Lust or no lust – that is the question…
When it comes to sex, English-speaking people often describe it as ‘making love’, whereas in other languages it is more about ‘having sex’. For me, it’s neither ‘having sex’ nor ‘making love’. I prefer to regard it as ‘letting love flow’, and as such consider it one of the best-kept secrets in the Western world.
Hardly anything we know about this fulfilling flow between two bodies is communicated to us in a natural way, even though in this day and age we are being constantly flooded with sexual stimulation and naked images. No other area between men and women is filled with so much promise, so much confusion and so much hurt. These days it seems that almost anything goes. However, this does not provide the wonderful passion and satisfaction we might have expected, but guilt and harrowing self-doubt. Our natural sexuality has been subsumed by a rather technical approach. We have often lost contact with our real passion and have no idea how easily we can express ourselves sexually, how powerfully our feelings can flow and how they can fill us and our partners with love. Sex has been robbed of its natural innocence and it has been replaced by the expectation that everything is possible. And so people get lost more and more often and don’t know where they are any more.
Today we face a constant barrage of sexual information. Quite ‘normal’ women’s magazines feature articles with the headlines: ‘Blow-jobs – How to give them properly’, ‘Lust through pain’ or ‘What men need’. With regard to sex, competition in the media is fierce and so we are constantly challenged to achieve more and more in our sex lives. Magazines promise more fulfilment by relentless comparisons: ‘Test your sexual positions – which ones are best for you and your partner?’ and ‘How often do you do it? More than once a week?’
It is not surprising when adults run out of steam under this all-pervasive pressure. Even more serious is its effect on young people. One teen-magazine article described a young girl who was terribly disappointed by her first kiss. After studying an article on 25 different ways of kissing, she had come to the frustrated conclusion: ‘I tried to do it exactly like that, but it didn’t feel right.’
Nowadays young people can scrutinize how others have sex. They can ‘consume’ sex by watching ‘dirty clips’ on the music channels or in the romantic settings of early evening soaps where only the most beautiful, sensitive and irresistible people do it. All teenage magazines offer endless sexual advice and technical tips. Adolescents who are preoccupied with exploring their own identity and are full of doubts about their body and attractiveness are being flooded with images of perfect multiple orgasms on every channel.
But all this doesn’t seem to function as a guideline for young viewers. A poll among 14 to 17 year olds revealed that only one third of this age group had had sexual intercourse and that the first time for nearly half the girls had been either ‘nothing special’, ‘unpleasant’ or guilt-ridden. Research done by the German Ministry of Health concluded that the pressure of sexual imagery on inexperienced teenagers was so great that most girls doing it for the first time worried primarily about ‘doing it right’. According to another poll, one third of all youngsters was already worried about not being good enough in bed.
Speaking as an experienced therapist, I believe that hardly anybody is aware how much emotional and physical damage this sexual fast-food is causing. Time and again I meet people who are ashamed because they haven’t had sex for years or have never found any real fulfilment in it. Poll results telling them bluntly that everybody else is having more fun than them only confirm their feelings of failure. According to the polls, German couples do it at least twice a week, East Berliners twice a night and one third of the people we see in the supermarket, at the gym or in the street enhance their numerous sexual encounters with whipped cream, champagne or leather outfits.
Those statistics claim that everything is possible for other people. They completely confuse people about their real physical needs, their sexual fragility and their sense of modesty. In reality, there is hardly any difference between normal statistics and statistics about people’s sex lives. Even in polls by renowned and serious institutes guaranteeing complete anonymity, nearly one third of anxious and inhibited people never give any answers at all. Questions regarding the frequency of sex, preferred practices and kinds of stimulants definitely remain unanswered. And as for the rest? Who would confess to feeling like a failure?
Researchers for an American poll tried new methods to get closer to the truth. They questioned nearly 3,000 people and repeated the questions up to 15 times. The results: one quarter of the men and nearly one third of the women admitted to not having had sex at all during the past year. Another quarter had only had it a few times.
TV, advertising, the internet and a whole variety of magazines suggest more or less directly that sensuality, eroticism and passion are normal and available for everyone. So if our intimate life has nothing of this glamour, this vitality and inner fulfilment, then we start pretending, both to ourselves and others. We abandon ourselves to images in our head rather than to our real partner, we dress up or we simply feel wrong and inadequate. A client once started a session with ‘I feel like a leper’ and confessed, in tears, that for a long time she had not wanted sex. In bed with her husband she had either faked an orgasm or stimulated herself with exciting thoughts and images. Afterwards she would often disappear to the bathroom to cry and wash herself. I’ve heard stories like that from many women.
Men, meanwhile, often feel swamped by shame and self-contempt when confessing to an almost addictive consumption of pornography or regular visits to prostitutes. A while ago I was waiting for someone in my car, parked in the city centre around midday in front of a pornographic cinema and peep show. While I was waiting there, one man after the other came out of the door. I wondered what it would be like to be all alone in a cubicle or a seat in a cinema with just a couple of tissues. From what I had heard in therapy I could tell what those men just had experienced, what they had got rid of and what they had gained. I looked into their faces. They were men of all ages and nationalities – men in sharp suits, men in grubby tracksuit bottoms with greasy hair, small men, tall men, fat men, skinny men… As different as they seemed, they had one thing in common – their eyes were dead and they all came out looking shifty. They seemed restless, as if haunted by other people’s eyes or their own shame. Watching them walk away, I felt great sadness and compassion. How they must all have yearned to actually make a woman happy!
Men often tell me why they buy sex or images of sex, why they secretly spend a small fortune in brothels or spend whole nights looking at porn on the net after their wives have gone to bed. What they describe sounds like a disease, an addiction, and it nearly always has its roots in their presumed inadequacy. In the darkest recesses of their mind they are saying, ‘I am a failure. I couldn’t make my wife happy any more, couldn’t reach her, make her open up to me…’ And somewhere in their body there is a passionate desire to free themselves, to let themselves go and to really connect with someone.
Whether it stems from Hollywood movies, statistics or adverts, men as well as women are submitting more and more to the pressure of this ubiquitous chase for perfect images, perfect partners, perfect positions and a perfect performance. Eventually they are driven by the desire to do everything perfectly.
In my view it is this pressure to achieve and the resulting emotional and mental exhaustion that primarily prevent physical love these days. Everyone is obsessed with the frequency of lovemaking. You simply have to do it twice a week, and if it’s only twice a month that’s serious evidence of sexual inadequacy. But these demands, this measuring up and comparing, simply lay the foundations for the disappearance of lust. Nothing is more important for physical love than relaxation and leisure. Instead it is viewed in a technical and controlled way, and, weighed down by fantasies and utopias, loses all perspective. At the beginning of this book I claimed that 70 per cent of all divorces were unnecessary. I have also come to the conclusion, judging by number of shameful faces distorted by addiction that I see, that in an equally high number of marriages there has been either no sex for years or the sex has become a matter of routine without any romance at all.
Nobody dares to admit that they don’t have sex very much. Even those who courageously ignore society’s demands for a certain quantity find it difficult to express that though they comply to statistical normality they lack a certain something, that somewhere inside they are haunted by emptiness. Countless long-term couples feel trapped in a repetitious cycle of sex. There is hardly ever anything new or creative about it, let alone any magic. Sexy lingerie, porn videos, role-playing, swinger clubs, changing partners – none of it gives them the scope for a real mind and body encounter. There may still be love between the partners, but they are unable to genuinely express it in a physical way. This invariably leads to a slow withering away of the relationship or to an increasing number of arguments. Sooner or later separation seems to be the only way out.
In my mind, if sex becomes a dead-end street, it can blow apart any relationship. But separation, particularly if it’s rooted in the bedroom, doesn’t solve the real problem. Sooner or later the old restlessness is back and the search goes on for the chance to connect sex and soul and express love in a physical way. It is a search driven by a deep human desire – a desire that permeates every corner of our lives, that overcomes all conventions and morals, that in the long run is stronger than all the euphoria at the beginning of a new relationship and that cannot be fulfilled by pornography and sexual fantasy. It is a desire that reminds us of our real challenge: to give ourselves to another person, just as we are, and to love them back in the same way.
And so we stumble on, keeping a count of how often we make love, checking on our practices and our partners. Hardly anybody experiences the real, deep, nurturing power of physical love or realizes its powerful spiritual dimension. In terms of sexuality, nearly everybody would be best off starting again from scratch. It would be liberating if we could confess to each other that we don’t know anything or that nothing we do know leads us to what we desire. If we dared to do this, we could meet our partner again in all innocence and truthfulness, and we could open up physically and heal. But we don’t hear anything about this process in the media or in society as a whole, and we don’t learn about it in our educational system either.
There is a huge lack of knowledge about physical love. To talk about the natural flow of love in our Western society is like talking of snow in a desert. Young people have technically-orientated sex education and are then left to struggle on alone in their search for intimacy. These days we have easier, earlier and more frequent sexual experiences than ever before, but they lead to easier, earlier and more frequent insecurity, anxiety and shame. Instead of experiencing sexuality as a natural life-force, many young people doubt themselves and distrust their own body. Sex remains unprocessed, an inner shadow in the body, only to be activated later in life with every attempt to make physical love. Most of the time we have no idea why we then feel cold, frigid or impotent, or are always craving new affairs.
Our love life is polarized, with a wide gap between ‘want it all the time’ and ‘don’t feel like doing it at all’. And it might come as a surprise to you, but they are equally unsatisfying.
If we don’t feel lust at all, we feel numb and dead. Often our heart has been broken. Somewhere along the way our dream of true love and satisfying sex has been destroyed by possessiveness, jealousy, sacrifice, greed, distrust and betrayal. Bit by bit we have withdrawn from our bodily sensations and cut ourselves off from our sexuality. We may even condemn it. But even when we repress our pain and deny our deep-seated desire for physical love, sex still retains its power over us, only in the form of its shadow.
One of our favourite shadows is our partner. If we repress our desires, for our partner everything is about sex. They always want it, dream of it. They can always do it. And if we don’t let them, they simply go out – to parties, bars, websites, peep shows or prostitutes.
If, on the other hand, we control our sexuality without immediately encountering a sensual or lustful shadow either inside or outside us, something in our life hardens. Something dies. We become a ‘better’ person, but dead.
Either way, the sexual impulse remains powerful. If we don’t heal our wounds, if we repress our pain and control it, then it turns into a kind of guerrilla fighter threatening our life from all quarters. In the end we can flee into being dull, self-righteous or judgemental, or attend to our wounds and reconnect to our heart and sexuality. Then the sexual flow returns to us more or less naturally.
It’s not only those who deny or repress their desires who have problems. Insatiable lovers also suffer from heartache. Changing sexual partners frequently often reveals a desperate search for love. All those Casanovas storming one bedroom after the other and all those ever-willing seductresses are not sex gods and goddesses at all – they are lost, searching with the body for what can only be found with the heart. Their hearts have been broken, just like those of the people who are eternally numb, and they don’t want to feel the pain any more either. But they haven’t given up – they are fighting, searching and challenging. They are driven on by the lure of a new thrill, a new conquest.
Whenever we treat sex like a drug we really are busy healing old wounds. We are looking for a connection we didn’t make before. We might have wanted to give love and only got sex back. We might have wanted to give our heart and been trapped by possessiveness. It might be all in the past, but it’s still there inside us, so we are constantly looking for connections and never finding them, and if we do find them, we can’t stay and make something of them, as we still have this old divide between our body and our heart.
Nowadays there is hardly a person or a relationship that doesn’t need sexual healing. When couples come to me in crisis, they usually describe one of two kinds of sex. ‘We haven’t had sex for quite a while’ is one statement. The other one is: ‘Nothing works any more, whereas before it was always fine in bed.’ In the first case it’s obvious that the connection between the two partners has been severed. The same is also true for the second, as I know from experience. And affairs and all kinds of pornographic addictions are found in sexually barren relationships as well as in sexually active ones.
When Rebecca came to me she was in shock. She had found out that her husband had been visiting brothels regularly for some time. ‘But it was always so good in bed,’ she said, shaking her head. Why did her husband visit prostitutes? She couldn’t understand it at all.
In the course of our sessions it turned out that sex had long been the most powerful weapon in the power struggle that was their marriage. Rebecca had played with her body and with her husband. Sometimes, when she couldn’t reach him in any other way, she had seduced him. She often did what he wanted, but only to dominate him later. Sometimes he was ‘allowed’ to have her because she wanted more time with him. Sometimes she rejected him in order to feel her own power over him. At parties they very quickly went their own ways and flirted with other people in front of each other – but only up to a certain point.
In one session, when Rebecca was very graphically describing sex with her husband, she said how something had ‘clicked’ with her: ‘I was pressed up against the headboard because he was pushing so hard. And that pain triggered something in me. It abruptly pulled me out of my fantasy world and I realized that my body didn’t want all this. For a moment I felt like crying. But the feeling vanished very quickly and I carried on furiously.’
Rebecca discovered that there was hardly any real intimacy in her marriage, that she rarely confided her desires to her husband and that their lives were very busy – as busy as they were in bed. She also found that they rarely experienced any real togetherness and connection. Most of all she realized that she had always, from day one, been afraid of losing her husband. When they had met he had been in another relationship and it had been a while before he had chosen Rebecca. Ever since then she’d been plagued by insecurity. She had never had the feeling that he had committed himself wholeheartedly to her. So whenever she was afraid that he might leave her or cheat on her she got a kick out of seducing him. She always felt she had to prove herself – and that roused her passion. But her heart had never been at rest in the relationship. She had never felt really loved.
At a later stage Rebecca’s husband came to the sessions as well. He hadn’t fared any better. ‘My wife is always making demands on me,’ he mused. ‘I’m never good enough. She’s always nagging me. Our marriage has been very demanding.’ They had indeed had sex ever more frequently and intensely, but he had felt emptier and emptier.
When sex is used as a weapon it becomes empty, greedy or lifeless. Sometimes it is used to manipulate those we claim to love. Often it determines levels of dependency, worthlessness and attractiveness in a relationship. We use our bodies to attract others or to keep them away. And all that detracts from our own physical power and robs sex of its healing effect.
There’s one feeling most frequently linked to sex: fear. But sex is the medium of love, a gateway to giving, a way of making meaningful contact with another person and putting aside our loneliness. Look at how babies are naturally connected to their own vitality. Sex is our most natural way of communication. It should be fun. It can build bridges and can express the love that we feel.
The second part of this book will examine lust and love in more detail. For now, let’s turn our attention to men and women.