Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (31 page)

Choosing involves selecting some life options and forgoing others. When you choose your partner, you relinquish other possibilities. By
making choices and living with them, you become clear about who you are, and more adept at the Four Points of Balance. Part of getting what you
want
involves accepting the loss of paths not taken, in the process of fulfilling your heart’s desire.

Lots of people have difficulty with wanting and choosing. Testosterone and estrogen don’t choose, and choosing and bonding are different: Mammals mate with the best available partner when their hormones kick in. Highly intelligent animals may have a rudimentary capacity for choosing, but only humans have the degree of choice that we do.

Choice became part of human sexual desire in the sociobiological adaptation that changed your ancestors’ bodies and minds millions of years ago, when women’s sexual biology changed. Unlike other primates, women shifted to inconspicuous ovulation, which gave them more control of their sexuality. As women had more ability to modulate their sex, they evolved a brain that could control it.
¹³⁰

As they developed a mind that could choose, they chose partners whom they wanted. One factor in whom they chose was driven by their reflected sense of self. Humans learned to signal desire through nuances of language and behavior, rather than the appearance of genitals. These same nuances got them the reflected sense of self they wanted.

Choice is how humankind’s emerging self shaped the body that housed it. Through millions of years of sexual selection, women probably bred men for two things they liked. One was a man’s capacity to engage with women’s personal emerging self. This hastened the co-evolution of the prefrontal neocortex. The other, according to some anthropologists, was that women bred men to have long and thick penises.
¹³¹
If that doesn’t illustrate the power of sexual selection, nothing will.

Women’s conscious control of their sexual desire laid the foundation for our ability to bring meaning to sex. Choice is a primary activity of selfhood. It’s how we define ourselves.

When humans started having sex for more than lust, infatuation, and attachment, they also
stopped
having sex because of those same reasons. Going at it “self to self,” and not just genitals to genitals, took sex to new heights and lows. When our reflected sense of self showed up, issues of power common in all primates took on entirely new proportions. At
some point in prehistory, there had to be the first man with a small penis who had the first feelings of sexual inadequacy.

We have the capacity to choose a partner, but that doesn’t mean everyone exercises this ability. Not everyone chooses the partner they marry. Many people don’t.
In many marriages, one partner chose the other, and the other got married because he didn’t have to choose
.

Countless LDPs have told me, “I don’t have those kinds of feelings of desire for my partner,” making it sound specific to this person. When we looked deeper they often fit this rule: People with weak Four Points of Balance don’t want to
want. Wanting
makes them nervous. There’s anxiety in choosing a partner, so they don’t choose. Living with someone doesn’t mean you’ve picked each other. If you lack Four Points of Balance, the vulnerability in choosing is just too much.

In the last chapter we saw that desire problems surface when your partner becomes more important to you than you are to yourself. When you choose someone, her importance grows exponentially. Suddenly you’re in a situation that may be more than your Four Points of Balance (Solid Flexible Self, Quiet Mind–Calm Heart, Grounded Responding, Meaningful Endurance) can handle.

This was Tom’s situation. Tom didn’t want Helen to be more important to him. Tom was too dependent on a reflected sense of self. He couldn’t handle the real and imagined vulnerability that came from choosing. By not choosing Helen, Tom kept the emotional maelstrom within him in check. Tom modulated Helen’s importance in his life to compensate for his difficulty holding on to himself. As it was, he could barely keep his emotional balance. Choosing Helen would grant her privileged status in his life. Tom couldn’t handle her being that important.

In choosing your partner, you bring her inner world into your mental reality. (Accurate mind-mapping is important.) You consider her inner world when you deliberate about your own life, with all its complications, frustrations, and limitations. This invariably limits your choices (which poorly differentiated people experience as being controlled or suffocated).
You can’t choose your partner if you can’t hold on to your self. That’s why Tom couldn’t choose Helen: It wasn’t that he couldn’t make up his mind; he couldn’t handle the emotional impact of making a choice.

Why couldn’t Tom handle Helen becoming more important to him? This is where Tom’s history with his mother comes in: Tom’s experiences with his mother’s
If you love me, you’ll give me what I want …
made him keep his emotional investments in check, lest they be used against him. Helen’s growing importance in their first year together triggered his sexual withdrawal. As his caring for her increased and she became a more central figure in his life, this triggered his fears that she would use this to manipulate him.

An inability to maintain your own sense of self makes you afraid the Chosen One will swallow you whole. Without some solid sense of self and the ability to regulate your own anxiety, you don’t have much free choice in your life. That includes the ability to choose your partner.

You can see this in how Tom and Helen got together. Tom’s first post-divorce girlfriend had just dumped him, and Helen had recently separated from her husband. A few movies and dinners later, things got sexual, and they began to think of themselves as a couple. Because both were on the rebound, they agreed to just date and see what happened. Neither was ready to make a big commitment, and they didn’t want to ruin things by discussing it.

As they spent more time together, separate housing became a real bother. After six months, Tom sort of moved in with Helen. In some ways it was no big deal, because half his wardrobe was already at her house. There was never a clear discussion of what this meant between them. Helen didn’t want to push Tom, and Tom didn’t want to discuss it. He said it was wonderful to be together, and they should just enjoy it and see what happened.

Fast forward three years and things look different. Tom still wanted to live with Helen, but he didn’t want sex and he wasn’t ready to marry her. And there was Helen, with Tom in her house, without him ever making an active decision to be there. Looking back, she could see how they got from where they started to where they were now: They ignored the difficult questions about what they meant to each other.

Tom didn’t want to choose Helen, but he didn’t want to lose her, either. To cover up, he fended off Helen’s attempts to map his mind. He deliberately said things to implant a false picture in Helen’s mind. Perhaps Tom feared Helen would turn into his mother, but Tom was actually the one playing out his mother’s dynamic. Tom’s message throughout their sexual relationship was
If you really love me, you will stay with me with or without sex and make me happy
.

Then there was the problem of Helen needing to feel chosen. Her reflected sense of self relied on being chosen and wanted. Helen needed to be chosen for the same reasons Tom didn’t want to choose: limited Four Points of Balance. This explains why millions of people are like Helen. But it doesn’t explain why Helen is one of them.

Helen’s family was in shambles growing up. Her father gambled and drank. Her mother ran the house with the money she made. Her father squandered everything else. Helen’s parents spent most of their time fighting with her older brother. He was her one ray of hope, running interference for her in their house. But he went to prison for car theft when Helen was fourteen and died in a brawl with other inmates. Helen had a series of fruitless love affairs over the next decade, followed by a brief marriage and a messy divorce. By the time she met Tom, she was ripe for anyone who would be nice to her.

The meaning Helen brought to sex was,
I’m glad just to be allowed to participate, you don’t have to pick me
. Her need to be wanted didn’t mean she held out for someone who really wanted her. Quite the contrary. She lied to herself about Tom the same way she lied to herself about her parents. Growing up, she had learned the advantages of being helpful and not asking for much. Her parents were nicer when they needed her to do something. If she doted on them, sometimes they would actually be quite pleasant.

Helen doted on Tom in bed. She was an attentive and active partner, eager to please. She didn’t complain if she didn’t orgasm. She made
sure Tom had his orgasm. If he didn’t feel like reciprocating, that was okay too.

I said to Helen, “It sounds like you do the wanting for both of you.”

“I’m better at it than Tom.”

I continued. “You make it sound like a virtue. I think you do the wanting for both of you because you think Tom can’t do it, and you don’t expect him to. But your wanting doesn’t come from the best in you. It stems from your neediness, not because you’re stronger.”

Helen got what I was saying, but it made her defensive. “Well, I think I chose Tom. Tom didn’t choose me.”

“In many marriages, one partner chooses the other, and the other partner gets married because he doesn’t have to choose. Tom never chose you because he didn’t have to or want to. You chose him out of your difficulty keeping your emotional balance. He
didn’t
choose you, because of his similar difficulty holding on to himself. Lots of couples dodge the thorny question of ‘who picked whom?’”

“I want Tom to want
me
, and not just for sex.”

“You’re understating things. You
need
him to want you.”

Helen got defensive. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting Tom to need me. It makes me feel important to him.”

“Yes, it does. But it interferes with you getting what you say you want.”

“How so?”

“You want Tom to want you, to choose you?”

“Yes.”

“And you want him to need you?”

“Yes.”

“Unfortunately, as long as Tom needs you, he can’t really choose you. It’s not really much of a choice.”

“Ohh …”

“You may want to be wanted, but your shaky reflected sense of self needs the security of being needed. You make yourself indispensable to your partner.”

“Ohhhh…” Helen’s eyes widened.

“So who keeps you from being chosen? Ultimately, you do—through your need to be needed.”

“Ohhhhhhhh …” From that moment, Helen began dealing with never having been chosen. She confronted herself about conveniently ignoring that Tom had never chosen her. From then on, Helen developed a single-minded focus. She wanted to be with someone who had the backbone to choose her.

“I guess I’ve been tolerated all my life. I’ve glommed on to anyone who would have me. I know my first husband never choose me. His first choice was to marry another woman, but she married someone else so he married me. I’m clearly not Tom’s overwhelming choice. I settle for men who like me to keep them company. They can see I don’t expect them to choose me.” Helen glanced at Tom and then at me. “Maybe I’m kidding myself. I know I have my shortcomings. But I think I deserve to be with someone who really wants me!” She sounded determined.

When I said earlier you could expand your desire, I was referring to
consciously chosen, freely undertaken desire
. Choosing and wanting are large parts of your desire.

Another level of desire involves your intentionality. The 1940s singer Al Jolson crooned, “You made me love you! I didn’t want to do it! I didn’t want to do it! You know you made me love you!” Obviously loving and choosing don’t necessarily go hand in hand. You can be in love with someone and wish you weren’t. You can have desire for someone and wish you didn’t. You can have no desire for someone and be glad you don’t. You may not want your partner, but know you should look like you do.

Pick the mythical quest or romantic love story you find most appealing. Odds are they involve consciously chosen and freely undertaken desire. That’s the kind of desire we want to feel within ourselves and emanating from our partner.

Do you really want more desire? Perhaps you don’t. Your desire to have desire—and your intent to do something about your situation—controls whether or not you’ll be successful. Everyone knows this. That’s why Helen closely mind-mapped Tom about his reluctance to have sex or get married.

Tom framed his problem as lacking desire to have sex or get married (i.e., he was unmotivated). The real problem wasn’t that he didn’t want sex or Helen. Tom didn’t want to want, period

Intent is tremendously important in sexual desire problems. Partners dance around this by expressing a wish to have desire (for sex or their partner), misrepresenting themselves as being open to developing desire when in fact they are not. This forestalls the other partner from taking it personally. Misrepresenting your desire to have desire only shores up your partner’s reflected sense of self briefly.

Tom didn’t want to
want
because
wanting
made him feel vulnerable. Experiences with Mother taught him wanting her love made him susceptible to her manipulations. He also couldn’t handle the loss of paths not taken. There might be a better partner for him out there. But what Tom really couldn’t handle was wanting something or someone and not getting what he wanted.
Wanting
put him in touch with an emptiness he felt inside him. Tom avoided this at all costs.