There is a question everyone avoids, even though everyone is affected by it: why relationships are so bad today in the Western world. Why there are so many divorces, why not enough children are being born, and why closeness, sex, and intimacy have become exhausting, postponed, overly complicated things for so many people.

This cannot be traced back to a single cause. It is the result of a long process in which roles, expectations, and instincts have drifted apart. On one side, there is the transformation of the female role. Excessive emancipation brought freedom, but it also created a mode of operation that, in many cases, pushed femininity toward a performance-based, controlling direction. The idea of “self-realization” often did not lead to fulfillment, but to a constant state of readiness. Project thinking. Expectations. Rule systems.

In this kind of functioning, closeness is no longer instinctive but conditional. Tied to timing, mood, proper communication. Not because women are cold or unkind, but because the role they live in leaves little room for spontaneity. Desire, however, does not function well inside rule systems. It does not like being managed.

There is a reason a young man once summed up sex in a single sentence: it is too much hassle. When something becomes too much hassle, it eventually disappears. Not because of prohibition or anger, but because of exhaustion.

On the other side stands male uncertainty. Feminization does not mean men have become more sensitive. It means they have lost confidence in instinctive initiation. They fear rejection, ridicule, making the wrong move. So they avoid risk. They wait. They withdraw. Desire is replaced by compliance, instinct by self-control.

This is how two people end up next to each other who, when single, wanted everything for themselves: freedom, equality, self-fulfillment. As a couple, however, they do not know what to do with each other. The relationship turns into a negotiation process. A task list. A constant probing of whether something is allowed. A collection of compromises.

The shared mistake is simpler than we think. The lack of self-surrender. Not in big things, but in small ones. A remote control can only be in one hand at a time. A car can only be driven by one person. Two people cannot steer at once, yet this is exactly what they try to do. Both want control, while closeness works precisely because sometimes someone lets go, even in important matters.

This is not an indictment. It is not against women, and not against men. It is a description of a state. A civilizational fatigue in which everything is conscious, everything is reflected upon, everything is discussed, while instinct has been pushed into the background and, over time, almost turned into a taboo.

The solution is not revolutionary. It is more of a pause, a step back. Stopping for a moment. Stepping out of ongoing projects. Letting go of roles, at least temporarily. Paying attention to what is neither learned nor enforced.

When that happens, many questions resolve themselves. Who leads. Who handles the money. Who decides in certain situations. Who holds the remote control or the wooden spoon. Not out of expectation, not through negotiation, but naturally. Voluntarily.

And in that moment, the hassle disappears.