Sexual Identity Crisis and Conflict

TERRI was a modestly dressed woman in her early 40s, suffering from depression and chronic fatigue syndrome. But that was not why she had driven 200 miles to see me. She had come because she was unhappy with her sex life with her husband, Bill. Some nervous explorations on the Internet had helped her realize she really wanted kinky sex, and she wasn’t sure how to broach it with him. She was a conservative Christian, and her equally religious husband was a deacon in their church.

Another problem plaguing Terri was that she had had a deeply troubling, long-term lesbian relationship in her youth. Her girlfriend turned out to be psychotic and violent, and Terri literally had to flee her. She didn’t feel safe again until she met Bill, a soft-spoken, kindly, undemanding teddy-bear of a guy. She prayed that marriage would be her salvation. But now that their only child was out of the house, she felt empty and alone, and she’d been thinking a lot about being with a woman again.

She couldn’t talk to her church pastor; she couldn’t even attend services in good faith anymore. It was church gospel that people “choose” to be homosexual. She didn’t choose it. Did she? She felt like she was falling apart on the inside.

Terri was so distraught, it was all she could do to wheeze out her story between sobs and trembles. As I took her sex history, I realized that the angst-ridden woman sitting across from me in a crisp white shirt and neatly ironed pants with tiny pearl studs in her ears, tiny gold cross around her neck, and sensible pumps on her feet, was likely a kinky lesbian submissive in denial.

Though Terri believed that gay people should have freedom, she believed in it for other people, not for herself. She had always lived as her family and community expected her to live, and not as she, secretly, wished she could live. She couldn’t imagine another life. She wasn’t a “lesbian” lesbian. She could live without it. She had proven that she could have a normal marriage to a man. Yes, she could only climax with him if she was thinking of women, but she enjoyed the sex with him anyway.

There’s a peculiar misconception that if you are gay or lesbian you are incapable of performing with the other sex. Not only can some gays and lesbians perform very well in bed with members of the opposite sex, some enjoy the occasional heterosexual romp. As I’ll be explaining in the second part of this section, there are hundreds of shades of gayness, lesbianism, bisexuality, and everything else. Emotionally, it even made sense that Terri would have decent sex with her husband. It was the first and only mutually respectful sex – with someone who was always gentle and kind – that she’d ever experienced. They loved each other and wanted to please each other. They may not be the ingredients for complete fulfillment but they are the basic ingredients for mutual pleasure in bed.

The more Terri talked, the more the history of her disastrous lesbian affair took center stage. Terri had made a lot of assumptions about sexuality based on that affair.

She was worried that her fantasies of being spanked and tied up by women were signs that she really wanted to be abused. Why else did she stay with her violent girlfriend for so long? Still, she always fantasized about women when she had sex. In real life, they terrified her. She didn’t even feel comfortable making friends with women at church.

I did my best to address her immediate concerns that day, including better stress management, advice on broaching BDSM with Bill, and masturbation exercises I thought would be fun for her and help with the stress (you can find samples of those exercises in the first volume, Sex and the Self). But I knew it was like applying band-aids to septic wounds. Until Terri was ready to confront the real issue, that she was trying to be someone she wasn’t, our work together would not go far.

We may never find a “gay gene” or other definitive explanation for why people are gay or lesbian, but the historical evidence is conclusive. Homosexuality and lesbianism are normal sexual orientations that have been amply documented since the beginning of human history. No matter the time or place, no matter the community standards or religious dogma, homosexuality is, always has been and always will be well within the arch of normal human sexual experience. The story of how and why our culture has come to believe that gayness isn’t normal is not a rational history but rather a series of belief-based fears about the meaning of sex based on the idea that the Supreme Being only wants people to have sex in a way that produces babies.

It was the Victorians, seeking to put a more scientific face on the irrational and condemnatory religious attitudes towards sex, who came up with the idea of dividing human sexual behaviors into categories. They sought in earnest to end sexual misery, but their narrow dogma only prompted new forms of misery. They labeled everything that varied from reproductive sex in marriage as pathologies, including jerking off, oral sex, and even lust in women. They were dead wrong about it all.

Anyone who has spent a minute on the Internet knows that real people have sex for pleasure, that pleasure takes a million different forms, and that we all want to look at it even when it isn’t our cup of tea. We all know it, but our culture and laws still operate on their patriarchal, religious assumption that sex for pleasure is evil, and that its depiction, whether through art or pornography, is obscene. I would love to see Freud on the Internet and wonder what he would make of sex in the 21^st century.

When societies proceed on the basis of fundamental sexual ignorance and ludicrous, unscientific theories, we all feel the burden. Public sexual health suffers and puts a strain on the health-care system. Sex acts that don’t conform to the model are hidden, whispered over, laughed at and condemned. If you’re born to be a little different from the mainstream expectation, that burden can become very personal.

I call it a sexual identity crisis when we internalize the way society tells us we’re supposed to be and that image clashes with the person one is inside. The vast underlying biological realities of our brain structure, DNA, and individual responses to environmental stimuli from birth to death (all of which are contributing factors in sexual identity) cannot be shut down without negative consequences. Repression, denial, and avoidance make us feel helpless and often lead us to deceive others about who we are. They take a huge toll on our self-esteem and, over time, can warp our self-image and our relationship to the world. Sooner or later, people who suppress their innate sexual identity are bound to experience a sexual identity crisis.

For me, the five hallmarks of a sexual identity crisis are

1. A constant nagging sense that something is missing from your sex life with your partner.

2. Fantasies or sexy thoughts that are both deeply arousing and deeply emotionally troubling.

3. Feeling that if the adults who are close to you knew the “real” you sexually they would reject you, so you have to wear a mask.

4. A pattern of loss of interest, instability or cheating in relationships.

5. A pattern of avoiding sexual intimacy.

Although these symptoms may all be explained by other diagnoses, in my opinion, people who can say “that’s me” to all of the above are likely struggling with an underlying sexual identity crisis.

I couldn’t tell Terri that her personality was now collapsing under the burden of her efforts to live a life that was completely counter-intuitive to her identity. It’s not as if a gay person learns she’s gay and says, “Eureka! I’m gay! That solves all my problems!” (Although in Dr. Brame’s perfect world…well, wouldn’t it be nice if connecting with your authentic self was a positive value in our world, something people looked forward to as part of the process of adulthood?)

Given how invested she was in her view of the world, even telling her she was lesbian at that stage might have shattered her. While most gay and lesbian people are aware they’re different from heterosexuals even as little kids, they may not know what homosexuality is or feel it really applies to them. If they grow up believing that being gay or lesbian is a bad thing or an impulse they must repress to be loveable, their true identity may be so deeply buried, even they can’t fully access it.

I knew a wall was the only defense system Terri had ever developed. I knew she built that wall around her authentic sexual identity to protect herself from threats both real and imaginary. Part of the process of healing from a sexual identity crisis is redefining which threats are real and which are based on ignorance or fear. Until Terri could build a new, better defense system, one that really did protect her from genuine threats (such as predators and violent homophobes) while letting in good stuff (such as potential loving partners), that wall was her only true security.

There was another reason I didn’t want to give Terri a label that day. While “kinky lesbian submissive” may sound pretty darn specific to some, to me, it’s clinically generic. There are too many kinds of kinky, too many kinds of lesbian, and too many kinds of submissive for the “kinky lesbian submissive” label to be more than a starting point for me, and a general guide to understanding Terri as a flesh and blood human being. Only real-life experience would establish what worked best for Terri emotionally.

Terri’s story has had such an inspiring arc since that day, almost 10 years ago, when she first drove through the foothills of the Georgia Piedmonts to talk to me. Her journey deserves its own book. She never gave up on therapy, no matter how painful and depressing it was at times. Eventually, she didn’t need me to tell her who she was or give her a label – she knew exactly who she was. It didn’t make life easier – there was so much safety in staying where she was. But it inspired her to make change and take the risk that she could and maybe even would find happiness after all this time.

And – not by miracle, not by twists of fate, but by believing in herself, and knowing that she deserved to be loved as she was made, and making choices that respected and honored her value as a human being – she succeeded beyond all expectations. She got a very amicable divorce, came out to her family (for better AND worse), moved to a bigger city, joined a Lesbian/Gay-friendly church, and after some mighty bumps in the road, finally met a beautiful, loving sexy dominant woman. They just celebrated their fourth happy anniversary. These days, that weepy hopeless church lady is a radiant, cheerful, and incredibly strong church lady. It’s a beautiful thing.

Coming to terms with your authentic sexuality identity is a process of small changes and big insights. A sexual identity crisis can be healed when people integrate what they know about themselves in their head with the choices they make in life. Step by step, they can make life choices from a place of education and self-awareness. They can break with the pattern of disappointment they came to expect as their lot in life, and start growing a life with a new assumption – that every adult is entitled to sexual satisfaction.

This applies as much to mainstream heterosexuals as it does to anyone else. Countless couples live in a state of sexual anxiety, feeling dissatisfied, frustrated, confused, scared or sexually abandoned, treating sex like a Molotov Cocktail rather than a normal and routine part of intimacy, or a great topic for conversation with your partners.

Sexual identity crisis usually takes a different form though among those who, at least superficially, conform to social expectations.

MARC R., a medical supply salesman from the Midwest, said he did everything he could think of to make his wife happy. He bought her the house she wanted and a new car every two years. He helped around the house too. But no matter what he did, she always found reasons to criticize him.

Their sex life was as dead as a doornail. He hadn’t touched her in three years. No great loss. She was so unresponsive in bed, it was like fucking a corpse. He loved her but there was nothing sexual there for him anymore. His big secret, and the reason he was really seeing me, is that he had been going to sex-workers. He felt bad about it, but, unlike his wife, sex-workers always knew how to make him feel good. Escorts made sex simple and fun, the way he thought it should be. His wife wouldn’t even go down on him.

I realize some people might, at that point sit up and say, “You selfish swine! You, Sir, are a sex addict!” However, I was more interested that he had found deeper satisfaction and intimacy with strangers than with the one he claimed to love and to whom he had vowed fidelity. I wanted to know what that meant and how this situation evolved.

Figuring out why people behave badly so you can help them to make better choices isn’t about jumping to easy judgments. It makes me livid when I hear experts in media leaping to bone-headed conclusions about human behaviors on the assumption that we are all cookie-cutter versions of one another. I am not saying that Marc sounded like a stellar character but I also knew there was more to the story.

I was interested in his wife’s unresponsiveness in bed and how it made him feel. Being with a partner who doesn’t reciprocate your passion or demonstrate some basic enthusiasm through words or acts has a strangely dejecting effect on people, and can be murderous to our self-esteem. We are at our most vulnerable during sex because we are at our least rational. If Marc was a fragile or wounded person, his wife’s obvious distaste for physical intimacy might have shut him down emotionally and made him change his perception of her from an exciting sex partner to an obstacle to his pleasure.

No doubt, his wife would tell a different story. Marc hadn’t brought her with him because, as he confessed, she’d leave him if she found out about the affairs. On one hand, that would be fine by him; it would be a decision he could live with. On the other, he didn’t want to hurt her by telling her the truth.

Whether or not she found out, I knew he was not the man she thought she had married. And if your therapist knows it, the person you live with probably knows too, even if they don’t know or understand the reasons behind it. Marc wasn’t the guy who vowed monogamy and meant it anymore. He might pretend to be the same guy on the surface but he had changed. I could hear the anger and frustration in his voice when he spoke of her. I’m sure she heard it when he spoke to her too.

It was time to come clean. His wife deserved to know that truth. It was moral fraud to let her believe that he still believed in the promises they once made. He was, in effect, deceiving her into staying married to him. Marc agreed but was so ashamed of himself he couldn’t face her. He had come close to blurting it all out once or twice, but always held his tongue at the last minute. When it came right down to it, he was afraid of losing her, even though he found more comfort in other women’s arms.

This helped me understand part of what was driving him to sex-workers: it was much easier to talk to people who were uninhibited and sexually experienced. He felt better about himself talking to people who had so much more, and so much more varied, sex than himself. He didn’t feel abnormal when he was around them. Sex-workers, porn stars, strippers, and yes, even nerdy sex therapists, provide something most people can’t get at home: explicit and emotionally stress-free conversation about sex. For Marc, cheating on his wife had opened the door to a kind of sexual openness he’d never known and which he now craved.

Cheating is not one monolithic phenomenon, but the consequence of a series of bad choices whose reasons vary from one adult to another. Here is a list of the 10 most common reasons I’ve heard in my office and email since I’ve been a therapist:

1. My partner doesn’t like sex as much as I do.

2. My partner doesn’t like the kind of sex I like.

3. My partner tries, but just doesn’t “get” what I need.

4. I tried, but nothing I did ever seemed to really work.

5. My partner and I never talk about real things.

6. My partner doesn’t make an effort to initiate sex with me.

7. All I get at home is criticism and negativity.

8. Even though I’m lying to him/her, my partner wouldn’t really mind.

9. My partner cares more about (“their job,” “the kids,” “the pets,” “the financial security”) than me.

10. I feel deeply lonely in my relationship.

For better or worse, adults may feel any or all of the above at moments, even in great relationships. Human moodiness makes long-term committed relationships a challenge unto themselves. But when such feelings are chronic, the pleasure of sex with a partner is gradually replaced by feelings of alienation and true intimacy vanishes.

Instead of sex being a hot, affirmative, loving connection that brings joy and release, it is a quiet nightmare of performance anxiety and self-fulfilling prophecies of sexual frustration. Unfortunately, when your expectations of sex are low, you usually end up having dissatisfying sex. And when you are dissatisfied with sex, it sends negative emotional ripples through your psyche, which can destabilize your self-image (What’s wrong with me?) and erode your self-esteem (Maybe I’m not good enough?).

At that point, all bets are off on how adults will handle their emotions. The spectrum of human responses to sexual frustration (or feeling sexually thwarted) is literally mind-blowing. Some people bow to circumstance and suffer in quiet. Most people live with it uneasily and bitch about it until they’re tired of bitching. Others get so angry, they rationalize breaking their own moral codes and cheat as a form of revenge. (Needless to say, in a mentally unbalanced person, once rage is triggered, the outcomes may be violent. I think of most violent sexual crimes as a “sexual snap” – that moment when a fragile personality can no longer handle the stress and tension of feeling sexually thwarted and becomes blinded by primal ape-like rage.)

Marc was a very angry man. He was angry at his wife for failing to satisfy him and at himself for failing to be a good husband. Guilt twisted his perspective. The more he cheated on her, the worse he felt; the worse he felt, the more he blamed her; the more he blamed her, the more he cheated and the angrier he got. It was a desperately self-destructive cycle.

Marc’s biggest problem, however, was not the cheating per se but his own moral compass. He had to take responsibility for his own choices. Being angry at his wife for “making him” cheat, for example, was lame. He could have made other choices, including seeing a counselor when the problems first began. On the other hand, his frustration and loneliness were understandable. The real question we would ultimately work on was who he really was and what kind of life could he live with. I know it sounds funny, but it’s the reality of adult life. Nothing is perfect but we can find a place of peace with our core sexual identities even if we can’t live out all our fantasies and dreams in the real world.

Even in high school, Marc liked dating different girls and playing the field. By college, he was sleeping with as many female classmates as he could. He gave up his wild ways when he got married but during the last several years he’d made up for it with paid encounters of every type, from hot-chat on porn sites to web-cam models, escorts and happy ending massages whenever he traveled – which was weekly. Apparently, on the day he decided it would be okay to cheat, he returned to his bachelor ways with a vengeance.

That he had managed to conceal his alternate life as a sex shark from his wife actually told me as much about the wife as it did about Marc: she did not question his weird work hours, did not check any of his bills, and never mentioned their sex life, perhaps because she herself was relieved it was gone. I explored the early sex history of the marriage. Like a lot of my clients, at first Marc painted a rosy picture of their honeymoon bliss but as I asked pointed questions – How often did they have sex in the first year of marriage? What activities did they try together? – the bloom faded off that rose in a hurry. She had never wanted to experiment or try anything outside of intercourse. He got married assuming it meant he could have sex every night. She was more of a once-a-week girl. He remembered fights they had when he’d try to get her to watch porn with him or try sex toys. She threatened to divorce him once when he tried to get her interested in a three-way, so he dropped that idea permanently.

It sounded to me as if the real issue was a sexual identity conflict with his wife. I call it a sexual identity conflict when there is a clash between what one person wants and needs to be sexually fulfilled and what the other one wants and needs. Shared sexual orientations or preferences does not guarantee sexual compatibility if your brain is not receptive to and aroused by your partner.

Marc wasn’t just hornier than his wife, and more experimental than his wife, he was strongly driven by the need for variety. His wife simply was not wired that way. My guess is that his constant pressure on her to do more and different things ultimately made her retreat from him altogether. She probably felt she would never be able to give him all the sex he needed. She was right about that. A person who needs and wants sex every day cannot be completely satisfied by a partner who likes sex only once a week, and someone who constantly craves new sensations is a tough match with someone who just likes meat and potatoes.

The sad thing is that people blame themselves, or get angry with one another, over natural, normal variations in desire. Some people blame the more sexual partner (“Why can’t he/she control him/herself?). Some say it’s because the less sexual partner is too inhibited. In my view, that’s all just moralizing. We don’t know enough about sex to know whether people are born to be monogamous. We know that most people vow monogamy but data shows that about 50% or more of them can’t keep that vow. Monogamy is a traditional (and ancient) cultural value; but promiscuity is a traditional (and ancient) human behavior.

I’m inclined to follow the behavior trail, not the social values one. Instead of looking at cheating as a sign of some mental disorder or “emotional problem,” or (heaven forbid) a “sex addiction,” I see the need for variety in partners as a common adult behavior, as in line with our natural biology as monogamy.

I first started thinking about compatibility issues in monogamous heterosexual couples while mulling over some BDSM research. One of the truisms of kinky sex is that it isn’t enough to be kinky, your kinks have to line up. For example, just being a BDSMer doesn’t mean you are kinky in the same way as everyone you meet and can therefore enjoy sex with everyone who shares your kinks. A bondagist, for example, who is agog over shibari and adores weaving exquisite rope webs for hours is not a good match for someone who just wants the restraints slapped on so the sexual teasing can begin. Put another way, one woman’s ecstatic bondage is another one’s utter boredom.

So it makes sense that heterosexuals are born to be different from one another in the minutiae of preferences and turn-ons. I’m not talking about sex drive per se, but about variations in how it is expressed. Some adults are only comfortable with intercourse, but far more adults and others can’t be happy without oral sex, while some need role-play and fantasies, but others are turned off by anything artificial in bed. I had a client who was so physically sensitive, anything more intense than light hugs or firm touches made her shrivel up in discomfort. She liked a lot of gentle arousal and kissing, followed by a few minutes of gentle penetration. She actually had a wonderful sex life with her husband, because he was happy to be very gentle and soft with her in bed. But I’ve known plenty of people who can’t even begin to imagine having sex and not giving love bites, or pinching someone’s nipples, or banging them into exhaustion.

We are generally taught that sex flows from romantic love: that when we fall in love with that one right person, sex is the expression of that love. At least that’s how it’s always depicted in books and movies. In real life, romantic love is a by-product of the sex chemicals in our brains. It is not the “heart” which desires: it’s the brain. Passion is a poetic term for a series of biological processes and brain functions operating in symphony. We first consciously realize we are attracted to someone after we’ve reacted to them biologically. Those sweet little human behaviors of holding hands and sharing a first kiss are tentative mating gestures which help us determine whether the physical connection is real, and – emotionally important to all humans – whether your partner’s interest and arousal is reciprocal.

Yet even when you think someone is hot and the kiss is good, you may still feel differently once you are in bed together. Their smell, the taste or texture of their skin, the quantity of body hair, their grooming and cleanliness, and multitudes of other minute differentials can change how much they turn you on. Studies have shown that females are repelled by certain male smells and turned on by others. No one knows why a whiff of one man’s sweat arouses one woman and makes another gasp for fresh air. We do know, however, that when females ovulate, and their hormones change, even male smells that turned them off before now smell pretty good.

In healthy people, when the sexual chemistry is right, passion sweeps over us. It feels mystical but it is really our blood stream being doped by our sex-o-centric brain. The fly in the sex ointment is that our primal mating biology is not a predictor for good human life choices. You also have to be able to make rational and realistic decisions about what to do with those feelings. Whatever may be going on subconsciously, our realities and lives are built on the conscious choices we make when we interact with other human beings.

Unfortunately, the biology of sex does not coincide with our cultural belief systems, which makes adults feel like freaks for not conforming when, in fact, variety is the way of human life, whether expressed in our appetites for food, how we style our hair or what clothes we wear, or our individual sexual preferences. One of the most common problems I’ve seen in couples with sexual identity conflicts is that when they first met or married, everything seemed great because their hormones made them so horny for each other.

There is a ton of research now about ‘newlywed sex,” showing that in the first two years of a marriage (but, really, any romantic relationship) partners are coasting on a kind of natural high from the mix of elevated hormones, opiates, and feel-good chemicals flooding their bloodstream.

Researchers have said it takes about two years for that hormonal haze to subside back to more normal adult levels. In my experience, that tracks well with the timeframe for subtle signs of sexual incompatibility to emerge. It usually begins harmlessly. Perhaps one partner isn’t in the mood as often, or suddenly life is so busy that sex gets shuffled to the bottom of the priority list. Or there’s an unexplained drop in the temperature of your sexual connection. Maybe one partner starts noticing the other one’s flaws or doesn’t feel as turned on as before.

More hurtful is when one partner declares, by fiat, that they will no longer have a kind of sex they formerly indulged. It’s an extremely common complaint among men that their partners were happy to do XYZ during the courtship phase, but once they settled down, the partner pulled the rug out from under them.

ARDEN was a shoe fetishist who had married a woman in part because she was so sexually free. She let him buy her shoes, she let him kiss her shoes, she even let him buy himself matching shoes in a larger size so they could wear their shoes together. [I know, ADORABLE!] She was fun and frisky throughout their engagement and for a few years into their marriage. But one day – for reasons he never understood – she dramatically collected every sandal, boot and shoe associated with their sex play and threw them all away. She told him she only wanted “normal sex” from then on.

I’ve heard hundreds of iterations on this theme, and it’s hardly limited to fetishes. Sometimes, even small sexual favors become grounds for war, with couples spending more time fighting over it than it would’ve taken for them to have some tension-relieving intimacy and move on with life. Husbands often complain that their wives were willing to engage in oral sex, or group sex or other spicy variations when they first met. They felt bewildered and betrayed, as if they’d been lured into marriage under the false pretenses of a happy sex life.

My guess for Arden’s wife was that once her flush of hormones faded, her genuine sexual identity, the one she had before she met a man she wanted to marry, resurfaced. Though Arden had assumed she enjoyed the footplay, I knew there was always the possibility that her hormones and brain chemistry made her more accommodating and willing to stretch her own boundaries for the sake of pleasing him.

It is sexual nature that when hormones run high, people will go to extremes to achieve intimacy. That is my nice way of saying people will do anything to get laid. It really shouldn’t be a mystery because biology is pretty clear on that front: from the instant the brain perceives a mating opportunity until the brain feels fully completed it drives us – through hormones and other brain chemicals – to mate.

The two-year hormone cycle – a distinct phenomenon that repeatedly shows up in reproductive medical studies - raises a new question for me: does our brain chemistry incline us to be ready for a new mate after a couple of years? If it’s an established pattern that many (though certainly not all) of us lose desire for our partners, is this a flaw of our sexual biology or a feature? Either way, acting on it is usually disruptive if not catastrophic when you are in a committed monogamous relationship.

What about the happy couples who never run out of juice for one another? Does that mean that some of us are wired for monogamy and can be completely sated and turned on for life by one partner? We don’t know yet if there is a biological explanation for sexually blessed couples or whether it’s a function of environmental, psychological and emotional factors, including common interests, shared values and good communication. We do know, however, that because of greater emotional and social factors, people choose stability in relationships, even when they aren’t sexually compatible; and that some people, luckily for them, are absolutely satisfied with one partner for life.

Emerging research suggests that simply having good sex with someone for a long period of time may alter our internal biology sufficiently to make us want to stay monogamous. There are psychiatric studies about brain structure changing through repeated positive experiences; there are endocrinological studies showing that chemicals released during sex promote bonding and nurturing (both of which subtly encourage monogamous behaviors); there are emerging studies on the positive bonding effects of ingesting semen during sex too. Add them all together and it’s not out of the box to speculate that the more fun you have in bed with your partner, the more your biology feels “rewarded” by the connection, and the better your scenario for fulfilled monogamy. The opposite holds true as well: the more negative or dissatisfying the sex, the more likely it will promote the brain chemistry to make you feel restless, lonely, and ready for someone new.

Many people have explained to me their feelings upon meeting someone exciting after a sexually dry marriage. It is like a spiritual awakening: they feel younger, more energetic. Passions they thought had died long ago suddenly fill them once more. They feel sexier and more sexually alive than when they were young. Suddenly, the world is a more beautiful place. The future seems more hopeful. Life has more meaning.

We can explain that phenomenon: natural drugs. The reason people feel born again when they have affairs is because their brains are once again gurgling with delightful chemicals, stronger than their conscious minds. They really do have more energy and more optimism: they are high on nature’s own, best anti-depressant, oxytocin. Although much has been written about the benefits of oxytocin to new mothers, there are five distinct effects which influence sexual behavior in all adults.

The Production of Oxytocin

1. Encourages emotional attachment and bonding

2. Increases sexual arousal

3. Triggers protective instincts

4. Improves communication skills

5. Raises level of generosity

From a sexological perspective, all of these are key ingredients in a truly successful, bonded relationship: we want adults to find someone to love, we want them to be aroused by their partners, we want them to feel protective (i.e., caring and tender) about their partners, we want them to communicate openly and clearly. Meanwhile, generosity is of profound psycho-sexual value in a permanent relationship – it makes us feel the other person loves us enough to indulge us. It’s fascinating to know that oxytocin contains the vital ingredients for romantic love in chemical form.

The longing for new and different is normal. The idea that we should all conform is perverse. In light of new research, it’s inhumane. The old paradigms, and quite a bit of Eastern medicine today, shared the belief that we each possess identical potential and can thus be guided towards an ideal model. We know this underlying assumption is false. We each have individual potential and that potential varies in its minutiae, making some people natural athletes and others natural nerds.

An article on identical twins published in 2012 (in the journal, Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry) showed that even when identical twins’ environments were identical, “genetic factors [account] for 35 to 50 percent variance in human happiness.” This makes sense to me: when it comes to questions of personal happiness, we really are all created differently.

What each of us does have is the potential to find a model that is ideal for us as we are, not as someone else thinks we should be. When adults feel compelled (by society, religion, family or peers) to live a lie, inner peace seems almost unimaginable. But it is not only imaginable, it is attainable when you learn who you are, accept who you are, and make life-affirming, positive, and satisfying choices based on the truth about yourself.