# Heroine's Heartache: Why marriage frustrates powerful, abundant women

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**Michele:** Real talk. Why is it, despite all your success, all your ambition, and all your personal growth, that feeling really satisfied in your relationship with your man feels like the one attainment? That's out of reach. I know you. You're strong, you're loving, you're wise, you're abundant, you're committed to your growth, and you've achieved so much already, but really deep intimacy, lasting passion, growing together, I can feel like you're banging into a plexiglass wall over and over and over.

Like, even if you're trying to do everything right, there's still something missing and it's subtle, but that's why I'm here to talk about it. This is the first episode in a limited podcast series where we dive deep into the dynamics of love, intimacy, and relationships for women like you. Women who are ambitious, successful, and rooted in your own [00:01:00] power, both outwardly in the world and inwardly in your own tenderness.

But you're listening to this episode on my regular podcast, sex, love power to get the rest of the episodes in this special series, please click the link in the show notes or go to our legacy, love. com slash elevate and get your own personal link. 

**Michele:** We'll be dropping episodes two or three times a week for the next month or so, and every episode's gonna focus on a specific facet of love and erotic life, and how women who have already mastered so much else Can now create the love and passion you truly long for. I'm having this conversation with you now because I know how frustrating it can be When you feel like you've got everything together except when it comes to your marriage or your intimate relationships with men Even if your relationship is close and strong and other people envy it You might sense that so much more is possible and the truth is you're not alone in this.

There are very real reasons why women are [00:02:00] disappointed or downright frustrated when it comes to love and intimacy. And today we're going to break it all down together. So let's make this our special time. Whether you're on a walk or you're driving to a meeting or you're grabbing a moment for yourself, I want you to really let this sink in.

Maybe this is the first time all day you've stopped producing, stopped making things happen, stopped fixing things for other people. This is your moment. Let's explore why love and desire feel so complicated and how to demystify them. Women have asked me variations on these questions. thousands of times over the last 27 years.

Why is it so hard for powerful, abundant women to have satisfying relationships with men? When I'm good at so many things and I have such great friendships and great other relationships, why is this so complicated? It feels like it shouldn't be this complicated, right? You've mastered your fitness, your career, your goals.

Many of my clients have [00:03:00] built empires, but love, real love, deep, satisfying love. Consistent turn on, the ability to keep going deeper together can feel like an unsolvable puzzle. Like when you finally turn to your beloved after a long day of being on for everyone else, do you find yourself wondering why satisfaction in this part of your life still feels so out of reach?

Maybe you think, I know how to figure anything out. Why does it feel like no matter what I do, I can't get really met, really supported? Deeply held so I can let go maybe it's that moment when you realize your partner didn't do anything for your birthday or your anniversary or Valentine's Day until the day of whether it's the grocery store flowers themselves or the cheesy card or Those are okay, but it's the metaphor that you're kind of an afterthought It hurts, right?

Or maybe it's the way he asks, Are we out of milk? Without even looking. Cause he knows you'll know. Or he's used to you figuring those things out. For [00:04:00] him, and for everyone else. And he doesn't understand why that's such an irritating question. And you can't even put your finger on it well enough to explain how exhausting it is to hold so much of the mental load.

Or maybe, it's the way sex seems not to happen. Or, it's only mildly pleasant when it does. When you know that really getting a good bodice ripping, sweaty, messy tumble is so good for your whole system, but you don't quite know how to get from where you are to there. Or, you're single or you're divorced and you want a lover, a partner, a deep friend.

But you despair that there's really a man out there who will actually make the challenges of dealing with a relationship into a worthwhile trade for the peace and simplicity of being single. There are so many layers potent, powerful, brilliant women wish for. So many fine details to what grates on you.

But in my experience, the reason that it's hard for the smartest, most ambitious women to get [00:05:00] deep satisfaction in our relationships? Boil down to five. First, we never learned how to do passion and love in these bodies with these pressures that we have today. You've likely believed that if you just applied the same drive and ambition to your relationships that you use to succeed in other areas of your life, it would all work out.

You might even have moments where you treat love like a problem to be solved, strategized. Maybe you try to fix things the same way you do in business. Like when you're making mental checklists during a conversation with your partner, or you're trying to keep the peace at dinner instead of talking about why you're upset.

Because you're pretty sure he won't get it and he's just gonna get defensive. So you don't bring it up. You've been trying to figure love out with the same energy that makes you successful in other places. But love doesn't operate on that same wavelength. And no one taught you how to do love and intimacy at the same level of success and power that you've mastered In other parts of your life, nobody gave you [00:06:00] the manual on how to balance the demands of being on, strategic, goal oriented, all day, and then also show up vulnerable and receptive when you're with your partner.

So you're left wondering why all the success in the world hasn't translated to satisfaction in love. And then physically, both you and your husband or your partner or your boyfriend or your lover are now years, if not decades older than when you learned how to be lovers, how to please someone else, how your own body works erotically.

Things have changed, understatement of the century, but we didn't get new manuals. We never got manuals in the first place, right? So we've been having sex in ways that used to work but maybe don't work that well now. Now the second reason that it feels so complicated to get the satisfaction we crave in love and sex, the masculine and feminine dynamics have gotten so confusing.

For years you might have believed that if you could just be more equal in your relationship, splitting roles, [00:07:00] responsibilities, and decision making evenly, that things would fall into place. Maybe you thought, if I do more, take on more, everything will balance out. Like when you're coordinating every detail of the household, you're managing the schedules, the meals, the bills, and expecting your partner to step in and help, but somehow it feels like the weight is still always on you, you're handling the mental load.

And here's what happens. Instead of that creating an egalitarian partnership where the two of you have great chemistry, Those blurred lines can really muddle your sense of safety, your turn on, and your ability to experience novelty in your relationship. Crucial for maintaining the spark. When we're unclear about these energies, it impacts everything.

You might feel like you've lost touch with your own femininity. Like you've been stuck in doing mode for so long that you can't relax into being mode. And without that, your relationship can start to feel more like a partnership of tasks than a passionate, intimate connection. Now, the [00:08:00] solution is not that you go back to some old traditional model where you operate in silos of masculine and feminine roles.

What I mean is that we have to get clear on masculine and feminine energy. Who's in yang and who's in yin at any given moment. And those don't have to correlate in any way with your genders, but they do have to be polarized for you to feel the real chemistry. Now, there's a third reason that this has gotten so complicated.

Let's be honest. You're busy. Ambitious women do not have time to sit around waiting for things to magically work themselves out. And yeah, you have high standards for yourself and for other people. You've likely told yourself again and again that if you could just do more, be better. If you could be more understanding, more accommodating, more perfect.

Then your relationship would finally click into place. If you're like me, you spent years trying to [00:09:00] be better, be more. And maybe you've been thinking about this during a meeting, checking off relationship to dos in the back of your mind, telling yourself that you're going to get around to figuring this all out after the next project, the next deadline.

Or things will turn around a little bit when you're on vacation and you both have a little less pressure. But you may be holding yourself to impossible standards, expecting yourself to be a high achiever in every area. As you do that, you're probably pushing yourself even harder in your relationship.

And maybe expecting the same from your partner. But that ambition and those standards that work really well in other places sometimes make it feel like there's no space for love. No room for the messiness of intimacy. It might feel like no one can really meet you and everybody's bound to disappoint you.

I know that feeling. And it's an awful, lonely feeling . You might even feel like you have to choose between your success and the deep connection that you desire. Like your [00:10:00] career. And your marriage are at odds or your career and finding a man are at odds. But the truth is, that is not a real trade off. You don't have to make that trade off.

The fourth reason that it's so hard to get satisfaction is that we aren't in our bodies. We aren't in our pleasure. You've probably believed your body is something you need to take care of so that you can keep performing. It's like a machine that needs regular maintenance. So you make sure that you eat well, and you schedule workouts, and make sure you get enough sleep.

And sometimes you don't. One of those, or two, or three, you fall apart. But. When you're on your game, this is your self care. But how often do you actually feel abundant pleasure in your body? Not just checking off the boxes to stay healthy, but really feeling alive and sensual and connected. Not just with someone else touching you, but inside your own everyday existence, outside your sex life with another person.

You might be so used to running on [00:11:00] adrenaline all day that when you finally slow down, Your mind is still racing. Do you crawl into bed at night exhausted? But rather than feeling connected to your partner, are you already thinking about tomorrow's schedule? The reality is for many of my powerful clients, powerful women like you, it's easy to live in your mind, in your to do list.

But love? Real, satisfying, deep love happens in our bodies. It's physical. It's sensual. And when we're disconnected from our bodies, it's nearly impossible to open ourselves up to the kind of love and pleasure we want. And this is why we have such an epidemic of women saying, My libido is missing. It disappears when we live in our heads rather than in our bodies.

And I want to share with you the last piece of the puzzle, the fifth reason that this gets so complicated in love and sex for women who are so great at figuring everything else out. We don't really know how to ask for what we truly want. You might be telling yourself that asking for what you need feels weak.

It might feel dangerous, [00:12:00] even holding it together for so long, being the one who knows, the one who does. You probably spent dinner smiling through your frustration thinking, okay, I'll just handle this myself. And because you've been doing that for so long, the idea of asking for more, of rocking the boat can feel really risky.

I feel like a foregone conclusion that you're going to be disappointed. Maybe you've told yourself, if I ask, I'll sound needy, or if I ask, it's like admitting that I'm not handling it. But when you do ask, letting what you receive in, letting it land, can feel foreign, like you don't really know how to truly accept it.

I used to say, this is really stretching my receiving muscles when I was trying to learn how to let other people Do things for me. Care for me. Say the things I really wanted said. Give to me erotically. When things don't go as planned, when your partner doesn't respond the way you wanted, when your request isn't granted, or somebody says they'll do it and then they don't, it can feel easier to [00:13:00] just pull back and take care of yourself.

You've been so busy holding everything together, keeping the peace, that not asking or not letting yourself hope. can feel safer. But the truth is, asking for what you need, letting it in if it comes, and soothing yourself when it doesn't or when you're uncomfortable because it is. Those things are key to opening the door to the deep, satisfying relationship you really crave.

Those are the five biggest baseline reasons I see that underlie powerful women's frustrations in love. Once we address those, I find that a woman has far more capacity to get through to a partner who, for instance, is oblivious to the mental load she carries, or who assumes she'll do most of the emotional labor in their relationship, or who's not showing up in bed in a way that's really a turn on for her.

But before she can invite him into a higher level of accountability and maturity on those pieces, in my experience and my clients, A woman has to integrate the [00:14:00] insights I've just outlined. When you do that first, then you can be ambitious, focused, organized, and goal oriented just like you are, but you can relate at eye level with your partner and receive as much as you give, including making those requests with grace and resilience rather than handling everything or treating your partner like an incompetent minion or resenting the ways he doesn't show up.

Or is negligent you can also cherish and be intimate with the body and mind and emotions that you have today in this hormonal chapter in this spiritual chapter With the contours and the curves and the wrinkles and the folds that you have right now Not trying to crowbar yourself into some other visual image or some erotic response Like you used to quote unquote you can integrate your masculine and feminine power So that you don't have to check any part of yourself at the door you can be as amazing [00:15:00] as you are in all the powerful dynamic ways and you can be soft and Receptive and need and receive you can find the standards that bring you peace and that bring you partnership And that others can be accountable for so that you're not holding everything.

When you integrate these five areas, you can be in touch with your body, your breath, and your sensations all day long. You can ride the ebbs and flows of your energy and your pleasure so that your body's wisdom and guidance are tools, resources for you, not something you have to hold at arm's length. and you're not wrung out at the end of the day.

It allows you to keep pleasure closer to the surface so that crossing from where you are to being in the mood isn't such an epic and daunting voyage. And it lets you be as good at receiving as you are at serving and giving and thinking and leading and doing it yourself and going without. And that is when the woman I work with, look around them and see that the man or the men in their [00:16:00] lives are all actually eager and delighted to please them to listen to precisely what they would like and to work hard to both get things done and to go deep emotionally and erotically.

It is the deepest privilege for me to watch that happen. So now you might be asking, what can I do about these five sources of my frustration? How do I start shifting those dynamics, bringing more love and more intimacy and more satisfaction into my relationships with men? Well, that's what we're going to dig into in the next episode, because you deserve to have it all, to be brilliant, to fully express your creativity and your power in your life, and to receive and exchange love that lights you up, that fuels you for all your other endeavors.

I have created that in my own life from a pretty miserable state starting out. And there is nothing I'm more challenged by or more proud to be doing one day at a time than cultivating that kind of partnership. That's [00:17:00] far from perfect and there's no finish line, but it is an exquisite spiritual path and I have moments every day of deep gratitude.

I cannot wait to show you more of that in the next episode. 

Now, you've been listening to this episode on my regular podcast, Sex, Love, Power, but I have a special series of episodes that I've recorded as a private podcast just for ambitious make it happen women who are really interested in taking their relationships to the next level, whether they're frustrating right now or lukewarm, pretty good all the way to great.

We can help you get the love and sex you really want. So to get the rest of those episodes, please click on the link in the show notes or go to our legacy love. com slash elevate and get your private podcast link right now.

**Michele:** Let's make sure we continue this conversation. Take me with you on your walk or your drive or while you're exercising or doing dishes and if something I've said today hit home If you're feeling that tug of recognition [00:18:00] Then this podcast series is for you Stick with me as we dive even deeper into these topics in the next few episodes in the next episode We'll be talking about how to reconnect with your receptive power.

You are not too masculine to be loved You are not too bossy your drive and your ambitions are gifts your relationship And you were built to receive. It's just that you've gotten some mixed up messages about the implications of receiving. So I'm going to break down for you how you can feel both strong and soft and how you can both have high standards.

And be deeply satisfied with exactly what you receive. Trust me, you aren't going to want to miss this one. So until next time, remember, your ambition and your competence are part of what's lovable about you. But they don't have to mean that you're always on, or that you're always the one in charge. You get to receive, you get to be soft, you get to be held in the ways that you yearn to.

Over the coming episodes, I'll show you lots more about how [00:19:00] strong, super smart women just like you can be. Do that. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss out on any episodes and please share this series with your friends who you know are frustrated with the same challenges. We can rise together, beautiful ones, and if you're feeling curious right now or called to take this deeper, you can head to my Instagram bio to find more resources.

I'll see you in the next episode and until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around you.