• The Comfort/Excitement Balance To Attraction 
• Autistic and Pseudo-Autistic Traits
• Signs of Under-Calibrated Nervous Systems
• Advice for Husbands
• Interpreting Male Emotional Expression
• Advice for Women
• Restoring Connection

If you’ve ever found yourself confused by how much love is present in your marriage but still feel emotionally disconnected, this post is for you. If you’re a man trying to understand why your efforts at connection don’t seem to land, this post is for you too. There’s a hidden variable affecting many modern marriages, one that’s rarely talked about. It might not only explain the emotional dissonance you’ve been feeling, but also offer a path to deeper connection, restored emotional vitality, and greater intimacy. What you discover here may change everything, for both of you.

§The Comfort/Excitement Balance To Attraction 

To understand why the balance between comfort and excitement matters so much in relationships, especially for women,we need to look beneath cultural narratives and into biology. This isn’t about blaming anyone, it’s about revealing a deeper structure most people have never been shown. If you’ve ever wondered why emotional or sexual connection can fluctuate in intensity even when love is constant, the answer often lies in your nervous system. Your biology plays a bigger role than you think.

What we’re about to explore isn’t a theory. It’s the result of millions of years of evolutionary adaptation. Female nervous systems are built differently than male ones, not just in how they process emotions, but in how they respond to sensory input, bonding cues, and stimulation. These differences are crucial to understanding why certain dynamics succeed or fail in marriage.

Most women have a significantly higher demand for sensory and emotional stimulation. This isn’t conjecture, it’s a physiological consequence of female neurobiology. Estrogen enhances sensory receptivity, and women’s skin has more nerve endings and finer spatial resolution than men’s. Combined with hormonal modulation of emotional states, this results in a heightened need for both physical and emotional engagement.

Some of that need is biologically satisfied through caring for children, which provides a form of continuous low-level stimulation. But in the absence of children or outside of maternal bonding, that same physiological mechanism still demands input. This is where the husband comes in. He must not only provide security and predictability (comfort), but also novelty, dominance, and emotional friction (excitement) to sustain mutual engagement.

So the comfort/excitement tension isn’t just a social preference or cultural trope. It’s a necessary equilibrium in female emotional homeostasis. That 2:1 balance in either direction is about right, too much comfort and attraction decays; too much excitement and the system destabilizes.

What appears socially as “relationship dynamics” is, at root, a consequence of evolutionary strategies for reproductive success and pair-bond longevity. The reason the dichotomy exists at all is because the female nervous system demands it.

§Autistic and Pseudo-Autistic Traits

Now, there’s a complicating factor we rarely talk about: women on the autism spectrum. These women have the same underlying needs for sensory and emotional stimulation, but their ability to interpret, process, or even tolerate that input is compromised by their neurotype. This doesn’t mean the needs disappear. It means they’re harder to fulfill, even when the husband is doing everything right.

There’s also a broader layer to this. Although autism is formally diagnosed in only 1-2% of women, many more display pseudo-autistic behaviors, symptoms that mirror autism but arise from a different cause: developmental deprivation. In our modern, sanitized, screen-heavy environment, many children, especially girls, are not exposed to the kinds of sensory, social, and environmental inputs their nervous systems evolved to process. Overprotection, lack of physical play, digital overstimulation, and reduced face-to-face interaction leave them under-calibrated for real-world complexity. As adults, these women often experience normal life as overwhelming, leading to social withdrawal, emotional volatility, and relationship breakdowns.

They aren’t broken. They’re untrained. Their nervous systems are underdeveloped in key dimensions because the environment didn’t give them the calibration they needed during childhood and adolescence. This creates a large cohort of women who are not autistic in a clinical sense but present with very similar issues, especially in intimate relationships.

§Signs of Under-Calibrated Nervous Systems

This can create serious distortions in the feedback loop of a marriage. The woman feels under-stimulated or emotionally disconnected, but because her husband’s signaling doesn’t land as intended, she may interpret the problem as his failure, not her filtering.

If her nervous system is already operating near a fight-or-flight threshold due to sensory overload, even normal masculine behavior, like assertiveness, protectiveness, or sexual pursuit, can feel overwhelming or even threatening. As a result, she may demonize traits she would otherwise find attractive. She’s not rejecting masculinity itself; she’s reacting to a distorted perception created by her overstimulated state. Meanwhile, the husband often understands something is off but lacks the tools to make it land.

So how can a man know if his wife might be neuroatypical or under-calibrated? Here are a few recurring patterns to look for:

• She gets overwhelmed by physical touch or sound, even in safe and intimate contexts.

• She has difficulty articulating emotional states or interpreting yours.

• She avoids spontaneity or novelty, preferring strict routines.

• She gets easily irritated by sensory input most people filter out.

• She misreads social cues and seems detached in emotionally charged moments.

• She experiences frequent shutdowns or emotional flatness, not just mood swings.

These aren’t definitive on their own, but together, they can indicate that her nervous system is running a different decoding protocol. And crucially, many of these women are never diagnosed. They grow up masking, adapting, and internalizing their differences just enough to barely get by.

That can work when they’re younger, have more energy, and life is relatively simple. But once they marry and have children, the increasing complexity overwhelms their already underdeveloped coping mechanisms, and they crash out hard.

That crash can take a lot of forms: a mental breakdown, impulsive decisions like cheating or walking away from the marriage, or just a deep well of unhappiness that leaks into every part of the household. They might spiral into dissatisfaction and blame everyone around them, especially their husbands, not because those people are doing something wrong, but because the internal system can’t handle the load anymore.

§Advice for Husbands

This asymmetry can generate chronic resentment, even in otherwise loving marriages. It’s important for women in this position to recognize that their own neurology or environmental history might be interrupting the satisfaction of their needs, not that the needs don’t exist, nor that the husband isn’t trying. Awareness alone can reduce misplaced blame and help couples co-develop more precise, intentional forms of connection. The good news: once understood, it’s manageable.

If you’re a husband facing this situation, and your wife is struggling to recognize the pattern, the best starting point is non-confrontational curiosity. Instead of making accusations or suggesting she’s “on the spectrum,” try something like: “I’ve been thinking about how different people process things, especially emotions and sensory input. Have you ever noticed if certain things hit you differently than they seem to hit other people?” This opens the door without assigning blame.

From there, introduce patterns you’ve noticed gently, using neutral observations rather than critiques. It might seem frustrating that you have to be so careful, but there’s a reason for it: if she’s already dealing with all the sensory and emotional overload we’ve described, she probably knows something’s wrong, and feels it deep in her body. Most women don’t do well with direct confrontation even when they’re calm. When they’re overloaded, it doesn’t just stress them, it triggers a defensive reflex. If you come in too hard, it sets up a “you versus me” frame instead of an “us versus the problem” one. The goal is to frame the issue as a shared mystery you’re solving together, not a personal flaw she needs to fix.

§Interpreting Male Emotional Expression

One of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of male behavior, especially by women with sensitive or under-calibrated nervous systems, is how men express their emotions.

Men often discharge emotional energy through vocal and physical expression: yelling, speaking loudly, pacing, or making intense gestures. This isn’t always, nor even usually, a sign of anger or aggression. Often it’s simply how men process energy. Just as women cry to release emotion, men roar or shout to do the same. It’s not about control or threat. It’s about clearing the system.

The problem arises when a woman’s nervous system, already overloaded or poorly calibrated, perceives this masculine energy as danger. She may not distinguish between a man venting versus a man preparing to attack. And so even when the man is not directing his intensity at her, she responds as if her life is in danger. This is terrifying for her, and deeply invalidating for him.

That mismatch creates an emotional double standard. Society defends a woman’s right to cry, break down, and show emotional vulnerability, but often punishes men for expressing their emotions in loud, physical, or masculine ways, even when those expressions are non-threatening.

Telling a man he can’t raise his voice, speak with passion, or express raw emotion is just as harmful as telling a woman she can’t cry. It pathologizes his nature. And it disconnects him not only from his wife, but from other men, who rely on such expressions to assess trust and authenticity.

The most masculine men, the leaders, the fighters, the providers, tend to be the most expressive. They’re loud, boisterous, and full of life. And their energy isn’t just tolerated by other men, it’s respected. It’s how they signal alignment, honesty, and presence.

If you want to live with men, especially high-agency ones, you must train your nervous system to distinguish between male emotion and male threat. Just as a mature man learns not to interpret well meaning female tears as manipulation or danger, a mature woman must learn not to read male intensity as violence.

Trying to suppress male emotional expression doesn’t make the world safer. It just alienates the man, and makes it impossible to share a home, a marriage, or a life without fear.

§Advice for Women

If you’re a woman reading this and recognizing yourself in the descriptions above, the good news is that your needs are real and valid, but also more specialized. You’re not broken, and you’re not crazy. What you’re dealing with is a miscalibration in your central nervous system, a mismatch between what it was exposed to growing up and what it’s expected to handle now.

The good news is that, like physical training for an athletic event, your nervous system can be trained, too. You wouldn’t expect to run a marathon without building up to it. Similarly, you can gradually increase your tolerance, flexibility, and capacity for stimulation and connection. Once you do, you’ll experience life, and relationships, in a much more joyful and manageable way.

And don’t expect this kind of advice from a doctor. Most of the medical and psychiatric systems aren’t trained to recognize these patterns as developmental calibration issues. They’ll either dismiss it, medicalize it, or label it with something that doesn’t give you tools. This is not a disease. It’s not a disorder. It’s a systems mismatch that can be recalibrated.

Here are some actionable steps you can take to begin recalibrating your nervous system:

• Get off screens and reduce electronic stimulation. Prioritize presence over distraction.

• Replace social media with real, in-person social contact, eye contact, voice, touch.

• Go outdoors. Natural environments offer complex, low-stress sensory input that recalibrates the nervous system.

• Reintroduce physical sensation through safe, voluntary contact, massage, swimming, dancing.

• Practice slow, predictable engagement. Routine doesn’t mean sterile, it means safe repetition that expands capacity.

• Track what types of sensory or emotional input feel safe, tolerable, and enjoyable.

• Start incorporating nervous system-reset techniques like deep breathing (such as box breathing or 4-7-8 breathing) to calm your body’s baseline.

• Dry brushing can help desensitize the skin and improve sensory regulation over time.

• Replace harsh, flickering LED lights with high-quality, full-spectrum bulbs that don’t pulse, your brain tracks that flicker even when your eyes don’t.

• Make sure you’re sleeping enough; your nervous system needs recovery time as you recalibrate.

• Write down emotional states when you experience them and review patterns.

• Try scheduled intimacy, emotional or physical, so that it’s predictable and safe.

• Be open with your husband about what does and doesn’t work for you without assuming failure or intent.

• Consider a formal assessment for autism or sensory processing disorder; even if you don’t pursue diagnosis, the process itself can provide insight.

These are not just hacks, they’re physical, repeatable ways to build the capacity you’re missing.

§Restoring Connection

Restoring that connection doesn’t mean becoming someone else, it means engineering your relationship and daily life around your real constraints, instead of fighting them. That’s how you get your needs met without burning down the trust and love already built.

So yes, balance is critical, but so is knowing when the system itself is misaligned and adapting accordingly. And it’s worth it. You can restore the kind of intimacy and love that both of you crave in your marriage. Don’t give up. Try everything. Work on it together. If you want help, this is what I do. I walk people through this process. I help them grow, not just emotionally, but neurologically. I help remove the emotional blocks that prevent people from doing the things we’ve described here.

If you don’t work with me, make sure you work with someone. Or work through it intentionally on your own. Life’s too short to live miserable, especially in your marriage. Don’t miss out on the depth of love and intimacy that’s possible. You can get there. And it’s worth the work.