Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (23 page)

Karen, the high desire partner, was a star employee selling business machines to large corporations. Julian, the low desire partner, taught mathematics at a private high school. Julian had been the major breadwinner until Karen went back to work after their two children entered high school. Karen’s success had surprised them both.

Karen had always been the more sexually eager of the two, but she hung back in fear of intimidating Julian or embarrassing herself. Julian had long-term difficulty reaching orgasm too rapidly (within two minutes) when they had intercourse. Julian steadfastly avoided dealing with this problem, and after ten years of gentle prodding Karen finally confronted him head-on and told him she wanted a divorce. At that point Julian said he would go for treatment. However, when Karen made the appointment, Julian made excuses, and they never went. That was five years ago, and at that point their marriage collapsed. Karen lost desire for sex with Julian, and they basically became celibate. They’d had sex a couple of times a year since then.

Karen stayed with Julian because she loved him and their two children,
but she hated sex with him. She hated how his rapid orgasms dominated their sex. More than that, Karen hated the way Julian used sex like a prize. If she pressed him on other issues in their relationship, she knew sex was off the table for a good long time.

Although in her marriage Karen looked sexually uninterested, sex was very much on her mind. Since early adolescence, she had masturbated four or five times a week. She’d had sex with many men before she met Julian. Men she met at work found her attractive and frequently propositioned her. A year ago she’d had a six-month affair. Julian found out while she was breaking it off. In the six months since then, Julian and Karen had had no sex. Karen recently told Julian she was thinking of leaving. That’s how they came to be sitting in my office, Julian raging that Karen had wronged him, and Karen saying her affair was both natural and his own fault.

Many clients have questioned me about monogamy, adultery, and human nature, so I educated myself a little about what science has to say. I learned that originally, humans were probably promiscuous, like the sexually active Bonobo monkeys. But as “human nature” developed some 350,000 years ago, things changed. Sexual patterns probably shifted back and forth between promiscuity and monogamy as living conditions went from good to bad and back again. Anthropologist Helen Fisher says, “Modern human sexual anatomy and the human sexual emotions evolved in conjunction with the evolution of the reproductive strategy of serial monogamy and clandestine adultery.”
¹⁰⁵

Hunting-gathering societies are more tolerant of infidelity than industrial societies, but your hunter-gathering ancestor’s reflected sense of self was there to take it personally. Social rules prescribed a beating, an argument, or public ridicule. They had a conscience and a sense of right and wrong. “Should” and “shouldn’t” existed by this time. So did, “I know I shouldn’t, but maybe I can get away with it.”

Many animal species form harems, but humans pair off. Pair-bonding is a peculiar human trademark. Monogamy is the rule (with a few exceptions). The vast majority of people only marry one person at a time. Of 853 cultures on record with the United Nations, 84 percent permit a man to take more than one wife at a time (polygyny). Only 16 percent prescribe monogamy (one wife at a time).
But only 5 to 10 percent of men actually have several wives simultaneously where polygyny is permitted
.
¹⁰⁶
Women around the world marry only one man at once. Another study of 250 societies concluded that every known human society is, in practice, monogamous.
¹⁰⁷

However,
monogamy and fidelity are not the same thing
. Strictly speaking, monogamy is being married to only one person at a time. It is essentially an exclusive relationship, but covert mating outside the pair bond occurs in all monogamous species. “Cheating” has been observed in over one hundred species of monogamous birds and monogamous mammals including monkeys. From a Darwinian perspective, adultery “improves” monogamy.
¹⁰⁸

Despite social rules, moral precepts, and our ability to anticipate emotional and social consequences (including punishment with death), no culture exists in which adultery is unknown. Alfred Kinsey found over a third of six thousand married men in his sample from the 1940s had affairs; he figured the real figure was closer to half. One out of four women had affairs by age forty. Forty-one percent had one affair, 40 percent had two to five, and 19 percent had more than five.
¹⁰⁹
In 1970, a survey of
Psychology Today
readers revealed 40 percent of husbands and 36 percent of wives reported extramarital affairs. A 1974
Playboy
magazine survey found roughly 40 percent of men in their sample had affairs.
¹¹⁰
A
Redboo
k poll from 1975 found almost 40 percent of married women had an extramarital affair.
¹¹¹
In the early 1980s, a
Cosmopolitan
magazine survey found 54 percent of married women had at least one affair. Another poll found 72 percent of men married for over two years had affairs.
¹¹²
While these results suggest more men than women have affairs, estimates from cultures around the world generally suggest women have extramarital
affairs as often as men do—if she wants to, and if her society says she has an equal right to do so. (This last “if” is the rub.)

Bonding with a single mate (monogamy)
and
extramarital affairs seem to be part of our evolutionary pair-bonding strategy. We like devotion
and
philandering.
¹¹³
That’s where your ability to map other minds comes in: To have an affair you have to use your ability to deceive (implant false beliefs in another person’s mind). Mind-mapping makes clandestine affairs possible.

Karen and Julian were in no shape to contemplate such things. They couldn’t appreciate how their reflected sense of self did the talking in their shouting matches.

“You made a fool out of me in front of our entire community.”

“Why are you the fool? I had the affair.”

“You’re my wife.”

“I don’t belong to you!”

“Don’t give me that crap. You know what I mean. What you do reflects on me.”

“All you care about is how you look to other people.”

“That’s not true. I care about you. I want you to make a commitment this won’t happen again. Why can’t you commit?!”

“Why didn’t you commit to working on our sex? You said you would five years ago, and then you did nothing. Why should I commit when you don’t?”

“I don’t know if I can have sex with you now. I don’t trust you.”

“Well I don’t want sex with you, either!”

Until now Karen managed to keep up with Julian, parrying his thrusts. But Julian’s reflected sense of self really wanted Karen punctured. He wasn’t about to have her come out intact. He needed her reduced to tears, and he knew how to do it.

“No, we’ve got to have sex now, whether we like it or not. Because if we don’t, you’ll end up screwing someone else!” Julian’s move was cold and calculated.

Karen mapped Julian’s mind. He was saying this to hurt her. What punctured her was the calculated violence. Julian wasn’t just expressing his feeling or venting his anger. He was pounding on her emotionally, and eventually she burst into tears.

This was Karen’s first extramarital affair. But she and Julian exhibited the long-term effects of borrowed functioning and subjugation to tyranny. It happened when Julian insisted that they not talk about sex. Avoiding his problem with rapid orgasm kept his anxiety down, his self-esteem up, and his feelings of inadequacy at bay. Julian subjugated Karen by withdrawing sex, intimacy, and approval, and making her feel cheap and slutty. The only reason he could get away with it was because they had a monogamous relationship (or so he thought).

Why did Julian do this? He said the most immediate reason was he was threatened by Karen’s success. She wanted to have more influence in family decisions because she contributed a growing percentage of their income. Julian feared Karen would eventually dominate him. At the same time, he feared she would leave him. Maybe she’d find someone else more successful and dynamic than him.

Their script was as old as the human race. Conflict over personal development and monogamy shaped how the human race turned out.

Ten thousand years ago, men apparently engaged in the greatest act of borrowed functioning ever: men began subjugating women. This continues to shape marriages and societies around the world.

Homo sapiens
apparently came out of the Stone Age different from how they went in. As far as we know, men and women were equal in status in hunter/scavenger–farmer/gatherer societies.
¹¹⁴
But by the end of the Stone Age, man was the master and the woman was his property.

What caused this huge shift? This might have been early man’s solution to emotional gridlock. It could have been his response to woman’s
request for (other-validated) intimacy. Some evidence suggests it came from man’s needy reflected sense of self. No one knows for sure why it happened, but there’s no question that it did. Some authorities say it came when hunter-gatherer cultures shifted to agrarian societies, with the domestication of animals and the invention of the plow. Men took over farming and caring for livestock, and women’s status sank because they didn’t put food on the table; they cooked it.

Apparently, this gave man’s reflected sense of self delusions of grandeur. Earliest records indicate it clearly got out of hand. By 3000 B.C., women had become chattel, and double standards for sexual conduct were well in place. The male-dominated society was born.
¹¹⁵
No doubt man’s ageless quest for aphrodisiacs was a matter of necessity. It is easy to imagine your female ancestor’s low desire and sexual withholding when she shifted from being a partner to being property.

Because people were tied to the land, agrarian life demanded permanent monogamy. As industrial societies became the dominant economic and social force, women regained some measure of equality. Today we are freer to play out our primordial sex, love, and marriage dynamics as equals. The most recent trends of human differentiation have shown women gaining
choice—
cognitively, socially, and reproductively. Increasingly, women around the world refuse to submit to tyranny.

In
The History of Sex
, Reay Tannahill blames the subjugation of women on man’s reflected sense of self. She thinks around the Stone Age, men figured out their sperm played a crucial role in women’s pregnancies and ensuing children. Until this point (and still today in some remote native cultures), sex was thought of as something couples did, but insemination was between women and the gods. When man’s reflected sense of self realized
he
was the baby-maker, Tannahill proposes, women’s role in procreation shifted from central to peripheral. Rather than men and women being equal partners, each contributing something, women became the “earth” in which men planted a complete “seed.”
¹¹⁶
Man’s reflected sense of self basked in the glory of
my
wife and
my
child.
¹¹⁷

Unfortunately, about the time “my son” came into being, so did “cuckold.” Men started to control women’s sexuality because she could not only tamper with spreading his DNA, she could tamper with the inside of his head.

Paternity is the other side of what Helen Fisher called the “sex contract”: Women became multiply orgasmic and interested in sex throughout the year, and they used it, through sexual selection, to breed with men willing to pair-bond and help with the kids. “Dad” emerged on the
Homo sapiens
scene, and thousands of years later we celebrate Father’s Day.

Unfortunately, Dad’s reflected sense of self turned paternity into patriarchy. This is how we got the sexual double standard that still exists today.

The subjugation of women illustrates borrowed functioning. Man’s sense of self was artificially enhanced, and woman’s was correspondingly suppressed. Women’s chastity became important because sex with other men upset man’s reflected sense of self and made paternity uncertain. The sexual double standard gave man what many people want: sexual variety for themselves and sexual exclusivity for their partner.

Women have been bred to support men’s reflected sense of self for at least ten thousand years. (Odds are its closer to millions.) It shows up as women “sliding under” men to prop up their ego and feelings of adequacy. It occurs around the world. Although they’ve been doing it a long time, women have not learned to like it. Their instinct to refuse to submit to tyranny always seems to come up.

Women engage in borrowed functioning too. Women tend to marry—and have affairs with—men of status, power, wealth, and influence. In Darwinian terms, this gives her genes the greatest chance of surviving into subsequent generations. In reality, however, women have affairs because they
like
them, and they prefer rich influential men who inflate their reflected sense of self in many ways.

In
Chapter 5
you learned that intimacy is a powerful system at work in your marriage that dramatically affects desire. Now let’s consider monogamy the same way. Monogamy is another opportunity for personal growth. Let’s approach this with an eye toward sexual desire, commitment, and refusal to submit to tyranny.