Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  They forget that fire needs air . 6 Sex Is Dirty; Save It for Someone You Love When Puritanism and Hedonism Collide Sex without sin is like an egg without salt. —Luis Buñuel I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce. —J. Edgar Hoover W HY DO SO MANY COUPLES become erotically alienated? The list of factors that contribute to the waning of excitement is long, and the one most commonly invoked is stress. “As soon as I sit down, I see the laundry that still needs folding, the unopened mail, the strewn toys, and it takes all sexual desire away from me.” “Between our new jobs, our old parents, and our young kids, I’m wiped out. I don’t have a very strong sex drive to begin with, but right now I don’t have any desire for it at all. Don’t take it personally.” But when my patients cite the all-too-real stresses of modern life to explain why romance went south, I suggest that there may be more to it. After all, stress was a reliable feature of their lives long before they met, and it didn’t stop them from leaping into one another’s arms. In the next tier of justification they trot out the deeper problems in the relationship: the heated bickering and icy standoffs, the lack of trust, the chronic disappointments, the cycles of blame. “Sex? You must be kidding. After what you just said to me?” “When’s the last time you showed me you were interested?” “Do you think you could put just a little effort into making yourself attractive?” “I wish you’d shut the damned TV off; it makes me feel like dead meat.” This litany of disenchantment notwithstanding, I believe there’s an additional layer to our libidinal demise that has to do with our culture’s deep ambivalence around sexuality. While we recognize the importance of sex, we nonetheless vacillate between extremes of excessive license and repressive tactics: “Don’t do it till you’re married.” “Just do it when you feel like it.” “It’s no big deal.” “It’s a huge deal.” “You need love.” “What’s love got to do with it?” It’s an all-or-nothing approach to sex. Porn sites proliferate on the Internet, yet we continue to debate whether or not to provide sex education in our schools and, if so, whether we should call it “Sex Ed” or opt for the less graphic “Health Ed.” Despite living in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom in America, the practice of policing sexuality has continued unabated since the days of the Puritans.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Perhaps the poem was a stark portrayal of what must have gone on in Irene’s home after her brother’s death, especially the parental clash as her father and mother each dealt with their loss in diametrically opposed ways. This situation is not uncommon after the death of a child: husband and wife grieve in different fashions (characteristically following gender stereotypes: more often than not the female grieves openly and emotively, while the male deals with grief through repression and active diversion). For many couples each of these two patterns actively interferes with the other—that is precisely the reason that so many marriages break up after the loss of a child. I thought of Irene’s connection to other images in Frost’s “Home Burial.” The changing view of the burial plot’s size was a brilliant metaphor: to the farmer it was both the size of the bedroom and so small that it was framed by the window; to the mother it was so large that she could see nothing else. And the windows. Irene was drawn to windows. “I’d like to live out my life in a high-rise apartment staring out the window,” she had said once. Or she imagined moving to a large seaside Victorian house where “I’d divide my time there between staring through the window at the ocean and pacing the rooftop widow’s walk forever.” The farmer’s wife’s bitter dismissal of friends who, after visiting the grave briefly, immediately made their way back to their everyday lives had been a familiar theme of Irene’s in therapy. Once, to make this point more graphic, Irene had brought in a print of Pieter Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus. “Look at these peasants,” she said, “working away, not bothering to look up at the boy falling from the sky.” She had even brought in Auden’s poetic description of the painting: In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. Other aspects of Irene in Frost’s “Home Burial”? The mother’s clinging to grief and the father’s matter-of-factness and impatience with her for not letting it go: that too I had heard her describe in her own family. But these observations, however graphic and informative, did not sufficiently explain why Irene had placed such importance on my reading the article. “The key to what has gone wrong in therapy”: those were her words, her promise. I felt let down. Perhaps I’ve overestimated her, I thought; for once she has missed the mark.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Though he had cleared his morning schedule, he had five consecutive sessions starting at one o’clock. Time was running out, and he turned to the real business of the day. “I’m going to have to leave soon,” he said, “very much against my will, but my patients await me. I cannot tell you how much I’ve enjoyed our talk. It’s really brought me out of myself. I needed it at this point in my life.” “How come?” “It’s been a bad time.” Ernest sighed, hoping his words, which he had rehearsed several times the night before, would seem spontaneous. “About two weeks ago I visited an old girlfriend of mine. Hadn’t seen her for a couple of years, and we had a lovely twenty-four hours together. Or so I thought. In the morning, I awoke and she was gone. Vanished. Not a trace of her. I’ve been in a bad way since. A very bad way!” “That’s dreadful.” Artemis was more concerned than Ernest had ever hoped for. “She was important to you? You were hoping to reconnect with her?” “Well, no.” Ernest thought of Halston and how she must have felt about him. “That’s not quite it. She was—well, what should I say?—more of a playmate, a sexual friend. So I’m not in grief about losing her. The real pain is not knowing. Was it something I did that caused her to run? Did I hurt her in some manner? Something I said? Was I an inconsiderate lover? Was I in some fundamental way unacceptable? You know what I mean. Stirs up a lot of bad stuff.” “I’m with you on that one,” she said, shaking her head sympathetically. “Been through that myself—and not too long ago.” “Really? It’s amazing how much we seem to have in common. Shouldn’t we try to heal one another? Continue this conversation some other time—say, at dinner tonight?” “Yes, but not a restaurant. I’m in a cooking mood. Yesterday I picked some beautiful chanterelles, which I’m going to make into a Hungarian mushroom ragout. Join me?” Never had therapy hours ticked by so slowly. Ernest could think of nothing but Artemis. He was enchanted with her. Again and again he prodded himself: Concentrate! Focus! Earn your fee! Sweep this woman from your mind. But Artemis refused to be swept. She had set up housekeeping in his frontal cortex, and there she stayed. There was something eerie and alluring about Artemis that brought to mind the immortal, irresistible African queen he remembered from Rider Haggard’s novel She. It did not escape Ernest that he was thinking more about Artemis’s charms than about alleviating her distress. Ernest, mind your priorities, he rebuked himself.

• From Story of O (1954)

  In the end, I see Story of O as a fable. Be careful what you wish for. René desires a woman who will withhold nothing from him, yet he falls truly in love with Jacqueline, a selfish lover who withholds everything. Sir Stephen desires the perfect submissive, yet after branding and shackling O as his personal property, he finds that O is not the one. And O, who desires to be desired and to perfectly satisfy her lovers’ every dark need, finds herself without a lover at all. She becomes a common vessel without anything meaningful to fill it, an object to be used but not treasured. We are left asking the question: Did O sacrifice herself for love, or did love make a sacrifice of O? Sylvia Day I The Lovers of RoissyHer lover one day takes O for a walk in a section of the city where they never go—the Montsouris Park, the Monceau Park. After they have taken a stroll in the park and have sat together side by side on the edge of a lawn, they notice, at one corner of the park, at an intersection where there are never any taxis, a car which, because of its meter, resembles a taxi. “Get in,” he says. She gets in. It is autumn, and coming up to dusk. She is dressed as she always is: high heels, a suit with a pleated skirt, a silk blouse, and no hat. But long gloves which come up over the sleeves of her jacket, and in her leather handbag she has her identification papers, her compact, and her lipstick. The taxi moves off slowly, the man still not having said a word to the driver. But he pulls down the shades of the windows on both sides of the car, and the shade on the back window. She has taken off her gloves, thinking he wants to kiss her or that he wants her to caress him. But instead he says: “Your bag’s in your way; let me have it.” She gives it to him. He puts it out of her reach and adds: “You also have on too many clothes. Unfasten your stockings and roll them down to above your knees. Here are some garters.” By now the taxi has picked up speed, and she has some trouble managing it; she’s also afraid the driver may turn around. Finally, though, the stockings are rolled down, and she’s embarrassed to feel her legs naked and free beneath her silk slip. Besides, the loose garter-belt suspenders are slipping back and forth. “Unfasten your garter belt,” he says, “and take off your panties.” That’s easy enough, all she has to do is slip her hands behind her back and raise herself slightly. He takes the garter belt and panties from her, opens her bag and puts them in, then says: “You shouldn’t sit on your slip and skirt. Pull them up behind you and sit directly on the seat.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I had no doubt about that: there were months when she said she lived only for our visits. And yet, close as we were, I had always thought that she and I met only obliquely, that we had always missed a true “I-thou” encounter. She had tried, as she had put it earlier in therapy, to keep me outside time, to know as little as possible about me, to pretend I had no life narrative with a beginning and an end. Now that changed. At the beginning of therapy, on a visit to her parents, Irene had come upon an old illustrated Frank Baum Oz book that she had read as a child. On her return she had told me that I had an uncanny physical resemblance to the Wizard of Oz. Now, after three years of therapy, she looked again at the illustration and found the resemblance less striking. I sensed that something important was happening when she mused, “Maybe you’re not the wizard. Maybe there is no wizard. Perhaps,” she went on, more to herself than to me, “I should simply accept your idea that you and I are just fellow travelers through this life, both of us listening to the bell tolling.” And I had no doubt that a new phase of therapy was beginning when she came into my office one afternoon in our fourth year looking straight at me, sat down, looked at me again, and said, “It’s strange, Irv, but you seem to have gotten a lot smaller.” Lesson 5: Reason Versus Treason As our work proceeded into the third year, I grew more and more discouraged. Therapy had hopelessly bogged down. So deeply mired in depression was Irene that I could not budge her. Nor approach her: when I inquired about how close or distant she felt in a session, she responded, “Miles and miles away—I can barely see you.” “Irene, I know you may be tired of hearing this, but we absolutely must consider beginning an antidepressant. We’ve got to understand and resolve why you’re so fixed in your opposition to medication.” “We both know what medication means.” “Oh?” “It means you’re quitting, giving up on our therapy work. I am not looking to be quickly fixed.” “Quickly fixed, Irene? Three years?” “I mean, making me feel better is no solution. It only postpones dealing with what I’ve lost.” No matter what arguments I used, I could not dissuade her from these beliefs, but eventually she humored me by allowing me to prescribe antidepressants.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  “That dog is purebred weimaraner,” Dwight said, keeping his eyes on the TV. “I don’t want it. I want my Winchester.” “Then you’re shit out of luck, because your Winchester is on its way to Seattle.” “But that was my rifle!” “And Champ’s your dog! Jesus! I trade some old piece of crap for a valuable hunting dog and what do you do? Piss and moan, piss and moan.” “I’m not pissing and moaning.” “The hell you aren’t. You can just make your own deals from now on.” My mother was at a political conference. She had done some local organizing for the Democratic party in the last state election, and now they were trying to get her to work for Adlai Stevenson. When she got home the next day I met her outside and told her about the rifle. She nodded as if she’d already heard the story. “I knew he’d do something,” she said. They had it out after I went to bed. Dwight made some noise but she backed him down. The rifle belonged to me, she said. He could yell all he wanted but on that point there was nothing to discuss. She made Dwight agree that when Champion’s owner sent up the AKC papers he’d promised to send, papers that would prove the dog’s illustrious line of descent, Dwight would call him and arrange to drive Champion down to Seattle and get my rifle back. He couldn’t do that now because he didn’t know the man’s last name or address. In this way the affair was settled to my satisfaction, except that the man somehow forgot to send the papers. WE TOOK CHAMPION hunting for the first time at a gravel quarry where mergansers liked to congregate. These ducks were considered bad eating, so most people didn’t shoot them. But Dwight would shoot at anything. He was a poor hunter, restless and unobservant and loud, and he never got the animals he went after. This made him furious; on the way back to the car he would kill anything he saw. He killed chipmunks, squirrels, blue jays and robins. He killed a great snowy owl with a 12-gauge from ten feet away and took potshots at bald eagles as they skimmed the river. I never saw him get a deer, a grouse, a quail, a

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Three different drugs were not only ineffective but resulted in unpleasant side effects: severe somnolence; alien and frightening dreams; loss of all sexuality and sensuality; a frightening sense of nothing mattering, of being removed from herself and her concerns. When I suggested that she consult a psychopharmacologist, she flatly refused. Desperate, I finally laid down an ultimatum: “You must see the consultant and follow his recommendations or I will not continue to work with you.” Irene looked at me unblinkingly. As usual, precise and constrained, she gave nothing extra in speech or movement. “I’ll consider it and give you my answer next session,” she said. But at our next meeting she did not respond directly to the ultimatum. Instead she handed me an issue of the New Yorker, open to an article by the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky titled “On Grief and Reason.” “In this,” she said, “you’ll find the key to what’s gone wrong in therapy. If not, if you read it and find no answer, then I’ll see your consultant.” Patients often ask me to read something of interest to them—some self-help book, an article about a new treatment or theory, a piece of literature that strikes close to their own situation. More than one writer-patient has handed me a long manuscript, saying, “You’ll learn a great deal about me by reading this.” This proposition has never proved valid: the patient could always have delivered the material verbally in far less time. Nor do they want an honest opinion of the writing from me—I generally loom too important to the patient to have the freedom to offer an objective commentary. Obviously they seek something else—my approval and admiration—and a therapist has far more direct and effective ways of dealing with that need than spending long hours reading a manuscript. I generally search for a gracious way to decline such requests—or at most agree to a quick skim. I value and protect my personal reading time. Yet I did not feel burdened as I began reading the article Irene had given me. I had great respect not only for her taste but for her clarity of mind, and if she believed this article contained the key to our impasse, I was confident that the time invested would be well spent. Of course, I would have preferred more direct communication, but I was learning to be receptive to Irene’s oblique and often poetic mode of discourse—a language she had learned from her mother. Unlike her father, a paragon of lucid rationality who had taught science in a small Midwestern high school, her mother, an artist, had communicated subtly. Irene had learned about her mother’s moods indirectly.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  In the next tier of justification they trot out the deeper problems in the relationship: the heated bickering and icy standoffs, the lack of trust, the chronic disappointments, the cycles of blame. “Sex? You must be kidding. After what you just said to me?” “When’s the last time you showed me you were interested?” “Do you think you could put just a little effort into making yourself attractive?” “I wish you’d shut the damned TV off; it makes me feel like dead meat.” This litany of disenchantment notwithstanding, I believe there’s an additional layer to our libidinal demise that has to do with our culture’s deep ambivalence around sexuality. While we recognize the importance of sex, we nonetheless vacillate between extremes of excessive license and repressive tactics: “Don’t do it till you’re married.” “Just do it when you feel like it.” “It’s no big deal.” “It’s a huge deal.” “You need love.” “What’s love got to do with it?” It’s an all-or-nothing approach to sex. Porn sites proliferate on the Internet, yet we continue to debate whether or not to provide sex education in our schools and, if so, whether we should call it “Sex Ed” or opt for the less graphic “Health Ed.” Despite living in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom in America, the practice of policing sexuality has continued unabated since the days of the Puritans. State intervention makes some of us breathe a sigh of relief while leaving others stricken with terror. We promote abstinence with fear-based tactics, threaten straying politicians with impeachment, fight gay marriage, and gnaw away at the fragile abortion laws. Though virginity seems a relic of a bygone era, every day our elected officials bring moral gravitas to the legislation of sexuality. Abortion, homosexuality, adultery, and “family values” have been active items on the national political agenda for more than thirty years. This sexual conservatism is rooted in the Puritan tradition, with its deep suspicion of pleasure and its moralistic attitude toward anything that strays from heterosexual, monogamous, marital, reproductive sexuality. Meanwhile, television producers invite us to phone in if we’ve had more than 100 sexual partners. Never before has sex been so publicly displayed, an incessant barrage of explicit images wherever we rest our eyes. Sex, the perennial default for advertising, has also become a commodity in itself.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Oscar Wilde wrote, “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is getting what one wants, and the other is not getting it.” When our desires are unfulfilled, we are disappointed. It’s frustrating to be denied a raise, a college acceptance, an audition. When the object of our desire is a person, her rejection leaves us feeling lonely, unworthy, unloved, or—worse—unlovable. But fulfilled desire carries its own brand of loss. Getting what we want undermines the thrill of wanting it. The deliciousness of yearning, the elaborate strategies of pursuit, the charged fantasies, in short all the activity and energy that went into wanting give way to the foreclosure of having. Just think about the last thing you had to have until you owned it. Now that it’s yours, you may enjoy it, you may love it, but do you still want it? Do you even remember how much you wanted it in the first place? Gail Godwin wrote, “The act of longing will always be more intense than the requiting of it.” Is it harder to want what you already have? The law of diminishing returns tells us that increased frequency leads to decreased satisfaction. The more you use a product, the less satisfying each subsequent use will be. Paris just isn’t the same on your fifteenth trip as it was on the first. Fortunately, the logic of this argument breaks down when it is applied to love, for it is based on the erroneous assumption that we can own a person in the same way that we can own an iPod or a new pair of Prada heels. When my friend Jane said, “Perhaps I only want what I can’t have,” I responded, “What makes you think you have your husband?” The grand illusion of committed love is that we think our partners are ours. In truth, their separateness is unassailable, and their mystery is forever ungraspable. As soon as we can begin to acknowledge this, sustained desire becomes a real possibility. It’s remarkable to me how a sudden threat to the status quo (an affair, an infatuation, a prolonged absence, or even a really good fight) can suddenly ignite desire. There’s nothing like the fear of loss to make those old shoes look new again.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  I can think of a number of things that I could suggest to this couple, joining them in their practical approach to the problem of diminishing desire. But I question the rationalist approach in matters of the heart. I think that the challenge of sustaining eros in a committed relationship over time is of a different nature. We don’t always know our aims in advance. Our desires are not exempt from conflict; nor are our passions free of contradictions. No amount of will or reason can dictate our love dreams. Reason doesn’t know the roots of our dreams; nor does it know the mysterious needs of the heart. We can’t always use the laws of profit and loss in our romantic and erotic lives. Applying the work ethos is tricky. Even the most logical approach cannot neutralize the ambivalence of love. I tell Ryan and Christine, “I have nothing new to offer in the ‘how to’ department. You’ve had dates, you’ve been burning incense, you’ve cracked into the Astroglide. And it’s landed you a steady diet of sex that’s satisfactory without being really satisfying. Do I get it?” “Yes, you get it, but what are you saying? That that’s it? Like the song, ‘Is That All There Is?’” Christine asks. “There’s no logic to this. Passion is unpredictable; it doesn’t follow the dictates of cause and effect. What works on Monday might not work on Thursday. The solution is often a surprise, not the result of the kind of work you’ve been doing until now. So let’s not talk about work. Instead, let’s talk about freedom. Play.” “Huh?” “Try something with me,” I suggest to them. “It may seem off the beaten path; but since your path has become a dead end, you may as well give it a shot. What rigidifies desire is confinement. I’d like you to think about its opposite: freedom. Talk about it in the broad sense. When do you feel most free in your relationship? In what ways does being married make you more free, and in what ways does it make you less free? How much freedom are you comfortable giving each other? Giving yourselves?” I start the conversation in my office in the hope that they’ll continue it on their own. I like to make suggestions that might jolt people out of their complacency, or at least bring about a different way of thinking. I try to create some discomfort with the status quo. Although Ryan and Christine are unhappy with their situation, I’m not sure if they’re unhappy enough to brave change. In therapy I throw out a lot of ideas, never knowing where they’ll land or if they’ll take root. I let the idea of freedom sit for a while, to see if it will sprout.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  So even in this mission I was comparatively disappointed. I thought justice was not done to my clients, but I had not the means to secure it. At the most I could have appealed to the Political Agent or to the Governor who would have dismissed the appeal saying, ‘We decline to interfere.’ If there had been any rule or regulation governing such decisions, it would have been something, but here the sahib’s will was law. I was exasperated. In the meantime a Meman firm from Porbandar wrote to my brother making the following offer: ‘We have business in South Africa. Ours is a big firm, and we have a big case there in the Court, our claim being £ 40,000. It has been going on for a long time. We have engaged the services of the best vakils and barristers. If you sent your brother there, he would be useful to us and also to himself. He would be able to instruct our counsel better than ourselves. And he would have the advantage of seeing a new part of the world, and of making new acquaintances.’ My brother discussed the proposition with me. I could not clearly make out whether I had simply to instruct the counsel or to appear in court. But I was tempted. My brother introduced me to the late Sheth Abdul Karim Jhaveri a partner of Dada Abdulla & Co; the firm in question. ‘It won’t be a difficult job’ the Sheth assured me. ‘We have big Europeans as our friends, whose acquaintance you will make. You can be useful to us our shop. Much of our correspondence is in English and you can help us with that too. You will, of course, be our guest and hence will have no expense whatever.’ ‘How long do you require my services?’ I asked. ‘And what will be the payment?’ ‘Not more than a year. We will pay you a first class return fare and a sum of £ 105, all found.’ This was hardly going there as a barrister. It was going as a servant of the firm. But I wanted somehow to leave India. There was also the tempting opportunity of seeing a new country, and of having new experience. Also I could send £105 to my brother and help in the expenses of the household. I closed with the offer without any higgling, and got ready to go to South Africa. 33ARRIVAL IN NATALWhen starting for South Africa I did not feel the wrench of separation which I had experienced when leaving for England. My mother was now no more. I had gained some knowledge of the world and of travel abroad, and going from Rajkot to Bombay was no unusual affair. This time I only felt the pang of parting with my wife. Another baby had been born to us since my return from England. Our love could not yet be called free from lust, but it was getting gradually purer.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  If uncertainty is a built-in feature of all relationships, so too is mystery. Many of the couples who come to therapy imagine that they know everything there is to know about their mate. “My husband doesn’t like to talk.” “My girlfriend would never flirt with another man. She’s not the type.” “My lover doesn’t do therapy.” “Why don’t you just say it? I know what you’re thinking?” “I don’t need to give her lavish presents; she knows I love her.” I try to highlight for them how little they’ve seen, urging them to recover their curiosity and catch a glimpse behind the walls that barricade the other. In truth, we never know our partner as well as we think we do. Mitchell reminds us that even in the dullest marriages, predictability is a mirage. Our need for constancy limits how much we are willing to know the person who’s next to us. We are invested in having him or her conform to an image that is often a creation of our own imagination, based on our own set of needs. “One thing about him is that he’s never anxious. He’s like a rock. I’m so neurotic.” “He’s too much of a wimp to leave me.” “She doesn’t put up with any of my shit.” “We’re both very traditional. Even though she has a PhD, she really likes staying home with the kids.” We see what we want to see, what we can tolerate seeing, and our partner does the same. Neutralizing each other’s complexity affords us a kind of manageable otherness. We narrow down our partner, ignoring or rejecting essential parts when they threaten the established order of our coupledom. We also reduce ourselves, jettisoning large chunks of our personalities in the name of love. Yet when we peg ourselves and our partners to fixed entities, we needn’t be surprised that passion goes out the window. And I’m sorry to say that the loss is on both sides. Not only have you squeezed out the passion, but you haven’t really gained safety, either. The fragility of this manufactured equilibrium becomes obvious when one partner breaks the rules of the contrivance and insists on bringing more authentic parts of himself into the relationship.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  I’m lazy in the ‘make me feel special’ department. When we first met I bought him a briefcase for his birthday—something he saw in a store window and loved—and it had two tickets to Paris inside. This year I gave him a DVD and we celebrated with a couple of friends by eating a meat loaf his mother had made. Nothing against meat loaf, but that’s what it’s come to. I don’t know why I don’t do more. I’ve become complacent.” Adele, in her breathless riff, vividly captures the tension between the comfort of committed love and its muting effect on erotic vitality. Familiarity is indeed reassuring, and it brings a sense of security that Adele would never dream of giving up. At the same time, she wants to recapture the quality of aliveness and excitement that she and Alan had in the beginning. She wants both the coziness and the edge, and she wants them both with him. The Era of Pleasure Not so long ago, the desire to feel passionate about one’s husband would have been considered a contradiction in terms. Historically, these two realms of life were organized separately—marriage on one side and passion most likely somewhere else, if anywhere at all. The concept of romantic love, which came about toward the end of the nineteenth century, brought them together for the first time. The central place of sex in marriage, and the heightened expectations surrounding it, took decades more to arrive. The social and cultural transformations of the past fifty years have redefined modern coupledom. Alan and Adele are beneficiaries of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, women’s liberation, the availability of birth control pills, and the emergence of the gay movement. With the widespread use of the pill, sex became liberated from reproduction. Feminism and gay pride fought to define sexual expression as an inalienable right. Anthony Giddens describes this transition in The Transformation of Intimacy when he explains that sexuality became a property of the self, one that we develop, define, and renegotiate throughout our lives. Today, our sexuality is an open-ended personal project; it is part of who we are, an identity, and no longer merely something we do. It has become a central feature of intimate relationships, and sexual satisfaction, we believe, is our due. The era of pleasure has arrived. These developments, in conjunction with postwar economic prosperity, have contributed to a period of unmatched freedom and individualism. People today are encouraged to pursue personal fulfillment and sexual gratification, and to break free of the constraints of a social and family life heretofore defined by duty and obligation.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  But I do like sex, or at least I used to, I just don’t like it so much with him. He doesn’t get me sexually, and I can’t seem to let him in on it, either. It feels hopeless. I’m only twenty-nine. That’s too young to stop having sex.” “Is there a right age to stop having sex?” I ask her. “Later maybe we can pick a date. For now, I’d rather know what is it you want from Ray that you’re not getting.” “I want him to be more of a man, and I can’t believe I’m saying that out loud.” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t even know what it means. Like I want him to be some kind of 1950s Neanderthal. But I don’t want that. My mother had that. I don’t think my father ever asked her what she liked, in the bedroom or out of it. Ray is a mensch. He’s a real gentleman, he respects me, and he lets me be. I love how easy our relationship is, but it doesn’t do a thing for me sexually.” “What’s missing?” I inquire. Suddenly she leans over and grabs my wrist, not roughly, but with confidence. “This is what I want,” she says. Then, tentatively, gently, she brushes my forearm and adds, “This is what I get.” “So he’s passive?” “Not exactly. He initiates sex all the time, but the way he does it makes me crazy. He just sort of raises his eyebrows and goes, ‘Hmmm?’ It feels like he’s asking me, ‘Am I going to get laid tonight?’ like I’m supposed to take over from there.” “He has a way of approaching you that doesn’t say, ‘I want you,’ as much as ‘Do you want me?’ Is that it?” “Yes!” Joni shouts. I explain that if I’m going to understand what she wants from Ray, first I have to understand what it is she wants sex to provide. “If sex is a quest,” I ask her, “what is your Holy Grail?” Joni is quite forthcoming in disclosing her sexual past: the best experiences she’s had, the worst, and what made them so. She gives me a raft of information about the atmosphere she grew up in, her early stirrings, the age she started to masturbate, and the age when she understood what masturbation was. But when I ask her, “What does sex mean to you? What are the feelings that accompany your desire? What do you seek in sex? What do you want to feel? To express? Where do you hold back?” she looks at me, perplexed. “I have no idea,” she admits. “No one’s ever asked me that before.” All of us invest our erotic encounters with a complex set of needs and expectations.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  pheasant, an edible duck, or even a large fish. He thought his equipment was to blame. To his collection of target rifles he added two hunting rifles, a Marlin 30/30 and a Garand M-l with a telescopic sight. He had a double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun for waterfowl and a semiautomatic 16-gauge that he called his “bush gun.” To spot the game he never got close to he carried a pair of high-powered Zeiss binoculars. To dress the game he never killed he carried a Puma hunting knife. For all the talk of Champion being my dog, I understood that he was supposed to be part of Dwight’s total hunting system. When we reached the quarry, Dwight threw a stick into the water to stimulate Champion’s retrieving instincts and to demonstrate the softness of his mouth. He said weimaraners were famous for their mouths. “You won’t see one tooth mark on that stick,” he told me. Champion ran up to the water, then stopped. He looked back at us and whimpered. He was quaking like a chihuahua. “Go on, boy,” Dwight said. Champion whimpered again. He bent one paw, stuck it in the water, pulled it out and started barking at the stick. “Smart dog,” Dwight said. “Knows it’s not a bird.” The mergansers came in at dusk. They must have seen us, but as if they knew what they tasted like they showed no fear. They flew in low and close together. Dwight fired both barrels at them. One duck dropped like a stone and the rest rushed up again, quacking loudly. They circled the quarry long enough for Dwight to reload and fire. This time he didn’t hit anything, and the mergansers flew away. The bird he’d brought down was floating in the water about twenty feet from shore. Its bill was under the surface, its wings outstretched. It wasn’t moving. Dwight broke the shotgun and pulled out the shells. “Get ’er, Champ,” he said. But Champion did not get the duck. He wasn’t even on the shore now, or anywhere else in sight. Dwight called to him in tones of friendliness, command, and threat, but he did not return. I offered to bring the duck in by throwing rocks behind it. Dwight said not to bother, it was just a garbage bird. We found Champion under the car. Dwight had to sweet-talk him for several minutes before he bellied out, yelping softly and cowering. “He’s a little gun-shy is all,” Dwight said. “We can fix that.” Dwight decided to fix that by taking Champion goose hunting in eastern Washington. He talked my mother into going along. They were supposed to be

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  “When we married, we loved each other very much. We still do. But, shall we say, we had both known stronger passions. Charles came out of it disillusioned—the high intensity was always short-lived, and he was left with women he didn’t have much in common with. I came out of it relieved. I got too lost in it. We talked about it back then, that we were both looking for something more enduring and a little calmer.” Rose goes on to explain that she and Charles had other goals for their marriage—companionship, intellectual stimulation, physical and emotional care, support. “We really valued what we had found with each other.” Rose grew up poor. Her father ran a junkyard in rural Tennessee. Today she has a corner office on the fifty-sixth floor overlooking Madison Avenue in Manhattan. “My hillbilly town wasn’t exactly supportive of girls with ambition, and I had a lot. When I met Charles, I knew he was different. I could be with him and he would let me do my own thing. In the early 1960s, that was a big deal.” “What did you think was going to happen sexually? That was a big deal in the sixties, too,” I say. “I was OK with our sex life. I thought it was fine, even nice,” she tells me. “I’ve always known that for Charles it wasn’t enough, but I expected him to deal with it.” In a private session with Charles a few weeks later, Charles gives me his take on things. “Sex with Rose is nice, but it’s always been kind of flat. Sometimes I can deal with the low intensity; other times it’s been unbearable. I’ve gone online, I’ve gone outside of the marriage, I’ve gone to Rose. Mostly I tried to squelch it, because there doesn’t seem to be room for this between us. But I don’t want to do that anymore. Life is too short. I’m getting older. When I feel erotically alive, as you call it, I don’t worry about death and I don’t worry about my age, at least for a few moments. “Frankly, I’m surprised at her reaction,” he continues. “It’s been years since she was interested in sex. This may sound strange, but I honestly didn’t think she’d feel so strongly about my being involved with other women. Even though I’m not exclusive any longer, I’m as emotionally faithful and committed as I’ve always been. I don’t want to hurt her, and I certainly don’t want to leave her, but something had to change for me.” Charles isn’t behaving according to the script, but then neither is Rose. She is fragile and afraid, not the invincible woman Charles needs her to be. Just as they had banished his seductiveness, they had also suppressed her vulnerability. They have outgrown their respective roles, and they are in a crisis.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I thought. Why so uncompassionate, so unchristian? The research grant stipulated that during the first six months of funding I hold a two-day workshop to consult with a panel of six experts in cancer treatment, research design, and statistical analysis. I invited Paula and four other group members to attend as patient consultants. The workshop was pure window dressing, a flagrant waste of time and money. But such is life in the field of federally sponsored contractual research: one simply learns to accommodate these charades. Paula, however, couldn’t accommodate. Calculating the amount of money spent in the two-day meeting (approximately $5,000), she railed at me about the immorality of the workshop: “Think of the help that five thousand dollars could provide for cancer patients! ” Paula, I thought, I do love you, but you can be so muddle-headed. “Can’t you see,” I said, “that compromise is necessary? There’s no way that the five thousand dollars can be used for direct patient care. More important, we’ll lose our funding if we don’t follow federal guidelines for a consultation workshop. If we can persevere, complete the research, and demonstrate the value of our approach to dying cancer patients, we will benefit more patients, many more, than could be directly helped by the five thousand dollars. Let’s not be penny-wise and pound-foolish, Paula. Compromise, please,” I pleaded, “this one time.” I could sense her disappointment with me. Shaking her head slowly, she replied, “Compromise once, Irv? No such thing as a single compromise. They breed.” During the workshop the consultants all made the contribution for which they had been recruited (and were well paid). One discussed psychological testing to measure depression, anxiety, modes of coping, locus of control; another talked about health care delivery systems; another about community resources. Paula threw herself fully into the workshop. I assume she felt that with little time left, one doesn’t play a waiting game. She acted the Socratic gadfly to the solemn consultant panel. When, for example, they discussed such objective evaluation indices of maladaptive coping as a patient’s not getting out of bed, not dressing, withdrawing, and crying, Paula argued that for her, each of these activities was at times a stage of incubation that eventually ushered in another stage, sometimes a period of growth. She rejected the experts’ attempts to convince her that when one uses a large enough sample, aggregate scores, and a control group, such considerations can be easily dealt with statistically in the data analysis. Then came the moment when the workshop participants were asked to suggest important antecedent variables, that is, factors that might predict a person’s psychological adjustment to cancer. Dr. Lee, a cancer specialist, wrote these factors on the blackboard as the participants called them out: marital stability, available environmental resources, personality profile, family history. Raising her hand, Paula suggested, “How about courage?

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  You’ve discussed this over and over again, hour after hour. Just like your comments about the dating scene—you know what I mean. During those hours I’ve ended up feeling less engaged with you and less helpful as well.” “But those are the things that preoccupy me—you tell me to share what I’m thinking.” “You’re absolutely right, Myrna. I know it’s a dilemma, but it’s not what you say but how you say it. But I don’t want to detract from my earlier point. The mere fact that we’re talking so openly supports what I said a little while ago—that you’re different, working better and harder in therapy. “It’s time to stop for today, but let’s try to pick up from here next week. Oh, yes, here’s the bill for last month.” “Hmmm,” said Myrna, uncrossing her legs, not neglecting to swish them vigorously, and scanning the proffered bill before dropping it into her purse. “How disappointing!” “What do you mean? ” “Still one-fifty an hour. No discounts for being a better patient?” The following week, as she listened yet again to Ernest’s countertransference dictation on the way to her therapy hour, Myrna decided to steer the discussion to his comments about her physical appearance and sexual attractiveness. It wasn’t difficult. “Last week,” she began, “you said we should continue where we left off.” “All right. Where shall we start?” “At the end of the session last week, you were talking about my whining about the singles scene—” “Whoa! You keep quoting me as though I said you were whining. That was not my word—repeat, not my word. I said something about your circular or repetitious comments.” Myrna, of course, knew better. Whining was precisely his term: she had heard him use it on the tape. But, eager to proceed, she’d let him have his little lie. “You were saying you were bored by my talking about the singles scene. How am I supposed to deal with it if I don’t talk about it?” “Certainly you’ve got to talk about the major concerns in your life. As I said, it’s how you talk about them.” “What does ‘how’ mean?” “Well, you didn’t seem to be speaking to me. I felt out of the loop. Time and again, you’d tell me the exact same things—the unfair ratio, the meat-market scene, the ten-second visual checkout in singles bars, the impersonality of Internet matching services. And each time you’d say it as though you were telling me for the first time, as though you’d never thought of asking yourself whether you’d ever said this before or how I might regard your repeating it so often.” Silence. Myrna stared at the floor. “What do you feel about what I just said?” “I’m digesting it.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  We penetrate our partner mentally. We talk, we listen, we share, and we compare. We disclose certain parts of ourselves, while we adorn, fiddle with, and conceal others. Sometimes I learn something about you because you tell me: your history, your family, your life before we met. But just as often my understanding comes from watching you, intuiting, and making associations. You present the facts, I connect the dots, and an image is formed. Your singularities are gradually revealed to me, openly or covertly, intentionally or not. Some places inside of you are easy to reach; others are encrypted and laborious to decode. Over time, I come to know your values, and your fault lines. By witnessing how you move in the world, I come to know how you connect: what excites you, what presses your buttons, and what you’re afraid of. I come to know your dreams and your nightmares. You grow on me. And all this, of course, happens in two directions. As John settles into this new relationship, he stops talking about it in therapy, and I assume that no talk means no problems. So when, after a year, he brings it up again, I pay close attention. “Things are going well. We’ve moved in together. We get along great. She’s beautiful, she’s funny, she’s smart. I really love her. We don’t have sex.” Intimacy Begets Sexuality…or Does It? The prevailing belief of couples therapy in America today is that sex is a metaphor for the relationship—find out what’s going on emotionally and you can infer what’s going on in the bedroom. If couples are caring and nurturing—if they have good communication, mutual respect, fairness, trust, empathy, and honesty—you can reliably assume an ongoing, pulsing erotic bond. In her book Hot Monogamy , Dr. Patricia Love gives voice to these ideas: Good verbal communication is one of the keys to a good sex life. When couples share their thoughts and emotions freely throughout the day, they create between them a high degree of trust and emotional connection, which gives them the freedom to explore their sexuality more fully. Intimacy begets sexuality. For many people, a loving, committed relationship is indeed a great enhancer of sexual desire, a fillip. They feel accepted and swaddled, and that safety allows them to feel free. The trust that comes with emotional closeness enables them to unleash their erotic appetites. But what about John and Beatrice? They don’t fill the bill. They have a beautiful, intimate, loving relationship (they communicate); and, according to this view, that should form the basis for sustained desire. But it doesn’t. And if it’s any consolation to them, it doesn’t work this way for a lot of people. Ironically, what makes for good intimacy does not always make for good sex.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The unresolved theological problems of the sixteenth century were made worse, in my view, by the collusion of the Western churches with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Many Christians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries still held to a robust resurrection hope. That, indeed, formed part of the postmillennial “Puritan hope,” reflecting a mood of cultural optimism as well as spiritual hope. But by the nineteenth century the notion of “going home to heaven” had all but taken over. The essential Epicureanism of the Enlightenment insisted on a great gulf between earth and heaven. Many devout Christians accepted that unbiblical cosmology, opting for a detached spirituality (a heavenly-mindedness with a questionable earthly use) and an escapist eschatology (leaving the world and going to heaven). Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on both sides of the Atlantic, this has taken us back once more to the medieval heaven-and-hell eschatology, which has radically conditioned both soteriology (“How are we saved for that goal?”) and missiology (“How should the church set forward God’s work of salvation?”). True, the doctrine of purgatory was not so popular outside Roman circles in the nineteenth century. But “penal substitution,” which had been emphasized partly in order to ward off that idea, then found a new home in the Western piety that focused not on God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven, but on my sin, my heavenly (that is, nonworldly) salvation, and of course my Savior. This, indeed, presses a particular question upon us: if many of our contemporary ideas about what was achieved on the cross belong with a nineteenth-century view of “sinners” being “saved” and “going to heaven,” what might the cross mean for the earlier view in which the gospel is transforming the whole world? That is a question for the historians, though since my own view of the cross as the start of a revolution has a lot in common with those earlier beliefs, I will be giving my own answer in due course.