What Men Really Think About … Intimacy in Long-Term Relationships

There’s lots of different kinds of intimacy – emotional intimacy, sexual intimacy, spiritual intimacy. And it can be shared in many different relationship constellations – with friends, family, community, a faith, with lovers, strangers, through art, and in our interactions with the greater world.

Romantic relationships are distinguished from our other relationships by sexual intimacy. And yet this crucial ingredient can be particularly difficult to maintain, let alone grow. In this confronting forum, three special male guests explore why they can lose the spark that unites them with their beloved. Why at times they have stopped revealing their deepest truths to their one-time most trusted confidant. Why they have experienced resenting or rejecting the aspects of their partner that they first fell in love with. Why sometimes a third party has entered their sacred union. And how they have learnt to cultivate the sexual and emotional intimacy that help long term relationships thrive.

‘What Men Really Think About… Intimacy in Long-Term Relationships’ is part of an emotionally confronting yet humorous series looking at men in a society famous for male repression. Guests speak with stark honesty about issues most men usually never talk about – and especially not in public. Everything from love to the desire for status to purpose to parenting to porn to mental health to body image to death, and more. This kind of raw honesty turns on its head the notion of the closed-book Aussie bloke by unashamedly revealing what men really think and feel. The series investigates the costs and consequences of living by a silent code of self-censorship, why men don’t communicate their feelings, and what happens to them (and everyone around them) when they do.

To watch previous forums in the series, to read the stories of the panelists and to contribute your own story, visit www.whatmenreallythinkabout.com.