Closed Mouths Don't Get Fed or Fucked Well

Why the inability to ask for what you want never stays in one area of your life.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Danaë (c. 1612)

No one I grew up around ever expected to be given anything. If you wanted something, you had to ask for it, and if you didn’t, that was your fault. These women had one piece of advice they gave each other: “Open your mouth and say what you want, because nobody is going to guess. Closed mouths don’t get fed.”

They were right. Say nothing and nothing comes. Wait to be offered and you’ll end up with whatever someone else thought was enough for you. But that advice leaves out something important, and that’s where things get interesting. Because when you keep your mouth shut about money, you are keeping it shut everywhere else too, and it does the most damage where you would never think to look.

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Nobody Checks the Bedroom

Your sex life is the last place you’d look to explain your money. You’ll take apart your spending, your pricing, your childhood, but will never once think about what happens when your clothes come off, even though it’s the same closed mouth in both places.

It shows up when you get into bed with a partner you like and they’re going too fast or too hard, or in the wrong spot, or they try something they saw in porn that has never once worked for you. You know within seconds that this isn’t going anywhere good. But you don’t say anything.

You just shift your hips a little, trying to guide them without speaking, hoping they’ll notice. They don’t. So you force yourself to moan, because keeping quiet would be worse. Eventually you figure out that the quickest way to finish is to give them an ending, so you do. You fake your orgasm. Then they roll over, pleased with themselves, while you lie there in the dark, wide awake.

And if your friends ask you about it later, you’ll say it was fine, that you weren’t really in the mood anyway. You didn’t want to make it weird, or hurt their feelings, or turn a good night into a conversation about technique. Every one of those excuses is a way of saying their experience was more important than yours. You would rather fake an orgasm than tell them to slow down.

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Now Look at Your Money

You expect your work to speak for itself. That’s the good girl rule, and you’ve followed it whether you work for someone else or run your own business. It’s why you’ve spent years doing your best and waiting for recognition. But then someone else gets the promotion, or a client chooses another woman whose work you know isn’t as strong as yours. You end up thinking you just needed to work harder.

So you work harder, but working harder only goes so far. You start giving more than you’re paid for, staying late on tasks no one is billing for, and perfecting work that’s already done, all in the hope that someone will notice your contributions. No one says anything. Why would they? Your actions don’t show that you want anything in return.

After a few years, resentment starts to build, but you have nowhere to direct it, so you blame yourself. You tell yourself to be more grateful and to stop keeping score. Then you repeat the cycle, because working hard with your head down is the only way you know. Meanwhile, the woman who spoke up about what she wanted got exactly that.

Why It Never Gets Corrected

This is hard to notice when you’re in it because the system works. It just doesn’t work for you.

Your partner had a great night. They tell their friends you’re amazing in bed, and they mean it, because you gave them exactly what they wanted and never made things complicated. The client got a bargain and sent you three referrals because you were so easy to work with. Everyone around you seems to be having an amazing time. You’re the only one who isn’t.

No one complains, and that’s the problem. There’s no feedback or anyone telling you that you’re doing something wrong. Keeping your mouth closed costs you nothing today, but the real cost takes years to show up. By your mid-thirties, you realize that it’s been years since your income has grown. And you also can’t remember the last time someone made you cum.

Girolamo Macchietti, Allegory of Prudence (c. 1535–1592)

This Isn’t Generosity

Generosity is a choice; it means you decide to give. But what you’re doing is letting go of your own preferences before anyone even knows what they are. This gets in the way of what you want most. You say you want real intimacy and to be truly known, but you’ve spent years altering yourself to be accepted, doing whatever it takes to keep whoever you’re with pleased. With your partner, who they are getting to know isn’t really you. So when intimacy doesn’t happen, it’s not because they missed seeing you. It’s because they were never actually seeing the real you.

You did the same thing in your career, and now that version of you is what you get hired for. Once they know you won’t say no, you become the answer to every problem nobody wants. What grows is the workload, not the pay, and not your position. You built a reputation on being accommodating, and it’s the only thing anyone thinks to call you for.

You Know Something’s Wrong

You already know things aren’t working. That much is clear. You feel it in your relationships, and you feel it in your career. It’s been going on so long that it barely surprises you anymore.

But you’re missing the other side of things. It’s not just about what’s wrong, but about what you actually want instead. In the bedroom, you knew something felt off, but you couldn’t articulate what you wanted your partner to do instead. With work, maybe it’s the position, more money, or the role you’d prefer.

Try finishing this sentence: “What I want is...” You’ll probably notice it’s hard to answer without making it sound practical or reasonable.

There’s a reason for this. You’ve spent your life learning how to read other people. You can walk into a room and quickly sense who’s upset, who needs support, and what everyone wants before they even say it. That’s a real skill you’ve developed since you were young. But in exchange, you never learned to focus on yourself. No one ever asked what you wanted and waited for your answer, so you never had to figure it out. Eventually, you just stopped knowing what to say.

There’s also something you might not want to admit. Sometimes, not knowing what you want actually protects you. If you don’t have an answer, no one can reject it. You never have to find out if your desires are too much, if your partner would say no, or if others would think you’re asking for too much. Keeping things vague has kept you safe, but it also meant missing out on everything you never asked for.

So you fall back on what’s familiar. You work harder, try to please others even more, and hope someone will notice you. But none of it works, and it feels like that’s all you can do. You can’t ask for something if you’ve never allowed yourself to want it.

Where This Actually Starts

Before you can ask anyone for anything, you have to find out what you want, and you can’t do that with somebody else in the way. There’s no way around it. Even if you woke up tomorrow with the nerve to tell someone exactly what you wanted, you’d have nothing to tell them.

• Treat yourself to the kind of night you wish someone else would plan for you. If you want romance, create it for yourself. Light candles, pour some wine, set out roses – whatever you’ve hoped a partner would do. Take your time setting things up, since that’s part of the experience.

• Skip the porn, since watching something is just another way to escape, and you already know how to do that. Stay present for this moment.

• Next, explore how you like to be touched. Where, how much pressure, and what you want more of. Spend an hour on this and don’t rush to the end, since finishing quickly isn’t the goal.

• You’ll probably find yourself rushing. You might catch yourself trying to get it over with, treating your body like a task to get through, and that’s the real exercise. It’s the same thing you do with everyone else, but here is the one place you can watch it happen with nothing on the line.

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What Happens Instead

The women I work with don’t become difficult. That’s always the fear – that saying what you want will somehow make you a problem – but it just isn’t true. What happens is that people finally see who you really are, and the ones who matter adjust without any trouble at all.

Your partner says okay, slows down, and even seems relieved that you spoke up. Clients agree to what you asked for, and afterward, you feel something new – a feeling you can’t quite describe – which is what it feels like to get exactly what you asked for.

That’s what my 14-Day Email Coaching Intensive is for. Each morning, I help you see what you’re avoiding, what it’s costing you, and what needs to change. Then I give you a clear action to take that day – not a plan for the future, but something you do before the day ends.

After two weeks, the good girl stops answering for you. You'll know what you want, you'll say it to the person who can give it to you, and you'll stop waiting for anyone to guess.

The investment is $397. That’s what stands between just understanding your patterns and actually changing them. In two weeks, you’ll either know what you want or still be waiting for someone else to figure it out for you.

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