Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (36 page)

When sexual desire problems arose at the outset of their marriage,
Barbie said she thought her problem might be hormonal. But she delayed getting herself checked out for over a year. When she did, her results came back normal. For the next six months Barbie did nothing, and Ken got angry. Barbie said she didn’t trust the results and wanted to repeat them. Six months later, further testing came back in the low normal range. Ken said both tests indicated Barbie’s hormones were normal. She said this meant her hormones were low.

Barbie spent the next eight years trying various herbal remedies, to no avail. Barbie’s stance was it wasn’t her fault she didn’t have sexual desire. The problem wasn’t her, and it wasn’t Ken either. It was her hormones. Ken’s position was if this was the problem, Barbie should do whatever it took to fix it.

Instead, Barbie mounted a multi-pronged impregnable defense. Early on, she insisted on homeopathic solutions because she didn’t want the weight gain hormone replacement therapy might cause. Asking Ken,
“You don’t want me to gain weight and look fat, do you?”
was a great strategic move. Ken’s narcissism demanded a wife with an incredible body. When Ken eventually got fed up and opted for weight gain, Barbie changed to
“I don’t want to put anything unnatural in my body
.”

With moves like these, it’s not hard to map out your partner’s intent. Barbie wanted Ken to feel the impact of her lack of desire. Ken saw this, but he couldn’t crack Barbie’s back-up defense: When he pointed out her obvious lack of interest in having more sex, Barbie would get wild and scream, “I don’t care, I don’t care! No one’s going to make me do something I don’t want to do! You’re torturing me! Leave me alone!” Barbie pushed Ken to back down to keep their relationship together. Ken’s difficulty holding on to himself helped keep their marriage going.

Barbie wasn’t a terrible person. She was just a little cold. Reptilian. Cold-blooded. Not “frigid” in the traditional sense. She could lubricate and reach orgasm just fine. It was more as though Barbie was missing a few pints of human warmth and kindness. Apparently her mother had
sucked it out of her. This made me wonder whether Barbie was willing to go through the pain of becoming warm.

Remember Barbie emphasized what a “good catch” Ken was? She never chose him. She never wanted him. She just wanted to catch him. (This is similar to what we saw last chapter with Tom, but colder and more calculated.) Barbie never found Ken attractive in the first place. His grandiosity, and Barbie’s skill at showing men what they wanted to see, kept him from knowing this. Barbie married Ken to reduce her emotional vulnerability: Sometimes people pick partners
because
they don’t desire them. Part of Barbie’s feelings of “safety” came from
not
desiring him. Barbie had lost sexual desire in prior relationships. She knew her desire evaporated quickly once the relationship developed.

The best way out of this kind of pattern of cruelty involves (a) giving a clear and complete accounting of yourself and what you’ve been doing and (b) giving your partner a fair shot at his own vision of happiness. But if you’re unwilling or unable to hold on to your self and give your partner a chance to leave, then emotional torture and fusion continue until the marriage falls apart.
¹³⁷

Barbie wasn’t willing to confront herself about how she got into their relationship. Whenever you dodge a two-choice dilemma, screwing with your partner’s mind becomes
de rigueur
. Barbie wasn’t about to risk her safety and security by getting to the bottom of things.

Ken’s egotism—inflated by wealth and status—made him expect the women he dated to “come after him.” However, Barbie expected the same thing from the men in her life. When Ken stopped initiating in their marriage, sex dropped from once or twice a month to nothing in the last two years. In session, Barbie said she was too afraid and awkward to make approaches to Ken. She proposed that she would participate if he initiated, but she reserved the right to say no if she didn’t want sex.

What finally led Ken and Barbie to see me? They made a deal to work things out, which I call the Devil’s Pact. Many couples spontaneously
hit upon this diabolical deal. (Some therapists actually prescribe it in treatment.) The Devil’s Pact is ineffective because it’s a bad-faith agreement born of emotional combat and normal marital sadism. It creates a marital theatre of the absurd.

One night Barbie and Ken were lying in bed. They were arguing. They were angry, exasperated, and defensive. Ken said, “Why don’t you ever initiate?”

Barbie replied, “Because you never give me the chance to initiate. You initiate all the time.”

Ken railed, “I give you plenty of time. I have to initiate because you never do. We’d never have sex if I left it up to you.”

Barbie grabbed the high ground. “You’ll never find out because you always initiate first. You never wait. If you’re not initiating every five minutes, you’re not happy! You do that to make me feel bad. I may not do it often enough to suit your standards, but I initiate enough to suit me.”

Ken tried to take the high ground away from her. “We’d have sex every five years if it were up to you. You never initiate!”

“You never give me the chance!”

Scene One repeated
ad nauseam
for a month.

It was now a month later. Ken and Barbie were arguing again. They were more hurt, frustrated, defensive, and angry. They hated talking about their problem even more. Nothing was changing. Ken felt pressured because time was flying by. Barbie felt Ken always pressured her for sex, and she deserved some time off when this wasn’t on her mind. Scene Two started out louder than Scene One:

Ken said, “Why don’t you ever initiate?”

Barbie replied, “I do. Just not as much as you.”

“That’s not true. You never initiate!”

“That’s because
you
never give me a chance.”

Ken started to lose himself. “I give you all the chances in the world!”

Barbie spat out her words like a machine gun. “You
always
initiate first. Just when I’m getting ready to initiate,
you
do it. You
never
wait. You’re
always
pushing me, expecting me to make a move on you!”

“I could wait until hell freezes over and you wouldn’t make a move!”

Barbie became superficially calm but holier-than-thou. “Well, if
you
didn’t initiate all the time, maybe
I
would do it more.”

“It wouldn’t make any difference if I initiated less.”

Barbie’s tone was snotty and belittling. “
You
don’t know.
You’re
always initiating.”

Ken became more incensed. “
Are you telling me it’s my fault you don’t initiate? Because I initiate all the time? Are you nuts? I can’t believe this!!”

Barbie’s pseudo-calmness was dismissive and infuriating. “I’m saying I don’t feel like initiating when I feel pressured all the time. And if I didn’t feel so pressured by you, I’d probably initiate more often.”

Ken was beside himself with anger. “
This is so frustrating
. How can you say this with a straight face?”

“Because it’s true. If you’d just back off, so I didn’t feel so pressured, things might be different.” Barbie’s cool demeanor was like a red cape before a bull.

“Prove it! It’s a lie!”

“I can’t!
You
prove it!”

“Okay!” Ken said the fateful words. “I’m not initiating from here on out. We’ll see what happens. I’ll prove you won’t initiate.”

“Okay. We’ll see.”

“Yes, indeed, we will.”

On the surface, the Devil’s Pact makes perfect sense: Create a vacuum, and the LDP will fill it because she no longer feels pressured by the HDP. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work because it doesn’t change the system. It actually reinforces the status quo.

Six weeks later, Ken and Barbie had a huge fight. Ken was screaming like a lunatic. Barbie sat quietly. The expression on her face said,
See what
I have to put up with? And you expect me to initiate sex with you when you act like this?!

Ken screamed, “It’s been a month and half! You haven’t initiated once! You said you’d initiate sex if I backed off! Why haven’t you initiated?!”

The dismissive sing-song quality in Barbie’s voice said her take on things was unquestionably right. “At first I didn’t initiate sex because I was enjoying not feeling pressured. After all, that’s why we made this agreement. The whole idea was that I wasn’t going to feel pressured for sex. Besides, I want sex to be meaningful when we have it. I didn’t want to do it just to do it.”

Ken rolled his eyes in disgust. “Okay. Maybe that explains the first night or the first several days. But why didn’t you initiate after that?”

“Well, when we didn’t do it the first night, I knew you expected it on the second. I started to feel pressured, so I didn’t do it, hoping the pressure would go away.”

Ken grabbed the high ground: “I was good. I didn’t say a word.”

Barbie took it away from him. “I felt like you were watching me, waiting to see what I would do. Which you were—don’t deny it. I don’t feel sexy when you do that!”

“But it’s been six weeks!”

Barbie snarled, “You don’t
need
to say anything. I could tell you were frustrated and expecting me to initiate. You were doing your same old thing, in a different way. I’m not going to have sex when I feel pressured!
You’re not going to force me to have sex with you when I don’t want to!
”

Ken eased up a notch. “So why didn’t you say something about this weeks ago? We had a deal.”

Barbie’s snarl turned to weariness and fatigue. “I knew we would fight. I’m so tired of this. I just put it off. I needed a break. This whole thing doesn’t have to rest on my shoulders, you know!”

Ken was ready to tear his hair out. “That was our agreement!”

Barbie’s tone was mocking. “Oh, so now it’s all my fault! You expect me to make all the initiations? I never agreed to do all the work. I’m not the only one in this relationship. You didn’t bring it up, either. It’s your responsibility, too.” And with that Barbie walked out of the room.

The Devil’s Pact didn’t change their system—the Devil’s Pact intensified it. Once it was made, Barbie felt increasing pressure to initiate. However, since part of the premise is to reduce pressure on the LDP, Barbie felt entitled to not feel pressured, and to not initiate if she still felt it. Unfortunately, the longer she waited, the more Ken’s frustration escalated, and the spiral intensified. At that point, as she saw it, Barbie was standing up for her rights by refusing to initiate. She refused to recognize how she co-produced the pressure she felt.

Here’s the key that gets lost in the drama: The point of making this Devil’s Pact is to solve a conjoint problem that can only be solved by the low desire partner making initiations. When Barbie turned around and said Ken’s reduced initiations were why she
didn’t
do it, after she agreed to it, you have a good demonstration of mind-twisting normal marital sadism. Telling him he could have initiated during their pact was more of the same.

The Devil’s Pact starts with the LDP avoiding self-confrontation as long as possible. It then shifts to bad faith negotiations, misrepresentations, and attempts to thwart your partner. It ends with recycled arguments, instead of confronting what’s going on. If you want to eat someone’s heart out, the Devil’s Pact is hot sauce.

This was the point at which Ken and Barbie came to see me. Barbie had moved into their spare bedroom “in order to get some sleep.” Their relationship was shaky, and divorce was in the air. They were gridlocked and embittered. Barbie seemed ready to leave.

This is a tough place to start therapy from, but couples do it all the time. The important thing is to get a grip, settle down quickly, and demonstrate some interest in saving your marriage. You do this by confronting yourself about your limitations and your role in co-constructing your marriage. You have to look at your situation more objectively. However, if you (or your partner) insist on approaching the situation from your feelings, it doesn’t bode well for staying married.

In our first session, Barbie wanted me to tell Ken to stop pressuring her. She cast herself as coerced into sex, and expected me to side with her. When I didn’t do that, Barbie saw me as a threat.

I tried to explain that (in monogamous marriage) the LDP
backs herself into a corner
by repeatedly declining to have sex. There is only one good way out of that corner. She has to come forward and initiate sex, which she doesn’t really want to do. When she won’t, she also paints her partner into a (different) corner. The Devil’s Pact supplies more paint: Barbie pressured Ken to give up his desire for sex, so she wouldn’t feel pressured. It wasn’t enough for him to give up having sex. He had to give up
wanting
it, too.

I said to Barbie, “In your deal, you still felt pressured when Ken didn’t initiate. It came from the fact you knew he wanted it.”

“That’s right.”

“Then the only way Ken can take the pressure off you is by giving up his desire for sex, forever. Intentionally or not, this is what you’re pressuring Ken to do.”

“I don’t think Ken has to give up sex forever. I just want him to stop pressuring me.” Barbie’s message was
I’m not looking at this from any other perspective than my own. You’re asking me to look at this from his perspective rather than from mine. I’m entitled to my feelings. You’re taking his side
.