Most people think their relationship struggles come from poor communication, emotional immaturity, or choosing the wrong partner. And while those things can be true, they’re often symptoms – not the root.
What if the real reason you’re distant from your partner… tired of dating… or stuck in cycles that feel familiar… has more to do with your body than your beliefs?
Your hormones shape your tone of voice. Your gut health affects your mood. And your nervous system sets the tone for how safe or unsafe someone feels around you.
When the body is dysregulated, intimacy becomes complicated. Polarity between the sexes fades. Arguments escalate faster. Sex feels off. And yet, we keep trying to fix the surface – more therapy, more books, more talking.
But the bridge between health and relationships isn’t metaphorical. It’s literal. Your physiology is your relationship baseline.
In this post, I’ll break down how:
- Inflammation can kill attraction
- Mineral imbalances influence your masculine or feminine energy
- Trauma stored in the body blocks intimacy
- And how healing your body might be the relationship advice no one’s given you yet.
Let’s start by looking at how attraction begins in the body – long before it reaches the heart.
Inflammation is taking out love
Yes, you heard that right, inflammation is a cold-blooded killer of love, but it’s doing this without bias and with great precision (this doesn’t include ‘autoimmunity‘). It is doing this for a good reason though, so maybe we can call it a warm-blooded killer of love.
Inflammation is the process by which the immune system recognizes and removes harmful and foreign stimuli to then work to repair the human system. It is often labeled as a bad thing, as in many cases, it can become ‘chronic,’ where disease can develop from this progressed level of inflammation.
When inflammation goes up, our sex hormones – such as androgens (these are usually more abundant in men than women) and estrogens (and these are often more abundant in women) – can go down, leading to a cascade of events beyond just loss of virility in men or women losing their sweet softness.
The reason why is cortisol. When the immune system fires up, cortisol is released to regulate it, like a thermostat. Cortisol can be seen as a ‘fire marshal,’ where inflammation can be seen as the cleansing fire. Cortisol works to prevent the fire from burning everything down.
For the hormone cortisol to perform this role, however, it needs to reduce the activity of estrogens and androgens. When these sex hormones drop in activity, we consequently can lose various functions that tie into our relationship:
- A man may feel passive, withdrawn, or irritable instead of driven and grounded.
- A woman may feel anxious, sharp, or emotionally volatile instead of soft, receptive, or radiant.
When engaged in a romantic relationship, and some of the above feelings transpire, a couple can go from having a really great time out dancing or at a picnic under the sun, to a very bad time quarreling over something very small.
Solving for highly functional inflammation that works for the body, rather than against it, is one of the most important health processes any individual can do – not just those engaged in romantic relationships.
