If your partner has ever said you don't take sex seriously enough, this episode is for you. Intimacy  Tari has spent over a decade working with couples, and one pattern comes up more than almost any other: men who use humor, jokes, and playfulness as an escape hatch the moment intimacy starts to deepen.



This isn't about being too silly. It's about never having been given a model for masculine erotic presence — and compensating with behavior that quietly kills sexual tension. Tari explains what's actually driving the deflection, what women are asking for when they want a man to "show up," and gives two actionable, body-based shifts any man can start using immediately.

Why She Won’t Initiate Sex — And What To Do About It

THE CLOSENESS PODCAST
Your New Sex Education

Hosted by Tari Mannello — Southern California's most sought-after sex and intimacy coach, with 80+ five-star reviews — Closeness is an honest, intelligent education in the things almost none of us were ever actually taught: desire, attraction, seduction, and the art of real connection.

Because we pieced it together from hints, imitation, and guesswork. And then we settled into the routines that quietly hollow out a relationship — until desire becomes a negotiation. An ask. Something traded for a clean kitchen or a good mood.

It was never meant to work that way.

Each episode goes where most people are too uncomfortable to go: touch, tension, seduction, confidence, emotional connection, and the honest distance between the sex you're having and the sex you both actually long for. Not clinical. Not crude. Something far more interesting — frank, elegant, and genuinely useful.

At the center is one idea. Desire isn't summoned by force or technique. It's built — through presence, attention, and the nerve to lead, to read her, and to actually move. That's the skill almost no one teaches. It's the one Tari has spent more than a decade teaching, in the room, with real people.

Practical. Actionable. Free of shame and judgment. The kind of guidance that holds up in a real relationship, not just in theory.

You're leaving more on the table than you know. This is how you stop.

Listen closely. New episodes regularly. Find Tari at closeness.com — or search IntimacyMentor on socials!