How to Think More About Sex (The School of Life)

iii. Resentment

I.

Let’s return now to Daisy and Jim, our couple in South London who have not made love for a month. The reason Daisy doesn’t want to have sex with her husband after they turn off the television and the lights is that she is furious with him, though this sentiment would come as quite a surprise to him – and indeed to her as well. She has seemed calm and measured all day. The two of them had a wholly polite, if somewhat superficial, supper together only a few hours earlier, during which she never complained or gave any other indication of distress. Furthermore, as she lies in bed, she herself has no inner awareness of having any active gripes against Jim. She isn’t even thinking about him; she is feeling a bit sad, keen to be alone and rather worried about all the things she has to get done the next day.

The common conception of anger posits red faces, raised voices and slammed doors, but only too often it takes on a different form, for when it doesn’t understand or acknowledge itself, it just curdles into numbness.

There are two reasons we tend to forget we are angry with our partner, and hence become anaesthetized, melancholic and unable to have sex with him or her. Firstly, because the specific incidents that anger us happen so quickly and so invisibly, in such fast-moving and chaotic settings (at breakfast time, before the school run, or during a conversation on mobile phones in a windy plaza at lunchtime) that we can’t recognize the offence well enough to mount any sort of coherent protest against it. The arrow is fired, it wounds us, but we lack the resources or context to see how and where, exactly, it has pierced our armour. And second, we frequently don’t articulate our anger even when we do understand it, because the things that offend us can seem so trivial, finicky or odd that they would sound ridiculous if spoken aloud. Even rehearsing them to ourselves can be embarrassing.

We may, for example, be deeply wounded when our partner fails to notice our new haircut or doesn’t use a breadboard while cutting a bit of baguette, scattering crumbs everywhere, or goes straight upstairs to watch television without stopping to ask about our day. These hardly seem matters worth lodging formal complaints over. To announce, ‘I am angry with you because you cut the bread in the wrong way,’ is to risk sounding at once immature and insane. An objection of this sort may indeed be both of those things, but given that immaturity and insanity by and large constitute the human condition, we would be well advised to stop subscribing to (and then suffering from), any more optimistic notions.

Comparable arguments, on topics objectively petty and absurd to outsiders, punctuate the history of every relationship. It comes down to ambition. To fall in love with another is to bless him or her with an idea of who he or she should be in our eyes; it is to attempt to incarnate perfection across a limitless range of activities, stretching from the highest questions (how to educate the children and what sort of house to buy) to the lowest (where the sofa should go and how to spend Tuesday evening). In love we are therefore never far from the possibility of a painful or irritating betrayal of one of our ideals. Once we are involved in a relationship, there is no longer any such thing as a minor detail.

Over the course of an average week, each partner in a couple may be hit by, and in turn fire, dozens of tiny arrows without even realizing it, with the only surface legacies of these wounds being a near-imperceptible cooling between them and, crucially, the disinclination of one or both to have sex with the other – for sex is a gift that is not easy to hand over once we are annoyed, especially when we aren’t even aware we happen to be so.

The situation has a tendency to spiral into ever greater nastiness. The one who has done the unwitting hurting will be punished sexually, which will lead to the firing of yet more surreptitious arrows, causing wounds that themselves will be neither understood nor dealt with and will then inspire further covert acts of aggression and withholding.

Finally, the following sort of explosion is likely to occur, even between otherwise generous and rational people who are deemed to be reliable colleagues, loving friends and assets to their communities:

JIM: You don’t want to have sex with me ever, do you?

DAISY: Yes, I do, but I’m not in the mood now.

JIM: You say that every single time.

DAISY: I do not. I just don’t want to be forced.

JIM: I’m not trying to force you!

DAISY: You are, you’re bullying me.

JIM: I’m starting to suspect you’re frigid, you know.

DAISY: And I’m realizing you’re rather nasty.

JIM: I’m going to sleep next door.

DAISY: Fine. I don’t care in the least.

At any given moment, hundreds – perhaps thousands – of identical conversations are being had across the globe, often in its most privileged precincts, the sorts of places where there are no wars or desperate economic conditions, only well-stocked shops and expensive institutions of higher education. The waste of time and life seems appalling, for despite all the insults they may be trading, the combatants probably truly love each other and could be reciprocally kind, if only they could first work out how they managed to grow so angry.

2.

By this point in our history, as a species, we know full well why couples tear at each other and relationships collapse. The reasons are set forth in the sober pages of psychological handbooks bearing titles such as Couples in Treatment: Techniques and Approaches for Effective Practice (this particular volume is edited by two British psychotherapists, Gerald Weeks and Stephen Treat).

While the information is there for all to read, it has a cunning habit of being unavailable to us in moments of crisis. We lack objective onlookers to seek advice from and mantras to chant to stick good ideas in our minds. Our knowledge is intellectual and unrepeated. We are undone by the sheer speed with which disappointments occur and by our inability to pause and rerun the tape, to rise above the fray and shift the focus away from recrimination and towards an identification of the true sources of our hurt and fear.

In a more well-ordered world, rather than allow Jim and Daisy to press on any further in their attempts to quantify precisely how evil their partner allegedly is, Gerald Weeks and Stephen Treat would take charge of them, sit them down together in a quiet room and encourage them to retrace every step that led them to their private hell. In time and with effort, the couple might then begin to appreciate that their hostilities towards each other were shaped by the flow of their individual personalities through the distorting emotional canyons of their particular childhoods.

In a perfect world, all couples would be visited by a psychotherapist on a weekly basis, without even having to put themselves forward for the service. The session would simply be a regular feature of a good, ordinary life, as the Friday-evening meal is for Jews, and would offer some of the same cathartic function as this ritual. Above all, neither party would be made to feel by society that he or she was crazy for having therapy – which is currently the main reason people neglect to see therapists and therefore slowly go crazy.

This ideal therapist would take a history of a relationship, explore its current tensions and try to serve as a catalyst for the sort of change that the couple themselves were too weak, busy or confused to bring about on their own. She would remind her clients that every exchange, however minor, had meaning and could set off a chain of recriminations and resentments that would prevent them from wanting to have sex. She would teach them to treat the complicated business of being in a relationship with extraordinary care. She would ask them both to arrive at every session with a list of issues that had arisen during the previous week, and insist that they each listen to the other’s complaints compassionately, without resorting to angry self-justification or injured self-pity. She would advise them that if they did not make love at least once a week, they would necessarily experience an excess of libido that might then seek other outlets, with consequent implications for their union. She would review their individual psychological histories and endeavour to help make the couple aware of some of the ways in which, because of their particular pasts, they might both be likely to distort or misread reality. And when arguments did flare up, she would urge each of them to see the other as being wounded and sad rather than malicious and spiteful.

This therapist would belong to a new kind of priesthood, designed for an age that no longer believes in religious forgiveness and understanding in the afterlife but that is still very much in need of those same qualities in the here and now.

3.

If such a service does not yet exist, it is only because capitalism is still in its infancy. We are able to have exotic fruit delivered to our doorsteps and construct micro-conductors, but we struggle to find effective ways of examining and healing our relationships. The problem is that we think we already know everything necessary about how to be with another person, without having bothered to learn anything at all. We are no more capable of figuring out how to handle this task on our own than we would be able intuitively to work out how to land a plane or perform brain surgery. Whereas most workplaces are now awash with artificial procedures designed to prevent employees from murdering one another, modern lovers still baulk at attempts to introduce standardized practices and external assistance into their relationships. The idea persists that too much thinking might make it impossible for us to feel – as if it weren’t already quite plainly apparent that a large and constant amount of thinking may be the only thing that can keep us from destroying each other.

By overwhelming consensus, our culture locates the primary difficulty of relationships in finding the ‘right’ person rather than in knowing how to love a real – that is, a necessarily rather unright – human being. Our reluctance to work at love is bound up with our earliest experience of the emotion. We were first loved by people who kept secret from us the true extent of the work that went into it, who loved us but didn’t ask us to return affection in a rounded way, who rarely revealed their own vulnerabilities, anxieties or needs and who were – to an extent, at least – on better behaviour as parents than they could be as lovers. They thereby created, albeit with the most benign of intentions, an illusion that has complicated consequences for us later on, insofar as it leaves us unprepared for the effort we must legitimately expend to make even a very decent adult relationship successful.

We can achieve a balanced view of adult love not by remembering what it felt like to be loved as a child but rather by imagining what it took for our parents to love us – namely, a great deal of work. Only through similar application will we be able to sort out which partner in our relationship is firing the arrows and why, and thereby stand a chance of enjoying a better union and, as a windfall, more frequent and more affectionate sex.