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Imperfect Love, Imperfect

Lives: Making Love, Making
Sex, Making Moral Judgments
a
Irwin Hirsch Ph.D.
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Adelphi University & New York University
Version of record first published: 30 May 2008.

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 Studies in Gender and Sexuality
8(4):355–371, 2007

Imperfect Love, Imperfect Lives:

Making Love, Making Sex,
Making Moral Judgments
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Irwin Hirsch, Ph.D.

Psychoanalysis’ judgments about patients’ decentered sexual lives are

often inf luenced by analytic ideals that are based on long-cherished
cultural values and/or theoretical constructs. These analytic value
judgments sometimes assume that all or most individuals are opti-
mally fulfilled in the context of deeply intimate and sexually monoga-
mous long-term relationships, where attachment love and sexual pas-
sion coexist in equal intensity. Such analytic aims may not at all
correspond to the wishes of any given patient, nor do such aims con-
sider the literature that suggests that what may be called attachment
love is often difficult to integrate with intense erotic desire. As well,
there is risk that analysts’ aims for patients may be hypocritically
more idealistic than the values that analysts themselves adhere to in
their own personal lives. Analysts’ acknowledgment and acceptance
of their own imperfect sex lives and love lives may leave more room to
respect the idiosyncratic compromises and adaptations of each
uniquely individual patient.

Irwin Hirsch, Ph.D., is a member of the faculty and a supervisor, Manhattan Insti-
tute for Psychoanalysis; distinguished visiting faculty, William Alanson White Insti-
tute; and adjunct clinical professor and supervisor, Postdoctoral Programs in
Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis, Adelphi University & New York University.

355 © 2007 The Analytic Press

 356 Irwin Hirsch

PROLOGUE: AN ANALYST LEARNS

I have always learned best from my failures, and a number of years ago
I became a more educated analyst at the expense of a very smart, hand-
some, likeable, and mostly heterosexual man. Although he had a seri-
ous girlfriend, Z. engaged in cross-dressing f lirtations with other
cross-dressing men in cyberspace and at bars and occasionally had
one-night stands with women. I believed that Z. would have a good life
with this girlfriend and thought that she would help him settle into the
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hard work of his demanding profession, and as well, help him actual-
ize what I felt would be his considerable potential as a loving father to
his yet unborn children. I attributed his cross-dressing as well as his in-
fidelity largely to his identification with and his desire to overcome his
infantilizing mother and his early life as her soft and overweight
momma’s boy. As he grew into adolescence Z. f led from this humiliat-
ing identification into sports (a very strong interest of my own), and he
became an excellent athlete. Charming and f lirtatious, through his
late teens and 20s he had a very prodigious heterosexual sex life. He
entered analysis in his early 30s ostensibly because his career was fal-
tering. He was very bright and had excellent academic credentials but
balked at the grueling work required to advance his career, and he
kept losing jobs. It took some time before he informed me, with some
shame, of his by now long interest in cross-dressing, much of this re-
cent activity occurring on the Internet during his long hours at the of-
fice. At no point did Z. indicate to me that he clearly wished to stop
cross-dressing. He actually hoped that he might integrate this into his
sex life with his accepting current girlfriend, although he feared in-
forming her of his cyberspace and bar contacts that stopped just short
of hands-on sex with men.
In my misguided zeal to help Z. actualize his career and to solidify
his relationship with his girlfriend, my interpretive schema accented
the immaturity of his sexual interests, maintaining his archaic
girly-boy identification with his mother and avoiding the “stronger”
and more masculine emphasis on career and commitment to this, in
my mind, wonderfully f lexible young woman. Even if I had been
largely on target with my insight in linking history to present, the
more salient message this sensitive man heard from me was to con-
trol his cross-dressing distractions and to settle down to a promising
 Imperfect Love, Imperfect Lives 357

career and a monogamous relationship with this girlfriend with

whom I was so taken. In his charming and seductive way, Z. quit ther-
apy for “practical” reasons, never challenging me for my egregiously
unwarranted impositions on elements of a life that he desired. He
probably even knew that it was not his cross-dressing per se that was
blocking his career and his relationship and that I was too threat-
ened personally by his sexual tastes and his feminine side to help
him adequately integrate this into his love life and work life. I sus-
pect that Z. even knew that the sports metaphors we so frequently
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spoke in and my interest in his career were reassuring to my own

counteridentifications with my own infantilizing mother and that
my ambitions for him were as much countertransference based as
anything else. I did Z. a great disservice and benefited a great deal
more from him than he did with me. Z. helped teach me how
self-serving it usually is to make so-called clinical judgments about
others’ de-centered sexuality, including the moral value of monog-
amy and sexual fidelity as a universal ideal for all individuals.

LOVE, SEX, AND INFIDELITY: THESIS

AND CLINICAL ILLUSTRATIONS

By way of overview of my thesis, I suggest that we not assume that all

of our patients wish to optimize their potentials for love and for work
in the ways Freud originally seemed to mean this. Everyone does not
want lasting love relationships and/or intense intimacy, and every-
one does not want monogamy. Also, everyone does not strive for a
single relationship that integrates love and sexual fulfillment, as
much as this is an ideal for many. From most accounts and surveys
(e.g., Glass and Wright, 1992), sexual infidelity in marriage is statisti-
cally normal for both genders (as is divorce), and, as opined, the
more options one has in life, the more likely infidelity is exercised.
Infidelity per se cannot be subsumed under any rubric of
psychopathology any more than are the multiple variations of mis-
sionary position heterosexual sex, many of which were formerly con-
sidered “perversions” by respected analytic colleagues. There is cer-
tainly no universal motivation for infidelity, or, for that matter, for
fidelity; does fidelity result from—to name the extremes—very strong
values or fear of infidelity’s potential consequences? By the same
 358 Irwin Hirsch

token, infidelity’s multiple motives may make trouble or they may be

largely adaptive. They should therefore be explored or understood
analytically, just as analysts ought to examine motivations for mo-
nogamy. There are many ways to have meaningful relationships and
satisfying lives, and psychoanalysts’ ideals about such matters are
best personally reflected upon and minimally imposed on patients.
Likewise, sexual fidelity can be hard to define. For example, how do
we characterize kissing and fondling at the office Christmas party; or
engaging in the increasingly popular recreation of lap dancing, in all
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its variants; or talking “dirty” on the Internet; or masturbating to the

widening array of pornographic stimuli?
One trim, well-dressed, and vivacious man (Y.), 67 years old when
we began analysis, viewed himself as my mentor in the ways of sex
and family life. He perceived me (some dozen years younger than
he) as conservative and cautious and was inclined to share with me
the wisdom accumulated from an adventurous and interesting,
“rags-to-riches” life. Brilliant and manically driven in all dimensions
of life, he had accumulated a fortune through myriad businesses,
had ambitions directed toward high elected office, enjoyed a wide
range of avocations, contributed enormous sums philanthropically,
and was very involved with his large family—wife, three children, and
numerous grandchildren. His wife, who felt at her wits’ end after
catching him in yet another of his many sexual infidelities, re-
manded him to analysis. When young they had had a passionate sex-
ual relationship, but for some time Y.’s interest was gone. He
claimed to love and to deeply admire his wife, and he now enjoyed a
close relationship with his large family. He had been a disengaged
and preoccupied father but had become a deeply involved grandfa-
ther and spent considerable time with this close-knit group of chil-
dren and grandchildren.
I initially felt as if I were engaging in a grand deception—Y. pla-
cated his wife by visiting me but would rather “be buried” than aban-
don his sexual exploits. However, not too long after beginning treat-
ment, Y. ran into certain problems with his businesses and became
quite anxious and somewhat depressed at various limits that were be-
ing forced upon him. At this point I began to feel that his reasons for
coming to see me were more legitimate—more internally driven. He
alternated between speaking quite openly about his fear that his life
would revert to the feelings of dependence, weakness, and oppres-
 Imperfect Love, Imperfect Lives 359

sion that characterized his early years and enthusiastically informing

me of his most recent sexual exploits or the latest honor bestowed
upon him by some charitable organization. I never experienced this
as crude boasting; indeed, I always perceived Y. as a refined man,
soft spoken, gentile, and elegant in his manner. He spoke of his
achievements with a richness and pleasure that felt almost sensual. It
was in this latter mode when Y. situated himself as my father/
teacher, sharing with me what he believed was wisdom that would
enrich my own pedestrian life. Certainly there was an element of
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dominance-submission here, and I was quite capable of feeling small

in contrast to this larger-than-life, characteristically charged and en-
ergetic man. In addition, having lacked a father who was strong and
accomplished, I believe I was receptive to engaging with Y. in this
configuration. On the other hand, his sense that he had power in re-
lation to me helped him share his fears with me.
Because he was pushed by his wife to see me in order to cure
him of his sexual infidelities, much of the wisdom Y. shared with
me focused on the absurdity of my engaging him in such an
endeavor. He spoke of sex and love as two entirely distinct phe-
nomena, mocking the broadly applied term “making love” as sim-
ply “fucking the same person whom you love.” He reported that he
knew one person, a golfing buddy roughly his age, who still thor-
oughly enjoyed having sex with his wife—the woman he also loved.
This was hard for Y. to comprehend, although he did ref lect that
he sometimes envied this man, and his ability to be satisfied with
what he had in life, and his capacity to be more tranquil and less
driven than he. Y. claimed to regret hurting his wife by not re-
sponding to her sexual desires and by philandering relentlessly
even though she was aware of it, although not enough to resist sex-
ual opportunity with the attractive and much younger women
available to him. On the other hand, he underscored the unnatu-
ral and counterintuitive property of desiring only one sexual part-
ner, stating that usually the only people who adhere to monogamy
are those without opportunity (with a subtext that I might be
among those). He argued that his wife should have accepted this
fact long ago and that if she had had sexual liaisons of her own,
she might have been less hurt and angry with him. He further lec-
tured that in no other culture are men in particular, especially
powerful men like him, expected to remain monogamous.
 360 Irwin Hirsch

I saw Y. into his early 70s, when even barely able to be erect with
the aid of Viagra, he was still shamelessly seducing much younger
women with reasonable frequency; much of this sex consisted of his
receiving oral and manual stimulation to orgasm. By this time Y.’s
wife preferred to believe he was too old and impotent for even this,
and she caused little stir. I believe that our analytic efforts helped Y.
get beyond his overt fears that he would someday lose his esteemed
and powerful place in society and once again be the castrated little
boy of his early years, but there remained covert anxieties and angers
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that still fueled his driven ways. Y. did indeed cause considerable
pain to his wife, and his marital configuration undoubtedly had re-
percussions with his children, even though each of them developed
into highly functioning individuals. However, by the time treatment
had ended his marital strife had ceased and he seemed to me to be a
largely constructive force in his family. He even often felt helpful to-
ward the women with whom he was having sex. From Y.’s account-
ing, they all fully knew it was “just sex,” and took from it whatever
benefit they may have received: gifts, help in opening up career
opportunities, or simply association with a charming, attractive, and
charismatic older man. Of course it is possible that some of these
women felt cheapened or expected more from Y. and were hurt by
the experience, but Y. did not speak of these eventualities. By the
time we stopped our work together, Y. was more vigorous and satis-
fied with his life than are the vast majority of men in his age range,
and from my perspective, he met most of Freud’s original criteria re-
garding work and love: a rich and involved career; a vital and in-
volved, although ambivalently loving contemporary relationship
with his wife; an affectionate and generous connection to his chil-
dren and grandchildren; and a contribution to society (in the form
of extensive philanthropy). Y. affirmed what others in the psychoan-
alytic literature have suggested (e.g., Freud, 1912; Eagle, 2003) and
are currently arguing with greater frequency: that the relationship
between sexual desire and love is complicated, and for better or for
worse, the two feelings are often poorly correlated and difficult to
integrate.
Another, briefer example will underscore this point. X. initially
consulted me with his wife because of her complaints about their aw-
ful sex life. She seemed to have no clue that he was gay, actually
rather effeminate in manner. After this became clear to her they de-
 Imperfect Love, Imperfect Lives 361

cided to remain married, and I worked individually with X. They

stopped trying to have sex with one another, he pursuing bathroom
blowjobs and other anonymous encounters and she, as I later
learned from her analyst after my work with X. had ceased, both
short-term and more serious affairs with male colleagues. Both par-
ties seemed to have looked the other way. From X.’s descriptions
and from what I saw from his wife originally in couple’s therapy,
these two people loved one another dearly and deeply—indeed, in a
way more profound than that do most heterosexual married people
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I have met in and out of my professional context. Once the tension

of sex was removed, they were deeply intimate friends, powerfully
loving brother and sister: they shared a multitude of interests and
values, enjoyed being together to the point of exuberance, and “fit
together,” as compatible—except for sex—as virtually any couple I
know. X.’s reports of his wife’s loyalty, tenderness, and caring over
the long period of his tragic and grueling struggle with AIDS, which
was to end in his death, remain among the most moving experiences
I have encountered in my work.
I certainly do not intend to argue that long-term love relationships
cannot include a strong monogamous sexual relationship, although
so far I have attempted to illustrate, with these true but hyperbolic il-
lustrations, that the pleasures of sex and of long-term love can
readily operate on different tracks (Freud, 1912). Sexual infidelity
may be designed to end love relationships, or have that consequence
even if not intended, but this sort of transformation is not inherent.
If one does not think in traditional moral or in idealistic terms,
there are many mundane illustrations of long-term relationships
surviving in part because infidelity serves as a compromise. For ex-
ample, W. consulted me because of post-affair anxiety. Her affair
consisted of sex with a male business associate about whom she had
long had intensely erotic, often masturbatory, fantasies. Although he
too was married, she worried that she would become too enamored
with him and no longer be able to function with her husband in her
marriage. She claimed to love her husband and their family configu-
ration (two small children), and she hoped to remain married to
him. W. had chosen to marry a man whom she could control and
who would not impede her independence and her demanding ca-
reer pursuits. From her reports, she was the dominant party in the
marital dyad (e.g., the primary breadwinner and decision maker),
 362 Irwin Hirsch

had much affection toward but only a modest sexual interest in her
reportedly very good-looking husband, and was the recipient of his
complaints about dispassionate sex. Although she had consciously
planned to not marry someone too strong for fear of winding up the
submissive masochist that her mother was, her sexual passions in-
clined toward powerful older men (most of them, as she described,
not nearly as physically attractive as her husband). Over the course
of our work together W. became frightened of her attraction to me
and began to fear that our involvement would render her marriage
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insignificant. She felt submissive toward me and feared that I had

significant influence and power over her. This configuration closely
paralleled what she had seen in her parents’ relationship and what
she had always resolved to avoid. These transferential feelings were
explicated, although perhaps because I found this relational config-
uration comfortable, they never shifted very much. However, the in-
tensity of her dependent and submissive transference feelings led
her to further appreciate both her marital configuration and her
preference for remaining the dominant figure in it. Her ultimate
compromise and adaptation were to remain in her comfortable mar-
riage yet feel less anxiety when she engaged in periodic sexual trysts
with lovers to whom she no longer worried about submitting in ways
beyond the immediately erotic.
A serious professional man, religiously committed, and report-
edly deeply in love with a wife toward whom he was quite sexually at-
tracted, V. was anxious, guilt-ridden, and depressed that he found it
irresistible to, in his words, “sexually cheat.” Despite a reported ac-
tive and hearty sexual attraction to his wife, he claimed to be
near-addicted to Internet pornography, obsessed with locating and
sometimes visiting prostitutes found originally through this me-
dium, and unable to control lap-dancing involvements when travel-
ing on business. He noted that a high percentage of his male col-
leagues either saw prostitutes or lap danced when traveling,
although it “tore him up” emotionally more than it did most of
them. V.’s preoccupation with pornography started in adolescence,
originally as an attempt to master humiliation at the hands of a se-
ductive, emotionally volatile, and overbearing mother. He became
aware that his secret sexual life seemed to give him some sense of au-
tonomy from her, and over the course of analysis it became clear that
he feared being dependent upon and at the whim of his strong-
 Imperfect Love, Imperfect Lives 363

willed wife, and of me, as his mother in the transference. On the

other hand, V. literally asked me to be a strong father to him, to back
him up in his effort to finally abandon his childhood fears and what
he felt was his moral weakness in response to these fears. Actually,
he wished for me to actively prohibit all extramarital sex, and as well,
to be a male presence who would counter the power of his wife and
of his internalized mother. Although I did not literally accept the
role of a prohibitive religious force, I felt quite comfortable with V.
in the phallic role as ballast. V. and I were together for some time,
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and indeed, he eventually became far less obsessed and preoccupied

with pornography and with the exciting pursuit of prostitutes. When
at home, he was relatively present, and his marital sex life produced
significant pleasure. He reported feeling stronger and less threat-
ened by female irrationality. When he traveled professionally, which
he did a few times each year, he indulged himself with lap dancers.
This took up minimal emotional space for V., and though he
claimed to be still striving to resist this type of infidelity, at the time
of termination of our work together he had not. Indeed, he reported
that this sexual compromise, for the time being, helped him feel in-
dependent and sexually potent in the context of his marriage.

DISCUSSION: IMPERFECT LOVE,

IMPERFECT LIVES

In each of my clinical illustrations, sexual infidelity occurred in

the context of reported love toward a spouse and the strong desire
to preserve the marital dyad. Infidelity, however, is also often de-
signed to hurt the other, to exact revenge for emotional injuries,
and/or to destroy a relationship. Indeed, destructiveness and re-
venge were among all of my patients’ multiple motives. However, if
one thinks in terms of adaptation or compromise, infidelity some-
times provides an emotional spacing that may allow imperfect
love, sex, and family relationships to persist or endure over time. I
do not offer this as a professional recommendation but as a re-
sponse to the risk of analysts creating ideals that patients do not
really wish to meet and that we analysts in our own personal lives
may not approach. It feels crucial to me that we analysts infer from
the imperfections in our own lives the likelihood that our patients
too will not emerge from analysis as ideal lovers and/or ideal
 364 Irwin Hirsch

workers. In an article that portrays psychoanalysts as sexually

de-centered as the rest of the population, Dimen (2001) pointedly
illustrates the hypocrisy of analysts’ moralism in the context of liv-
ing sexual lives every bit as idiosyncratic as our patients. Freud
himself did not work and love optimally, and biographers (e.g.,
Jones, 1955) have suggested the total absence of sex from a very
young age in his own marriage. Many analysts today still fail to ac-
knowledge how rare it is for anyone to function on all or on most
cylinders in the realms of work and love and sexual pleasure. It is
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both a cultural and an analytic ideal to achieve an integration of

love and sexual fulfillment in a long-term relationship, although in
reality I think that this is an ideal state only reached by a small mi-
nority of couples. In my clinical work and in conversation with
colleagues, I observe that minimal sex or no sex at all characterizes
a higher percentage of long-term marriages than does sexual ec-
stasy. Infidelity in all its forms is by no means necessarily the best
compromise to absence of sexual fulfillment in long-term love rela-
tionships, though it is a very common one. When not mutually
agreed upon, infidelity always reflects betrayal and dishonesty and
leaves great potential for pain.
Because of this last factor it is often tempting for analysts to take a
moral stand with respect to injury to our patients’ significant others
and to their breaches in the analytically cherished qualities of open-
ness and honesty. Each unique analyst draws implicit (or explicit)
lines at points where one may impose values or moral standards, and
those these lines are likely to be at least somewhat affected by each
unique patient. I believe that each analyst will impose moral judg-
ments at some moments with some patients, although when doing
so it is very important to present these as subjectively or counter-
transference based and not as a declaration that a patients’ acts are
perverse or pathological per se. When very extreme acts are com-
mitted, however, this rather idealistic stance becomes quite difficult
to sustain. Of course there is much risk in taking moral positions, for
they may imply that we do not accept a patient, warts and all, for who
he or she is, and perhaps that we ourselves, in our own personal lives,
live by higher moral standards. As well, imposing a moral judgment
suggests that we may view people as perfectable, and in so doing, we
create aims for patients that are not reachable for them and that we
have not reached in our own lives. This ranks high among the lessons
 Imperfect Love, Imperfect Lives 365

I learned from my unfortunate experience with Z. I was threatened

personally by his effeminately tinged infidelities, and my imposition
of a view of him as perverse was quite harmful to him.
I do not believe that I have any greater perspective than any of my
colleagues about at what point harm to others calls for an imposition
of moral prohibitions. For me, physical violence and harm to chil-
dren are most likely to qualify. Although I know that some individu-
als I have discussed here have hurt their significant others by the for-
mer’s betrayals and lies, I view such phenomena as part of living an
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imperfect life. Although it is absolutely central to any analytic pro-

cess to help patients recognize that they are angry, hurtful, and de-
structive to others, I prefer to refrain from attempting to change this
by moral approbation or disapprobation, and when it comes to mat-
ters sexual, by invoking the pseudoscientific term “perversion.” An-
alytic ideals should not be confounded with analytic aims, and when
analysts’ aims are idealistic, we are likely to be in a state of denial
about our own f laws. Our patients’ lives, like our own, will always be
imperfect, and in one way or another, each of us will be hurtful to
significant others. We may risk harming our patients by exhorting
them to levels of intimacy with others that they might not desire.

LOVE, LUST, AND ATTACHMENT:

DISCUSSION AND CLINICAL EXAMPLE

In his essay on this question of sex, love and infidelity, and moral
judgment, Eagle (2003), extrapolating from psychoanalytic attach-
ment research, concludes that attachment and sexuality are two dif-
ferent systems and that these two systems are antagonistic to one an-
other. This is essentially an affirmation of an observation made by
Freud (1912) in the early days of psychoanalysis. Eagle posits that
sexual desire brings people together long enough to afford the possi-
bility of attachment. When relationships endure, it is because love
develops from attachment, and indeed, adults very commonly love
while experiencing minimal or no sexual desire for the person who
is loved. These thoughts are compatible with the evolutionary think-
ing summarized by Fisher (2004), who explains that across species,
familiarity breeds friendship and runs counter to sexual desire. She
points out how infatuation can last only so long without such stimu-
lation becoming dangerous to one’s body and psyche. Blechner
 366 Irwin Hirsch

(2003) notes that there are large individual differences, both be-
tween cultures and within them, about how passion and fidelity are
played out. Speaking from a historical psychoanalytic perspective,
he documents that the primary purpose of marriage through the
ages has been pragmatic: the wish to create stability and family. Only
in recent centuries has marriage been associated with romantic sex-
ual love, and in some sub-cultures it still is not, and marriages are ar-
ranged. Though romantic love and marriage indeed constitute the
modern western ideal, Blechner observes that not all long-term rela-
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tionships sustain the inclusion of sexual pleasure. He further ob-

serves that for some people, either sexual fantasy or sexual infidelity
provides pleasure, while marriage-like relations provide stability, de-
pendency, and loving attachments. Blechner notes a cultural prefer-
ence that evokes my patient Y.’s personal views: In some societies, it
is expected that men in particular have lovers, especially for men
who have power. He also states that in homosexual subcultures
where legal marriage is not yet possible, there may be more experi-
mentation with the parameters of erotic attachments and commit-
ment.
Some of the current interest in this subject was inspired by Ste-
phen Mitchell’s (2003) posthumous book, Can Love Last? In attempt-
ing to answer why it is so difficult for sexual desire to endure in
long-term relationships, he suggests (along with Fisher, Eagle, and
others) that feelings of familiarity and dependence tend to be
anti-erotic, whereas romance (read sexual desire) has always been
normally fueled by novelty, mystery, pursuit, and the hope of con-
quest. He posits that even the most intensely passionate desire for
relatively unknown partners constitutes but a very small emotional
risk because these relative strangers are not the objects of our de-
pendency or of our attachment love. To feel this intense sexual de-
sire and love and dependence toward the same person, however, is
an emotional risk of immense proportion, and one that relatively
few dare to take. For Mitchell, the degree of potential humiliation
and loss in loving and desiring the same person over time leads to
the normal compromise of dividing these affects into two catego-
ries. Much of what is called romance or “falling in love” refers to the
erotic wish to conquer a new lover. This helps make new sex or “no
strings” sexual infidelities extremely desirable, and when not acted
upon, such desire often consumes much space in fantasy life. For
 Imperfect Love, Imperfect Lives 367

most people I know personally and clinically, optimally exciting sex

is synonymous with relatively anonymous sex, and Mitchell’s thesis
makes sense to me as an explanation for this. Most long-term rela-
tionships are fueled by love other than romantic love, that is, feel-
ings of attachment, friendship, shared interests, and dependency.
Perhaps a more appropriate title for Mitchell’s book would have
been Can Lust Last? because it does appear easier to sustain
long-term love than long-term lust. I believe that romantic fiction
and American cinema have helped mislead us by playing to what
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most of us want—equating raw sexual attraction with true love. This

helps make long-term love seem a more exciting prospect and less
the quotidian, f lawed, and laborious project that Mitchell suggests
and that most people in long and stable relationships find. Romance
and attachment love are related to the extent that some loving rela-
tionships begin with sexual attraction. The concept of romance
ought to refer to primarily erotic desire, and the latter is indeed of-
ten difficult to sustain in most long-term loving relationships. As my
patient Y. suggests, one may be most fortunate to want to fuck the
same person who one loves. Mitchell himself offers no easy council
with regard to the dilemma of how to keep lust alive in long-term
love relationships. He says essentially that it takes a strong commit-
ment to this project and consistent hard work.
Married with two preadolescent children, U. tries to do this
hard work as he struggles to remain sexually faithful to his tense
and overworked wife, whom he sees as aging physically more rap-
idly than he. She juggles the demands of motherhood and serious
career and reportedly has little time to engage with U., much less
have anything like the relaxed and playful sex they enjoyed before
parenthood. Sex is further inhibited by the discomforts of early
menopause, and U.’s wife accuses him of being unsympathetic to
her total situation. U. alternates between angrily lamenting about
the loving attention he used to receive and fantasizing about extra-
marital sex. He is charming, good-looking, and in the world. He
has much opportunity for infidelity, but he holds the integrity of
marital commitment in high regard. He believes that if he just
screwed around a little, he’d be much less angry toward his wife,
feel far less deprived, and his marriage might improve. He looks to
me to gauge how I would feel were he to find extramarital sex and
wonders what I have done in my own marriage in this regard. I try
 368 Irwin Hirsch

not to influence him and am relieved at not consciously feeling

strongly about either of his choices, though I do believe he may ul-
timately feel better about himself if he does not make the choices
he associates with his mother’s excessive narcissism.
U. recalls his parents’ relationship—a father who maintained his
caring and gentle ways with his wife despite her demanding, narcis-
sistic, and demeaning character traits. U.’s mother spoke openly
about her crushes on celebrities and on powerful acquaintances,
and he suspects that she probably had some affairs. He has great
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compassion for his humbled father and much anger toward his
mother and is in considerable conf lict about indulging himself in
ways he associates with her. He wishes to be kind and giving like
his father, yet he fears the humiliation of what he also felt was his
father’s castrated passivity. He associates his “good boy” fidelity
with being a fool and a cuckold like his father. U. still has faith that
he can revive the sexual dimension of his life with the woman he
still loves but only rarely feels lust toward. In the context of this
struggle so far, he claims he feels better about himself than were
he to take the easier road that he associates with his mother’s self-
ishness and hurtfulness.

EPILOGUE: GENDER AND THE QUESTION

OF UNIVERSALS

Not all analysts who address this subject believe that familiarity and
dependence dampen sexual desire. In a dissenting response to
Mitchell, Goldner (2004) argues that the very familiarity that many
experience as anti-erotic provides for others an erotogenic condi-
tion of safety. She suggests optimistically that many individuals in
long and safe relationships allow themselves to disinhibit sexually,
and this freedom and absence of anxiety can readily lead to better
and better sex. Goldner refers to normal arguments and fights that
occur in long-term relationships, and the getting together again af-
ter these mini breakups (rupture and repair), as providing some of
the erotic mystery and novelty that is otherwise absent. In the con-
text of safety, this “make-up sex” (a term originating in the television
comedy series, Seinfeld), Goldner suggests, can be as arousing for
some as novelty is for others.
Clearly, individuals are sexually aroused in different ways, though
it is awfully tempting for me to suggest that Mitchell and Goldner
 Imperfect Love, Imperfect Lives 369

may be representing, in an aggregate or normative way, their respec-

tive genders (Mitchell is male, Goldner female). My own observa-
tion, from patients and personal life, suggests that even if married
men and women are equally unfaithful, men’s extramarital sex com-
monly entails a wider variety of sexual practices, which might give
them more opportunities for infidelity. If wives’ unfaithfulness prin-
cipally entails literal sexual encounters with other men and women,
husbands’ adultery goes beyond that. Perhaps as many women as
men use pornography and engage in cybersex, though anecdotally
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this seems not to be the case. But men also partake of lap dancing
and, of course, patronize prostitutes, activities that for women are
nonexistent in the first case and relatively rare in the second.
The argument for coupled men as generally more inclined toward
infidelity than coupled women finds some support in the psychoan-
alytic literature. Stoller (e.g., 1975, 1979) has made the most mean-
ingful contributions to this literature, emphasizing the inherently
sadomasochistic nature of most heterosexual relatedness. He views
men as essentially living with an inherent sense of weakness in rela-
tion to women, an inadequacy born of prolonged dependency on
mothers or on maternal figures. He sees men as perennially trying
to compensate for feeling like boys, longing for maternal nature, and
humiliated by neediness toward and dependency on women. Com-
pensation often takes the form of turning the tables on women, of
efforts to transform weakness into strength. Anger, physical intimi-
dation, and contempt for women’s lower-status work are among
these compensatory expressions, as are sexual acts and sexual posi-
tions that emphasize the power and the dominance of the man.
Hirsch (1997) observes that heterosexual men’s common preoccu-
pation with sex, particularly in the form of gazing at women in per-
son and in photos and in talking with other heterosexual men about
women, is an everyday way that many men attempt to convert feel-
ings of weakness into strength. Stoller (1979) suggests that pursuit of
prostitutes and other illicit sex is often in the service of trying to con-
trol both the prostitute and the significant love interest in the man’s
life. Childhood humiliation at the hands of powerful women is con-
verted to unconscious strategies to control and to humiliate
women—to sexualize them, to purchase them, and to betray them
through infidelity. Hirsch (1999) offers the perception that many or
perhaps most heterosexual men prefer the companionship of other
men to that of women, turning fear of women into a male bonding
 370 Irwin Hirsch

characterized by sexualized preoccupation with dominating or oth-

erwise humiliating women. Along similar lines, Person (1999) em-
phasizes the role played by male fear of engulfment by women as a
major motivating force in men’s effort at emotional distance from
their lovers, spouses, and so forth. Sexual infidelity has the advan-
tage of creating emotional distance, gaining emotional control over
dependent longings, and exacting revenge for childhood humilia-
tions at the hands of powerful mothers. For all of these reasons, it
appears plausible that men are less sanguine about long-term love
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relationships than are their female counterparts and may be more

inclined to use sex as a way of maintaining emotional equilibrium in
relation to female partners. The very safety that Goldner (2004) sug-
gests may make some people more free to enjoy sex makes all too
many others feel trapped and stifled, leading potentially to a pro-
found loss of erotic desire for a long-term lover.
Despite my sense that many men may have more readily under-
standable, historically internalized reasons for sexual infidelity than
do women, I believe that we always lose much when we speak in univer-
sals. As well, it seems more difficult to identify generalized hypothe-
ses that attempt to explain sexual infidelity specifically in women.
Our psychoanalytic literature does not make such convenient gener-
alizations available, and this is probably for the better. Highly complex
feelings and acts like love and sex and fidelity are best addressed in re-
lation to human uniqueness and idiosyncrasy, not in reference to ag-
gregates, though Freud (1912), Eagle (2003), Fisher (2004), and
Blechner (2003) have offered some ideas about normative sexual be-
havior and the motivations involved. The more we think in diagnostic
or in other universal splits and binaries, the more inclined we are to be
disapproving with our patients and to impose our own personal moral
judgments standards upon them. Indeed, both men and women have
difficulty integrating sexual vitality with long-term love and depend-
ency, and various forms of infidelity are one compromise for what is
most likely a majority of both genders. If we do not see sex and love as
inherently synonymous—as intrinsically linked in the idealistic way
dictated by both our psychoanalytic history and cultural fictions—
how we view infidelity, whether as inevitably destructive or as some-
times a very imperfect compromise that suits the ordinary imperfec-
tions of life, depends on the f lexible analysis of each unique situation.
Needless to say, we must respect the aims of our patients. These aims
 Imperfect Love, Imperfect Lives 371

quite often fall short of those dictated by some of our cherished psy-
choanalytic constructs, idealistic principles that we ourselves as ana-
lysts, in our own personal lives, fail to live up to at no less frequency
than our patients.

REFERENCES

Blechner, M. (2003), Commentary: What happens when love lasts? An ex-

ploration of intimacy and erotic life. IARPP On-line Colloquium Series,
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Dimen, M. (2001), Perversion is us? Eight notes. Psychoanal. Dial.,
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Eagle, M. (2003, February), Attachment and sexuality. Presented to the So-
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Fisher, H. (2004), Why We Love. New York: Holt.
Freud, S. (1912), On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of
love. Standard Edition, 11:179-190. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
Glass, S. & Wright, T. (1992), Justification for extramarital relationships:
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Research, 29:361-387.
Goldner, V. (2004), Attachment and Eros: Opposed or synergistic?
Psychoanal. Dial., 14:381-396.
Hirsch, I. (1997), On men’s preference for men. Gender and Psychoanalysis,
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Hirsch, I. (1999), Men’s love for men: Contrasting classical American film
with the “Crying Game.” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanaly-
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Jones, E. (1955), The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2. New York: Basic
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Mitchell, S. (2003), Can Love Last? New York: Norton.
Stoller, R. (1975), Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred. New York: Pantheon.
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