When the Body Speaks and No One Listens

Love falters not from absence, but from silence

The Symptom

We do not fall out of love. We fall out of sync.

We confuse a soft cock with a dying flame, a dry touch with disinterest, a fading pulse with fading devotion. But love and sex are not fixed states. They are stochastic processes—sensitive to initial conditions, dynamic with time, subject to everything from hormone levels to shame, from last night’s dream to this morning’s silence.

And yet, in this modern world that flaunts sex but censors intimacy, we still refuse to talk honestly about our bodies.

This is the dysfunction. Not the penis that doesn’t rise. Not the clit that doesn’t spark. Not the rhythm that falters. The dysfunction is in our refusal to speak. Our refusal to entangle fully.

What We Know

We have been aware of how this works for a while now. Clay tablets from he 17th century BCE Babylon record cries of heartbreak.[^1] Ancient Hebrew psalms speak of hearts broken by rejection.[^2] Heartbreak is not a metaphor. It is a physiological event. There is now a diagnosis for it: Takotsubo cardiomyopathy.[^3]

Our ancestors named it. Our science proved it. And we do not only pretend that sex and love are binary switches, we teach that to our children. This is not an article about involuntary celibacy, but the topic appears to be related.

What Can Happen

We make love with people we adore. But some nights, our desire is dulled. Not because we love them less, but because our systems are nonlinear.

We are affected by our medications, moods, guts, and trauma (mental and physical). And then we (and our partner) make assumptions about our morning erections and lack of erections. Our bodies send strange signals to our brains that we do not have the words to express. And, society has told us that the words are too obscene to be used. So we fail to say:

  • “I want to be touched but I don’t want to fuck.”
  • “My balls ache for you, but my head is elsewhere.”
  • “My clit is numb but my heart is screaming.”
  • “My cock is quiet but my love is loud.”

Instead, we go silent. And in that silence, the most critical signal can be lost. We still love each other.

Our Great Thinkers Knew This

In Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, the protagonist is a man who masturbates furiously, jokes compulsively, but cannot speak openly to his lovers.[^4] He is isolated, not by lack of passion, but by inarticulate shame. In The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall gives us a love story doomed not by betrayal, but by society’s denial of the lovers’ ability to speak their truth.[^5] Even the pioneering sex researchers Masters and Johnson, in the 1970s, found that the key to healing sexual dysfunction was not pills or technique. It was touch and talk.[^6]

They developed a system where partners learned to narrate sensation, to ask gently, to give permission, to say what felt good and what didn’t. They restored language to the bedroom, not to narrate a performance, but to allow the system to recalibrate.

What Do We Need

We don’t need more sex. Yes, I know, that is easy to say, and coming from me, hard to believe. However, this does not make it false. We need more signal. We need to make it acceptable to say:

  • “This is where I feel it.”
  • “This is where it went numb.”
  • “This is what I need.”

And yes, sometimes that means naming the parts that still make us blush. Cocks. Clits. Balls. Asshole. Piss hole. Etc. This isn’t vulgarity. It’s vocabulary. When we use less accurate and precise words, how can we expect to be understood in a way that will resolve anything?

We are not broken for softening. We are broken for pretending we don’t. Let us speak.

Written for The Quantum Weave

Where metaphor becomes memory, and memory becomes message.

[^1]: Al-Rashid, Nada. “Heartbreak in Ancient Mesopotamia.” ANEToday, March 2023. https://www.asor.org/anetoday/2023/03/heartbreak-ancient-mesopotamia

[^2]: Psalm 69:20 (Hebrew Bible)

[^3]: Mayo Clinic. “Broken Heart Syndrome (Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy).” https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/broken-heart-syndrome/

[^4]: Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. Random House, 1969.

[^5]: Hall, Radclyffe. The Well of Loneliness. Jonathan Cape, 1928.

[^6]: Masters, William H., and Virginia E. Johnson. Human Sexual Inadequacy. Little, Brown and Company, 1970.