CHAPTER 3
A Closer Look at Intelligent Lust
“This is the body that engages in sex, a body with so much soul that any attempt to deny its layers of meaning will come back to haunt us.”
—THOMAS MOORE
What is intelligent lust? We’ve been talking about it all along, so you are aware that it is a process in which we discover our true sexual desires. By that I mean we bravely explore what really turns us on and then begin to think about where those desires come from and what they mean. Then, perhaps the most challenging but exciting part, we use those insights to create a meaningful, satisfying, and healing sexual life.
Lust (the craving for sexual pleasure) can best be described as selfish—our passion for the object of sexual interest is placed above all reason. It is empty, mechanical, and soulless. Examples of lust are plentiful in all forms of meaningless sex such as random anonymous sex or sex under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Intelligent lust, on the other hand, engages the body, mind, and spirit to give and receive physical pleasure through a deep emotional connection to ourselves and another. It is a process that involves searching for authenticity, unity, and purpose beyond the simple desire for sexual gratification. It is the source of deep satisfaction and beauty, though unsentimental and sometimes ruthless.
The steps of intelligent lust foster
The steps of intelligent lust begin with discovering our authentic sexual needs and desires. We organize a bundle of confusing thoughts and fantasies into a clear definition of our sexual truth. We embrace the reality of the facts rather than denying them.
For the most part, this is a solitary process. But once we are stripped of our veils and masks, the our goal with intelligent lust is to transform self-knowledge and self-acceptance into action. We accomplish this by manifesting new sexual experiences that are authentic, meaningful, and restorative in nature.
TRANSFERENCE
At some point during the course of most intimate relationships, we project onto our partner feelings and expectations that originated in our own childhood experiences. Often we choose a significant other with qualities similar to a parent with whom we experienced conflict, essentially finding a new edition of an old relationship. In our desire for reconciliation and catharsis, we create an emotional warp in which we drag the past into the present by reenacting the old conflict with our new partner, this time hoping for a different outcome in which our partner gratifies our needs and makes whole what was fractured or incomplete. But because we chose a partner based on our projections, he or she cannot make us whole and we go deeper into our loneliness and despair. Psychoanalysts call this process transference.
My patients Jenny and Mark had a marriage that fell victim to the effects of transference.
When Jenny met Mark, she was instantly attracted to him. Both originally Midwesterners, they came from a similar family and religious background, and both were college educated. Mark ran a successful insurance business in the suburbs of New York; Jenny was a fourth-grade teacher in the same community. She admired his family values and solid work ethic, which were much the same as her own. Socially, he was gregarious in contrast to her shyness, which she felt complemented her perfectly. He seemed levelheaded and decisive, much the way her father had been. They fit easily into each other’s lives, enjoying a sense of familiarity and easy comfort.
While Jenny felt she had a good childhood, she never believed she was able to command her father’s full attention. No matter how she tried—getting good grades, dressing pretty, or acting defiantly—Jenny could never get him as interested in her as he was in her brothers, both stars of their high school varsity baseball team. Since her father had played baseball in college, but fallen shy of a professional career, he had his hopes pinned on his sons. He clearly favored them.
Although Mark was like her father in many ways, he was different in one important way. She had never experienced such warmth and affection. It more than made up for what she missed from her father. She glowed in its flame. And their sexual relationships were “hot.” Jenny could seduce Mark at the drop of a hat. She enjoyed teasing him, rewarding him with sex, and setting up surprise sexual adventures. Where she had failed at getting her father’s attention as a child, she could succeed with Mark by using sex. She even got him to pay her for it with expensive gifts. She felt powerful. She was sure that the attention Mark showed her during their courtship would continue far into the marriage. But she was wrong.
With the responsibilities of new marriage in mind, Mark felt an obligation to earn money for his and Jenny’s future. He began to put longer hours in at work and at home was always working at his computer. He felt secure in the marriage and that the best way he could show his love for Jenny was to protect their financial future. After all, she wanted a beautiful home, children, and a comfortable social life.
On the weekends he started to play ball with his friends and office mates in order to “blow off steam.” And while Jenny was always invited to come along and watch, she increasingly preferred to stay at home. “He works hard,” she thought. “He deserves to have fun.”
Before she understood exactly what was happening, she found herself in the same position she had been in as a child, “craving a man’s attention.” She continued to flirt with Mark, buying and dressing in sexy clothes, but she usually failed to get his attention. He was tired or distracted. He was busy building his business and hanging out with the guys. Soon her marriage completely echoed her childhood. They began to argue about other issues like household responsibilities and spending money. Jenny became depressed.
The same feelings of failure and inadequacy that she had experienced as a child now dominated her marriage. While she had chosen Mark because he had many of her father’s “best qualities,” she had also unconsciously transferred on to him the expectation that he would satisfy her unmet childhood needs, making up for the lack of her father’s attention. And without her awareness, she had eroticized the conflict, imagining that by using sex as a tool to gain Mark’s attention, she could solve it.
THE RESTORATIVE EXPERIENCE
What if we set out instead to consciously identify our true sexual desires and the underlying conflict from which they sprang? Well, if we understand the nature of our desires, they will tell us what is needed and what is best. We could specifically choose a partner with whom we are deeply sexual and otherwise compatible, and who has the qualities that can enable us to heal from those unresolved feelings for which our true desires act as antidotes.
By following the steps of intelligent lust, we create a restorative experience, based on intimacy, respect, trust, and honesty, that can have a profound emotional and spiritual effect on us, whether it’s in the context of a brief encounter or ongoing relationship. We give preference to self-awareness, exploration, and authenticity over sexual performance or reaching an orgasm.
In a restorative experience, we create a safe and consensual encounter in which we act out with our partner a fantasy we have imagined in our fantasy life and whose symbolic meaning we have already come to understand.
Whether the scenario is as conventional as romantic seduction, or as unusual as extreme bondage fantasies, we connect—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—with the deepest part of our psyches, recovering what was suppressed or lost. In the process, we restore ourselves to wholeness.
Of course, the deepest and most lasting healing comes when we have the opportunity to experience our true desires and work through the mastery of the conflicts behind them over time. Whether it’s with a lover or spouse, a restorative relationship assumes an emotional posture that is often diametrically opposite from the dysfunctional ones we experienced in our childhood. Characterized by openness, intimacy, and mutual respect, the new relationship allows us to derive a new settlement to old conflicts. Within this friendship, sex is not separated from the joys and struggles of daily life, nor diminished by its challenges. Instead it offers a rich and fertile ground for a meaningful and satisfying life.
Mark and Jenny had the seeds of a restorative relationship from the beginning of their courtship. Mark had some of Jenny’s father’s “best qualities” and many of his own. But sadly, over time, he came to favor her father’s worst behavior: withdrawing his attention. This eventually left Jenny feeling lonely and isolated, similar to how she had felt when she was growing up.
Why did this happen?
Mark had been raised in a family always on the edge of financial disaster. As the “sensible son,” he saw it as his duty as a young man to support his family. Now, as a married man, he wanted to do whatever possible so that he and Jenny never suffered similar financial concerns. As much as Jenny resented Mark’s increasing absence from family life, Mark secretly resented the burden of what he felt was his responsibility. Jenny, however, never actually expected him to shoulder this responsibility alone—it was he who expected it from himself. Without being aware, Mark had transferred unresolved feelings of anger and resentment toward his family of origin onto Jenny. Further, where Jenny had eroticized the rejection she felt in her family, using sex as a tool to win Mark’s attention, Mark had turned his resentment into sexual withdrawal. He even masturbated while thinking about disciplining Jenny for expecting too much from him.
Since neither Mark nor Jenny consciously understood the transference in which they enacted their daily interactions, they gradually drifted from the warmth and affection that initially characterized their relationship. Not surprisingly, they each found themselves feeling similar to the way they felt in their own families—the very feelings they had hoped to escape by marrying. It was only after following the steps of intelligent lust that Mark and Jenny realized they could use what they had each eroticized to turn their relationship around.
Understanding how they had each sexualized their family conflicts began to mend the emotional and sexual distance that had come to divide them, but such insight wasn’t enough to create real change. With my guidance, Mark and Jenny began to plan sexual encounters in which they acted out their fantasies and secret desires. They played out scenes in which Jenny deliberately used sex to bargain for Mark’s attention; she traded sex, the kind Mark liked, for other time together. Mark enjoyed disciplining Jenny, which required a level of attentiveness that Mark had never given before. It was as much the honesty and intimacy achieved in their planning sex, as the gratification they came to mutually experience through it, that helped them restore the elements of their relationship that had originally attracted them. That is, they found again the attentiveness that once seemed so abundant to Jenny and the feelings of trust and security that made up for the absence of it in Mark’s family of origin. By following the steps of intelligent lust, Mark and Jenny were able to use sex to reverse the corrosive effects of anger, resentment, and disaffection, opening the door to a better future together.
Similarly, by following the steps of intelligent lust, my patient Jason finally broke through a long-standing pattern of failing relationships, generated by issues of transference, to cultivate a restorative one that nourished his deepest desire for sensuality and affection.
REVERSING TIME: JASON
Nearly two years after his divorce, Jason came to see me for a consultation. Forty-five, tall, and handsome with deep blue eyes and a shock of gray hair, Jason was having problems with women. He had no trouble meeting them, but he found that after dating for a few months, they would invariably end the relationship.
When I asked him why, he said, “Women think I’m too laidback. I get called things like passive or dull. They lose their patience or get bored. They yawn in my face.”
By the time he’d come to see me, Jason had given up dating and was spending his free time in his workshop repairing old watches, avoiding the world. But a good friend confronted Jason, who confessed he was deeply depressed over his relationships with women; the friend encouraged him to seek therapy.
Shy and soft-spoken, Jason grew up in a privileged New England family with a long history of inherited wealth and a short history of accomplishments. Although Jason’s father was an architect, he had never achieved much success nor had he cared. Instead, he enjoyed time on the golf course at the same club to which his own father and grandfather had belonged.
Jason informed me early on that he was “proud to be a terrible disappointment” to his parents. When I asked him how he’d disappointed them, he replied, “Because I refused to follow the social agenda they set for me.”
Instead, he had devoted himself to more intellectual pursuits like reading and writing poetry, and watch repair—he even owned a small repair shop. When he wasn’t being “totally ignored by his father,” Jason said, he was being berated by him for his disloyalty to family tradition, a label Jason wore like a badge. Jason’s mother, whom he described as “cold,” put most of her energy into fundraising for local charities. “Everything for strangers, nothing for family,” Jason said.
Although Jason told me that he’d rejected his family’s social expectations, he nonetheless found himself dating women from his same social class. “In general,” he said, “they turned out to be more like my parents than not. And mostly they choose me.”
While it seemed obvious that Jason’s depression was related to his long-standing conflict with his parents, I chose to approach it by first examining his failure with women, the symptom that had brought him to therapy.
When we began to talk about chemistry, Jason seemed puzzled by the concept. “It’s not something that’s ever happened on my end,” he said. When I asked why, he insisted he had no idea. When finally pushed to explore what might attract him, he imagined a woman with “a kind, open face, delicate features, and a sweet disposition” adding, “nothing like the women I’ve gone out with.” This seemed to come as a surprise.
As the therapy unfolded and Jason grew more comfortable exploring his sexual fantasies, he came to understand that what actually aroused him was the image of being gently caressed. He craved tenderness—“soft kisses and gentle fondling.” In the past, when he engaged in sex with women, his orgasms came prematurely or not at all, disappointing everyone. Now, when he brought himself to orgasm, he imagined “the gentle touch of fingers brushing against my back.” Jason soon recognized that he had unknowingly sexualized the qualities that he had so long ago craved from his parents—warmth and tenderness.
It was clear now how his lack of authenticity had contributed to his failures. In his past sexual practice, he had never experienced such feelings because the women who had chosen him were cold, no match for what he now recognized as his true desires. Caught up in his rebellion against his parents, he had sabotaged his chance at happiness by engaging with women who resembled them and whom he would then punish by withdrawing until they gave up.
Once Jason understood this, he decided he could break the cycle and search for an experience in which he could honor his true sexual desires. For the first time, he felt excited about dating. He posted a profile on a popular Internet dating site that included brief and poetic descriptions of his sexual interests and within a short time received a dozen well-suited responses.
Within a few months Jason had met a woman whom he described as “lovely.” And as shy as he was, Jason took my advice and began to talk about sex after a handful of dates. He opened the conversation by speaking about his own experiences, and then gently working toward asking about hers. By then the conversation seemed natural. They quickly discovered that they felt the same way about sex—they were both turned on by gentle touching and tenderness. It wasn’t long before they were having sex.
“This was the first time I actually made love,” Jason told me, “and it was tender and beautiful. I find myself wanting to be generous with her in every way and for hours. She asks nothing of me, expects nothing from me. She comes from a middle-class family, the sort my parents wouldn’t have talked to. But I’ve met them also, and they’re as kind as she is. I’ve finally realized that being in a family doesn’t have to mean being in a prison.”
Jason had broken the cycle. By following the steps of intelligent lust, he discovered his true sexual nature then succeeded at choosing a partner not only with whom he was sexually compatible, but also who enabled him to heal an old family conflict.
• • •
In following the steps of intelligent lust, we cultivate a life in which sex serves as the pathway for understanding some of the profound mysteries of our existence. We go to the trouble of making sex an art that fully engages body, mind, and spirit and gives us depth and humanity. And while we live from a place of meaning and purpose, we make pleasure a priority.
Without the benefit of intelligent lust, we wander through relationships, confused to why they feel unsatisfying or repeatedly fail. Detached from our true selves, we are more likely to suffer from sexual addictions or romantic obsessions or show signs of performance anxiety, lack of interest, and other sexual dysfunctions, or we may act on lust impulsively or recklessly. Without self-knowledge and self-acceptance, we cannot bring complexity to our imaginations and therefore no real resolution to the emptiness and boredom that fill our relationships.
ALYSSA’S THOUGHTS
Feeling Accepted
It seems to me as if something that virtually every human being is looking for is the feeling of being accepted for who we truly are. And if we are ever to achieve such a thing, it cannot be done without first acknowledging and accepting ourselves. We then must find the courage to share this. With sharing, with any connection to any other person in fact, comes risk. For we cannot control them or predict the outcome of each inherently unique connection. It is in our willingness to risk that that we bare our soul.
In a society that glorifies individual power and success, it’s easy to lose sight of the satisfaction we can feel by being generous to others. There is, in my opinion, very little that feels as good as giving openly and without expectation, not only the kind of giving that comes from sharing who we truly are, but also giving pleasure to another person. Seeing your partner for who he or she is and listening without judgment to what he or she likes facilitates his or her growth as well as your own. Embodying a spirit of giving and compassion can leave you content in a much more permanent way than any temporary receiving of pleasure can bring. Furthermore, being permitted to participate in someone’s deepest longings can create an intense bond based on mutual respect and, of course, acceptance. This is how sex heals the soul.