as evidence that he is spiritually lesser than she is.

That’s not a nervous system doing its job. That’s a choice about how to treat someone, and it’s the person making it who has to own it and change it. Understanding where the flinch comes from explains the flinch. It doesn’t excuse cruelty on top of it.

Why It Looks Like He Only Cares About Sex

Naomi had a version of the bait and switch too, and hers was not made up.

Emmett really did stop asking her about her life. He stopped planning things. He stopped driving two hours to sit somewhere boring with her. And by year three, if he came looking for her, it was for one reason, and she could tell the difference from across the room.

But I want to give you a few reasons why it looks like a man only cares about sex when he probably doesn’t.

1. Before marriage, sex was off the table, so all of that wanting had to go somewhere else. It went into conversation. It went into questions and dates and long drives. It wasn’t that he was more interested in her inner life back then. He was interested in her, and the only door that was open was that one. Once another door opens, some of that traffic moves.
2. For a lot of men, sex is where they feel emotionally safe. It’s where they feel wanted, accepted, and known, and often it’s the only place in their life where they feel any of those things. Esther Perel describes sex as “the language through which men have license to ask for love,” along with tenderness and affection, and says it is often the only opening a man has to any of it. So when he reaches for her, he may be reaching for connection in the only language he’s fluent in. She hears “He wants my body.” He’s asking whether he still gets to be close to her.

I think they are both after the same thing and taking different roads to get there. She feels close to him first, and then she wants sex. He has sex, and then he feels close. Neither road is wrong, and neither one of them recognizes the other’s as an attempt at the same thing.

3. Nobody told him the dating part continues. And when I say dating, I don’t only mean taking her out. I mean doing the work of knowing who she is, which is a moving target, because she is not the same person she was at 23, and he isn’t either. He had a script for courtship and he followed it well. Nobody handed him a script for year four. So he stops doing the things that worked, not out of laziness exactly, but because he thinks that phase concluded successfully.
4. Rejection changes what a man is willing to ask for. After enough no’s, a lot of men stop making any bid at all. He stops asking about her day, because a small rejection on a small bid hurts more than it should when you’re already keeping score in the back of your mind. What he can’t quite stop asking for is sex, so that becomes the only bid still visible. The ratio shifts, and from the outside it looks like sex is the only thing he wants. It’s the only thing he’s still willing to risk asking for.

Over time, she wants more tenderness and gets less of it. He didn’t stop wanting closeness. He stopped reaching for it in the form of tenderness, right around the time she started wanting it most. Once every hand on her back is read as a question about sex, there’s no such thing as a hand on her back anymore. He can’t give her affection that isn’t an ask, because she can’t receive it as anything else. So he quits offering.

So he’s asking for the thing she has the hardest time giving, and she’s asking for the thing he stopped offering, and they both experience the other one as having changed the deal.

Esther Perel says something about this that I come back to constantly. The wife here is not less interested in sex. She is less interested in the sex she can actually have. And the husband is chasing connection through sex with a partner who isn’t interested in it.

That first part changes everything. She isn’t uninterested in sex. She’s uninterested in the sex that’s available to her. What’s available is eleven at night, no buildup, an expectation sitting on top of it, with a man who hasn’t asked her a real question in three years. She turns that down, and everybody reads it as turning down sex. Those are not the same thing.

Both of them are reaching. Neither one of them is getting anywhere.

Delaney and Trent were living in exactly that.

Delaney and Trent

Delaney told me, “He proposed to a person and married a body.”

She and Trent had been married about six years. Two kids. She said, “He can tell you the exact night I’m most likely to say yes, and he can’t tell you the name of the woman I’ve been having a hard time with at church for eight months.”

Trent’s side of that was harder for him to say out loud. He told me, “Every time I ask about her day I get two sentences, and then she’s back to the kids.” He’d decided she didn’t want to talk to him. So he quit trying, and then the only initiating he did was in bed, where at least there was a chance.

She read his silence as disinterest. He read her short answers as dismissal. And they had been running that loop for years without either one of them saying it out loud once.

That’s what I mean when I say this is always co-created. Not equally, not in the same ways, and not with the same intent. But there is no version of a marriage where one person builds the entire dynamic alone.

What Each of Them Was Actually Contributing

Naomi and Emmett were each building their half of this too. Emmett was contributing more than he thought.

He had made every single touch a question. Naomi couldn’t get a hand on her back without doing math about where it was going. He would go quiet and cold for two days after a no, so she learned that saying no cost her the whole rest of the week. He kept a count in his head and she knew he kept a count in his head. And he had stopped being curious about her, which meant the woman he wanted to have sex with was somebody he’d stopped getting to know four years ago. The questions he used to ask had a job. He was deciding whether to marry her. Once he had his answer, the questions had nothing left to do, and it never occurred to him to give them a new one.

Naomi was contributing too.

She had let “I’m tired” stand in for about nine different real answers, because the real answers were harder to say. She said no and then offered nothing else, no other time, no other kind of closeness, nothing that told him this was about the moment and not about him. She’d let a little contempt leak in, small comments, a tone. And she had never once told him what was actually happening in her body when he reached for her, because she assumed he’d hear it as an accusation.

Both of them were doing something. Both of them could do something different. And each of them can only actually change their own half of it, which is either the discouraging part or the freeing part depending on the day.

Curiosity Is the Whole Assignment

I asked Emmett to stop trying to figure out whether Naomi had deceived him and start trying to figure out what sex means to her now.

Not what it should mean. Not what he wishes it meant. What it actually means to her, today, in her body.

He didn’t want to do it. He wanted me to say that she’d changed and it was on her to change back. I told him, “Judgment and curiosity can’t both be in the room, and you’re going to have to pick.” He’d been trying it the other way and it had gotten him exactly nowhere.

So here are the questions I gave them. These are not gotcha questions and they don’t get asked in bed.

1. What did sex mean to you before we got married?
2. What does it mean to you now?
3. When do you think that changed? Was there a moment, or did it happen slowly?
4. What do you think I’m asking for when I reach for you?
5. What are you afraid it means about you if you say yes? What are you afraid it means if you say no?
6. What did you think marriage was going to give you that it hasn’t given you?

That last one made both of them cry, separately, on different days.

Emmett found out that Naomi had never once in four years experienced his touch as a compliment. Not once. Every time, it landed as a test. He had spent the whole marriage thinking he was telling her she was wanted, and what she heard was something she owed him.

Naomi found out that Emmett had never lost interest in who she was. He thought that part was finished. He had asked his questions, gotten his answer, and married her, and he thought that was the whole of it. She had spent years reading his silence as proof he didn’t care. He had spent them reading her no as proof she didn’t want him.

Neither of those was true. Both of those were completely reasonable conclusions to draw from the available evidence. That’s what happens when two people stop asking and start deciding.

What They Did Next

Emmett started asking Naomi questions again, and it was awkward for about three weeks. He said, “This feels fake.” I told him, “It’s going to feel fake. Feeling fake isn’t the same as being fake.” He was out of practice at something he used to be good at.

He also stopped making a touch on her shoulder mean anything. That took him longer. It took him actually deciding that a hand on her back could be a hand on her back and nothing else, and then holding to that even when she didn’t respond the way he hoped.

Naomi started telling him the real answer instead of “I’m tired.” Sometimes the real answer was “I want to and my body isn’t there yet.” Sometimes it was “I’m carrying something from today and I need twenty minutes.” Sometimes it was “I don’t want to tonight and it has nothing to do with you and I want you to know that.” That third one changed more than anything else, because it took the blame out of the no.

She also started looking at what she’d been taught for a decade, and asking whether she still believed it. Not all of it went away. Some of it is still there. But she can catch it now, which gives her a choice she didn’t have before.

They’re not finished. A lot of this was in place before they ever met, and it doesn’t unwind in six weeks. But they stopped being two people who got tricked and started being two people trying to figure out what happened, and that turns out to be a completely different marriage.

What I’d Ask You to Consider

If you’re sitting there certain your spouse pulled a bait and switch, I’d ask you to consider that they were telling the truth then and they’re telling the truth now, and that something in between changed the meaning without changing the facts.

And then I’d ask you what part you played in that. Not because it’s your fault. Because your part is the only part you can actually reach.

Nobody deceived anybody here. Two people made promises they meant, the meanings moved underneath them, and neither one noticed it happening. What’s left is a marriage where two people stopped asking each other real questions a long time ago and started answering those questions for each other instead.

So you get to choose. You can keep deciding what your spouse meant, or you can ask them. Only one of those has ever changed anything.

God gave us sexuality on purpose, and I believe it was meant to be one of the great connecting forces in a marriage. Getting curious about what it means to the person you married is how you start getting that back.