Episode #1048
If it feels like you and your wife have drifted apart, like you’re just going through the motions or living as roommates, this episode is for you. Doug and Chris unpack one of the most common issues men bring up: how to bring back the spark and get the intimacy flowing again in your marriage.
Most guys think the problem is sex. But the real issue usually starts way before the bedroom. Emotional safety is what creates the space for connection, attraction, and fun to come back. Without it, you’re stuck in a loop of frustration and distance.
In this conversation, you’ll get a clear look at what’s actually going on and what to do about it. Doug shares practical tools that help you shift the dynamic fast, like the Hidden Motives Technique and how to make intimacy something your wife actually wants to initiate. He also walks through how to create an environment where both of you can open up, have more fun, and rebuild that spark without needing long, uncomfortable conversations.
This isn’t about games or being someone you’re not. It’s about stepping into the role of a grounded, confident man who leads with clarity and strength. That’s when everything changes.
Want to go deeper?
Get the free training at https://fixmarriage.thepowerfulman.com/scales. It’s packed with simple tools you can start using right away to reconnect and lead your marriage forward.
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Head over to our BONUS page for special access to some of the deeper tactics and techniques we’ve developed at The Powerful Man.
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Transcription
Doug Holt 0:00
But what guys miss is that protection isn’t just physical protection, right? It’s emotional protection too. But I can tell you that what the women talk about with their trainers is sex and each other. Women fantasize about this. They want a strong, powerful man. You want passionate, connected sex. But is it fun? Like, why is she gonna want to go in there? Have you made that bedroom a fun experience? But it’s because he made her feel safe, right? That was the key that he was missing.
Doug Holt 0:42
Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of The Powerful Man Show. I’m your host, Doug Holt. I’m a father, husband, and I’ve been advising and mentoring high performers just like you for the last two decades. And today we’re going to talk about how to reignite the passion in your bedroom. But before we start that, there’s something that I noticed. I want to thank you guys for your comments.
Just doing a little housekeeping one of the things that we don’t do as well is let you know what’s going on at The Powerful Man as the movement itself. So when this episode comes out, we will be in wine country in California, where we’ll have over 40 men talking to experts, having adventures, and doing some epic growth all over the idea of legacy. You know, guys, you may not realize this, but when you think of legacy, a lot of men think about the money that we leave behind. But you are leaving a legacy one way or the other it’s just whether you plan the legacy you’re going to leave.
And so these men are going to be working on just that. Fast forward to February, we will be doing an entire retreat on grounded masculine leadership, and that’ll be in Japan. So again, we’re gonna have more men there, a lot of experts, a lot of fun. We have a ton of adventures because we know that the men like to do that. In order to go to these events, you do have to be a member of our Brotherhood, which is our high-end, one-year mastermind group. But on top of that, we are at the TPM Ranch. We’ve invested in a 106-acre ranch here in Central Oregon where we host events. No, I do not live here, but we do it to host events, and we have the Alpha Rising going on right now.
So I just want to let you guys know a couple of things that are going on within TPM. And now let’s get back to the topic. Once again, we are graced by one of our program advisors. Chris, thanks for being here, man.
Christopher Hansen 2:37
For sure. So on a pretty regular basis, I’m going through and looking at questions that men ask in the TPM app. And one of the questions that seems to come up a lot is around how to ignite intimacy in the bedroom how to reignite that spark. So I figured, why not do a podcast episode on that and talk about it a little bit?
Doug Holt 3:00
It’s interesting, because one of you know, we put out shorts on social media, as a lot of people do, and one of the ones that went semi-viral for TPM was “How to Get the Freak Back in Your Wife,” I think was the title or something. It’s a great topic and one we haven’t dove into too deeply. But at TPM, as you know, I do a lot of the one-on-one coaching for the higher-end clients that come in, and that’s the topic we talk about the most at first. The biggest missing element here which is going to be odd to any guy that’s new to the show is the idea of safety, right? So a woman needs to feel physically safe, and that’s just obvious. Most men get that, right? They understand that, hey, my assignment is to provide and protect.
But what guys miss is that protection isn’t just physical protection it’s emotional protection too. And for a lot of men, and this happened in my marriage too, Chris, over time I didn’t get the emotional protection part, and so it created distance and space between my wife and me. We’d have a little fight, an argument, and I grew up with the “just brush it under the rug” type attitude in the household I grew up in. But that builds up resentment, like we talk about mud on the glass, and over time, you can’t see each other very well. And when that resentment builds, it also builds distance not physical distance, but emotional intimacy distance and that’s what we talk about.
The situation a lot of men find themselves in is they have a roommate with a ring, right? Their wife becomes their roommate, not their lover, and it just dissipates over time. Now, the good news is we’ll talk about by the end of this how you can change all of that. I’ve seen men change it all in a day that’s how fast it can happen. Not all guys, most guys don’t do it in a day, but almost all guys are able to do it over a time period if they put the work in. But it’s going to start with that emotional safety and getting your wife to feel safe. So at TPM, we use a thing called The Hidden Motives Technique. In fact, I included that in the book A Man’s Guide on How to Save Your Marriage Without Talking About It. At the end of this, I’ll talk to the guys about how I’ll give the book to them free if they want to read about it it’s got everything in there.
And in that book, we talk about The Hidden Motives Technique, which allows your wife to feel seen and heard. Once she feels seen and heard, she can start to feel safe. The walls can start coming down. Her nervous system, as my wife describes it, just relaxes. Then she can slip into her feminine. And once she slips into her feminine, then you have the possibility of having hot, passionate sex not just sex, but passionate sex.
Christopher Hansen 5:45
Absolutely. I mean, that’s been my experience. It’s funny you say turning it around quickly I’ve seen that as well. You’re starting to attack a problem at its root, right? And the moment that happens, the symptoms of that problem very quickly disappear.
I had a conversation with a guy this morning right before I came here, and we were talking about this exact topic. For him, it’s been years at this point since he’s had sex with his wife. To be quite honest, that may seem like a really big, long bridge to gap, right, because it’s been so long. But I know that I’ve experienced in my own relationship that the moment she starts to feel safe, that entire dynamic starts to shift. She starts to become attracted to you and starts to initiate sex or even just intimacy, right? Hand-holding, touching, whatever it may be. It can happen very quickly.
Doug Holt 6:49
It can, it can stay there, right? I was just telling Coltyn, who produces these we were in a conversation. My wife was texting me, and she was texting me sexy texts. And look, I have a mirror, but my wife, for some reason, thinks I’m the hottest guy in the world. But that’s because of the things we’re going to talk about in this episode, right? I do them consistently, and that allows her to feel that attraction to me. Having that safety is fundamental. All women will tell you that’s number one.
And as men, good men, great men, we take a back seat. We become the nice guy, right? Using Dr. Glover’s book No More Mr. Nice Guy great book, highly recommend it. And that really just tells you the symptoms, right? You can identify yourself in that. And we’ve talked about it a lot in TPM, like The Activation Method, the program we have. It’s an eight-week program, as you know, Chris, that’s designed to take men from deactivated to activated. And guys learn these step by step, with a coach holding their hand, saying, “Okay, here’s what we’re doing week one, week two, week three you’re going to be doing these things to bring safety in.” And men can come back, they field-test it, bring it back and say, “Okay, I did this. This is what happened.” The coach says, “Great, here’s what we’re going to do next.”
Well, I’ve talked about this a lot. I used to own a personal training studio in Santa Barbara, California in my 20s and early 30s. And in doing that, this was a private training studio, so I had two other companies at the time. So imagine a two-story building, but it’s one door you walk in, and there are stairs you walk up to loft offices, if you will. And being a private training studio, a lot of women would come in, and sometimes there would just be a few women training with their trainers. And I’d be upstairs working late in the office. We could hear the conversations through the vent. People downstairs think it’s private conversations they’re having and it’s not like we were trying to hide anything but I can tell you that what the women talk about with their trainers is sex and each other.
Women want to have sex. This is a fallacy that men think, “Well, my wife’s just not interested in sex.” She’s not interested she’s not interested in sex with you, right? And there’s probably a lot of reasons for that. You can reignite that passion you can reignite it. And so when you think about it again, I’ll drive this home Fifty Shades of Grey. I use this example a lot. Google right now, or ask ChatGPT how many copies of that book were sold. One of the best-selling books of all time. That book talks about a woman being dominated physically and emotionally by a man not dominated in a way that he’s physically beating her or anything but she submits to him because of his inner strength, willingly.
Women fantasize about this. They want a strong, powerful man, and that starts with inner power the power inside grounded masculinity. And a grounded masculine man, or what we call a powerful man, starts with making sure everybody feels emotionally safe. You’re just safe around that person physically but also emotionally. So when women can feel this, they feel seen and heard. So we use The Hidden Motives Technique to make them feel seen and heard. Then we can start moving into other aspects of it, right? We can move into this ability to make the bedroom fun, which is, ironically, another question I’ll ask the guys.
I’ll be like, “Hey man, is the bedroom fun?” And most guys look at me like, “I’ve never thought of it that way.” Cool. You want your wife to be freaky in the bedroom. You want to have sex with her. You want passionate, connected sex. But is it fun? Why is she going to want to go in there? Have you made that bedroom a fun experience to the point where you’re getting texts like I am, that she wants to, that’s what she wants to do for fun today? Like, “Hey, finish your podcast, hurry up.”
But I didn’t get that, right? Sex is fun naturally as a guy, we use the analogy that guys are like microwaves. When do you get turned on? Immediately whenever it’s available, and sometimes when it’s not. You know, for a woman, it’s like a slow boil, right? You’ve got to constantly keep that fire on a slow boil and then she’ll be ready anytime. But she needs to have that connection, have that safety, and then you make it a fun experience. She’s gonna want to jump your bones all the time. 100%.
So when we look at this idea of how to unlock the inner freak in your wife step one, safety. How do we do that? The Hidden Motives Technique. If you’re in our programs, we have you do the Clean Slate Method as well, which wipes the slate clean. I don’t recommend necessarily doing it by yourself and I’m not saying that to promote the program it’s just one guy writes a Clean Slate letter, which we have him do. We’ve never and we’ve had thousands of men do this never had one do it right the first time. Right? There are so many nuances to doing this perfectly.
But I get that not every guy is willing to make that investment to join a program. I really do. So I want to give you guys all the tools. And again, I talk about this more in the book, and at the end of this, I’ll talk to the guys about how to get the book for free. So now we’ve got safety, right? Cool. Your wife’s starting to feel seen and heard, and when she feels seen and heard, she’s going to be more connected. And I always say that men at least me I feel more connected to my wife when we have sex. After we have sex, I just feel a better connection, a better bond. Oxytocin is released, etc. My wife and women in general need connection in order to want to have sex. So which one comes first, right?
Well, we’re high-performing men. We want to make sure we set the tone right. I want to set the scene for a sale. I want to set the scene for a great opportunity in my business. So I also want to set the scene for my wife allowing herself to live her inner fantasies her Fifty Shades of Grey fantasies with me. So I’ve got to make it fun, right? I’ll invite connection with my wife, and we do a thing called “collecting berries” and a bunch of other things we teach in The Activation Method. So now let’s just say my wife’s feeling seen and heard. I’ve used The Hidden Motives Technique, probably the Clean Slate Method that we teach. Then I’m starting to make the bedroom fun.
Then let’s say we have intimacy like this guy you’re talking about, the first time he’s going to have sex with his wife. He’s gonna be so excited they’re having sex, you know? And look, there are techniques to make you last longer in bed. We talk about some of these in more advanced programs, and guys can Google those. But even if he doesn’t last long, he can still make it a fun experience, right? It’s an experience. We talk about in a previous podcast I did with Mr. Andreessen, one of our coaches, like date night dinner is not an experience. Dinner’s not a date. You can make dinner a date. Dinner’s just dinner.
And so the same thing with sex sex is just sex. Now you can make that a sexual experience where she is guided, she has an amazing time, she feels seen and heard and desired, which are three things all women need seen, heard, and desired all during this experience, right? That you’re having. And I’m not doing anything magical, man. I’m just a normal dude you can meet at a barbecue, right? I’m not doing some crazy kung fu stuff in bed. I’m just making it a fun experience. And most people never even think about it like, “Oh, is it fun? Huh, yes or no?” We want to be primal, right? And that’s good too that can be part of the fun.
Christopher Hansen 14:29
I agree 100%.
Doug Holt 14:34
Okay, so we got the safety, we’ve got her feeling seen and heard and desired, we got the bedroom being fun. Then what we really get to do to bring out our inner kink is be inquisitive. So there’s a thing that we give to the men we have it in The Activated Couple, which is a course that I put together alongside my wife, and we teach it at retreats now. It’s going to be part of The Academy, which is a four-year curriculum we’ve put together for men to become a powerful man and really, it’s to get to the legacy event of their lives, kind of the pinnacle, if you will.
And in The Activated Couple, we have a sheet that’s called “Yes, No, Maybe.” This is so fun. I don’t know if you’ve ever done it with your wife I’ve done it with mine, and it was eye-opening, man. In fact, almost every guy I’ve given this to take home with their wife and do as an exercise, they were blown away. Even guys that are having great marriages sex is good, right? We’re having sex. And you know, sex is a weird topic. People, for whatever reason, in our almost puritanical society, don’t like talking about it. Yet, we’re all here because two people had sex.
So what the “Yes, No, Maybe” sheet is it’s a sheet that basically has all kinds of things like: Do you like giving… jobs? Do you like receiving? Do you like sex with toys? Would you want a partner somebody else to join you in bed? Would you want to have public sex? All kinds of questions. And it’s got I’m gonna make up the number, Chris but maybe 40 questions. And next to them is a “yes,” a “no,” or a “maybe,” right? So let’s just say, “Do you like giving head?” So I may check “no,” right? It’s not my thing. And then my wife might say “yes,” “no,” or “maybe.” Maybe she doesn’t want to.
Now, I know if she says “yes,” I’m like, “Oh, why am I not getting jobs? Wait a minute.” And so it gives you an idea. Now, in my experience and again, I’ve done this with thousands of people the women have way more yeses and maybes than the guys even do. Interesting, right? And there’s only, for a heterosexual man, maybe one or two questions that fall outside that line, if I recall correctly. So you’d almost think that most guys, the way they talk, it’d be all yeses except for maybe those two, right? But it’s not. It’s women guys that share it with me it’s like, almost all yeses across the board, or maybe it’s like, “Eh, the mood’s right, the setting’s right. I’d be interested in talking about that.”
Christopher Hansen 17:21
I love that. I love the exploration piece and being inquisitive, right? Because you’re 100% right. I mean, there’s so much you said puritanical. A lot of people have shame around sex. It’s just we don’t talk about it that openly.
Doug Holt 17:37
I want to buy you a gift. Look, if your marriage is struggling and let’s be real every marriage struggles at some point. But if yours is struggling where you’ve lost that love, admiration, and respect, I want to help you. I want to buy you a copy of the book that I wrote, A Man’s Guide on How to Save Your Marriage Without Talking About It. In here, I’ve distilled over eight years of programs that we’ve developed at TPM to help men just like you save their marriages without talking about it. There’s no fluff, no BS it’s an action plan that you can start using today to actually save your marriage and bring that love and respect back into your family, back into your house. You deserve it. Look, all I ask is you pay the postage you pay the shipping. I’ll buy the book for you. That way you can take massive action today. Click the link or find it in the bio and get your copy now.
Christopher Hansen 18:30
In our culture… so, I have not done this with my wife, so I’ll get very curious.
Doug Holt 18:38
It’s super cool. And so what you do with this is you fill you give her the sheet, you have the sheet, you fill it out, and then you exchange. Now, depending on where you are in your relationship, most couples I don’t recommend you exchange in person because of the shame and the guilt, right? Okay, women are scared that men will think of them as sluts, right? The slut-shaming has been around forever. And most of us as men have made our wives the Madonnas, right? They have our kids and everything, so then we have the slut–Madonna complex, which is all over psychology. You know, which one is she? So her inner freak is scared to come out because can you handle it?
And guys, this is where having grounded masculinity is so important. Because if she triggers you outside of the bedroom and you can’t handle her emotional ups and downs, then why is she going to let you see the crazy side of her in the bedroom? Conversely to that, if you can I have a guy I’m working with one-on-one who’s done this so friggin’ well if you can, outside the bedroom, handle her safety tests, her tests to see if she’s safe, and you can do that consistently, she now has a license to show you everything in the bedroom.
And you will I guarantee, money-back guarantee you will be blown away at what she’s capable of. And she will want to give you everything that’s possible, that’s out there. I’ve seen this. There’s a guy I was working with he used to be a pastor, very, very religious. His organization was what I would call ultra-conservative. So his wife, I mean, the kind of sex they had was almost missionary style, almost like she was a dead fish my words, not his, so I want to make sure I’m explaining that correctly when he hears this. She just wasn’t interested in sex. She did it out of obligation, even told him that she did it out of obligation, right? Which obviously just killed him inside because he’s a man he loves her and they had fallen apart. They’d become roommates without a ring.
So fast forward he goes through the program. They’ve reconnected. Things are good. They’re having sex often. It’s better than it was, right? It’s not the “dead fish” anymore, but it’s still pretty vanilla. And even though he’s this conservative ex-pastor, he’s like, “Doug, like… I’d like to explore something a little bit more. Is that wrong?” No. And so I gave him this Yes/No/Maybe sheet, had him give it to his wife, and he’s like, “Man, that’ll be all friggin’ no’s. Why are we even doing this?” Comes back 90% yeses. And all the guys are like, “Oh my gosh!” I won’t say his name, but let’s just say his name was Ron (it wasn’t Ron). They’re like, “Oh my gosh, Ron, get some electrolytes! Your wife just let you see her!”
But it’s because he made her feel safe, right? That was the key that he was missing. She thought he was going to judge her. She thought she wasn’t safe because she could upset him. And Ron, in this case, would fly off the handle, right? She’d come home, or he’d come home, and she’d be like, “Ah, you didn’t take out the trash.” And then he’d go into DEER mode Defend, Excuse, Explain, React. “I’ve been working all day, and you’ve been home all day with the kids why couldn’t you take out the trash?” And of course, she’s going to shut down and give him vanilla sex. He can’t handle her emotionally. But as soon as he flipped that script, Chris, it was just insane. She gave him permission, like, “Hey, here I am.” And they had been married for over a decade, so it wasn’t like they didn’t know each other but they didn’t know each other at the same time.
Christopher Hansen 22:38
Well, and that’s as a woman that’s when you’re at your absolute most vulnerable. Yes, right? In the bedroom. And again, physically, you’re safe, but emotionally, at least as I understand women, that emotional pain of being judged in that space is scarring. I mean, that hurts.
Doug Holt 23:02
Also, when you look at it from the flip side we all want to be, I shouldn’t say we all do, but I think most of the men listening to this love women, and they want their women to feel satisfied. They want to be the one to satisfy them. Women are dying for that. I remember a direct story a woman named Alexis. So same gym in Santa Barbara, right? Upstairs loft, I was there working because I was running three companies at the time, so I worked a lot. My now-wife who was my wife was training this woman. Neither of them knew I was upstairs working, headphones on at the computer. But I could still hear them, with light music playing. And she just goes, “I just want to be ” and I trained her husband, right? They had kids and everything else. But she then she went on a tirade about this.
And what was happening I didn’t know it then, hindsight 20/20 was he became a nice guy. He was just trying to put her in the Madonna complex. You know, average American couple, nothing spectacular, middle class. And women are dying inside. Now, they’ll talk to other women about this and women tell everything to other women. I mean, I will tell you the things I have heard. They’ll talk about your penis size, how good you are in bed, the positions you do and it’s not without judgment. They share everything with each other, whereas guys, we don’t talk about any of that stuff. So women are dying inside for this. That’s why they’re reading Fifty Shades of Grey. They’re dying for their man to allow them to be the freak in bed.
So as men, we get to provide safety. We have to use The Hidden Motives Technique. We have to use the Clean Slate Method, Alpha Rise and Shine, Alpha Decompression all of these things come together to make a man a better man, or what we call a powerful man. And that gives permission for the woman to step into her light and really show who she is and let that inner freak out.
Christopher Hansen 25:02
Absolutely. We get to create the space for that to exist, right?
Doug Holt 25:07
100%. And that’s why one of the reasons, it’s kind of a good segue is I wrote the book A Man’s Guide to How to Save Your Marriage Without Talking About It, and in there I lay out The Activation Method. So, The Activation Method is our flagship program. It takes over eight weeks. You’re with a coach, you’re in a cohort. It’s for business owners only. We do have a side program called Navigate, which is for non–business owners. It’s run differently, but you do go in there. I wrote everything we teach down into this book, and so, as you know, Chris, we have it’s an office space next to me it’s just loaded with books. I have to buy these books from Amazon, but I’m willing to give away the book to any listener here. You pay the shipping that’s all I ask.
I literally, between me and a guy named Levi, we have to package up all these books in padded envelopes, write your name or print it out, and ship it off to you. But I will buy the book for you just pay the shipping for it. That’s all I ask. And look, man, guys listening to this, please understand that we’re shipping these out. So have some grace. This isn’t Amazon two-day delivery. Give us, you know, a few days to get these out. I’ve got kids and a family. But I will literally buy the book for you as long as you promise to use it. Just go over to thepowerfulman.com/freebook. Made it as easy as I possibly can. Guys, only shipping into the U.S. right now just to be blunt, it’s a pain in the rear for those outside the U.S. Email vip@thepowerfulman.com and we’ll get you an ebook copy. Happy to do that.
I want to get these resources into as many men’s hands as possible. That way, guys, you can unlock the inner freak in your wife. Not only is it going to help you have an amazing, connected marriage and great sex, but it’s going to allow your wife to fully express herself inside and outside the bedroom. And at TPM, we’re here to save the men so we can save the kids. That’s what I’m really passionate about and people don’t get that sometimes. I’m here for your kids, man. I’m here for your kids. You are my conduit to protect the kids.
And we need more great men out there. All the guys listening to this are great men all of you guys are great men, or you wouldn’t be listening to it. And we have a lot of women that listen to this too. Ladies, you’re no exception. We get to help you step into your greatness so your kids can see it so they can have role models out there. We’ve lost our role models in society, and I need more great men out there. So this is the way I can do it. I provide this book with my decades of experience. It’s short it’s not a lot of pictures (sorry for those guys who like a lot of pictures; I’m one of them). I say that in jest.
But I’ll get that to you I’ll get it in your hands. Just pay the shipping. The shipping is cheap, you know it’s like the price of a Starbucks cup of coffee or something. You take care of that, and all I ask for is a couple days’ grace, because I literally do pack these up and ship them out to you. And then you’ve got to apply it, though. You have to apply it and show for yourself that it does work. So go over one more time to thepowerfulman.com/freebook. Chris, I love you bringing this question up.
Christopher Hansen
Absolutely. I love being here, Doug. Thank you.
Doug Holt
Thank you, gentlemen. As I like to say, in the moment of insight, take massive action. And you heard Chris we were just having this conversation. He’s like, “I want to do the Yes/No/Maybe.” And I know Chris is a man of action, so he’s gonna hit me up, I’m gonna give him the sheet, and I’m sure with his beautiful wife, they’re gonna go over it in the next few days. And hopefully something fun happens out of that. At least it’s a good conversation topic, right? Again, sex is so taboo, and yet, all of us as men we want to be that man for our wife. We want to be the man she’s fantasizing about when we’re not around. We want to be the man she’s fantasizing about when we’re around.
And you can turn this around, guys. If you’re in a marriage where even if divorce papers are on the table I’ve seen it happen so many times that I’m a believer. We, as men, can be the leaders in our families. We, as men, can turn things around. I’m going to invite you to talk to one of our program advisors, like Chris, if you’re interested, to see if The Powerful Man is the right fit for you. We’re not the right fit for everybody that’s why we have an application process. You may not be the right fit for us. But if you’re listening to this if it’s resonating with you then at least you owe it to yourself to find out more information. But if not, over a thousand podcasts here for you guys, and I’m willing to send you a free book. I’m not sure what else I can do to give you the tools and opportunity to make the changes that you know you need to make, that you want to make. You deserve more than average.
We’ll see you next time on The Powerful Man Show.
