"I can't live like this anymore! He doesn’t talk to me. He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t see me!" Sasha cries, wiping her nose with a tissue. Simon looks away; he's heard this a million times. I decide to lubricate the moment with some playfulness to help Simon see his role in this dance.

"What do you think, Simon? Are you really emotionally challenged?" Sasha laughs awkwardly, not expecting me to put it that way.

"Yeah…actually, no…I do have feelings; I just don’t share them."

I'm not surprised, but Sasha is caught off guard.

"Then why don’t you share them?" I ask, inviting him to take up more space in the room.

"He doesn’t share because he’s not connected to his feelings. He never learned how to communicate," Sasha bursts out.

"Thank you, Simon 🙂!" I say to Sasha with a smile, signaling that I want to hear from him directly.

I see this often in the clinic: One partner (often the female in heterosexual relationships) pulls her partner into therapy because she’s tired of feeling alone without intimacy. Like Sasha, the partner feels “lonely at the top” with superior emotional intelligence compared to her emotionally “limited” partner. I playfully call that supposedly “superior” partner "The Intimacy Queen" (or King), while the less verbal partner I call, with a wink and humor, "the Emotionally Challenged Partner."

This is a common, unspoken, almost normative, hierarchical dynamic that damages relationships. After all, the cliche of an emotionally stunted man is just not sexy, and a critical........

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