Grouchy Guy: Monogamy
GROUCHY GUY: MONOGAMY
BLOGGER: LAWRENCE JOSEPHS, PHD
Why are grouchy guys so grouchy? Why do they make mountains out of molehills and pick fights about stupid little things? What do they have to be so angry about when more often than not their girlfriends and wives bend over backwards to please them and make their lives comfortable? Is it simply that they don’t like their jobs and come home to take their work frustrations out on their wives or children? That’s part of it but there is often a deeper reason, one that grouchy guys don’t like admitting to their partners because it is offensive to women. Often times they don’t even like to admit it to themselves because they feel guilty about feeling this way.
To put it bluntly, grouchy guys resent relinquishing their sexual freedom for the sake of long-term monogamous relationships, even with women they truly love. In a nutshell, men in committed relationships become grouchy because it frustrates their pressing desires for casual sex without strings attached with an endless variety of young, beautiful, and sexually indulgent women. Though most men don’t get close to gratifying this sexual fantasy when they are single, once they are in a committed relationship they begin to privately blame their girlfriends and wives for preventing them from making their dreams of playboy paradise come true.
Men don’t like to admit this fact to women or even to themselves. First, men know it’s an unrealistic fantasy and that they weren’t really such studs when they were single. They are ashamed of this fact because at some primal level men believe that if a man is not a first rate stud he is a first rate loser. Getting married then seems like settling for second best, an admission of defeat that they couldn’t cut the mustard as a first class seducer of women. Second, men feel guilty about their womanizing ambitions. Men appreciate that thinking about women as sex objects to be loved and left to boost the male ego hurts women’s feelings even when men don’t have any real intentions of being unfaithful. Men fully understand that any self-respecting woman wants to think that she is well worth the price of monogamy and that it wounds a woman’s self-esteem to realize that her grouchy guy resents having to be faithful to her as though marital fidelity is some huge, almost unbearable sacrifice.
Being in a long-term monogamous relationship means giving up casual sex with other women in exchange for enduring love and affection from a woman with whom you might hope to raise a family. In other words, being monogamous requires men to endure a certain type of sexual frustration that men find difficult to endure. Men in general are much more interested in casual sex than are women. In comparison to women, men want to have more sexual partners in a lifetime, want to have more sexual variety, have more sexual fantasies about having sex with someone other than their current partner, utilize more pornography, utilize more prostitution, want to have sex earlier in a relationship, have more willingness to have sex with strangers, are more predisposed to have extra-marital affairs, and are more predisposed to have extra-marital affairs in search of casual sex as opposed to a finding a serious lover. Curiously, though girls usually reach puberty several years earlier than boys do, the average boy has his first orgasm at age 13 while the average girl has her first orgasm at age 15. And if boys don’t masturbate they start having wet dreams to relieve themselves. In contrast, some women can go years if not decades without ever having their first orgasm and without ever having one in their sleep. Many men just seem to be driven by their sexual desires in a way that many women aren’t and men’s sexual desires often have a more impersonal and insistent quality than do women’s.
This sexual difference can be an underlying source of perpetual conflict in long-term relationships and is often a touchy issue that is difficult to discuss without being defensive. Ultimately, men have to learn how to deal with the sexual frustrations of monogamy without dumping their frustrations on their girlfriends and wives. To some extent women help men do that not by learning new sexual techniques, not by giving them quickies every time they want to be sexually serviced, not by getting breast implants, and certainly not by looking the other way while they cheat. You can help him become less grouchy by not taking his grouchiness so personally, making fun of him when he is acting like a jerk, and setting firm limits on his surly behavior when it goes over the top. Your grouchy guy has to learn how to get over himself and you can help him do that by helping him not take his fragile male ego so seriously.
WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS?
To find out more about Dr. Josephs, click here to read his bio.
