A belated Eid Mubarak to all those who celebrate!
Kapil Gupta is the founder of coaching company Nibana Life. He is a transformational life coach, a self discovery coach, a relationship coach, an intimacy and a sexuality coach. He is also the coauthor of Being Fine: The Other F Word.
After 15 years chasing a corporate career and material success, his divorce after an 11 year relationship made him stop and take stock: “I had no idea what I desired from life. I’d only known the traditional path of education, career, a relationship…and I’d ticked all the boxes. What else was I meant to want? Why had I failed at my relationship?” He’s since spent over a decade on a path of self discovery and personal transformation.
I first came across Kapil in 2018 when we inhabited the same office building in Clerkenwell, London. I was running a coding school for women, while he was running orgasmic meditation workshops. According to Kapil, orgasmic meditation — a concept surrounded by controversy (especially in the US) — is where mindfulness meets sexuality. The goal of the practice — where one person strokes the clitoris of another for 15 minutes — isn’t to climax but to train your attention and to notice what and how both partners feel. I heard about him again when I stumbled upon his TEDx Talk on the need for men to embrace their sensitivity.
Here, he discusses how men have been socialised and the impact this is having on their relationships. (Note: this piece is focused on cis-heterosexual relationships)
You don’t need to know it all
Masculine conditioning in our culture teaches young boys that their manhood is dependent on what they know — from relationships and sex, to their jobs and general trivia. The insinuation or accusation of not being man enough is the ultimate humiliation. Once upon a time, you could have asked me about rocket science and I’d have come up with some clever answer instead of saying I don’t know. I still do it with my partner — it’s so ingrained — but the difference is now I can catch myself and be like, ‘I don’t know anything about this’.
One of the areas this plays out most? Sex. Men are supposedly meant to know everything about sex which is why we turn porn into our teacher. We believe sex for hours correlates with our manliness. We believe the size of our penis correlates with our masculinity. We believe being dominant is a requirement. We need to learn to ask for what we want and what we don’t and we need to be able to give our partners the space to do the same. It gives us permission to learn about each other and to learn about ourselves.
Learn to regulate not repress
Hiding emotions is another way of showing we’ve got it together.
When I was six or seven, I was a really sensitive kid. One day, my mum said, ‘if you're going to be this sensitive, how are you going to survive in this world?’ It was meant to protect me but I took it to mean there was something wrong with me. I translated her words to mean any intense emotions or feelings needed to be shut down if I wanted to be a boy, to be a man.
Instead of us being able to regulate our emotions, we suppress them. If you suppress your feelings for long enough, it leads to numbness — a feeling of emptiness and an absence of emotion. It makes it hard to feel emotional connections or build relationships. If you are numb, it makes it hard to be present and in the moment when having sex. It becomes impossible to focus on your feelings and emotions. When you’re numb, you rely on patterns or techniques that you think create pleasure because you’ve experienced it before or because you’ve seen it done in porn or in a film, instead of listening intently to your partner’s responses to your touch.
In order to regulate our emotions, we first need to become aware of them. We are so used to being in control and allowing ourselves to feel our emotions can feel like losing that control. But that work leads to regulation. It’s a lot of work and a good place to start usually is therapy or coaching.
Find places you can be vulnerable
Men often find a woman who they can open up to emotionally — or, at least, the most they’ve ever opened up — and this person becomes the only place they feel safe. This woman tends to be a romantic partner. It’s an unhealthy way to be in a relationship because our partners end up becoming our emotional dustbin. A woman will initially feel happy and even honoured that her partner is opening up to her. As time goes by though, what was a beautiful thing at the start has become unhealthy — she becomes irritated that she is his only outlet and it has a huge impact on intimacy.
The work I do with men — solo, in groups and in men circles — is mostly to create places men can come and be emotionally vulnerable with other men. We must hold spaces for each other so that our primary relationship with our partner isn’t the only place we can be emotional.
Start with your friendship groups. Talk about more than just ‘macho stuff’ like who you’ve slept with, politics and sport. We need to go deeper and discuss sincerely what we’re feeling, what sex feels like, and the beauty and challenges within our relationships. We need to build confidence to share our struggles with the men in our lives. Start building trust by asking, ‘how’re you feeling?’ and just listening. One question can change everything.
You don’t need to be the provider
Men are stuck with the cultural hang ups they’ve been fed their entire lives about relationships. They’ll tell potential women partners — who have degrees, careers, money, power, freedom and have had relationships — that after marriage she’ll give up her career, stay at home with the kids and maybe even live with her in-laws. Many women will say no and men won’t understand why when they’re offering everything they’ve been taught to give — financial stability and a family.
To not be that person in a relationship can feel emasculating. We’re fed that message from our families, Bollywood and music. I have flashbacks to when I was young of men standing around and laughing at other men whose wives were more powerful or earned more than them.
It’s a dangerous slippery slope because a man who feels emasculated can easily harden. An emasculated man can become driven to needing success and power over others to prove they are man enough. This is also why figures like Andrew Tate become famous — they give men who feel emasculated somewhere to place their blame, whether that be women, their sensitivity or vulnerability.
Don’t expect your relationship to complete you
In South Asian cultures, it’s believed that our partners are our better halves and complete us. That belief is a recipe for disaster.
I’ve been with my now wife for 10 years — we met six months into me doing my personal growth work. The key difference to previous relationships I’ve had is that we believe we are whole human beings that are each on our own personal journeys.
Don’t look for someone else to complete you — that’s way too much responsibility to put on a partner. Instead, own who you are and do the work to learn and grow, and support your partner’s self development work. You want your partner’s light to shine outwards into the world — don’t absorb it all.
Practise your relationship
A relationship is a practice that requires work just like anything else.
Relationships start out great. But then this and that happens and it becomes rough around the edges. Ask yourself, ‘why did we get together in the first place?’ ‘What made it great?’ ‘Why are we (or why am I) not doing that thing now?’ Start there and you’ll begin to find answers. Often, it’s as simple as ‘we used to go out all the time on dates and now we just sit at home and watch Netflix’ which, with effort, can be changed.
Intimacy is a practice too. Practice telling your partner raw, straight from the heart, truths. Practice working through conflict together. Practice gratitude for each other. Practice sex and listen to each other, both words and physical reactions.
If a relationship does break down, men can reach a moment of desperation because they thought they were doing everything right. A big moment like that can give men an excuse to draw a line in the sand and ask, ‘what happened there?’ and start looking deeper into themselves. My takeaway from my divorce was that I may have been an adult age wise, but when it came to emotional and psychological maturity, I was just a boy.
You can find Kapil on LinkedIn and Instagram.
I’d love to hear what you think about this more educational format for the ‘conversation with a professional’ pieces. Comment below or drop me an email!