Author: Neil Strauss
ISBN: 978-0062336958
A hilariously funny book about serious relationship questions. How a world famous pick-up artist (Neil Strauss, the author himself) went from picking up women into a commited relationship, escaped it to pursue various relationship styles and ended back in a commited monogamous relationship. A page turner! I want more!
[SPOILER ALERT: The author concluded that commited monogamous relationship is bad but still the best relatinship style there is. Not long after finishing this book he broke up and escaped the commited relationship again. Go figure!]
EXCERPTS
Every family has a skeleton in the closet. You may know your family’s skeleton. You may even be that skeleton. Or you may think that your family is different, that it’s the exception, that you’re one of the lucky ones with a perfect set of parents and no dark family secrets. If so, then you just haven’t opened the right closet door yet.
When I think about the prospect of marrying someone, I think of spending the rest of my life with her, of not being allowed to fuck anyone else, of her aging and losing interest in sex and me still not being able to fuck anyone else.
They say that when you meet someone and feel like it’s love at first sight, run in the other direction. All that’s happened is that your dysfunction has meshed with their dysfunction. Your wounded inner child has recognized their wounded inner child, both hoping to be healed by the same fire that burned them.
When I’m single, I want to be in a relationship. When I’m in a relationship, I miss being single.
We expect love to last forever. Yet as many as 50 percent of marriages and even more remarriages end in divorce. Among those who are married, only 38 percent actually describe themselves as happy in that state. And 90 percent of couples report a decrease in marital satisfaction after having their first child. Speaking of which, more than 3 percent of babies are not actually fathered by the male parent who thinks he did.
Maybe, then, the problem isn’t just me. Perhaps I’ve been trying to conform to an outdated and unnatural social norm that doesn’t truly meet—and has never met—the needs of both men and women equally.
Lying is about controlling someone else’s reality, hoping that what they don’t know won’t hurt you.
[at sex addiction clinic] “What I’m saying is that if you have true intimacy with your partner, you won’t need to seek sex outside the relationship.” She holds me in her gaze for a moment longer, then slowly scans the room. “This is the reason all of you ended up here. If you’re addicted to sex, you’re probably co-addicted to something else, like drugs or work or exercise, and this is because you’re afraid of intimacy and you’re afraid of your feelings.”
“Being overcontrolled as a child sets you up to lie as an adult,”
“So the theory of sex addiction is that when you feel out of control or disempowered, you sneak around and act out sexually to reestablish control and regain your sense of self.”
“People are under the logical fallacy that when their partner wants sex outside the relationship, it’s harmful to their intimacy together. We are all here because we don’t believe that’s true, but we do believe that lying and deceit harm intimacy. So instead of being retrained to accept a relationship on our partners’ terms, we could just as easily retrain them to accept the relationship on our terms.”
Intimacy is sharing your reality with someone else and knowing you’re safe, and them being able to share their reality with you and also be safe.
THE MALE DILEMMA 1. Sex is great. 2. Relationships are great. 3. Relationships grow over time. 4. The sex gets old over time. 5. So does she. 6. Thus the problem.
Troy shakes his head resolutely. “You wanna hear something tragic? I was still having sex with my wife four times a week when I started my affair.” “And that’s the problem with what Joan’s been telling us.” Calvin flashes a big, guilty grin. “Sex isn’t always about intimacy. Sometimes you just want some dirty sex.”
“Wanting variety is natural,” Troy says quietly as the guys lean in. “Look at porn: Guys don’t watch the same girl every time.”
I ask them the ultimate question: “So if your wife allowed you to sleep with other women, would you allow her to sleep with other men?” And much to my surprise, every guy except Adam says yes. “I wouldn’t like it, but I guess I’d have to suck it up,” Troy says.
“A relationship should be about what you both want, not about what you both don’t want each other to have. There must be some way in which we can have freedom and our partners can have security—or we can all have both freedom and security.”
It’s people with compulsive behaviors who change the world.
As I review the list, I realize that my family fits neatly into the sex addict mold that Lorraine taught us: Mother is strict and punishing (i.e., rigid) and father is distant and unemotional (i.e., disengaged).
Third type of parenting: enmeshment. This is my upbringing. Instead of taking care of a child’s needs, the enmeshing parent tries to get his or her own needs met through the child. This can take various forms: a parent who lives through a child’s accomplishments; who makes the child a surrogate spouse, therapist, or caretaker; who is depressed and emotionally uses the child; who is overbearing or overcontrolling; or who is excessively emotional or anxious about a child. If you grew up feeling sorry for or smothered by a parent, this is a sign that enmeshment likely occurred: In the process, enmeshed children lose their sense of self. As adults, they usually avoid letting anyone get too close and suck the life out of them again. Where the abandoned are often unable to contain their feelings, the enmeshed tend to be cut off from them, and be perfectionistic and controlling of themselves and others. Though they may pursue a relationship thinking they want connection, once they’re in the reality of one, they often put up walls, feel superior, and use other distancing techniques to avoid intimacy. This is known as avoidant attachment—or, as they put it here, love avoidance. And most sex addicts, according to this theory, are love avoidants.
The sins of the parents are the destinies of their children. Unless the children wake up and do something about it.
So if you remain loyal to people who abuse and mistreat you, that’s called trauma bonding. If you only feel normal if you’re doing something extreme or high-risk, that’s trauma arousal. If you’ve developed intense self-loathing, you’ve got trauma shame. If you find chemical, mental, or technological ways to numb yourself and your feelings, that’s trauma blocking. And it goes on and on. One pattern of trauma; many different possible responses to it. We’ve only scratched the surface. But at least you know the model we’re working with here. It’s not about blaming but understanding . . . In summary, we each spend our adult lives running on a unique operating system that took some eighteen years to program and is full of distinct bugs and viruses. And when we put together all these different theories of attachment, developmental immaturity, post-traumatic stress, and internal family systems, they make up a body of knowledge that allows us to run a virus scan on ourselves and, at any point, to look at our behaviors, our thoughts, and our feelings, and figure out where they come from. That’s the easy part. The tough part is to quarantine the virus, and to recognize the false self and restore the true self. Because it isn’t until we start developing an honest, compassionate, and functional relationship with ourselves that we can begin to experience a healthy, loving relationship with others.
I don’t know why I never rebelled, why I never just went out anyway, why even at that age I put up with being constantly imprisoned.
It’s no wonder you have fear when it comes to Ingrid. You don’t want to end up in a relationship like the one your parents have.”
“Intimacy problems come from a lack of self-love,” she continues. “Someone who fears intimacy thinks, unconsciously, If you knew who I actually was, you’d leave me.” “I’d classify all of you as intimacy avoidants,” she presses on. “The avoidant is very good at seducing, in the sense that he has an uncanny ability to find out what his partner needs and give it to her. Because he was usually enmeshed, he gets his worth and value from taking care of needy people.”
What happens in either case is that we choose partners who are at our age of emotional development and maturity, and whose issues are complementary to ours. Your wives may think they sent you here because you’re sick and they’re normal, but I’ve never worked with a couple where one of them had it all together and the other was a screw-up. They’ve got just as many issues as you do. Proof of this is the fact that they’re still with you.
You should be in recovery for you, not for her. And that’s typical of your marriage as a whole. Because when a love avoidant and a love addict begin a relationship, a predictable pattern occurs: The avoidant gives and gives, sacrificing his own needs, but it’s never enough for the love addict. So the avoidant grows resentful and seeks an outlet outside of the relationship, but at the same time feels too guilty to stop taking care of the needy person.” “By outlet, you mean an affair?” Adam interrupts. “It can be,” Lorraine says. “But it can also be obsessive exercising or work or drugs or living on the edge or anything high-risk. He will also compartmentalize it because the secrecy helps kick that intensity up a notch. In the meantime, as the avoidant’s walls keep getting higher, the love addict uses denial to hold on to the fantasy and starts accepting unacceptable behavior.”
“The pain and the fear are so intense for the love addict that she often develops her own secret life as well. Where the avoidant wants the highs, the addict typically goes for the lows. She wants benzodiazepines, alcohol, romance novels, shopping till she drops, or anything that depresses the central nervous system. If she acts out sexually or has an emotional affair, it’s not for intensity, but to numb the pain and get away from the agonizing hurt. Soon, the relationship is no longer about love for either partner, but about escaping from reality.”
“Some people have elements of both or play different roles at different times,”
“A healthy relationship is when two individuated adults decide to have a relationship and that becomes a third entity. They nurture the relationship and the relationship nurtures them. But they’re not overly dependent or independent: They are interdependent, which means that they take care of the majority of their needs and wants on their own, but when they can’t, they’re not afraid to ask their partner for help.” She pauses to let it all sink in, then concludes, “Only when our love for someone exceeds our need for them do we have a shot at a genuine relationship together.”
I’m not doing a very good job of taking my recovery more seriously, but in her depiction of a relationship, all the highs and peak experiences of life have to be sacrificed in the name of intimacy. And that doesn’t seem like a goal worth aspiring to. “I’d be willing to bet that after the high of the intensity, there’s a comedown, and you feel not so great and you need that next hit of intensity,” Lorraine responds coolly. “So ultimately, you can live your life like a hamster on a wheel, chasing after the next hit to keep yourself spinning. Or you can realize that ultimately it’s all a distraction to avoid the harsh reality that you are not connected to yourself.”
“Life’s not worth living if you’re living someone else’s life.”
There’s one thing I’ve been striving for all my life: with sex, with writing, with surfing, with partying, with anything and everything. And that is to be free. It’s the one feeling I never had growing up.
“You’ve been letting the grounded teenager control your life,” Lorraine says as I rise unsteadily to my feet. “And he wants to compensate for missing out on his adolescence by doing all the things and having all the women he was never allowed. But it’s time to be an adult.”
The women you’ve slept with, the ones you never did but primed for a future encounter, the ones who seemed interested but then suddenly stopped texting: Unless you do something horribly wrong, they never completely disappear. A lonely night, a cheating boyfriend, a sudden breakup, an attack of low self-esteem, an attack of high self-esteem—anything can, out of the blue, send them scrolling through their address book looking for validation, for security, for conversation, for adoration, for the fantasy of you filling some empty space in their life.
However, she does have a good point: Why would I rather masturbate to a girl who looks like Ingrid than actually have sex with her in the flesh? Is this intimacy avoidance or just normal male fantasizing?
There were two schools of thought in rehab. One was taught by a very compassionate woman named Lorraine: From her, we learned that we weren’t there for our partners but ourselves. And the goal is to separate from our parents and our wounds so we can live our authentic lives. And the other? The other school of thought was more puritanical. It was taught by a very strict woman named Joan. And she believes that masturbation, pornography, seduction, fantasy, and casual sex are all unhealthy. And that basically anything other than lifelong monogamy is a symptom of sexual addiction and intimacy avoidance. Why can’t they both be right? You gotta be kidding me. Then nearly every male in the country should be in rehab. [?]
The goal is not monogamy or nonmonogamy. It’s for you to be living a life that brings you happiness.
“It’s too bad there’s no such thing as a woman who’ll let you do what you want and still love you,” Calvin says.
“I think a lot of your behavior is classic ADD stuff, especially the excitement seeking and the conflict. Wanting to be with new women is a biological drive to keep the species going, but it’s totally destructive when you can’t pair-bond appropriately and then be involved in raising a family.” As he speaks, I realize that’s the exact problem: These two contradictory evolutionary desires—for variety and for family—have been tearing me apart. And on the journey to reconcile them, not only am I getting neither, but I’m discovering I’m insane.
Two months ago, I was just a jerk who cheated on his girlfriend and felt really shitty about it. I’d never seen or even wanted to see a therapist in my life. Now all of a sudden I have generalized anxiety syndrome, depressive disorder, socialization problems, brain damage, ADD, sex addiction, eroticized rage, developmental trauma disorder, emotional incest syndrome, Axis V impairment, and who knows what else. It’s a miracle I can function in society at all. [?]
“Resentment is the anger the Avoidant feels because of thinking he or she has been victimized by the partner’s neediness or by the partner’s ‘demands’ for connection in the relationship.”
She bites her lower lip and gazes down at Hercules. Then she hits me with it: “So why are you working so hard to stay in this relationship?” It’s a good question. One I’ve been asking myself lately. I think back on my past girlfriends: I broke up with Kathy because she was constantly jealous. I broke up with Katie because she kept cheating on me. And I broke up with Lisa, my most serious relationship before this, because she started to remind me of my mother. But with Ingrid, I can’t find anything hopelessly wrong with her, any way to use her behavior or shortcomings as an excuse to flee. Sure, she’s being a pain in the ass right now. And she shuts down when she’s angry, smothers me with affection, demands my attention when I want to work, can be needy due to her abandonment issues, and has some understandable insecurities because I cheated. But these are all things a guy can live with. So if I can’t find anything significantly wrong with her, then I must accept the only other conclusion available: the problem is still me. And after months of working on me, I’m a bigger mess than I was when this whole thing started. When I was dating Ingrid and cheating behind her back, everything was in stasis. She was happy. I was happy enough. We were living in ignorant bliss. Those were the good old lies. But now, everything I once thought I liked about myself has been turned into a symptom of something wrong with me. I’m told over and over by addiction experts not to trust anything I say, think, or feel.
And so instead of being healed, I’ve become raw, edgy, irritable, and moody. The blood flowing through my veins feels like it’s filled with sand and broken glass. And my sexuality is boiling over. Despite using the three-second rule, I’m attracted to any woman under three hundred pounds and some cartoon characters. I feel like the drunk who can’t get any booze, then starts chugging mouthwash and rubbing alcohol. I’m ready to scrape the bottom of the barrel. And Ingrid’s become so sensitive to my moods that I’m sure she’s aware of this.
I look into her eyes and try to stop the enmeshed monster inside me from taking over, but it’s too late. The love I see shining there is like a bear trap, snapped shut on my soul to keep me from straying. I am a prisoner of fear. And in that moment, I realize that the self-destructive impulse I’ve had lately is not actually about wanting to hurt myself. It’s about freedom. It’s about not wanting to live under constant scrutiny, to be responsible for her feelings, to feel guilty if I happen to have a sexual thought that’s not about her, to feel like my every word or expression is a red-hot brand that may scar her. Once again, my girlfriend has turned into my mother: Ingrid doesn’t trust me, she doesn’t give me space, and her happiness seems to depend almost entirely on my behavior.
“I’ve gone through a lot of emotions about this stuff too,” Calvin replies. “There’s no end to it. It’s not like, ‘Go do this work for a few months or years, then you’ll be better.’ They want us to be in meetings and therapy for the rest of our lives." “Can’t you see what’s going on?” Calvin presses. “Think about it: If you add up all the people who’ve cheated in their relationships, that’s tens of millions of customers in the U.S. alone. Now add to that the even huger number of people who watch porn, and this is the smartest business plan in the world. If they turn being male and horny into some kind of brain cancer that’s covered by health insurance, they’ll be billionaires.”
Remember when Joan made me add up all the money I spent on sex? Well, if I keep doing this, I’ll end up spending even more money on recovery.” I hate that everything he’s saying makes sense . . . and I’m relieved that everything he’s saying makes sense. “Most people who go to rehab relapse,” he continues. “So what’s the point?"
“I don’t know what’s right anymore, man. I don’t know. But despite my frustration, I have to say, the enmeshment stuff really fits me like a glove.” “That part may be true, but remember: This is the same profession that said homosexuality was a disease and gave gay people electroshock treatment and lobotomies. And, you know what, back then, therapists probably blamed it on smothering mothers also. Maybe we’re just different sexually but the world hasn’t accepted it yet.”
Perhaps sex addiction is the new ADD or Asperger’s syndrome. It’s very real for some people, but it’s also massively overdiagnosed and anyone who doesn’t fit a certain unrealistic standard of behavior is labeled with it. Pretty soon, just like there are six-year-old kids taking Ritalin and Adderall, some poor child who strips a Barbie doll naked will be getting sex addiction treatment.
She responds by explaining that we’ve developed three different primary brain systems for mating: one for sex, another for romantic love, and a third for deep attachment. And after the initial intensity of a new relationship, our romance and sex drives often swing toward other people, while our attachment drive remains connected to our primary partner. However, before I can draw any conclusions, Fisher says that this natural ebbing of romance and sexuality can be prevented. The solution, she elaborates, is for couples to do novel and exciting things together (to release dopamine and get the romance rush), make love regularly (to release oxytocin and sexually bond), cut themselves off from cheating opportunities, and, in general, make sure their partners are “continually thrilling” enough to keep all three drives humming. “Wow, that’s a lot to ask of two people,” I tell her. “Yes, and even then you still may want to sleep with other people on the side,” Fisher retorts. “So if you’re gonna cheat, for god’s sake, don’t get caught.”
Even Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the fathers of modern psychotherapy, appear to have had affairs: the former with his wife’s sister, the latter with a patient. “The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful,” Jung wrote in a letter to Freud.
“If it were all genetic, if humans just by nature mated for life and there were a very tight pair-bond,” Professor Peter J. Richerson explains, “then we wouldn’t need all these marriage customs.”
Then again, no matter what your point of view may be, you can always find someone with a Ph.D to support it.
And so I find myself, nearly a year after returning from rehab, caught between one school of thought telling me I have an incurable psychosexual disease I need to treat daily, and another making a very convincing argument that over two hundred thousand years of human culture and evolution support my behavior as perfectly natural.
“There are some couples who have a lifelong relationship and children, and they agree to have an open marriage. As long as both people are truthful and intimate and operating with integrity, I’m not going to judge them.”
“I feel like I’m ready to explore other relationship styles, but I’m a little scared,” I tell Lorraine. “I’ve been waking up every morning this week full of anxiety about losing Ingrid. I’m worried I won’t be able to find this quality of love again and I’m ruining what may be my only chance for a happy future and family.” I’m so bad at commitment, I can’t even commit to being uncommitted.
This is when Rick finally opens his mouth to speak. “What I wish for you,” he begins, measuring each word to make sure it lands as powerfully as possible, “is that you commit all the way to living this adventurous lifestyle you want, without any other option. Because you need to get to the place where you have all the women you desire and find out it doesn’t solve your loneliness or your need for connection or your pain.”
Lorraine watches him speak. I feel a mounting sense of anxiety that she’s going to agree with him. “If you’re indeed going to follow through with your decision,” she eventually says, arbitrating, “I’m going to ask you to solve a mystery.” “What’s the mystery?” “The mystery is whether the path you’re embarking on is authentic or you’re operating out of a wound.” “How will I know the difference?” “Wounds bring drama and trauma. They don’t bring comfort.” She pauses to make sure I understand, then elaborates. “We all have six core needs: emotional, social, intellectual, physical, sexual, and spiritual. And if they’re being attended to and enhanced, then you’re doing the right thing.”
This is it, then: I must make a decision. A lifetime of monogamy with the woman I love. Or a lifetime of dating who I want, of doing what I want, of having complete and total freedom. It doesn’t mean I’ll never have a girlfriend or a child or a family. It just means I’ll have them on my terms, not those of this repressive society that expects you to cut off your balls as soon as you say “I do.”
Rick Rubin once told me that on their deathbeds, people don’t think about their work or their life experiences or the items remaining on their to-do list. They think about love and family.
But do I actually want that dream: a house in the suburbs, a domestic routine that never changes, a lifestyle where going out to a movie is some sort of grand adventure, ungrateful kids like me who blame all their problems on their parents?
Ingrid strokes my head reassuringly and says, “I feel like I caught a beautiful bird in the wild and put it in a cage, just for me to look at.” I listen. She knows. She understands me. “The cage is near the window, and the bird keeps looking outside and thinking about life out there. And I need to open the cage and let it go, because it belongs in the wild.”
Between sobs, she sputters her last thought, the six words that will haunt me forever after: “But birds die in the wild.”
I wonder why I feel like I can’t handle marriage, but I can handle fatherhood. I think this is because it’s not the responsibility I mind, it’s the exclusivity. You can raise a child and still have one or two or ten other children. And growing apart and separating is the nature of that relationship, so over time everyone gains more freedom.
“I wrote down some criteria for the type of relationship I’m looking for.” I pull out my phone and read a note I jotted the night before:
- It can’t be sexually exclusive, which rules out monogamy.
- It has to be honest, which rules out adultery.
- It has to be capable of developing romantic and emotional attachment, which rules out being a permanent bachelor.
- It has to be capable of evolving into a family with healthy, well-adjusted children, which rules out unstable partners and lifestyles.
But who decides what’s natural and normal, I wonder? What if it’s simply the cultural pressure women constantly receive about being a good girl, saving their virginity, and finding the one, combined with a preponderance of abandoning fathers creating clingy love addicts, that people misinterpret as an inherent female disposition toward happily-ever-after monogamy? I’m starting to believe that the whole notion of classifying certain behaviors as normal and abnormal hurts people more than it helps them.
“Let’s face it: What Neil wanted is not what Ingrid’s about. He was honest with her and that’s a huge step forward. I don’t know if any of us has been that honest with our wives. At least he’s figuring all this out before he gets married.”
Because I’m done sitting here with these spineless men, most of whom don’t even enjoy the marriages they’re struggling so hard to save.
“Whatever the situation may be, what you want is a bonded partnership that gives you a foundation to fly,” she tells me. “There’s a concept called compersion. And that means if your partner has another lover, rather than being jealous, you’re happy for her because she’s happy.”
In the end, you’ll find that true love is wanting your partner to have whatever she wants—whether or not you approve of it.
“You need to be upfront with everyone you meet. Because if you date a monogamous woman, she’s going to want to be in a monogamous relationship. It’s not fair to her. So if you’re serious about this, I want you to promise me you won’t have any monogamous partners.”
You can’t just date people randomly and then hope to slowly ease them into a nonmonogamous relationship. You have to be upfront from the beginning.
It is in these moments that I miss Ingrid most. Loneliness is holding in a joke because you have no one to share it with.
His words are a revelation. When I was with Ingrid, I was hoping for my sexual liberation. But a far better way to encourage a partner to open a relationship is to start by giving her the freedom that you want for yourself.
“I’m trying to put together a house like yours,” I explain. “Do you have any advice on how to make it work?” He lets out a long, low chuckle, then leans in conspiratorially. “It’s a full-time job. You have to be the leader. You can’t show any weakness or doubt, or you’ll get eaten alive.”
I consider reaching out and telling her I want to forget this whole search and just be with her, that the security of the cage is better than the freedom of the wild. But I’ve learned enough to know that these are just the thoughts of an ambivalent, manifestations of fear and loneliness from my failure so far to find what I left to look for. All that would happen is we’d begin the love avoidance cycle all over again.
For most men, what’s tougher than breaking up is the moment when their ex finally falls out of love with them and lets go, perhaps because it triggers a childhood fear—a psychological terror—of losing the first woman whose love they needed: their mother. And so, as Sheila would recommend, I let myself feel the pain, the loneliness, and the fear, using all my strength as the days pass to keep from giving in and reaching out to Ingrid.
Many women think that if they put out too quickly, their partner won’t respect them. This is not the case. It’s not about waiting for a certain quantity of time before having sex, it’s about waiting for a certain quality of connection.
Perhaps the reason friendships tend to last longer than relationships is that most of them don’t come with rigid rules and exclusivity clauses.
“Everyone at this table, and almost everyone I know in the Lifestyle, is either divorced or got out of a really long traditional relationship beforehand,” Nicole says. “You kind of need to get that first marriage or big-deal relationship out of your system before you can come around to the truth that having sex with someone else has no effect on your love for each other. If anything, it can add to it.”
Take the richest, most confident, most famous man in the world—and he’s no match for a beautiful woman in the throes of a dance that oozes sexual energy. This is why fortunes are lost, families are torn apart, and wars are fought.
In Eyes Wide Shut and every other movie with a decadent masked ball, the guests intermingle with grace, fluidity, and sensuality. But in actuality, it’s impossible to kiss anyone without multiple noses, feathers, horns, and bells poking, tickling, and obstructing. The result is more like a slapstick comedy. “Let’s just take these stupid masks off,” Nicole finally says. Real life is never like the movies.
Perhaps this is my scene, I think as James pulls me away. Just being able to go on a sexually decadent vacation like this a couple of weekends a year would probably be enough to make monogamy bearable the rest of the time. Kind of like the cheat day in a diet.
Suddenly, the way the guys thrust their girlfriends on me at Bliss makes a lot more sense. Swapping is the ultimate in male bonding.
“Once fear of loss is taken away, you get past jealousy.”
“For example, if someone breaks up with me, I know it’s because the relationship is no longer working between me and them. It’s never because they found somebody better, since the monogamous contract has been replaced by a new contract that doesn’t involve someone having to make a choice between two people. They can have them both.”
Their story reminds me of Tahl’s and Lawrence’s. If you want to open your relationship, then proper etiquette is required: ladies first.
In life, whoever has the strongest reality wins. Lose your moral certainty and lose the ground you stand on.
Perhaps the problem with most relationships is that the rules start to become more important than the values they’re supposed to be representing.
It’s not society that holds us back, it’s ourselves. We just blame society because not only is it easier but it’s a nearly impossible weight to move. This way, we don’t actually have to change. I thought I was fighting the system, but all I’ve really been doing is fighting myself: first my compulsions, now my inhibitions.
I make out with her passionately. I don’t know why I keep touching people’s filthy lips, but I crave the intimacy and connection more than the anonymous sex. Maybe I am polyamorous—because it’s not just free sex I’m searching for, it’s free romance, free connection, free relationships, free getting-naked-with-someone-you-enjoy-and-who-enjoys-you-and-then-getting-to-know-each-other-even-better-afterward.
But, I realize, the goal isn’t sexual anarchy. It’s that I want the rules around my sexuality to be self-imposed, not externally imposed. That’s the key difference—perhaps in everything. The goal, then, is liberation: to be the master of my orgasm. I don’t want my partner to own it, which would be monogamy, but I also don’t want the orgasm to own me, which would be addiction.
As we continue speaking, I’m reminded of a line from a classic sixties song: “I could be in love with almost everyone / I think that people are the greatest fun.” And this is what I’m discovering since leaving Ingrid. Whether it’s Nicole or Sage, Anne or Veronika, each woman is a wonderful world unto herself. And monogamy? It’s like choosing to live in a single town and never traveling to experience the beauty, history, and enchantment of all the other unique, wonderful places in the world. Why does love have to limit us? Perhaps it doesn’t. Only fear is restrictive. Love is expansive. And I wonder, since fear of enmeshment impels us to avoid commitment and fear of abandonment makes us possessive, what type of evolved relationship can emerge once those wounds are healed?
Even if someone is your perfect match, it’s unlikely to work if your core values are different.
Whatever we are looking for, we will find—if it doesn’t find us first. However, the result will not be what we’re consciously looking for, but what we’re unconsciously seeking. And so what we want will never be anything like what we expect. It is the forager’s law: You can find the berry bush, but you can’t control its yield.
I used to think that a good relationship meant always getting along. But the secret, I realize, is that when one person shuts down or throws a fit, the other needs to stay in the adult ego state. If both people descend to the wounded child or adapted adolescent, that’s when all the forces of relationship drama and destruction are unleashed.
I wonder if I give off an enmeshment pheromone that attracts abandoned women. Or if it’s just that the majority of fathers are so shitty that most women have been abandoned by them in some way.
The quickest route to poly-harmony—and life among the rest of the walking wounded—is truth and understanding.
And now we are a dysfunctional relationship. “Let me check with everyone else,” I tell her. I’m starting to wonder if the more people there are in a relationship, the less freedom each person actually has.
She nods yes, but she still seems displeased. It clearly wasn’t the answer she was hoping for. And I’m in shock. I met Veronika at a switch club where she was fucking everyone in sight; Anne presumably knew where I went and what I was doing that night; and when I first slept with Belle, we had another woman in bed with us. I met each of them under nonmonogamous circumstances and clearly told them we’d be living with two other women in a group relationship. And now every one of them, with the possible exception of Veronika, seems to want me to herself. Maybe what Randy’s wife said at the dinner where I met Nicole is actually true for most people: Sexual experimentation is fun—until you’re with someone you have feelings for.
Pepper turns to me: “What you can do to get them past that point is reassure them. I’ve seen really jealous people and people with a lot of abandonment issues get past their shit once the fear of loss goes away. A good nonmonogamous group is like a flock of geese, which is to say it separates and comes back together.”
“I guess swinging works because all the women you’re sleeping with are in other relationships, so they’re not a threat to your partner.”
“My invitation for each of you is to spend more time asking for what you want rather than asking everyone else what they want,” he concludes. “You will speed up your growth by being selfish. So imagine that the people you’re looking at can actually take care of themselves. And if you ask for what you want and trust that the other person will say yes or no powerfully, it will make things very interesting.”
I scroll through my brain, searching for the right response. I try to follow Reid’s advice—to speed up my growth by being selfish and see Anne as an adult who can take care of herself. My goal here is to be honest. To allow discomfort. To communicate openly. She needs to be prepared to accept a no.
“There are many people who don’t believe it’s natural for them to be with one person for the rest of their lives,” Nicole explains patiently. “They believe that their sexuality shouldn’t be owned or controlled by someone else, and that if they have sex with another person it doesn’t change the way they feel about their partner.”
Anne doesn’t react, so Nicole continues: “Think about it this way. When people have friends, they have different kinds of relationships with each of them. Even if they have a best friend, that doesn’t mean they can’t have other friends. And that’s the way the people at this party think of sexual relationships.”
This is my chance to stop taking care of everyone else’s needs and focus on my own. Anne and I never agreed to be exclusive. The deal was that we’d be in a group relationship. So she’s the one breaking the rules. For the first time, I’m going to do exactly what I told the guys in rehab that we should do: train a partner to accept a relationship on our terms rather than us accepting it on theirs. And, most importantly, to do it honestly.
So far, not a single alternative relationship that I’ve closely observed appears to be free, intimate, and healthy. In the sex addiction community, they wanted us to control our bodies so our hearts could connect; in this community, they want us to control our hearts so our bodies can connect. But maybe expecting to have it all—the deepest intimacy and the most unrestrained lust—is an unrealistic quest, like expecting a human being to be perfect. All you can do is work to get as close as possible to the impossible.
My problem this whole time is that I’ve been trying to rule by consensus. And every large group relationship I’ve seen or even heard about has been run by, as Kamala put it, a benevolent dictator. These girls are looking for a daddy, so as loathsome as that whole dynamic is, maybe it’s time to step up and be that daddy. Not the abandoning daddy or the enmeshing daddy, but the functional daddy with a sense of what’s right.
She was introduced to the Lifestyle shortly after her wedding, when her husband fucked another woman in front of her. Although it was painful in the moment, after she saw that it didn’t affect the relationship in any way, she realized it wasn’t such a big deal. Maybe I should have slept with each of the women in front of the others on the day Anne arrived, just to get the pain and possessiveness over with for everyone.
It’s not physical beauty that makes these parties pretty or ugly—it’s honest and open intentions. Hypocrisy is ugly.
In a sudden flash of clarity, I see the truth: I made the wrong decision. When Reid said be selfish, he wasn’t giving me permission to hurt people’s feelings. He was giving me permission to ask for what I wanted.
Impatience is the enemy of intimacy.
Perhaps that’s the price of making your fantasies a reality. You realize pretty quickly that they were more fun to imagine. [Nietzsche: Quickest way to destroy the dreams is to experience them.]
Since last night, I’ve written, rested, and talked to Isis and Orpheus. Now is the time to make a powerful decision. Father Yod made things work by not asking for or needing anyone’s permission to set the rules for the family. Same with Hugh Hefner. Same with Oneida and Kerista and Orpheus Black. Everyone was subservient to the mission and the word of the benevolent dictator in charge. If someone didn’t like the rules, they were presumably free to leave.
In my relationship with Ingrid, I think as I sit illuminated by the beams of six expectant eyes, I interpreted her love as control and resisted it. First through cheating, and when that got shut down, through resentment, fantasizing, and emotional distancing.
My whole life, I’ve been fighting against love for my freedom. No wonder I’ve never been married, engaged, or even had a love that didn’t wane after the initial infatuation period.
Fear of loss: It has motivated many weak people to make commitments they shouldn’t have.
“Your problem is that you still think of love and sex as things that have to go together,” his friend said. “You need to separate them. Start a family with a good platonic friend who’s your own age and keep sleeping with whoever you want.”
“You can’t force a relationship to happen,” he finally understood. “You just have to make a space in your heart for one, then let go of all expectations, agendas, and control.”
So we decided to build our open relationship on a foundation of honesty, freedom, and respect. It’s exactly what I’ve always wanted.
“If you’re feeling insecurity or jealousy, that’s for you to manage,” Lawrence answers. “It’s not her job to manage your discomfort—unless she’s doing something that’s disrespectful or hurtful. One tool I’ve used is to understand that even if Leah deeply loves another person, it can only be additive to our relationship.” “In what way?” “Think of it like this: You have a love muscle, and if you work it out more, it increases your capacity to love. And you can bring that energy and quality back to your relationship. The alternative to that would be my marriage, where I shut down my capacity to love and feel and have sex in order to stay monogamous.” Maybe I just have to eliminate my scarcity mentality about love, which is telling me right now that Sage has only so much to give and could run out. Lawrence’s point of view makes much more sense. Perhaps on some level, the demand for exclusive love is an immature demand, the desire of the needy child who hungered to be the sole object of its parents’ attention, affection, and care.
“Right. After being in the same situation fifty or a hundred times, pretty soon you won’t be so scared or overwhelmed. You’ll recognize the sensation as something that’s going to pass."
There’s nothing good that comes of jealousy. If someone’s going to leave you, they’re going to do it whether or not you’re jealous. In fact, they’re much more likely to do it if you are jealous.”
“What do you do if Leah sleeps with a guy who you think is a douchebag?” I ask Lawrence. “If he’s a douchebag, either there’s something else she’s getting from him or it’s for her to figure out. I don’t have to fuck him, so it’s not my problem.”
The problem many people have is that the exact quality that originally attracted them to their partner becomes a threat once a serious relationship begins. After all, this quality was the open door through which the romance started, so now they want to close the door, lock it, and throw away the key before someone else tries to come in after them.
“There’s definitely a transition period where you have a lot of emotions to work through. So you may have some scary insecurities about whether the other guy is better for her than you or whether he’s using you to connect with her. Just know that it’s part of the adjustment process.”
But evidently not for Lawrence. “Leah’s so great that I want other people to get the pleasure of experiencing what I get to with her,” he explains. “And I’m so in love with her, I want her to do what makes her happy.”
I was so sure this was the relationship my life was leading to. But freedom doesn’t taste quite as sweet without security. Perhaps this is the flip side of love avoidance: I have a need to feel needed, even if I don’t actually like it. [Entrepreneurship...]
“If you’re in pain of the heart, enter into the pain and try to find its source rather than letting the pain drive you, or trying to escape from it or overcome it.”
Compersion is a struggle. It goes against every fiber of my being. I don’t know if my resistance to it is cultural or evolutionary or both, but I work to overcome the emotional obstacles. I’ve done a lot of extreme and experimental things these past few months, and surely I’d be just as likely as her to go to a resort and enjoy getting pampered by two doting women. At least she’s honest about it.
My ex-girlfriend Lisa once said that every woman wants the same thing in a relationship: to be adored. So Sage had a great weekend of adoration, and maybe this will help me remember never to take her for granted or stop showing my appreciation of her.
Communication was something I needed, not her. She needed freedom. I’m sure Leah doesn’t text Lawrence every few minutes when she’s over at some guy’s house: “I just unzipped his pants, lol,” “I’m licking his ass, it tastes like kombucha,” “Now I’m fucking him, miss you!” Sage is absolutely right: I would’ve burst the bubble. If we spoke, I would’ve felt a need to give my opinion on everything, to make fun of the guys, to somehow control the experience or make sure she was thinking of me in some way—like Tommy with his running commentary when I had sex with his fiancée. No, I don’t use rules to control people anymore. Now I just pretend to give them freedom, then use guilt and passive-aggressiveness to control them instead.
For a guy who doesn’t want to be controlled, I never noticed how controlling I actually am.
Healthy nonmonogamous relationships clearly require a high EQ—emotional intelligence—not to mention some seriously secure attachment.
Most people, seem to believe that if a relationship doesn’t last until death, it’s a failure. But the only relationship that’s truly a failure is one that lasts longer than it should. The success of a relationship should be measured by its depth, not by its length.
He tells me about a book he recently read called His Needs, Her Needs by Willard F. Harley, a clinical psychologist who writes that a man needs five basic things from his wife: sexual fulfillment, recreational companionship, physical attractiveness, domestic support, and admiration.
Adam explains that a woman’s five basic needs are affection, conversation, honesty and openness, financial support, and family commitment. It seems antiquated to write that a woman needs her man’s money but not his sex and he needs her domestic support but not her conversation; however, this seems to resonate with Adam. I get the feeling sometimes that he wasn’t looking to be swept off his feet in his relationship, but to have the floor under his feet swept.
And that’s when I realize: He’s not a sex addict. “You know how they taught us that addiction is something that hurts your life and spirit, that gets progressively worse, and that you can’t stop doing even though you know it’s not good for you?” “Yeah,” he says. “I just realized that you’re a marriage addict.” “I think I am. I just can’t let it go for some reason.” “Maybe you need to go to rehab for that.” “Along with a lot of other married people,” he replies and swims off ahead of me.
They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but according to science, even more powerful than the large space between you and the one you love is the small space between that person and someone else. In studies on sperm competition, males ejaculated more and harder after their partner had been with a rival.
In her book Mating in Captivity, psychologist Esther Perel advises that the way to keep romance and sex hot in a relationship is through separation, unpredictability, and fear of loss.
In the weeks that follow, Sage and I try to adhere to this dictum. We try to keep each other full. We try to let go of possessiveness. We try to communicate through the inevitable discomfort, fear, and jealousy. And we try not to date others who don’t respect our relationship or who want to become our primary.
Try is the critical word here, because managing feelings is like taming lions. No matter how successful you think you are, they’re still ultimately in control.
Researchers at Princeton University did a study on the correlation between money and happiness. As people’s incomes rose up to $75,000 annually, their happiness increased. But at incomes beyond that, people on average did not become happier. Perhaps the same is true of sexual partners. Coming on more tits is not going to make me any happier. It seems I’ve mistaken being out of control for freedom.
Masturbate when you want to break the rules of your relationship or your celibacy agreement—and you’ll soon discover that once your desires are fulfilled in your imagination, the need to live them out in real life suddenly doesn’t seem so urgent. Once the brain’s reward center has gotten its hit of dopamine, it doesn’t need another one—at least not for a little while.
They say that viewing porn correlates with depression. I’m not sure whether it’s a cause or a symptom, but now I understand why it’s so appealing: It’s not just a world where sex is easy, but also where sex doesn’t involve dealing with someone’s emotions before, during, and after the experience. She doesn’t yell at you if you aren’t faithful and you start watching another porn clip. She doesn’t shame you for your taste in women, your fetishes, your performance, or your body, income, and faults—unless being shamed happens to turn you on, in which case she’s glad to do it all night. And she doesn’t mind if you come before it’s done, then roll over and go to sleep and never talk to her again. It’s just instant sexual gratification with no waiting, no rejection, no emotion, no commitment, no obligation whatsoever—plus infinite variety.
“So is it hard for you to be faithful?” I press. “Not exactly. I would never be unfaithful. But in relationships, I feel limited because I’m missing out on other things. It’s a bit tragic. You can be with someone that you really, really like and still feel a bit sad that you can’t have anything else.”
Recognize that I can make every argument in my head against monogamy. And they may even be right: It probably isn’t natural. But none of this is going to make me happy or bring me closer to Ingrid—or, if she won’t have me, to any meaningful connection.
“All of you share something in common,” Lorraine continues. “Each of you had a mother who was unhappy and who you could not help. And that has been the starting point for your three very different journeys away from intimacy and connection.”
As Adam scrapes the sides of his bowl clean, I realize why monogamy never worked for me before. It’s always been something that I felt my partner expected or made me do. If I treat it as a choice this time as opposed to a demand, then maybe I can be the Prodigal Boyfriend.
It turns out that leaving all my options open has kept me too busy juggling them to really live.
“Don’t trade long-term happiness for short-term pleasure.”
You can’t have a relationship with someone hoping they’ll change. You have to be willing to commit to them as they are, with no expectations. And if they happen to choose to change at some point along the way, then that’s just a bonus.
One can make you feel anything and you don’t make anyone feel a certain way. So don’t take on responsibility for your partner’s feelings and don’t blame your partner for yours.
It is the great lie—that husbands and wives have no sexual interest in anyone except each other. I know deep down that I haven’t conquered my desire for other women—I don’t think that’s possible without getting Hasse Walum to lower my testosterone levels—but I’ve removed what was psychological: the fear of loving, the terror of being loved, the compulsion to cheat, the cowardice of lying, the weak sense of self, the pathological accommodation, and all the defense mechanisms that kept this system in place and me too blind to see it.
There isn’t just one true and proper way to love, to relate, to bond, to touch. Any style of relationship is the right one, as long as it’s a decision made by the whole person and not the hole in the person.
If you’re interested in finding your own relationship species and want to avoid making the mistakes I did in these pages, heal yourself before exploring different styles. You’re likely to fare a lot better. If you’re healthy, whatever type of relationship you choose will also be healthy.
