5

Sexual Pleasure and Boredom in Relationships

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

—Honoré de Balzac

When turkeys mate, they think of swans.

—Johnny Carson

 

A comedian always got big laughs when he lamented, “I was making love to my wife the other night, and it wasn’t working; so I asked her, ‘What? You can’t think of anyone else either?’” The joke hides the serious issue that sometimes sex doesn’t “work” in a relationship. In fact, sexual dissatisfaction is a national epidemic. Based on interviews with more than three thousand Americans, a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 25 percent of women were unable to achieve orgasm, 30 percent lacked interest in sex, more than 30 percent of men suffered from premature ejaculation or other sexual dysfunction, and a high percentage of respondents of both sexes complained that they didn’t have sex often enough. Why are so many people unhappy in the bedroom? And how can understanding the dynamics of sexual arousal help us answer this question?

To understand sexual ennui and misunderstanding, we have to identify the forces that create and sustain sexual excitement as well as those that diminish it. It seems apparent that there are “natural” or universal tendencies for sexual intensity to decline over time in a long-term relationship. The unconscious processes underlying these tendencies are found in everyone. There are also, however, specific conflicts that create boredom. These conflicts are grist for the mill of therapy when the problems they generate are bad enough to bring the person or couple in to ask for help. The sexual history of a couple reflects the interaction of these two factors, the universal and the particular.

When a couple’s sex life declines in frequency and intensity, the question arises, “Is this decline normal or abnormal?” Is the couple merely going through what everyone goes through, or is there something wrong that needs to be addressed? Normal, however, is difficult to define. After all, everyone brings his or her own conflicts into the bedroom. There is not a couple alive who embodies either pure psychological health or pathology. To make matters worse, an intimate relationship always opens the mind to its greatest fears and vulnerabilities. We go to bed naked in more ways than one. Therefore, even in the best of circumstances, how can intimacy and familiarity not trigger highly idiosyncratic issues in both of the partners in a couple, and how can these issues not inevitably affect their sex life? If there is an unresolved issue or conflict in someone’s life, it will invariably appear in the bedroom.

Furthermore, the social expectation and standard of a “good” sex life greatly complicates our ability to identify a bad one, to tell where normal ennui ends and pathological boredom begins. Americans tend to have unrealistic expectations about the “normal” frequency and intensity of sex in a relationship. Our culture promotes an ideal of sexual bliss, a high-octane libidinal longing that is supposed to be present regardless of the length of time that a couple has been together, the physiological effects of aging, the availability of romantic time, and the presence of fatigue, work stress, or children. A healthy sex life is supposed to be frequent, creative, and intense. Therefore the inevitable fact that real people in real long-term relationships cannot and do not act as though they are in the heat of passion all the time causes many people to feel a sense of shame, disappointment, and failure. Never mind that millions of people are in the same boat, and that everyone tends to temper his or her sexual enthusiasm over time in a long-term relationship. Many patients have confessed to me a private disappointment or guilt that they’re having sex with their partners only two or three times per week; others, that it’s only once a month. Whatever the frequency, it comes to feel to the people involved like a “problem.” They worry about their or their partners’ lack of desire. Having defined themselves as sexual underachievers, they can’t talk to anyone else about it because they’re ashamed, or if it comes up, they lie about it. The topic of sexual frequency is shrouded in a cloud of unrealistic expectation and embarrassment.

In order to counteract this irrational performance anxiety, it is important to understand the factors that maintain and erode sexual intensity in relationships. If some degree of sexual boredom is universal, perhaps it needn’t be so shameful. In addition, it is equally important to explore and explain the myriad ways that these universal factors can interact with special psychological problems that afflict many people in the bedroom. Such an explanation of sexual chemistry and boredom will, at every step, be grounded in exactly the same model of the mind that we used to decipher the meaning of private sexual fantasies—namely, that sexual excitement is inevitably entwined in the issue of psychological safety.

THE NATURAL DECLINE OF SEXUAL INTEREST

Familiarity tends to breed sexual boredom. Notwithstanding our cultural idealization of eternal romantic intensity, most people intuitively understand that sexual intensity wanes with time, familiarity, and intimacy. This process of “waning,” however, may be quite slow and is rarely linear. Sexual attraction and desire can and do ebb and flow in an intimate relationship, usually diminishing under stress, and always mirroring the mood states and the general ups and downs of the relationship. In addition, while the overall sexual intensity of a relationship may begin to fade, with ennui often replacing ardor, the quality of sex for some couples may improve as they become more intimate. Familiarity with our partner’s body and sexual interests can obviously enhance our ability to arouse and please that partner—and vice versa. The increased safety that mature love can provide may counteract sexual inhibitions as much as the novelty and idealization of a new infatuation.

There are clearly great variations among couples in the quantity and quality of sexual changes that occur through the years. But even in relationships in which intimacy improves sexual communication, the overall level of activity and desire eventually tends to decline. It is harder to stay constantly aroused by someone whom you’ve seen in sickness as well as in health, at his or her worst as well as best, when he or she is feeling and acting grumpy, depressed, tired, and anxious, as well as sunny, charming, funny, empathic, and strong. True intimacy, of course, involves encountering and tolerating just such complexity, even as that complexity is lessening the perfection of the initial and blissful idealization. Intimacy and sexual desire can make uncomfortable bedfellows. Let us examine why.

When couples initially get together, their sexual attraction for each other is usually very strong. The intensity of their desire and the thrilling newness of each other’s bodies combine to make the connection exciting. A powerful current of idealization courses through each person’s experience of the other. By idealization, I mean that the other’s virtues are exaggerated and liabilities minimized. Your partner can do no wrong. His or her body is intensely stimulating, sexual technique masterful, and passion exhilarating. As H. L. Mencken once wrote: “To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia—to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.” In the throes of a new sexual relationship, one person’s arousal brings the other’s to a higher level and vice versa. An open channel of lust and desire between the partners is uncontaminated by worry, guilt, shame, self-doubt, or helplessness.

Idealization is ubiquitous in human relationships. Children idealize their parents, parents idealize their children, and we all tend to idealize people in authority. We endow those we idealize with special powers and virtues and cannot seem to see them as complex, flawed, and multidimensional people like us. This process is most exaggerated when two people fall in love. The other’s beauty, sexiness, capacity for passion, intelligence, wit, empathy, strength, altruism, or courage is exaggerated and taken to be the whole of who he or she is, while weaknesses of any kind are overlooked, diminished in importance, or rationalized away.

Sexual idealization is facilitated by a lack of familiarity between the partners in a new couple. They may think that they know each other’s innermost souls, but realistically they don’t. This relative lack of knowledge promotes the process of idealization because there aren’t any inconvenient emotional blemishes to get in the way. Tendencies toward depression, anger, or withdrawal are muted by the soft glow of idealization. Familiarity may not necessarily breed contempt, but a lack of familiarity can bring out the best in anyone.

Lack of familiarity also promotes psychological distance. New lovers are both merged and highly separate. They feel merged because of the intense identifications that accompany falling in love and separate because their real lives are not yet interdependent. The sense of fusion that often accompanies intense sexual excitement is possible precisely because, in the beginning of relationships, each person is more anchored in his or her separate reality than at any other time. The partners’ emotional and practical lives are not nearly as intermingled as they will be. Because of the actual psychological distance that must underlie even the most intensely love-struck couple, each person can safely throw him or herself into the other’s experience, including the other’s sexual experience, without the risk of losing him or herself in the process.

The feeling of intense connectedness is grounded in the reality of psychological distance. The subjectively intense feeling of union is with an idealized version of the other person, not with the whole person. The sense that new couples have of discovery and of delightful surprise is more intense than it will likely ever be as they get to know each other better and more objectively.

INTIMACY AND SEXUAL RUTHLESSNESS

One consequence of the greater sense of psychological distance in the beginning of a relationship is the enhanced capacity for sexual ruthlessness. As discussed in an earlier chapter, sexual ruthlessness involves that dimension of sexual excitement in which we are entirely selfish and not concerned about the excitement or well-being of our partner. Ruthlessness describes the quality of desire that enables a person to surrender to the full force of his or her own rhythms of pleasure and excitement without guilt, worry, or shame of any kind. Without sexual ruthlessness, we become enslaved to the feelings of the other person and can’t get maximally, or sometimes even minimally, excited. Because the early stage of a sexual relationship is one in which the partners in the couple idealize each other but feel a certain psychological distance as well, there is less of an occasion to worry or feel guilty about each other, to encounter each other’s raw nerves, vulnerable egos, or real or imagined flaws. By connecting with a “perfect” partner, our own value is automatically enhanced. In addition, the greater the psychological distance, the greater the feeling of “otherness” that we have toward our partner, the safer it is to treat that partner as a sexual object. Distance and separation promote sexual ruthlessness because the target is, in some sense, farther away.

Over time, however, certain idealizations become difficult to maintain and psychological distance begins to yield to the experience of intimate familiarity. It seems to be a universal experience. Couples become familiar with each other’s bodies, and they encounter these bodies in less than perfect condition and in less than sexy situations. Bodies get sick, expand or contract, become firmer or looser, and have all sorts of other functions that are anything but romantic and arousing. As physical familiarity increases, so does emotional familiarity. Each person learns more and more about his or her partner. Over time, couples begin to anticipate what each other will feel, say, and do. This means they also know each other’s preferences, fears, and vulnerabilities. They know exactly how to hurt each other and make up to each other. They know which topics to avoid and which are safe. The intimate familiarity of a couple always involves a loosening of personal boundaries and a certain degree of merger and mutual identification. This is a more real intimacy and merger than the temporary experience of ecstatic oneness seen in the early phase of a sexual relationship. Each person feels he or she really knows the other, for better or, perhaps increasingly, for worse.

Often, of course, this presumption of understanding turns out to be false. Couples hide things from each other all the time. They misread each other constantly and make false assumptions, project feelings onto each other that are really their own, blame each other when they themselves feel guilty, and are ignorant of blind spots derived from their gender, culture, or personality. Nevertheless, couples usually develop at least the subjective experience that they know exactly what each other is feeling in a given situation. Familiarity breeds the presumption of understanding and becomes increasingly laced with powerful processes of identification. The point at which one person stops and the other starts is not altogether clear.

This kind of deep immersion in and empathy with one’s partner’s experience is a double-edged sword, even in the healthiest of couples. On the one hand, understanding creates the foundation for intimacy. On the other hand, knowing your partner’s faults can create worry, dissatisfaction, guilt, and problematic identifications. Consider the familiar situation of the following couple. Partner A tends to be a bit depressive, while partner B tends to take on the caretaking role, always sensitive to signs of unhappiness in his or her loved one. This couple might be generally happy and high-functioning, blending together complementary character traits into a stable partnership. The caretaker partner, partner B, might have a tendency, as caretakers do, to feel a bit more than the average amount of guilt about being selfish, and the depressive partner, partner A, might have a bit more of a tendency to be self-preoccupied. Early on in this relationship, however, partner A’s underlying temperament might not have been visible or might have been made invisible by the rose-colored glasses of idealization. Perhaps such a partner might have been experienced as only “low-keyed” or “serious,” traits that paled in comparison to all of his or her endearing and sexy qualities. As a result of their growing intimacy, however, the caretaker, partner B, becomes increasingly aware of the depressive tendencies of partner A, and as this awareness grows, so does his or her worry, sense of responsibility, resentment, and guilt. These feelings, no matter how mild or subtle they may be, are inimical to sexual excitement because they inhibit the sexual ruthlessness necessary for arousal. The relationship may even be healthy and open enough for them to talk about these issues but, unless the fundamental character structure of the two people completely changes, these feelings and their effects on sexual passion will always be at least latent. Familiarity, then, has contributed to a dampening of sexual excitement in an otherwise high-functioning couple.

Or consider a couple in which one or both partners are basically modest about exhibiting their bodies or displaying their sexuality. Modesty often develops in people as a normal attempt to deal with feelings of shame and rejection. Let’s suppose that in this hypothetical couple, their vulnerability to feeling shame is only a whisper, hovering in the background, and not significantly detracting from what otherwise might be a healthy relationship. Such a couple might even be reasonably sexually active. In the beginning their mutual idealization may help them overcome feelings of sexual embarrassment by exaggerating each other’s confidence, spontaneity, and exuberance. As they become more intimate and attuned to each other’s psyches, however, each partner may more readily and clearly sense the vulnerability to shame and self-criticism in the other. One person’s need to turn the lights off during sex, while initially seen as a charming shyness, now feels more like a neurotic insecurity. The other person’s preference to give rather than receive oral sex, initially seen as generosity, now seems suggestive of shame. Such increased attunement works against passion in this case, because the feelings of insecurity and shame that are being sensed, however subtle, may elicit worry and feelings of responsibility—a sexual wet blanket.

In addition, powerful currents of identification inevitably come into play in the intimate realms of a long-term relationship. Partners not only sense each other’s feelings, they identify and empathically resonate with them. It may not be consciously apparent to either one that this is what’s happening. People sense, often unconsciously, the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of loved ones, feel them almost as if they are their own, and never become aware that this process is occurring.

So one partner’s shame becomes the other partner’s shame as well. Embarrassment becomes contagious, and both partners begin to feel a bit self-conscious. The partner who might like to have sex with the lights on unconsciously resonates with the partner who is embarrassed about it and therefore becomes more restrained. The partner who might want to give oral sex unconsciously identifies with the one who’s ashamed of his or her genitals and, consequently, begins to feel embarrassed and inhibited, too.

It may seem as if many of these dynamics would be more evident early on in a relationship when the partners are unfamiliar with each other; but more often, the intensity of sexual desire early in a sexual relationship often overrides feelings of embarrassment and self-doubt. As couples get to know each other, their deeper awareness of each other’s vulnerabilities can become their undoing. The other’s inhibitions and the shame upon which they rest begin to wear down spontaneity and passion. We are just too close, too identified with our inhibited partner, to escape the experience.

Sexual enervation doesn’t necessarily imply that something is wrong. These are descriptions of the normal dynamics of identification and emotional attunement. The familiarity and connectedness that long-term couples generally experience not only promote these dynamics but would be impossible without them. Everyone, after all, wants to be understood. We admire couples who know each other so well that they finish each other’s thoughts, and the experience of “growing old together” is a comforting and gratifying prospect for most people. The problem here is that the price of such comfort usually involves a certain degree of sexual apathy.

Identification is not the only ingredient of normal long-term intimacy that affects sexual desire. The closer we are to our partners, the more they begin to wear the mantles of the primary caretakers from our past. Freud called this process transference because we transfer the psychodynamics of our childhood onto our present relationships. The more emotionally significant the other becomes, the more likely we are to experience him or her according to templates laid down in our families.

Nowhere are adults more dependent than in the relationship they have with their partners, and at no other time was this dependency as strong as it was in childhood. Therefore, the normal emotional dependency in long-term relationships inevitably contains echoes of these earlier attachments. There is an old joke that says that when two people have sex, there are six people in bed: the two lovers and the parents of each of them. The truth behind the humor is that intimate sexual relationships necessarily open the psychic doors to the repetition of our own original parent-child relationship.

Transference constantly occurs in relationships. If our mother was unhappy, we will become selectively sensitive to unhappiness in our partner. Sometimes this makes us more empathically supportive, but at other times, it stirs up burdensome feelings of guilt and responsibility, with a corresponding impulse to get away. If our father tended to bully his family, we will either tend to be especially intimidated by conflict with a partner or become overly defensive in the face of it. If our father was weak, we will tend to react selectively to signs of weakness in a lover. An example of this situation occurred with a woman who had a weak father and who sought my help for a troubled marriage. Her primary complaint was that she could not tolerate her husband becoming even mildly depressed or ill. She found herself feeling contempt rather than concern and consequently often felt guilty. Unconsciously, she had transferred her feelings about her father onto her husband.

Another patient of mine, a relatively healthy young man, could not bear to hear his wife complain. His mother had been something of a martyr, and he’d grown up feeling responsible for the impossible task of making her happy. He felt that he was supposed to fix everything; and when he couldn’t, he felt helpless and guilty. The normal frustration that anyone might feel in response to the complaints of a loved one was enhanced in the mind of this patient because of transference. What might have been only a minor annoyance to another man became an intolerable accusation for which this patient felt responsible. We don’t have to be neurotic in order to relive the past in the present. It comes with being human.

Another patient, a successful attorney known for being aggressive in court, had a tendency to become inordinately sensitive to slights in her intimate relationships. If her partner was distracted for even a moment, she’d take it as rejection. Our work revealed that her mother was also easily emotionally wounded, often feeling neglected and rejected by her husband and children. The patient, to her chagrin, realized that her hypersensitivity to rejection was an identification with her mother and that she lived out this identification in intimate relationships. In this form of transference, however, the patient wasn’t transferring her experience of a parent onto a partner; instead, she had assumed the role of one parent, her mother, and treated her partner as if he were the other parent or even herself as a child.

As complicated as this sounds, it is really quite simple. In our original relationships with our parents, we develop an emotionally charged picture of who they are and an emotionally charged image of who we are as children—images that we internalize. In the case of the attorney, she found that she was living out her picture of her mother’s life and transferring her picture of her father and herself onto her partner. As a child she had felt like a bad and selfish girl who frequently hurt her mother. As an adult she frequently felt like her injured mother and experienced her boyfriend as a bad and selfish person who was hurting her. As a child she saw her father as someone who hurt her mother. As an adult she felt like her mother and easily saw her partners as hurtful, exactly like her father. This dynamic of identifying with our parents and treating others as we were treated by them is referred to by psychoanalysts as turning passive into active. It is another unconscious distortion of the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you becomes Do unto others as others once did unto you. In order to protect oneself from reexperiencing the helpless vulnerability that can often be evoked in intimate relationships, an experience that one suffered passively as a child is unconsciously turned around and actively done to another.

The relevance of transference to sexual boredom is obvious. To the extent that we unconsciously experience our partner or ourselves as similar to a parent, and to the extent that earlier parental relationships contained elements of worry, guilt, and shame (which most of our childhoods did), those feelings will enter our love life even more than they would most other aspects of our lives. Transference can, and often does, intensify the normal processes of sexual boredom by importing into the bedroom those aspects of our childhood that would tend to inhibit the free, spontaneous, and ruthless pursuit of pleasure. Because all of us have had at least some problematic experiences with our parents, the pressure to reexperience them in the context of our adult relationships is bound to interfere with sexual desire.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY: PATHOGENIC BELIEFS AND SEXUAL COMPATIBILITY

If the processes of identification and transference that accompany normal healthy intimacy can mute the intensity of sexual passion, it is not difficult to imagine the effect that these processes can have on the libidos of sexual partners who already have significant psychological problems. And yet, while it is probably the case that all of us have emotional problems of some kind, it is also the case that some couples maintain a feeling of sexual compatibility, however muted it may become over time, while other couples’ ardor fizzles completely. What accounts for these individual differences? What determines whether there is a good sexual fit? Interestingly, the sexual chemistry in a couple isn’t reliably correlated with the psychological health of the individuals involved. So-called sick people can have healthy sex. Why can some relationships work sexually even though the individuals involved seem quite psychologically troubled in other parts of their lives?

Just as sexual fantasies arouse us because they counteract our pathogenic beliefs, so, too, do good sexual relationships. Sexual compatibility is determined by the extent to which our pathogenic beliefs negate or reinforce those of our partner—and vice versa. And it is in intimate sexual relationships that our pathogenic beliefs about ourselves and others have the most direct opportunity to be confirmed or disproved. If we’re prone to feeling guilty about overwhelming people we love—a prime example of a pathogenic belief—that guilt will surface most forcefully in our sexual relationships. If we’re vulnerable to feeling shame, the choreography of our sexual relationships will either evoke or overcome that shame more directly than in other areas of our lives. If we’re anxious about intimacy in any way, or conflicted at all about pleasure (and who of us isn’t?), our sexual relationships will be the first arena in which these conflicts appear. In the naked world of sexuality, we often lack our usual defenses, the armor of language, wealth, and social role. Sex becomes a high-stakes game, a referendum on our self-esteem, exposing our pretensions, mirroring our narcissism, and assuaging our anxieties. Sexual desire is an extremely sensitive barometer of the ups and downs of our psychological lives.

Our sexual partners, therefore, have to perform the same function as sexual fantasies, namely, to establish the conditions of safety necessary to allow sexual excitement to emerge. After all, when it comes to the choreography of a real live sexual relationship, fantasies and preferences have to be enacted with another person. A good sexual connection in a couple requires that each partner’s predispositions to the emotions and beliefs that dampen excitement be counteracted by the other person.

Sexual attraction, however, happens in a flash. It doesn’t usually seem to wait until we’ve rationally figured out if the other person can make it safe for us get aroused. The process is not a conscious one. People tend to be romantically drawn, at least initially, to exactly the right person who can help them disprove certain irrational beliefs. It seems mysterious, almost magical, to the people involved, but in my clinical experience, the initial attraction is based on a great deal of nonconscious perception and information processing. If we are worried about hurting a partner with the intensity of our sexual desire, but find ourselves with a partner who seems to particularly enjoy aggressive intensity, that partner is making it safe for us to get turned on. We don’t have to do a battery of psychological tests to find such a person.

Sometimes we can sense this quality in a potential partner. One woman I treated claimed she knew instantly that her current boyfriend would be great in bed because of a certain “look” about him. Upon reflection, she realized that this “look” was one of arrogance, and it was to this arrogance that she was attracted precisely because it reassured her that she couldn’t push him around. Another example of this dynamic is the “love at first sight” that a male patient of mine recently experienced. This man had left a marriage to a woman who was quite depressed and with whom he had no sexual spark whatsoever primarily because of his chronic worrying about her. One night, when he was out at a tavern he frequented, he felt an intense physical and emotional attraction to the new bartender who had recently been hired. He realized later that the key to his attraction, to feeling as if this were love at first sight, was his perception of her as happy, outgoing, exuberant, and robust. He had grown up feeling guilty and worried about a mother who was frequently emotionally unavailable and often bedridden. It is no wonder he responded viscerally and powerfully to the image of a strong and happy woman.

A final example of the power of unconscious perception and chemistry involved a man who grew up in a strict fundamentalist home and felt ashamed of his body and sexuality. He found himself drawn to women who were somewhat exhibitionistic. He unconsciously sensed that their comfort with their own bodies, with their own sexuality, would rub off on him—that he would be able to identify with a woman who was uninhibited. He liked women who seemed comfortable being bawdy and flirtatious, who liked to dress in a sexy way, and who seemed to like sexual verbal repartee. He felt that he could sense all of this in the first moment of meeting a woman.

In all these cases, to the extent that each partner is able deliberately or inadvertently to disprove or counteract the other partner’s pathogenic beliefs, prospects for a good sexual chemistry will improve. To the extent that each partner confirms or reinforces the other partner’s pathogenic beliefs, the likelihood of sexual inhibition or dysfunction increases.

“THE GOOD”: THE CASE OF MARK AND BETSY

A good sexual relationship is like a good sexual fantasy. It is exciting because it is unconsciously safe. Let us first examine a relationship in which, like a successful fantasy, each person’s worst fears get successfully assuaged. Mark and Betsy consulted me for a short time about problems that their five-year-old son was having making friends in school. They had each been in their own individual therapy and were, as a result, highly psychologically minded people who wanted to be sure that nothing in their own relationship was contributing to their son’s problems. We met over a period of about four months, during which time their son seemed to do better. During this period, however, I had a good opportunity to get to know Mark and Betsy, and supplemented my observations with information garnered from their prior therapists. As it turned out, their relationship provided a window into the workings of a healthy sexual relationship. The key to this success lay, not only in their capacities for love and empathy, but in the fact that their pathogenic beliefs seemed to line up in ways that helped, rather than hurt, their sexual chemistry.

Both Mark and Betsy had been previously married to partners with whom they eventually had great sexual difficulty. Betsy told me that she had always felt relatively secure about her physical appearance and her sexuality, but she was insecure about her intellectual capacity. Her first husband was a brilliant man who initially seemed to respect Betsy’s intellect. This in itself was an aphrodisiac to Betsy because the promise of a “mutual admiration society” of the mind represented a powerful antidote to her own sense of unworthiness and shame. After a short time, however, her husband began to criticize her intelligence and to reject her. Where he had previously thought her witty, he now implied that she was boring. She came to experience him as cold and withholding. Betsy shut down completely.

Betsy had the irrational belief that she did not deserve to have a kind man love her, that she was somehow intrinsically defective in a man’s eyes. Her marriage had gone from counteracting to reinforcing this belief, one that had arisen in her childhood. Her father had been quite cold and had periodically beaten Betsy. One time, Betsy recalled, her father had overturned the dinner table and chased her around the house in an attempt to catch her and hit her for some minor offense. She locked herself in the bathroom and stayed there all night in fear.

Her mother, on the other hand, not only failed to protect her from her father’s violence, but tended toward obsessive worrying and seemed to take it out on Betsy in the form of frequent criticisms about her appearance and intellect. One time, Betsy recalled, her mother was having lunch with Betsy and her friend Amy. Betsy was reporting, with some excitement, how she had been approached by a modeling agency to do some work for them. Betsy’s mother suddenly said, “Look at how beautiful Amy’s hair is.… Don’t you wish you had lovely curls like her?” Over the course of her growing up, Betsy had internalized her parents’ criticisms and secretly saw herself as both unattractive and stupid. She had always tried to cover up this insecurity by at least becoming physically pleasing to men, something she became quite good at doing. Betsy’s first marriage had initially offered her a taste of redemption and the promise of disproving her pathogenic beliefs precisely because her husband seemed different from her parents. He was not only attracted to her physically, but he seemed to validate her intellectual competence as well. Eventually, of course, he repeated her parents’ devaluation of her and reconfirmed these same beliefs.

Mark’s experience had much in common with Betsy’s. He had been married to a woman whom he described as shrewish and emotionally brittle. She frequently belittled him and responded to his protests by withdrawing into hostile silences that would go on for days. She would criticize Mark if he wanted to play poker with his friends or if he bought and wore clothes that he thought looked particularly sexy. Unfortunately, Mark was familiar with such treatment, as it repeated key aspects of his relationship with his mother, a passive and hypochondriacal woman who had frequently made him feel guilty for wanting to be independent of her. Whenever Mark and his mother had a disagreement, she would act hurt and not speak to Mark until he caved in and apologized. Once, when Mark was about fourteen, he and his high school girlfriend, Sue, went to Mark’s house after school to study. As it turned out, Mark’s mother wasn’t home, and he and Sue were in the house alone. It was common practice in Mark’s family not to lock the front door, and so none of the family members ever carried keys. That afternoon, however, out of nervousness about being alone with Sue, out of not wanting to be disturbed—to this day Mark can’t remember why—when he and Sue came home to the empty house, he locked the front door behind them.

The studying lasted about the time it took to open their backpacks, and then Mark and Sue went up to Mark’s room to “fog up our glasses,” as Mark put it. Some time later, Mark’s mother came home, and to her surprise and great irritation found the front door locked. Because she didn’t have a key, she had to ring the doorbell to be let in. She was enraged to find Mark alone with Sue, who quickly gathered her books and left. Mark’s mother was so upset that he had been with a girl “under her roof” that she refused to speak to him for five days. Mark remembered that he was eventually reduced to weeping and begging for his mother’s forgiveness.

Interestingly, when Mark initially met his first wife, he was immediately attracted to her precisely because he perceived her as strong, the polar opposite of his mother. She was an outspoken feminist, and her public persona was that of an independent and assertive woman. This turned Mark on because it counteracted his expectation and belief that he was always supposed to be a “good guy,” responsible for weak and unhappy women. Soon after they got married, however, he saw that her strength was superficial, barely concealing how brittle and controlling she was, and his sexual attraction decreased accordingly.

When Mark and Betsy got together, each brought his or her own psychological baggage to the relationship. Mark had the guilty and irrational belief that he was a selfish guy and that he was supposed to worry about and take care of needy women. He was good at being sensitive to others’ needs but bad at taking care of his own. Betsy had the irrational belief that though she might be sexy on the outside, she wasn’t any good on the inside, that she was stupid and unlovable. She was relatively confident sexually but insecure in every other way.

Mark and Betsy’s marriage turned out to be a match made in heaven, partly because they had complementary pathogenic beliefs. Their strengths and their weaknesses lined up in such a way as to sustain a passionate connection. Good chemistry, in other words, doesn’t depend only on the similarity between two people, but also on the precise way that their differences line up. The psychologies of Mark and Betsy meshed in a way that made it safe for both of them to feel tremendously excited. Betsy, unlike Mark’s first wife, had no problem admiring men and Mark in particular. She enjoyed sex and liked to show off her body and turn her partner on because she took her partner’s arousal to mean that he was pleased and satisfied with her, and his arousal turned her on. Betsy’s psychology was an aphrodisiac to Mark. He could let go of his customary caretaking vigilance and indulge his own needs because his self-indulgence made Betsy feel happy, not hurt. Betsy even wanted Mark to be sexually selfish because only then could she be sure that he was completely fulfilled. A woman who was thrilled by his selfishness rather than offended by it negated Mark’s guilt and enabled him to get aroused. If Betsy had had less of an exaggerated need to please men, Mark might not have been able to convince himself that it was safe to be selfish and thus might not have felt secure enough to get maximally excited.

Mark, unlike Betsy’s first husband, had no problem being sensitive and caring. Betsy didn’t expect much in the way of caretaking—in fact, she struggled with a belief that she didn’t deserve any at all. As a result, Betsy responded intensely to Mark’s kindness and felt sexually liberated by it. She felt understood and accepted when he was attuned to her, something easy for Mark to be. Thus, Mark powerfully disproved Betsy’s irrational self-denigrating belief that she was defective and repulsive, making it safe for her to become sexually exuberant. If Mark had had less of an exaggerated need to take care of women, Betsy might not have felt reassured enough to let go and enjoy herself.

Chemistry comes about when it is easy for each person to disprove the other person’s pathogenic beliefs. The ease with which one partner reassures the other flows from who they are as people, not from a deliberate plan. Chemistry comes from being and not doing; it seems natural. It was natural for Betsy to admire Mark and to make his pleasure a top priority. If examined on its own, Betsy’s temperamental need to please men might even appear exaggerated or self-abnegating. But if viewed in the context of her background and current relationship with her husband, Betsy’s way of loving and adoring men was actually one of the pillars that supported this very healthy and happy relationship. This was balanced by Mark’s sensitivity to women, which he had spent his life perfecting. Even though Betsy didn’t require, as had his first wife, its constant exercise, he was by far the most understanding and caring man that she had ever met. Their personality quirks lined up in such a way that they naturally provided the reassurances that they each needed to free up their capacities for pleasure and excitement.

Betsy and Mark did have a basically healthy relationship and sex life, but the fact that they each had their own psychological baggage certainly created periodic frictions. This was real love, after all, not the storybook variety. There were tensions that arose from the very traits that had brought Mark and Betsy together. Betsy’s belief that she was unlovable didn’t go away simply because Mark loved her. Mark’s guilt didn’t just go away because Betsy never blamed him. These were feelings and beliefs that went back a long way and, while modified, were still operative in each person and thus were bound to cause problems, but they could be worked through in a relatively straightforward way because underneath there was a strong connection and sense of complementarity.

What if such a complementarity isn’t there? What happens if each partner’s pathogenic beliefs reinforce the other’s? What happens is bad chemistry and a sexual impasse. Sexual problems in a couple often stem from a system in which the very thing that one person needs to reduce feelings of guilt, rejection, or shame enough to get aroused is the very thing that the other person would feel too guilty, rejected, or ashamed to provide—and vice versa. To illustrate this painful, but common, dynamic, let’s consider the case of Jim and Laurie.

“THE BAD”: THE CASE OF JIM AND LAURIE

As she sat in my office during our first session, Laurie nervously and repeatedly looked at her husband, Jim. Jim seemed remote and had positioned his chair so that it pointed about forty-five degrees away from Laurie. As is so often true with couples, these physical postures turned out to be symbols of the underlying tension in their relationship, namely that Laurie was anxious about their attachment and Jim was burdened by it. Laurie and Jim had been sent to me by their individual therapists for couples counseling because of a complete breakdown in their sexual relationship. Their presenting complaint seemed simple enough: Laurie had developed a medical condition that, even with treatment, resulted in decreased vaginal lubrication. In order to have sex without pain, she needed the help of an artificial lubricant of some kind and had suggested to her husband that they incorporate its application into their foreplay. Jim, however, found himself feeling terribly upset about this idea because of his belief that if Laurie’s vagina was being lubricated artificially, he could never be sure if she was genuinely excited. He told her that he could tolerate it—barely—if she applied the lubricant herself, as long as he wasn’t around to see it or didn’t have to do it himself. He found himself repelled by the notion because of what he felt it communicated—or failed to communicate—about Laurie’s sexual desire. Laurie felt hurt by Jim’s attitude, interpreting it as a rejection of her. She wanted Jim to desire her so much that he would want to do whatever it took to make sex enjoyable and easy. As Laurie’s anxiety about Jim’s interest level mounted, Jim was not only unable to reassure her but seemed to become somewhat defiant in his insistence that their sex life wasn’t so great to begin with. Eventually, they stopped having sex altogether.

The most striking thing about this situation was the extent to which Jim and Laurie completely misunderstood each other. Each person’s subjective experience seemed so compellingly true that she or he was unable to grasp, much less validate, any competing version of the truth. Each had a need for reassurance that felt totally obvious, reasonable, and valid. It felt to both Jim and Laurie that to concede the other’s point of view, to put themselves in each other’s shoes, would be to relinquish their right to have their own emotional needs validated and met. This is a common psychological predicament in couples. Understanding yields to an emotional zero-sum game—if one person is right, the other person has to be wrong.

The deeper truth was that while Jim and Laurie’s needs for reassurance were legitimate from their subjective points of view, each of them was also in the grip of tormenting feelings and fears that, at their heart, did not have a rational basis at all, feelings and fears that derived instead from their own backgrounds and that had been imported into their relationship. Their subjective experiences not only were vastly different, but each was partially based in distortions born of childhood trauma. Each of them was driven by unconscious demons that masqueraded as reasonable, conscious concerns. Ultimately, this was the reason that they couldn’t communicate well about sex. They couldn’t yet face, much less speak, the deepest truth about what they felt.

What didn’t Jim and Laurie adequately understand? First of all, Jim was more worried than he admitted that he couldn’t satisfy Laurie. In fact, his ability to satisfy a woman was at the core of his self-image. It was as if a woman’s dissatisfaction completely impaled him; he felt that he had no choice but to take it to heart. Jim’s father, who had a history of job failures and two previous marriages, had abandoned the family when Jim was about four years old, leaving him to be raised by a mother who was openly hostile toward men. Soon after her husband left her, Jim’s mother came out as a lesbian and began publishing a radical feminist magazine that often pilloried men. According to Jim, his mother’s view was that men were usually disappointments if not outright misogynists. He remembers that his mother hung a poster over their toilet that read: “Men: Can’t Live with ’Em. Can’t Just Kill ’Em.” He said, with just a note of irony, “I had to look at this every time I peed.… No wonder I was confused about what it meant to be a man!” Given this environment, it was inevitable that Jim would develop the irrational belief that women weren’t ever happy with men. At the same time, however, he came to feel that if he didn’t make them happy, he was, in the words of his mother, a “pig” like his father.

For Jim to lubricate Laurie artificially would be to leave unanswered the question of whether she was really happy with him. In his unconscious mind, he was guilty until irrefutably proven innocent. It didn’t matter that Laurie reassured him otherwise. In Jim’s mind, physiology spoke louder than words. Jim was in the grip of what might have been called a “maternal transference” to Laurie in the sense that he experienced her needs as accusations, just as he had with his mother. For Jim to plunge ahead and not worry about Laurie’s “true” feelings of arousal, to have sex with her because he simply wanted to, was to risk being experienced as a selfish pig of a man. The more anxious Laurie became about his interest, or lack thereof, the more difficulty Jim had feeling desire because her complaints and anxiety unwittingly raised the specter again in his mind of an unhappy and unsatisfied woman for whose unhappiness he was responsible. Burdened by the “impossible” task of making Laurie happy, Jim went on “strike,” gave up, or simply turned away. And as most people who are in the grips of a sexual problem are wont to do, he then blamed his partner, maintaining the flimsy rationalization that Laurie wasn’t really into sex, despite her protests (and medical evidence) to the contrary.

Laurie, on the other hand, was unknowingly in the grips of her own pathogenic childhood beliefs. She had grown up with a mother who systematically belittled her and made her feel inadequate. Laurie was developmentally delayed when it came to her motor skills. She stood and moved awkwardly and had poor coordination. Her mother used to call her names like “ducky” because her toes pointed inward, and made jokes at her expense when she tripped or had trouble balancing things that she was carrying. Laurie complied with her mother’s disparagement and felt disgusting and deficient as a person and particularly as a woman. Her problem with vaginal lubrication threatened to reinforce her feeling of being defective as a woman. For Laurie, the only way to counteract this pathogenic belief about her femininity was for Jim not only to not mind if she used artificial lubrication, but for him to get turned on by applying it himself during their foreplay. She interpreted his unwillingness to do so as a confirmation that her worries about herself were justified, that she was disgusting to men and inadequate as a woman. Laurie was not aware of what was really at stake for her. She hid her own intense insecurity about her femininity behind her “reasonable” expectations that Jim stop holding an unavoidable medical condition against her. She couldn’t communicate the deeper levels of her self-loathing and anxiety because she didn’t understand them herself.

What, then, was the core problem here? To oversimplify somewhat, Jim experienced Laurie as an unhappy mother, and Laurie experienced Jim as a critical and rejecting one. Neither of them understood this because each one experienced him or herself as having legitimate needs and grievances that were being ignored. Laurie couldn’t understand Jim’s worry, not only because he didn’t understand it himself, but because she was seeing him through the distorting lens of her own idiosyncratic anxieties. Jim didn’t understand that Laurie felt that when he gave up on trying to please her, she took this as a sign of his disgust for her femininity, a disgust that she secretly felt was well deserved. He couldn’t understand this, not only because Laurie didn’t fully understand it herself, but because this wasn’t at all Jim’s experience of her problem with lubrication. Neither one of them could understand the other’s point of view. Each of them was in the grips of the reemergence of a childhood theme that was distorting their own and each other’s reactions.

Sexual interest is an extremely sensitive barometer of conflicts in a relationship. Sexual problems can be the earliest sign of a covert fight or hidden sense of injury and misrecognition in a couple. It is often a tip-off to the secret workings of guilt and anxiety, even when the surface manifestations of such feelings might be missing. It is in the intimacy of our sexual lives that the fault lines of our psyches are most obvious. Jim couldn’t understand Laurie’s feelings of rejection because, in his mind, he wasn’t rejecting her—he was simply defending himself against his worry that he wasn’t making her happy. Laurie couldn’t understand Jim’s feelings of guilt and inadequacy because she didn’t actually think he was selfish or inadequate but felt inadequate herself.

As we worked to clarify these issues, Jim and Laurie became more sympathetic to each other and began to make compromises. Laurie gave up on some of her insistence that Jim lubricate her each time they had sex, and Jim began to experiment with lubricating Laurie as part of their foreplay.

“… AND THE UGLY”: THE CASE OF ROB AND NICOLE

My patient Rob was inordinately worried about pleasing his wife, Nicole. He had grown up with a mother whom he experienced as often unhappy and self-abnegating. His father was absent most of the time. Rob felt responsible for his mother and very guilty about being too selfish, hedonistic, ambitious, or aggressively assertive. He developed the irrational belief that if a woman saw him as too ruthless or selfish in taking sexual pleasure, she would feel left out and hurt. Therefore, Rob was tentative in bed with his wife and ultrasensitive to clues about Nicole’s mental state, particularly her level of sexual readiness and excitement. He was cautious, gentle, and slow in his lovemaking, rarely initiating it unless he was sure she was interested. He refrained from staring too intently at her breasts or genitals, talking “dirty,” or being rough or coarse with her. As we discovered, Rob, of course, secretly wanted to do all these forbidden things but felt enormously guilty about it. He privately fantasized about being a voyeur but couldn’t put it into practice. As a result, his general sexual motivation became muted.

Rob’s considerate style of lovemaking, however, was anathema to Nicole. Her most exciting sexual fantasy was to be thrown on the bed and ravished. She wanted Rob to take over and not worry about her pleasure. She was turned off by Rob’s deference because she felt that she was being made to feel responsible for everything. Tender regard turned her off. In fact, when Rob demonstrated this kind of deference, Nicole would get irritated and complain that he wasn’t doing it “right.” When Rob tried to be a “nice guy,” Nicole would shut down and feel critical.

The irony was that they were more alike than they knew. Nicole had grown up with a great sense of guilt of her own toward both parents. She felt guilty about being stronger than her mother, a woman she described as depressed and often bedridden. She had surpassed her mother in almost every area of her life, from school to sports, and felt guilty about having done so. Nicole then developed a need to put herself down and developed the pathogenic belief that she wasn’t supposed to have a better and more exciting sex life than her mother as well. In addition, Nicole was often worried about her father, whom she saw as weak and unreliable. Her father was an alcoholic who consistently brought the family to the edge of economic chaos.

So why couldn’t Nicole simply tell Rob the truth, that she actually wanted him to be rough and ruthless with her, that it wouldn’t hurt her, and that the last thing she wanted was for him to worry about her? To the extent that she did tell him, why couldn’t Rob simply change course and act as the aggressive lover that he secretly wanted to be?

The problem, at one level, seemed clear. Both Rob and Nicole were unconsciously guilty about hurting each other. Both were burdened by exaggerated feelings of responsibility. Both felt that they had to worry about the other’s inner state and well-being to the exclusion of their own selfish pleasure. Because these beliefs were so ingrained, because they had originated in the cauldrons of their family lives, they simply didn’t and wouldn’t believe the other’s claims to the contrary. Rob didn’t really believe Nicole when she said that she wanted him to sexually dominate her. She might say that she wanted Rob to stop worrying about pleasing her, but the fact remained that she seemed displeased a lot of the time in bed.

Nicole, on the other hand, didn’t really believe Rob when he said that he urgently wanted to be more aggressive in bed, but that he held himself back out of a fear that he’d hurt her. She didn’t believe him when he eventually admitted that he was turned on by objectifying women’s bodies. After all, Rob did act tentatively in bed and seemed to be overly anxious about his performance. His actions spoke louder than his words because they confirmed her unconscious belief that men were basically weak and that she had to take care of them. Ironically, Nicole would have liked more of this kind of sexual admiration and voyeurism in her sex life with Rob but couldn’t take Rob at his word that this was what he also wanted.

When Rob told her that she did not have to feel responsible for him, that as far as he was concerned, she should even feel free to throw him on the bed and have her way with him, she couldn’t believe this sentiment either. Nicole was stuck in the belief that the only way she could really let go was if she had a partner who was bigger, stronger, and sturdier than she. She obviously felt too guilty to gratify her own sexual desires and impulses with impunity. Rob might be saying that he was holding himself back and that he wanted her to be more sexually assertive, but the power of her transference obligated her to discount his explanation.

Misunderstandings like this can go on for years. Both Rob and Nicole were afraid that if they took control of the situation and aggressively went after what they wanted, they would hurt each other. In addition, they both had the unconscious belief that, in light of their parents’ grim experience of the world, they weren’t supposed to have a fantastic sex life. Guilt was the glue that held this sexual stalemate in place.

Rob’s sexual fantasies clearly functioned as an antidote to the feelings and fears that were holding him back in bed. In his fantasies he was the lustful voyeur, and the object of his desire was none the worse for wear. Nicole’s sexual fantasies were similarly indicative of her underlying conflicts. Nicole would fantasize about being raped by a powerful man who treated her with utter indifference. It turned out that both of them used these fantasies, not only to masturbate, but to get and stay turned on with each other on the rare occasions when they had sex. If they had been able to talk about and understand each other’s sexual fantasies, they would have had further evidence that neither of them was as fragile and uninhibited as they both secretly feared.

Clinically, we see this type of situation all of the time. If each member of a couple is overly responsible and self-effacing, their sexual chemistry usually suffers. And such pairings are common, mainly because the underlying personality traits of guilt and responsibility are common. If you put two people with these types of issues together in a relationship, the intimacy can often threaten sexual desire. In the beginning of such a relationship, the presence of mutual idealization remedies each person’s tendency to feel overly guilty and responsible. As idealizations yield to the sober exigencies of everyday life, however, trouble starts to brew. Still under the sway of their childhood feelings and beliefs about the fragility of others and the danger of hurting them, each person reacts to a growing perception of his or her partner’s vulnerabilities by becoming more tentative, less aggressive, more restrained, and less aroused. Sexual ruthlessness and sexual desire itself become inhibited. The ongoing irony—or tragedy, depending on how severe the inhibitions are—is that each partner actually wants nothing more than for the other to be ruthless, to assert, and to take what he or she wants without worrying so much about the other’s well-being.

THE PROBLEM OF “THE GOOD WIFE”

Sexual misunderstandings often seem part of our culture. Consider the common situation in which a woman suppresses her own sexual longings in order to be the “good” wife and mother that she assumes her husband expects. Her guilty conviction is that she can’t be—and shouldn’t want to be—both a lustful woman and a responsible wife and mother. Her husband, however, experiences his “good” wife as asexual, innocent, and fragile, and therefore feels highly responsible for her. He worries about hurting or degrading such a “good” woman with his “dirty” interests, and consequently he feels somewhat sexually turned off at home. The man’s worries are usually heavily exaggerated by transferences from his childhood, a past in which he probably felt unduly responsible for his mother. In addition, men in our culture are steeped, whether they know it or not, in what is called the “mother/whore” split—the split image of women as either asexually maternal and on a pedestal, or degraded and sexually “loose.” The man is, therefore, further driven to transfer his sense of obligation to and responsibility for his mother onto his wife. Under the sway of these transferences, he inevitably suppresses his excitement because his unconscious mind assumes that his wife needs protection and not uninhibited sexuality. In fact, the reason that many men put their partners on pedestals in the first place is because of their unconscious need, motivated by guilt, to reassure the “fairer sex” that they won’t be sullied or contaminated by selfish, aggressive, and prurient male impulses.

What does the man, then, do with his “prurient” sexual interests and needs? He becomes prurient elsewhere. He splits off his sexual preferences and projects them onto other women—strangers, models, porno actresses, or the sexually wild and uninhibited women who populate his fantasy life. The key for the man is simply this: In his imagination, these “other” women love sex. They love to have it in every position, place, or manner that he can imagine. He doesn’t have to worry about hurting these women with his lust because he imagines that they’re lustful themselves.

The tragedy is, of course, that this man’s wife would usually like to have sex more wildly and more frequently. Why can’t she? The surface answer is that her life as a wife, mother, and, often, wage earner, simply wears her out. But if we probe beneath her physical and social burdens, we can often find very particular psychological ones. Often, for instance, we find that the woman has suppressed her sexual longings under the illusion that that’s what her husband wanted or because of a guilty, unconscious belief that she isn’t supposed to feel wild or ruthless sexual desire in her role as good wife and mother. Her own fantasy life may, in fact, be filled with sexual escapades in which she’s much more out of control of her excitement. They may even be “dirty,” aggressive, fetishistic, and wild—precisely the kind of qualities and proclivities that her husband would like to have in a sexual partner. But she has often had to relegate these to her fantasy life, perhaps only occasionally acting them out, not only because of social sanctions against this sort of sexuality in women, but because of her deep conviction that her husband couldn’t handle these desires and would either become hurt or reject her if he knew about them. The wife unconsciously protects her husband’s ego by taming her own passion. The irony is clear: both the husband and wife want the same thing—a looser, wilder, more passionate sex life—but are prevented from having one because of the unspoken, and often unconscious assumptions that the other person cannot or will not participate.

Many couples, both gay and straight, desexualize each other. In traditional heterosexual relationships, it is common for women to desexualize themselves and their male partners. Despite the ethos of sexual liberation, many women feel that once they’ve gotten into a committed primary relationship, particularly when this commitment leads to marriage and children, they are supposed to give up the wilder sexual intensity that might have marked their single years. A patient of mine, complaining of a lack of sexual interest on her part after her marriage, made light of the problem in the following quip: “How do you get a Jewish girl to stop having sex? Marry her!” This joke speaks to more than anti-Semitic stereotypes. It is an attempt to capture the (often) dramatic change in their feelings about sex that many women and men, Jewish and non-Jewish, experience when they “settle down.”

One of the most important things that the joke leaves out is the degree to which society expects women to lose their sexual passion and intensity when they become mothers. This broad social expectation that women suppress their sexuality often resonates with conflicts in their childhoods. The key to this desexualization lies in how much guilt these women feel about having more sexual pleasure in their lives than their own mothers did. This belief is usually unconscious, developing as it did in early childhood and adolescence when a daughter is vulnerable to any communication from her mother about the importance of sexual fulfillment in her own as well as in her daughter’s life. This communication may be explicit—I’ve heard many stories from women who grew up consciously knowing that their mothers were sexually unhappy because these mothers frankly told them so—or it may be conveyed through the way that a mother lives her life. In the end, the result is the same. These daughters grow up with the unconscious belief that if their mother’s marriage, sex life, and life in general wasn’t a good one, the daughters shouldn’t lay claim to much excitement either.

A colleague of mine told me about a patient of his who seemed to represent an extreme example of the degree to which a woman can feel driven to suppress, and then redirect in fantasy, her own sexuality out of an unconscious sense of guilt. His patient was engaged to be married. She had grown up with a strong injunction from her mother to not be “promiscuous” but to get married early and raise a family. Her mother was an unhappy housewife who had carefully supervised her daughter’s social life and kept asking the daughter when she was going to “make her happy” by getting married. The daughter eventually became engaged to a man who seemed responsible and kind but with whom she felt sexually inhibited. She knew that her fiancé wanted to have a wilder and more frequent sex life, but her unconscious need to be “good” made her act as if she was supposed to be constrained in the bedroom.

This patient, however, had an active fantasy life that belied this sexually proper image. She used to surf the Internet and visit sexual chat rooms in which those present would, under the cover of anonymity, indulge her sexual fantasies. Her favorite fantasy was one she called the “slutty bride” fantasy. In the fantasy she was having sex with her husband’s best man and groomsmen on her wedding day, all the while wearing her formal, white lace wedding dress. She was being defiled, treated like a whore, and felt just like one on this, the most important and virginal day of her life. The fantasy had to be “dirty,” rough, and crude. The psychological point of it was to rebel radically against her compliance with her mother and dismantle the image of herself as a “good girl.” To the extent that she was ostensibly degraded in her fantasy, it only further diminished her guilt—she was, after all, a secret harlot underneath the trappings of a virginal bride. Her guilty compliance and identification with her repressed and repressive mother inhibited her, while fantasies of being a harlot freed her up to get aroused.

At times the manifestations of sexual problems in the bedroom seem to be so stereotypical that they seem like part of a Hollywood movie—older man leaves wife for younger woman, sex dies out after the birth of the first child, economic strain leaves little time or energy for sex, power struggles on the emotional level breed hostile rejection in the sexual arena, alcoholism or drug use suppresses all senses, including sexual ones. Even though these patterns of sexual dysfunction are common and strongly impacted by social influences, they all involve highly personal, and often unconscious, processes that are not immediately apparent.

Consider, for instance, the many ways in which hostility between partners regularly interferes with sexual arousal and performance. It’s probably universal that when our partner is hostile, we feel rejected and vice versa. Intimate relationships sensitize people to rejection, and rejections regularly occur in most intimate relationships. “Not tonight, dear … I have a headache” has entered our vernacular as the classic form that sexual rejection takes. She or he may really have a headache or may be, as this remark usually implies, covertly rejecting the other’s sexual advances. And rejection, as we’ve seen, is incompatible with sexual arousal.

There are many other ways for hostility and rejection to be conveyed in a relationship—various forms of chronic fighting, “tit for tat” rejections, covert power struggles, or competitions that are, or become, sexual. Examples of these dynamics are legion. On the simplest level, people often withhold sex as a classic weapon in both the cold and hot wars that they engage in with their partners. It seems to be a common pattern that a woman won’t “give” her man sex because he won’t take care of her emotionally. Or a man is so angry at his partner that he ejaculates immediately after penetrating her, leaving her dissatisfied. Or either partner might be feeling devalued by the other and may subtly criticize his or her sexual performance.

These kinds of bedroom wars can go on for years, with sexual passion their primary victim. Some people are more disposed to feeling rejected than others, more sensitive to slights than others. The difference usually involves the extent to which people felt rejected by one or both parents while growing up. Some are so highly sensitive to rejection they are prepared to read it into situations that might, in fact, be ambiguous or even benign. I have had patients who will infer from a look, a gesture, or a tone of voice that his or her partner isn’t sexually interested, and this will immediately be read as a rejection and turn the patient off. Sometimes this sensitive person’s inferences are correct. At other times they’re not. In a situation where there isn’t, in fact, a rejection—when, for instance, one’s partner is simply tired or distracted and not offering a sexual rebuff—the prophecy can and does become self-fulfilling. The person reeling from an imaginary rebuke sexually shuts down and thereby rebukes his or her partner.

Often, however, fights between couples can be resolved by sex. I have heard many patients, as well as friends, report that some of their most exciting sex has occurred in just such situations. Using sex to make up after a fight is a scenario so enshrined in our culture that it seems natural. But if fighting usually turns people off, what is it about certain types of fighting that enhances sexual passion? Why is it that, for some couples, the emotional reconciliation is accomplished in bed?

The answer lies not in the inherent erotism of anger or conflict, but in the way sexual arousal functions as a solution to the problem of emotional distance, loss, and pain. Couples often, in fact, unconsciously arrange to have arguments to begin with in order to create emotional distance. Sexual excitement can then safely emerge and help the couple reestablish a connection. This is a complicated but important process, one that most people have experienced at some point in their relationships. It’s worth a closer examination.

The real psychological threat to sexual passion in such situations is not the fighting—it is what the fighting is intended to counteract. Fighting is an effective way of establishing psychological separation. When people are fighting, their opponent—in this case, their partner—is “over there,” outside and apart. Arguments build a fence between people. Sometimes these fences are intended to hurt the other person. Other times their unconscious purpose is to resist forces in a relationship that promote identification and merger. Intimacy promotes this type of psychological closeness, which, while comforting on one level, can be threatening on another. It collapses the differences between people, and therefore makes an individual’s sense of self and of sexual ruthlessness difficult to maintain. Sexual excitement is imperiled because there isn’t enough differentiation to allow for it. Arguing, therefore, can be first and foremost an attempt to free ourselves from the threatening and sexually inhibiting effect of intimacy and merger.

As a result of the differentiation created by the argument, sexual excitement again becomes possible. Now the partners are facing each other as two individuated people. The threat of merger reduced, sexual ruthlessness is possible. It becomes safe to get excited again. Moreover, the couple becomes motivated to get excited because fighting threatens each of them with the dangers of loss and rejection. Merger and identification produce the need to fight that produces the need to have sex. Depending on the personalities involved, this cycle can be repeated endlessly.

Patterns of fighting and sexual reconciliation are not heterosexual phenomena. They are human phenomena born of the inherent tensions between intimacy and sexuality, between psychological closeness and separation. In fact, the dynamic—and often vicious—circle of merger-fighting-separation-sexual excitement-intimacy-merger is often reported in lesbian couples. There is a phenomenon known as “lesbian bed death.” The issue seems to be that lesbian relationships often promote, and are grounded in, strong currents of identification and bear the stamp of powerful maternal transferences. These processes can, on the one hand, be one of the pillars of an unusually deep and satisfying intimacy. On the other hand, the kinds of identification upon which this closeness is grounded can lead to a collapse of the separation and psychological distance required to sustain erotic excitement, causing the relationship to become tilted too much toward nurturing and not enough toward ruthlessness. The fighting/reconciliation cycle, then, easily gets activated.

On one level, a couple’s emotional and sexual life can seem strangely unrelated. Couples who are emotionally close may be sexually inhibited, while estranged or acrimonious ones may only have a good sex life keeping them together. Some couples describe their initial sexual connection as similar to being struck by lightning; others feel as though they’ve grown into it. Still others never do ignite any sexual fire. All couples are burdened by being exposed to a vast array of social conditioning concerning what they should feel sexually, how they should feel it, and what they should do about it. But complicating these external pressures on our sexuality are the vast array of very particular psychological issues with which we each grew up. Our beliefs and feelings about them are, ultimately, what will determine sexual compatibility.

Of course, couples are rarely aware of these dynamics. People tend to feel that their sexual responses, or lack thereof, are mysterious and somehow biological. Couples will say, “The spark has just gone out of our relationship,” as if the “spark” is a fact of nature. On the other hand, sexual attraction and intensity are equally experienced as “natural” or biochemical in nature. “We just have good chemistry,” couples will say, as if chemistry has no psychological explanation. But, as I have shown, sexual chemistry—or its absence—arises from meaningful psychological sources. Awareness of these sources can only benefit couples trying to understand and communicate what is going on in their relationships.