Love in a Time of Loneliness

Paul Verhaeghe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781855756984
• eBook ISBN: 9780429915925
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The first essay, "The Impossible Couple", is both a humorous and razor-sharp analysis of the contemporary relationship between man and woman. In the second essay, "Fleeing Fathers", the author demonstrates that today the Freudian Oedipus complex has disappeared, with a resulting shattering of classic gender roles. Post-modern morals are strange compared to previous morality, because they convey an obligation to enjoy. Things become even stranger when one finds that the expected enjoyment fails to come and, instead of that, we are faced with boredom, anxiety, and anger. The author reconsiders the opposition between Eros and Thanatos as an opposition between two forms of sexual pleasure. The fact that this opposition is ever present in heterosexual love demonstrates that gender differentiation goes beyond temporal cultural forms. Accessibly written and provocatively argued, Love in a Time of Loneliness is a polemic whose very informality belies its serious intent. In these three fascinating essays, The author leaves the ordinary paths of thinking and sets out to discover what drives us in sex and love.

I. The Impossible Couple

The Divorce Express (by Paul Danzinger)

Mom's House, Dad's House (by Ricci Isolina)

Ellen is Home Alone {by Francine Pascal)

Jessie's Baby-Sitter (by Martin)

A Man for Mother (by Charles Nöstlinger)

Mum, Why Don't You Fall in Love? (by A. Steinwart)

Two Father, Two Mothers (by R. De Nennie)

Titles of recent children's books

(For children aged 9-12)

Spring 1969: Peter Easy Rider Fonda speeds on his bike through the American landscape, looking for freedom, leaving Pleasantville far behind. The sky is the limit. Autumn 1997: the same Peter Fonda plays a fifty-year old Vietnam vet, taking care of his grandchildren—his son is in jail, his daughter-in-law is a junkie and one of his worries is keeping his granddaughter off the street (Ulee's Gold).

Between these two movies, a world has disappeared that can be epitomised by the ubiquitous use of quotation marks—the 'lady of the house' invited the husband of her 'best friend' to her flat 'to have a drink'. Today, nothing means what it once meant. The perception of this cultural earthquake can be very different, ranging from an anxious plea for the return of law and order to a jubilant expectation of a new society. Independently of these moral interpretations, one thing is crystal clear to everyone: family life has changed drastically, the couple of yesterday has almost vanished and paradoxically (at least in most Western European countries) the main defenders of marriage are to be found in the gay community.

So the very idea of a couple has, to put it mildly, become problematic. A 'couple' here means both hetero-and homosexual ones and is not merely a knee-jerk reaction to political correctness.¹ Old-fashioned declarations of romantic love—if they are still heard—sound rather hollow. The former expectations of undying love no longer apply; it is 'just for a little while', 'so long as it lasts'. The younger generation rarely uses expressions such as 'my love', let alone 'my husband/wife'—it has to be 'my partner'. Their parents' generation is often disillusioned, with many unfulfilled expectations. We will soon see the Brave New World effect, in which the cynic views the long-term loving relationship not only as an impossibility, but even as something suspect, as a sign of psychological ill health for which the two deviants have to be treated as quickly as possible.

At the same time, this kind of life-long loving relationship is still what both young and old are dreaming of. The failure to achieve it in reality serves only to make the dream even more vivid, as well as intensifying the search for new ways to achieve it. There has been a very clear change in emphasis: while the main thing used to be sex, the emphasis is now on security. Love is a remedy in a time of loneliness.

And a remedy is called for. One of the best legacies of imperialism is the discovery that a relationship between the two sexes always develops on the basis of a culturally determined set of rules. Every ethnic grouping has its own traditions, interwoven with faith and history, and this is what determines the nature of the couple. Following this discovery, it is easy to take the next step. In our own western culture, faith and tradition have been shattered, so that the rules that were still determined by these factors yesterday have now disappeared. For the generation of our great-grandparents, the paths they had to follow were very clearly outlined: monogamous marriage, 'till death us do part'. The priest, the doctor and the schoolteacher all proclaimed the same message, and there was no room for doubt. Thus, every couple had to manage as well as they could within clearly defined limits.

These limits were removed in the second half of the twentieth century. The Wall came tumbling down and freedom was the new message. Freedom was to lead to a new and enlightened relationship between men and women, and it was expected that science would give it a new meaning. Certainly science has taken over the role of religion and ideology, both of which gave a meaning to life in the past. Men in black have been replaced by men in white coats. Initially this was accompanied by high expectations and the creation of a new sort of person. But there were no real answers, and today the things we learn from the laboratory sound less and less convincing. The result is that modern couples are desperately seeking a new formula that will tell them how to love. Scientology does have a future.

This search gives rise to all sorts of caricatured situations, and it is particularly striking that liberating and enlightened science can provide as many compelling solutions as religion did in the past. This always happens in the same way: the research results start to serve as compulsory norms. When apparently 'scientific' statistics in a journal are published on how often an average couple 'does it' per week, this is enough for discussions to start in the bedroom: 'Look, we're doing it too often/not often enough'. A well-known women's magazine came to the conclusion, following a survey of 'our female readers', that, on average, the readers spent thirty-three minutes a week having sex, of which eighteen minutes were spent on foreplay and fifteen on actual intercourse. I can just imagine the quarrels between couples following this publication, in some cases combined with secretly timing their own performance .. .

The same thing happens in the name of serious science. In this respect, the best example is that of Masters and Johnson, whose scientific research also led to 'prescriptive' behaviour when their discoveries became norms with which sexual behaviour had to comply. Their pioneering investigation into physical sexual response patterns in the 1960s is still essential reading in that field. For example, they discovered that although men and women are comparable as regards their physiological and sexual responses, there are still two important differences. First, the woman can potentially have multiple orgasms and reach a climax several times while making love; in contrast, a man ejaculates once when he reaches orgasm. Second, the curve of the sexual response cycle is approximately the same for all men (arousal, ejaculation, temporary impotence), but is fairly varied in women. In other words, men are boring, monotonous creatures, and women are not. In fact, women discovered this for themselves a long time ago: 'All men are the same'.

The prescriptive behaviour begins when these discoveries are linked to a curious development in the emancipation movement. In a number of cases the feminists' demands for equal rights were translated into a demand for equality between men and women. If a woman has to be the same as a man, this also means that she must do better than him. Very soon, women were forced to follow the male pattern of love-making, with scoring orgasms as the central element. In the name of science, she was forced to take on the model of multiple orgasms that every man dreams of. What can be achieved must be achieved.

On top of all this, during the 'flower power' period, the orgasms of both the man and the woman had to take place at the same time if possible, with the result that the post-Masters and Johnson couple eventually turned into a couple where the man was desperately trying not to reach a climax, while, at the same time, the woman was equally desperately trying to reach a climax. It had been completely forgotten that the woman—despite her potential for having multiple orgasms—has a very different attitude to climaxing compared to the man. The male preoccupation with the actual phallus is in stark contrast with the lack of importance attributed to this work of art by the average woman. This was noted by Oscar Wilde, who said that the obligatory honeymoon trip of those times to the Niagara Falls was the bride's second great disappointment. The elliptical formulation he used is perfect because it effortlessly evokes a truth that is almost inexpressible.

At the end of this millennium, the initial euphoria about 'the scientific answer' has now faded and has been replaced with insecurity. There is another clarion call for new values and for a new security; these same values and security will probably be next year's new establishment. So we will have to hurry to ask questions before a new morality makes them superfluous. The most pressing question is about the need for this sort of context. Why should there necessarily be any culturally determined rules for something that was once thought of as being a 'simply' biological act, namely, sexual activity?

The concerned techno-lover

This was certainly one of the convictions that became popular during the sexual revolution. Sexuality and eroticism are simply natural activities and nothing more. Education and culture were no longer allowed to put obstacles in the way. Children left to grow up in freedom would spontaneously discover their own sexual pleasure and would be able to develop their adult sexuality with the same freedom of feeling. It was even thought that they would develop erotic activity in a playful way and refine it to an art, in contrast with the uptight, bedtime sex of their parents. This aspect of sex as a game has a number of characteristics that it shares with an itch: when someone's back itches and a willing partner is prepared to scratch, he/she hardly ever finds exactly the right spot where it itches most, and it's really difficult to explain where this spot is ... It's something that you should really do yourself, but that doesn't work either.

Seen in this light, sex is a matter of technique, which, of course, reminds us of the old complaint by feminists: there are no frigid women, only useless men. The Dutch sexologist Paul Vennix produced the following apt formula: since most women climax with oral or manual stimulation, then consequently the main forms of sexual dysfunction in men—from the perspective of a female-oriented sexology—will be an aching tongue and stiff fingers. Nowadays the average man is trained as a techno-lover, with all sorts of video sex education, computer applications and so on. In the event of being undersized—and the fear of this is never far removed—there are now more than enough technical aids available. But what is the result of all this? When modern man tries to use all the tricks he has carefully acquired in practice—the 'foreplay' that was so important at one stage—he is often given the lowest mark for his effort. Now that he can do it, it is no longer required. I'm reminded of a well-known anecdote by Lucien Israel, who was treating a non-orgasmic woman when he started to practise as an analyst. The analysis was going fairly well. In fact, it went so well that at a certain point the woman told him she had made love to her husband and that she actually had an orgasm. After this, she brought the happy analyst down to earth by adding: 'And now I don't want to make love to him any more'. She desired something that she didn't want.

There is more to all this than just technique. Reducing it to a technical aspect was a typical male product of sexual liberation, in which sex was nothing more than a need situated between the navel and the knee, from arousal to orgasm. Soon this was converted into a performance model, where scoring was the main goal. It was at the same time that the myth of erogenous zones arose: find the right spot and stimulate it in the right way, and 'arousal' is presumed to follow automatically. Hordes of men went in search of the famous G-spot, and actual training sessions were organised, with massage, pressure techniques and so on. In short, this was a version of the prenatal yoga class and even therapists themselves saw Masters and Johnson's sex therapy as a sort of elevated form of keep-fit. Eventually it took a woman, Helen Kaplan, to add to this so-called two stage model (arousal/orgasm), the essential third stage, desire. But 'stage' is the wrong word, since desire is more of a pre-condition: without it erogenous zones are of no importance whatever. In fact, when there is no desire, they become a source of disgust. Inter faeces et urinarii nascimur. 'We are born between faeces and urine'. When there is desire, everything becomes erogenous. In the first instance the reduction to a 'Mr Fixit' model typifies the male approach, it is no coincidence that the majority of women haven't a clue about technique and assiduously attend evening classes on 'DIY for single women'.

Beyond this male preoccupation with and female lack of interest in technique, we can see what all this represents: unspoken expectations that provide support and guidance, giving men an idea of what women want, and vice versa. In other words, the underlying fantasy.

Fantasies that create reality

Attention to the practical aspects of sex reveals a characteristic element of the male imagination, particularly the focus of attention on the body and on certain parts of the female anatomy. The converse hardly ever applies. This difference can be illustrated in a physical way: a striptease by a woman for a male audience is not the same thing as a striptease by a man for a female audience. When there are male spectators, the tension is tangible, and at best there is an almost sacred silence. On the other hand, when the Chippendales—once a word synonymous with beautifully made furniture—perform their act, the women laugh themselves silly, and it is easy to think they are actually laughing at the men.

There is another curious phenomenon: the average man is easily misled/seduced by a transvestite, another man playing a woman, The Crying Game (Neil Jordan) and M. Butterfly (David Cronenberg) are exceptional films only because of the actual story, not because of the seduction itself. On the contrary: the red light district in every metropolis has a significant number of transvestite prostitutes whose clients are constantly being misled. I am reminded of a scene from an American detective writer (Patricia Comwell? Walter Mosley?) where the hard-nosed cop quizzes the traditional rookie when they are driving past kerb-crawlers in the red light district. How do you recognise the transvestites? 'They're the ones with perfect tits and legs'. Thus transvestites display super-female characteristics even more perfectly: a super-female from the perspective of male fantasy. There are few women who are as 'feminine' as transvestites. By analogy, it could be said that a relationship between two women is usually much more satisfying for the women involved and does not need a transvestite!

The success of these relationships has nothing to do with the fact that a partner of the same sex has a more suitable technique or knows where to find the right spot. It is somewhat naïve to think this. The success is mainly due to the fact that within these relationships the similarities between the respective fantasies of the participants are much greater. The male transvestite playing/embodying a woman does so on the basis of his male fantasy of the ideal woman; that is ideal for another man. The emphasis is on the so-called super-feminine aspect, in other words, the physical aspect. For women matters are a little more difficult. A woman who seduces another woman does not embody the ideal man, or does so only to a very slight extent; rather she embodies something beyond external appearances, something like an ideal relationship or ideal love. That is why there is no need for transvestism here. The distinction is even stronger in homosexual couples. For male partners, 'scoring' is the thing; for female partners, 'nesting' prevails.²

Meanwhile, we have found a really useful definition for a man and a woman: one is a fantasy for the other. There is a Parisian story about a masked ball. A secret couple finally see an opportunity for spending an evening together—after all, everyone is wearing a mask. They make an arrangement for an intimate rendezvous afterwards. During the party they flutter around each other, and when the clock finally strikes midnight they hasten to the rendezvous and remove their masks. Then they find: 'Alas, it wasn't him, and it wasn't her, either'. Each of us approaches the other person on the basis of our own fantasy and sees the other primarily as no more than this fantasy made real. When couples come together, there is a meeting of two fantasies that initially seem to fulfil each other—though the correspondence is rarely perfect: 'It wasn't him, it wasn't her, either.'

Why do we have fantasies anyway? Fantasy—the representation, staging or detailed spinning out of a story—is undoubtedly one of the most essential components of eroticism. Without it, the erotic element is reduced to the animal level and is not even erotic anymore. With fantasies, it becomes human. Moreover, these fantasies cannot be limited to individual daydreams. They also form the basis of every kind of art. As Freud wrote in his article on 'Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming', the artist successfully expresses his own fantasies in such a way that others can also enjoy them, with the ultimate intention of acquiring power and erotic allure. This brings us back once again to one of the questions in our introduction: why is there this ubiquitous need for imagination?

It would still be premature to answer this question now. Let us begin by looking for a moment at the difference between the two types of fantasies. Is there such a thing as a typically male fantasy, or a typically female fantasy? We can find an answer when we look at the way the different sexes fantasise. This is one of the most delicate of subjects, perhaps the most concealed and suppressed of all. There is little scientific research and when questionnaires are used they are generally not very reliable. The two things people lie most about are sex and money. However, there is another source of research which is readily available: the commercial expression of our imagination.

For men, these images are easy to find, since pornography is a typically male product. It is an open secret that video libraries get most of their income from renting adult-rated films, and these are mostly taken out by men. The women shown in these videos are always the same. The short-skirted, big-bosomed (silicone!) secretary/nurse who seduces her boss/doctor within a very short time. She is not only challengingly desirable, she is also immediately sexually available. In fact, she wants only one thing, here and now, preferably as long and as often as possible. In other words, she is the perfect pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue: Sex, Death and Power
• I. The Impossible Couple
• II. Fathers in Flight
• III. The Drive
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Films