If you’ve been following this blog so far you know I spend a lot of time pointing out issues that get in the way of you freely experiencing romantic love in your life. And it is fair to say that I focus a lot on you girls and the things you do that mess things up in your dating and relationships.

Believe me girls this isn’t because I think all the issues stem from you. I know we guys are major culprits too!

The reason I focus a bit more on you though is because usually you think you have the market on what makes relationships work, because of your more emotional nurturing natures.

You think guys just don’t “get it” and you need to educate them.

Emotional connection is definitely you girls’ strong suit but it can also be your weakness when you don’t balance it out with some healthy understanding of what makes guys tick.

So I work you over a bit it’s true!

But today I want to talk to the guys about what I think is your number one problem standing in the way of having a happy love life.

This of course assumes you want one.

If you just want me to tell you how to get to sex with girls I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.

Well, I could help you with that but I don’t want to!

I’m all about enjoying a rich love life that includes sex because I believe sex is an important component of real romantic love. But if sex is all you want you’ll have to seek help from someone else.

I know what you’re thinking. Here he goes again with that whole “most guys are naturally sexually addicted” thing.

Nope. That’s not what I want to talk about today.

What I want to talk about is something much deeper and more impactive than your natural proclivity for being sexual.

I get it that girls start to tire of you guys being so sex focused. But that would be much less of an issue for them if you could just get a handle on what I’m focusing on today.

In fact, while I wrote a pretty extensive expose of my own past sexual addiction and the way it made me a sexual avoider, even for myself the real issue was not sex addiction. That was just a symptom of what I’m going to share with you now.

I want to talk to you about the number one relationship problem you struggle with if you’re like most guys in our culture. I hear about it in one way or another from almost every guy I talk to, as they express themselves regarding their dating and relationships.

This problem is almost universal, so it is worth paying attention here.

To show you what I mean let me share a bit more of my personal history…

When I first met the girl I ended up marrying, it was a whirl wind romance. We did the whole “fall in love” thing with all the feelings and seduction and sweep her off her feet experience. Engaged in 8 weeks and married in 6 months, she was convinced she had met “the one!” I knew I had met someone I could make a long term go of it with!

I was in love with her and everything was going to be “happily ever after.” Okay in a non-sappy “guy way” of putting it.

But you know what I mean. I was into this girl!

Despite all that, almost to the day we married my feelings for her completely disappeared.

Vanished…cuputz…nada!

I spent the rest of my married life wondering what had happened to me and how I could recover those feelings.

I remember one day early on in our marriage she came up to me wanting to do something together and I literally said to her “Can’t you find something else to do with yourself?”

Ouch!

Sadly she did find other things to do with herself. When the children came along she got into them. And she got into gardening. And found bunch of other ways to live her life without me, even though we cohabited the same house and slept in the same bed.

And of course neglecting my wife included the whole sexual avoidance pattern I spoke about here, which led to my wife dragging us out to a sex therapist half way through our marriage, hoping for a solution.

Sadly the sex therapist didn’t have the insight to realize my sexual addiction was only a symptom, and her proposed solution the exact opposite of what was really needed.

Life dragged on. I could not figure out how to become emotionally connected again. In the fall of 2010 things finally came to a head.

We were long distance landlords having moved to British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley from Alberta, right before the downturn of 2008. We always put tenants in for a one year lease running from June to July, so we would not have to re-rent in the winter time.

Right at the end of October 2010 I received an email from our tenants telling us they were breaking their lease. So unexpectedly I had to drive to Alberta and camp in our empty former home there for four months, until I finally found tenants again!

This all put significant financial pressure on our marriage and accentuated the long standing issues that were brewing. We flew me home at Christmas time and through a series of conversations, my wife revealed that she was considering leaving me.

Naturally I was devastated. I was angry. I was hurt. I felt betrayed.

But this experience became the two-by-four to the head moment that shook me to my core and sent me back to Alberta to my empty house and internet connection, to try to “surf myself” and figure out what had gone wrong with me.

And figure myself out I did.

I began to learn about love avoidance and why lots and lots of us guys don’t know how to connect with the girls in our lives.

I learned I had a fear of intimacy. A fear of becoming close and opening myself up and being vulnerable. If you are a typical guy this is your problem too. And it’s a big problem. It is the problem that is ruining your relationships.

How do you know you’ve got this problem?

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Do you get all excited about a girl and really into her until you’ve had sex with her, then your feelings for her fade?
2. Do you find yourself really drawn to a girl but as soon as you’re moving to a more “committed” mode you want to run?
3. When a girl expresses her affection for you do you bite your tongue and not say anything in return, even though you feel things too?
4. When a girl “gets too close” does she seem clingy and make you want to avoid spending time with her?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’re probably a love avoidant like I was.

You’re afraid of intimacy.

I’ll write in the future about where love avoidance comes from, the likely path by which you naturally came to be in this state, and what you can do to start overcoming it.

You can overcome it. I’d love to help you do that. Buy me a coffee and let’s talk!

So what do you say guys? Have any experiences you’d like to share about this whole fear of intimacy and not letting a girl get close thing?