Living in the Real World

Source: PICRYL

When Lowell arrived in my office, he was middle-aged, divorced, feeling like a sexual failure. His wife of twenty-four years had left him, proclaiming that she had long known she was gay and had hung around just for the children (there were three, now all adults). He had dated a little since then, but experienced erectile dysfunction. “The women are so aggressive,” he told me, “and it throws me off. It’s like they’re the man.” So, here was the paradox. His wife had emasculated him by not wanting sex at all, and now he felt emasculated again by women whom, he said, would have chased him down the street and pounced. “How do I find some way,” he asked, “to get my sexuality back? I need a sort of balance.”

Lowell found himself drawn to women who seemed reticent, almost shy, sometimes even unwilling to get to first base. “I think I’m overcompensating,” he said, “for all the Gorgons that want to tear my pants off.” There was one woman in particular, Lisa, who fascinated him. She taught at the same private high school where he was a guidance counselor, and he’d helped her get some considerable perks—e.g., no gym duty, no study-hall supervision. But when he asked her out, she demurred. She seemed aloof and unattainable and, for that reason, just continued to attract him.

I wondered about this fixation and thought, perhaps, that it had something to do with how his mother had treated him. Very often, when a parent rejects us, or seems preoccupied, or just focused on themselves, we try to “fix” the situation in adulthood, attaching ourselves to members of that same sex who display similar qualities and whom we try to make accept us. It’s like replaying our childhood in another key, this time with the hope of a happy ending. The problem is that, almost always, the key remains the same and the rejection repeats itself. Only this time, we’re adults, and we can feel the rejection sexually. So, I asked Lowell about his mother and their relationship.

Apparently, she had become withdrawn and petulant after Lowell’s father died when Lowell was nine. Then when Lowell was fifteen, his older brother died in a boating accident, and his mother sank into clinical depression. Lowell had to stay with his aunt while his mother underwent treatment. By the time they reunited, they barely communicated.

His mother rejected his offers of support and the affection that support represented. In effect, she rejected him, seeming to prefer memories. It was as if she were no longer living in the world, rejecting a living/loving son for the shadowy world into which she had disappeared. There was no bringing her back, at least insofar as Lowell was concerned.

In his 50s, Lowell was rerunning the tape of his life, this time with edits. He was pursuing similarly indifferent women so that the early trajectory of his life—the rejection, the sense that he paled when compared to other men—would have a happier ending. But this wasn’t living in the real world. It was, in its way, a retreat from sadness much like his mother’s. The fact is that we cannot change the past. We can use it to help us understand the present; we should never, however, try to recreate it as something else to blot out how it still makes us feel. We should become more aware of and work on our feelings directly.

I pointed out to Lowell that, whether he meant to or not, he was using Lisa for his own benefit. “How would you like it,” I asked, “if all those women chasing you just felt inadequate and needed some man to confirm their sexuality?” That struck him. Love— and all the erotic urges that it entails—should not be yoked to some personal grief that we are trying to assuage. It should stand on its own. Love is about the other person as the other person, not about some dim version of ourselves that we’d like to polish up.

Thus, while pursuing happiness inevitably involves other people, we need to be mindful not just of who they are but of whom they represent. If they are (unbeknownst to them) playing the role of a remote, neglectful parent, then we have to ask ourselves: have we slipped through a wormhole in time where everything we’re doing expresses an unconscious fantasy, a narrative we’ve made up to satisfy ourselves? If the answer is yes, then we should ask a further question: Will this lead to our happiness in the long run as the fantasy plays out and once again we confront ourselves where we actually are?

Happiness is about living in the present. It’s often the case that we build up some self-consistent view of the world that, nonetheless, is still entirely wrong, that is, inconsistent with the world outside our heads. We need to figure out how to break through that view and, finally, leave it behind.

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Of course, in Lowell’s case, the fantasy just kept going by inertia. Nothing was there to stop it. Each time he’d make the same mistake with a woman, it would just reinforce his notion that he wasn’t loved. His mother’s apparent indifference, her lack of room for him alongside the memories of his father and brother, had left him to wondering: Was he, in fact, second-rate on some emotional scale that only she understood?

He had to stop asking himself that question. That’s because if you don’t see yourself as a fit object of love, you’ll perpetually seek relationships where you aren’t loved. You’ll test people, making demands on them that they are not prepared to satisfy. They may feel uncomfortable and just walk away. In the worst cases, you’ll choose people—like Lisa—who are uninterested just because, perversely, that’s what you expect.

Lowell is coming to terms with the hangover from his past. This is progress. “I realize that it’s unfair to use other people to prop up my own sense of self.” He is working more within the present, tying to meet women who share his interests. It won’t be easy. But he is focused on what he has to offer—rather than on what someone else might repair.