There are so many different kinds of people in the world that it’s almost impossible to generalize about men and women without being misunderstood. But patterns do emerge—and as a therapist, the more people you see, the more you find them cropping up here and there over the long term. None of these is universal, and even the examples that fit a given pattern will have novel elements. But describing patterns can be helpful, and much is lost when we give up on that effort out of zeal for political purity or fear of being misconstrued.

What I’m saying in this post does not apply to every couple. It might not even apply to every couple I have in mind as I write it. It certainly doesn’t apply to couples in which one person is narcissistically entitled and doesn’t give a hoot about the other person’s feelings; those need a very different kind of help. But I’m pretty convinced that the particular dynamic I’ve been seeing lately is common enough that a blogpost on it could be helpful, so here goes. It takes up some of the themes in my 11/27/2023 post about Couple's Therapy: Why Fights Escalate & How To Stop Them.

Meryl Streep recently said a poignant thing onstage at an event held by the Washington Post. It made a big impact, in that many women and some men have reposted it with passion. The gist was, “Women speak the language of men, but men don’t speak the language of women.” It reminded me of Deborah Tannen’s 1990 book, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, which remains justly popular.

There’s a vast scholarly literature on gender differences in social space, discourse, and conflict. The differences in how we tend to communicate are consistent enough that it makes sense to call them two different languages—provided we bear in mind that this is a metaphor, an overstatement that helps an important point get articulated. If men and women really spoke two different languages, most of us would be completely unintelligible to each other, just as 80% of Americans are monolingual. 

When couples argue, and the couple is half female and half male, it often happens that they talk past each other because they have different understandings of the point of the conversation. As is often observed, most men tend to be more information-oriented and solution-focused, while most women tend to be more expressive of their experience and focused on making themselves understood. Neither person is necessarily competent at those tasks, or at selecting somebody who is, or at finding ways to encompass all four of the values which those tasks represent (accuracy, pragmatism, authenticity, and acknowledgement). Often those values don’t even fit together so well anyway. So the pitfalls become pretty evident after you’ve seen a few hundred or a few thousand of these arguments unfold, in a large number of different couples with varying levels of rhetorical skill, self-awareness, psychological mindedness, and depth of commitment. 

An interesting thing keeps happening. Guys who have been socialized to care about women’s experience tend to be quite preoccupied with their own goodness or badness. If you’re a man who has robustly feminist sisters; if you have a mother who was either crushed by an oppressive male, or resolutely empowered (or both, where a gendered trauma drove an eventual political awakening); if you have women in your life whose grievances ever alarmed you about your own role in something called “patriarchy,” you are likely to be vigilant about what women think of you. You might really hate being seen as a bad human being until proven otherwise. And if this has been a big issue in your environment, you might even be hyper-vigilant about it, always churning out new evidence that you’re a decent man—fully a man and fully decent, thank you very much. 

That can be exhausting, and even after you get over it and decide to let your ordinary humane demeanor speak for itself, that old urgent need to defend your own goodness rises to the fore whenever a woman confronts you with anything that feels like grievance—regardless of the facts. Uh-oh, one says to oneself, it’s time to prove once again that I am not whatever monster this person may have in mind. And then it’s off to the races… 

That frame of mind gets in the way when you’re trying to connect to somebody who’s annoyed or even furious with you. It locks you in to defending yourself, usually by disputing whatever details of her presentation strike you as inaccurate embellishments that weaken your case and strengthen hers (a zero-sum game). So you seize upon those details, trying to play defense and score points at the same time. But even if you’re entirely correct about such details (e.g., exactly when some event took place, or how many times you took out the trash, or whether one thing happened before or after something else, etc.), and even if they actually matter to the issue at hand—often they don’t—you are still getting nowhere. Being right matters far less than it seems like it should.

That is because (for the moment) the woman you’re talking to may not be so interested in the individual facts, or not in the same ones you’re disputing. Her main interest may be in what she sees as the general arc of what took place, and how it is making her feel. Until you fit that piece into place, by understanding her position and showing you understand it, nothing you say will matter much—especially not an apology. Notice: showing you understand is the main thing. It’s even more important than actually agreeing with what you’ve understood. Why? Because the biggest relational threat to anybody is the prospect that their personal experience just does not matter. That’s why you’re so invested in defending yourself, and why she’s so invested in establishing her perspective.

Do not apologize—at least not at the beginning. Listen, empathize, and evoke her suggestions about what would restore the connection between the two of you. Do all the good stuff that an apology is supposed to accomplish, but without saying the words “I’m sorry” or “I apologize”—unless two things are the case: (1) you really do regret whatever words or actions you’re apologizing for, and (2) she asks for an apology. If she doesn’t, the only reason to give one is if your feelings of regret are still there after you’ve done the other things apologies are supposed to do, such as: take some appropriate degree of responsibility, reach for reconnection, and offer a suitable policy improvement or some sort of balancing gesture (and then, of course, check in and see if those moves helped).

Otherwise, saying “I’m sorry” can cost more than it’s worth, because it makes you feel defeated in a power struggle, and the fight is lost by everyone so long as it remains a power struggle, no matter which of you “wins.” If only one of you “wins,” you both lose.

Another problem with the words “I’m sorry” is that they can take the place of whatever reparation, or new pact, or emotional work, is really needed. Get that done instead, and the explicit apology might be quite unnecessary. That’s what “sorry doesn’t pay my bills” means, in a less obnoxious form. 

You will both be better served by focusing on improvements to the reality between you, than by placing blame and eating blame. Blame is about resentment (and resentment is, by the way, the biggest impediment to a good sex life for a couple). You resent me for something, so you blame me; I eat the blame, and now I resent you in turn. Blame is responsibility plus resentment, and nobody needs resentment in their diet. Why would I “eat the blame”? Well, to restore peace. But also to show I’m good, since a bad man would not accept any responsibility. If a good man does refuse to take responsibility, it’s because the accusation is either false, or partly true but so awful in his own eyes that accepting it would make him, well, bad. In other words, taking responsibility and refusing to do so can both be ways of broadcasting my terribly urgent claim that I-am-good-not-bad.

Here are two generalizations about conflict in couples:

When a man relentlessly defends himself in an argument with a woman, he is usually doing it to protect the goodness of his character: I am a good person! Can’t you see that?

When a woman exerts indignation in a relationship with a man, she is usually asserting her rights, her boundaries, her prerogatives: I matter! Can’t you see that?

Until the man stops trying to prove to her, and to himself, that he is GOOD and NOT BAD, he cannot go about the urgent business of showing the woman that she—her needs, her dignity, her work, her feelings—really does matter to him.

So the fight continues. Neither person can afford to let up (that’s their mistaken belief) because that would risk validating the other’s right to take them for granted as a doormat. The tragedy is this: even though neither of them has any real interest in subjugating the other (except in really awful relationships, which are not what I’m discussing right now), they have to keep fighting as if that threat were real. Each is reacting to private personal fears of being crushed, by a person who has no actual interest in crushing them.

What they do need are well-placed adjustments to the agreements they make, the ways they habitually do things, the rules of the little relational micro-culture that defines that particular relationship. Clarifying those is the upside of the conflicts—but they’re only worth enduring if the downside is smaller than the upside, the benefit greater than the cost. Learn to “fight” without hurting each other, and you’re pretty much golden.

When I see this pattern, one of the major moves I try to make is to get the man to see this. Let go of the effort to prove that you’re good. Accept that you are good. Accept that others can make you question the quality of your choices, words, and deeds, but don’t accept any assertions that you’re morally inferior to someone else; it’s a non-starter. If they’re merely implying that you might be no good, well, remember that they might not really be trying to imply any such thing—just reporting their personal distress about something you said or did.

After all, whatever you’re worried about is what you’re likely to project, hearing others as if they are saying the very thing you fear. Maybe they are; maybe not. Either way, trust that you are good. Relax. Then you can think clearly enough to help this other person you care about, who is feeling hurt and angry. Once her anger is over, then you can afford to revisit the question of your role in what transpired. 

The angrier someone is, the less they care about what your intentions were when they first got angry. Focusing on the merits of your intentions is worse than useless if you do it too early. Nobody can make much use of such information until they are thinking with their prefrontal cerebral cortex instead of their amygdala, the fight/flight/freeze module that can hardly think at all. Two simultaneously enraged people are in a tricky situation, because between them and the exit doors, there is a thick fog of adrenaline and cortisol. One of the doors is an exit from the fight, while another is an exit from the whole relationship. The fog makes it hard to know which is which.

If a guy has a vise-like grip on the effort to defend his character, and it’s driving the two of them bananas, I need to help him let go of it. That works better if I can offer him something else to hold onto instead—which is also true of encouraging somebody to quit an addiction, like alcohol or gambling: you can’t just take something away, you have to replace it.

The necessary, new, better thing is often hidden behind the more familiar thing he thinks he needs to keep on using despite poor results. As an analogy, consider the recreational abuse of “whippets,” those little metal canisters of compressed nitrous oxide gas. It can indeed be poisonous (especially over time), but the main way nitrous oxide hurts and even kills people is by displacing the oxygen we need to survive. Defending yourself instead of reaching out to your upset lady is a naively misguided tactic that blocks the interpersonal docking-site where you would otherwise connect. It also blocks the space in you where a new interpersonal repertoire could otherwise take root.

What’s the better thing that should replace it? A stance of really believing in your own goodness, followed by the unfolding lived experience of soberly managing your partner’s distress in ways that afford dignity to you both. Without requiring either of you to lose face, you try to marshal all your available warmth, patience, and agility for somebody who deserves that kind of effort. Of course, this is harder to do if you don’t really feel she does deserve it. And if that’s what your gut and/or your mind tells you, well, that’s a whole other blog post. Those aren’t the relationships I’m thinking of right now. 

This post is for people in resilient, deep romantic relationships that are still troubled by frequent conflicts that don’t make enough sense, don’t end soon enough, and don’t feel resolved. Replace bids for power and control with bids for connection. Replace verbal self-defense with curiosity about the cause and nature of the trouble, attunement to the other person’s feelings, and an eventual convergence where the problem can be seen as the natural result of a misunderstanding between two good people. 

Most of the time, the root of a couple’s conflict is not anyone’s bad intentions or perverse character traits. Maybe somebody dropped the ball, and the other one didn’t; maybe somebody really wronged the other in a strongly asymmetric, lamentable way. Those happen. But the majority of “fights” are about big broad themes, conveniently jammed into currently local situations that are in themselves quite trivial. If a couple says, “We fight about stupid sh*t all the time,” the underlying themes are probably Am I good, or bad? and Am I somebody, or nothing?

Ideally, you could each spontaneously blurt out at the very same instant, “You’re virtuous!” and “You’re important!” and the whole tangled ball of bickering darkness would vanish in the sunshine of your mutual loving care. Since that’s pretty unlikely, somebody has to start the process on his own initiative, and draw the other into collaboration on a positive feedback loop that brings you both out of the mud and up into peace and fun and togetherness. 

Which of you two should take up that leadership task, this time? Whoever is up for it? Whoever is less upset? Whoever is currently blocking it by prioritizing moralistic self-defense instead? My answer here is a partial one, but it does fit in: Sir, there is a gratifying experience of masculine, mature, competent role-appropriate behavior waiting for you right under your nose.

Snap out of the trance you’re in (the one about proving you’re a good person), and you’ll see it right there for the taking. If you can escape your own worry about being insulted, you may be able to guide your partner out of the miserable state of anger and protest that you both want to quench. And if you know what not to put up with, and how to make those boundaries clear without being scary or overwhelmed, you can calmly assess the quality of what she does with your contribution. Is the peacemaking effort reciprocated? Is the reparative kindness mutual? Does everyone present—all two of you—seem to prefer peace as soon as it’s genuinely available, or is somebody prolonging the conflict for bad or murky reasons?

This approach is not always a good fit for every relationship, nor does it work miracles. But if the couple has the right stuff without the right repertoire, this approach can get them on track toward learning how to use what they’ve got. Sometimes that starts with a man giving up an illusory project of vindicating his character, and replacing it with a real project of connecting with the person he cares about. You don’t need to prove you’re a good man by arguing that you are, if you can do it with loving behavior instead.

Of course, that requires a partner who won’t squander the opportunity you’re offering, or take opportunistic advantage of it by repeatedly asking too much of you in exchange for peace, or persistently gaslighting you with blame you don’t deserve. You’ll have to watch for that; if it’s there, you must notice it and take steps, but if it’s not, you’d better stop worrying about it.

Easily said, I know; harder to do. But very, very possible. 

A habit merits the term “addiction” when it costs you more than it’s worth; when you try to stop it, but find you can only put it “on pause” for a short while; and when you find your thinking (especially your judgment) is distorted by the high priority you place on repeating the habit. Another criterion is perhaps less important because it’s outside you, but it can be very important indeed: when multiple neutral or friendly people tell you they think you have a problem—especially if they haven’t spoken to each other about it beforehand. 

In an excellent book called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (2010), Gabor Mate argued that addictions have their roots in early trauma. He tells the story of the thousands of American soldiers who fought in the war in Vietnam, which at that time was part of the “golden triangle,” a geographical area that produced a large share of the world’s heroin supply. U.S. troops coped with horrific levels of combat trauma, including guilt/moral-injury; anxiety, uncertainty, and fear; bereavement and loss; the shock of seeing so much injury and death; and the various physical wounds, ruined health, lost limbs, and so on. Many became habitual heroin users. But when they came home, it turned out that for the most part, the soldiers who remained stuck in heroin addiction were those who had suffered childhood trauma, long before the war. The others were able to drop the habit, though heroin is perhaps the most addictive substance on Earth. 

Not every addict has a trauma background. But most do, and when you meet one who apparently does not, you can’t be certain they have (or have shared) a full knowledge of their own relevant personal history. While many different kinds of trauma can happen to a kid, the CDC lists a few of the big ones in its online material about Adverse Childhood Experiences (or “ACEs”):

Experiencing violence, abuse, or neglect.

Witnessing violence in the home or community.

Having a family member attempt or die by suicide.

Substance use problems.

Mental health problems.

Instability due to parental separation.

Instability due to household members being in jail or prison.

They add “not having enough food to eat, experiencing homelessness or unstable housing, or experiencing discrimination.”

This painful picture of deep human suffering should not be taken as a portrait of an “average addict,” since there’s no such entity. And what amounts to trauma is not actually the stuff that happens to somebody, but how it’s experienced. The mystery of resilience has to do with the kid’s temperament, circumstances, culture, and especially the interpersonal supports that did or did not keep the situation from being even worse. There are people who endured every ACE listed here, who have never been addicted to anything. And there are others who had only one or two of these to deal with, and in adolescence or adulthood became dependent on one or more substances or behavioral habits that cost them dearly. 

The difference is not a moral one, and there is no rational calculus about who had it worse, or who went on to put up the best fight against addiction or depression or anxiety. These pseudo-questions involve impossible apples-and-oranges comparisons and fictitious quantifications of how bad different childhoods were. The feelings are most important; the facts matter, too; but the measurements of them are largely illusory. The reality of trauma has to do with what happened inside the child: what the bad stuff meant to him or her. If parents are neglectful or abusive, a kid will infer that young person in the mirror is deeply flawed, and deserved the bad experiences. But if the same kid also has a benevolent art teacher, a well grounded mentor, a kind and wholesome uncle who is reliable and interested, sane and warm—the kid may be protected from drawing that toxic conclusion about the self, and grow up less susceptible to addiction, to cults, to swindles, to sadomasochistic attachments, and so on.

The trauma theory of addiction is the profound claim that we mammals, we primates, we human beings, have universal evolutionary needs for nurturance and protection, and when these go unmet, or are met with harm mixed in, addiction often results. The person seeks out whatever will soothe away the pain of neglect and/or abuse from long ago. Usually, it’s pain from very long ago: infancy is the first love relationship we ever have, the mother-baby dyad that sets the emotional foundation for the whole lifespan. Even if things don’t go relatively wrong until later in childhood, it’s the inner baby part-of-self within the older kid that’s most overwhelmed. Freud taught that each of us is all the ages he or she has ever been, so the baby who craves a substitute for the warm and milky breast is actually still active inside the active addict, running the show—which is why the addicted adult can be found making such poor decisions. A brilliant, short book by Abraham Twersky, Addictive Thinking (1997), spells out what that kind of cognitive distortion can sound, look, and feel like. 

But acute or chronic trauma need not be the only reason for addiction, and often there is a very useful significance to the person’s particular “drug of no choice,” as it’s sometimes called in twelve step culture. For example, with or without the expectable ACEs, people who have uncontrolled habits of excessive sexuality may be trying to prove to themselves that they are indeed attractive sexual beings, capable of evoking erotic participation from others. Boys who were repeatedly rejected by the girls they hoped to kiss—and that’s most boys, who mature more slowly than girls tend to do—can grow up with a lot to prove. Many spend their late teens, twenties, and even their thirties struggling to establish that they are not icky “involuntary celibates” who will never find a mate (even if the guy himself is now the only person who sees him that way). If they can do this without deception, and without heaps of gender-based resentment, and without excessive risks to physical and mental health, they may manage to accumulate enough sexual experience to falsify their own worry about it. They can be fortunate enough to realize one day that they have indeed established what they were so desperate to establish. Now they are free to let go of the pattern that looked like, or really was, “sex addiction.”

Shopping addiction can be like that, too. I’ve said “people with uncontrolled habits of excessive sexuality may be trying to prove to themselves that they are indeed attractive sexual beings.” Well, people with uncontrolled habits of excessive consumerism may be trying to prove to themselves that they are indeed successful participants in the world of consumption, including the spells cast by advertising. Ads comprise a powerful technology of conscious and unconscious persuasion that links people’s self-esteem to their capacity to get hold of whatever product or service is being defined as beautiful, validating, and necessary. If I succumb to this, my identity will be bound up with my ownership of the bag, the boots, the car, the designer version of whatever I’ve been convinced I need.

Insofar as this is true of somebody in particular, that person’s sobriety will have a lot to do with identity: achieve an internal locus of value, and you can also build up an internal locus of control that defeats the addiction. When a person suddenly comes into a sum of money, a lot can be learned by watching how they spend it: the speed of the spending, but more importantly, the buying choices they make. If you are making large purchases of “designer stuff,” you might be an erudite connoisseur of fine handbags and their nuanced history since the year 1588. But it’s more likely you are buying an Hermes bag for $9,850 because that is what the surrounding culture told you was important, valuable, and above all, validating for the identity of the buyer. It is, ultimately… a bag.

A designer purse like that “says” plenty, but just what it says depends on the wisdom of the beholder. The message can range from “look, I am successful, you would be fortunate to share sex, love, friendship, or business with me” to “look, I cannot think for myself, and remain profoundly naive about the available better uses to which money can be put.” Those uses include appropriately limited altruism, where you get good feelings by helping others who need help; buying experiences (especially travel, but also course-taking, conference-going, skill-building, etc.) rather than things; connecting to the past and to the globe by acquiring works of art that speak to you; funding ambitious projects that you find fascinating and beneficial to the communities of which you count yourself a part; and so on.

I know brilliant, beautiful, accomplished people who collect high-end designer handbags. I see it as an expression of their aesthetic enjoyment of these exquisite objects. I also see it as a mechanism of compensation for early experiences of having to do without the goods that other kids had. If your peers in elementary school and middle school and high school all wore flashy stuff and drove expensive bikes, while you wore hand-me-downs and walked to school without wheels, you might well benefit from disproving the worry that they are blessed and deserving while you are deprived and unworthy. And the collectors I’m thinking of are at least as psychologically sophisticated as I am; they know all about their own formerly unconscious motivations for spending “real money” on glam and bling. But they do it anyway, and apparently it serves them well. Rather than judging anybody for buying or selling luxury goods, I am commenting on some of the common underlying dynamics that contribute to habitual choices which can come to feel quite unfree.

And that’s the issue with therapy for troublesome habits: is the habit a free and informed choice? Is it an addiction, or would we get better results framing it as a mere habit that needs tending? The more it costs you—in money, time, opportunity, relationships, access, etc.—to continue with the habit, the easier it is to decide that you must stop. The less it costs you, the more reluctant you or I will be to use the term “addiction,” or recommend 12-step programs, or insist that only abstinence will constitute recovery. Mild addictions to substances or behaviors can be addressed with a commitment to “harm reduction.” Someone who drinks a few times a week but does not lie about it, nor have blackouts, nor have a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality change when they’re intoxicated, is probably a person who can reduce drinking by, say, 65% without too much struggle. But if it turns out to be a big struggle, then the language of addiction might be very useful for getting hold of the habit and changing it.

If you’re dealing with repeated behaviors that you suspect are costing you too much in money, time, peace of mind, or otherwise, consider booking a session with me. We can join forces to help you figure out your relationship to the habit in question, and find the best ways to change for the better—guided by your values and goals.

Email me through the contact form on this website, or call 917-873-0292.

Preoccupied with freedom, we can miss out on the full possession of whatever it is we have already chosen, or might choose now.

Keeping open as many future choices as possible is a great way to wind up with nothing.

Married men can cheat themselves out of a lot of wellbeing and self-respect by over-associating masculinity with novel erotic adventure, with an unrevised ideal of “fun,” with youth and its open horizon. It makes them underestimate how much wellbeing and self-respect can be had by freely choosing to love the person they have already chosen. Resentment blocks this process, so it’s an important early step in therapy to check for resentment. If there isn’t much of it there to obstruct the flow of feelings, then the man may be relatively free to make a new use of his freedom: namely, choosing afresh the same person he chose in the past, but this time making the choice as the more mature fellow he has become in the meantime. Suppose I first made the commitment when I was 27, and now I’m 41. My forty-one year old self has (and needs, and deserves) his own chance to make the choice on his own terms, for current reasons: to stay or to go.

Why stay? The fact that you promised to stay should be one reason, but it can’t be the only reason, or the promise is a prison. It is your exercise of your own liberty that liberates you, but it’s a common mistake to suppose that only a break-up would be an exercise of free will, an action, a difference-making choice. There are at least two other choices. One is to stagnate, to resent and to sulk, to withhold affection and sex and boycott the marriage without changing or ending it: choosing not to choose. Such a marriage is kept just-good-enough to be tolerable, but no better and no worse. The third choice is to opt for renewal and flourishing, despite uncertainty about just how best to go about it, and just what you can reasonably hope for by trying.

The goal is to open your heart. There is a better life waiting, though from where you now stand it may be invisible to you. Inside an attempt at an enduring monogamous commitment, a couple builds a small relational micro-culture in their home, that defines the norms of what they can expect from each other. How much verbal affection? How much sex? How much gift-giving, and on what occasions? Is it ok to yell? To use demeaning language, and call it “just a joke”? How much emotional safety is it reasonable to require? How much information about plans and spending and schedules is supposed to be shared in advance, to make the other feel included and facilitate collaborative problem-solving? How much of my time and attention should I expect to share with this person, and is it acceptable for one or both of us to be staring into a cell phone during that time?

The answers to all of those questions can be changed, but it takes deliberate effort. The ends will illuminate the means for achieving them. To find out what you need to do to improve things, envision the kind of relationship you actually want—the one that’s good enough that you could freely decide to stick with it despite your spouse’s limitations, and yours. Some of those aren’t going to change, but what might well change is how much that stuff actually matters to you. If she really can’t sing, she might sing anyway, but not well. If your husband has poor proprioception so that he never knows where his elbows and knees are, that’s unlikely to go away. Rarely does a person start to move like a gazelle who never resembled one before. People can learn to manage their A.D.D., but some of it may be intractable, and the chronically late person might never be consistently on time.

But what empowers us to look past those foibles is the much larger, more important open field of shared loving trust, joy, kindness, humor, help, reminiscence, learning, encouragement, celebration, and sex. Besides all those good things, the experience of shared suffering—getting through difficulty together—is a big contributor to bonded intimacy. And compared with the sum of these, a few human faults might not amount to much. I was going to add, “the signal-to-noise ratio is what matters,” but that metaphor won’t do, because exercising your freedom to improve your marriage doesn’t just make the music of love more clearly audible, it also makes it better music.

All of this assumes that becoming more invested and relationally ambitious is going to be appreciated and, at least somewhat, matched. If it’s not, and you’ve spent the past six months being more thoughtful than before, more firmly-but-gently assertive, more decisive-but-cooperative, more affectionate, more vulnerable, and more present—but your wife or husband has not changed at all, nor acknowledged it, nor made some similar changes to validate and reinforce yours, then you have to consider new options. Couple’s therapy can be a way to figure out how to stay together, or whether to stay together, or how to break up. It can be used to improve a good marriage or a bad one. It can also be a way of finding out whether the thing can be saved or not; if not, you can leave with the confidence that you tried your best. Or it can be a venue for discovering in greater detail just how to go about consistently making each other happier, perhaps even happier than you had thought possible.

With or without the help of a therapist, people in committed relationships who find themselves preoccupied with freedom will benefit from remembering that freedom is useless unless you make use of it. That can be done in ways that are immediately easy to observe, but some of the most consequential and wise uses of freedom are inward shifts that can bring to bloom enormous changes in due course. Among the best of these is the free decision to open the faucet in your chest from which love can flow when you dare to allow it.

For those whose marriages are dormant but good enough, and potentially very good indeed, it’s well to take a leaf from Homer’s Odyssey and reflect: you may find yourself sometimes fantasizing about Circe and Calypso, and that’s fine. But Penelope is the truth.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel The Great Gatsby, a self-made millionaire aspires to win the heart of a woman he once loved. Daisy is married and unavailable, but Gatsby has idealized her for years. He knows that she appreciates the outward signs of wealth, fame, and power—things that confer status—so he reinvents himself as a wealthy tycoon, hoping this will impress her enough to make her value him. He benefits from this quest because it focuses his energies, motivates him, and brings him the clothes and cars and cash that sometimes make life fun and exciting. Gatsby makes his money by bootlegging liquor during Prohibition, when it was illegal and therefore risky and lucrative. Alcohol has destroyed myriad lives, but in moderation it has been part of the good life in many cultures for millennia; one could argue that Gatsby’s path to success was not so antisocial as to be self-discrediting—he is no Al Capone, and no Macbeth. But such success itself poses a problem: if it all works out, and Daisy is won over by glitz and bling, how will he know she really loves him? Gatsby is a man, not a Rolls Royce or a bank account.

The book ends in tragedy, when Gatsby is killed by another character. But had he lived, one possible outcome would’ve been a temporary affair between him and Daisy, followed by some kind of disillusion. Either she would reject him and stay with her boorish husband (Tom), or Gatsby would tire of her upon realizing that she loves his status, his money, his power, more than she is capable of loving him. Such disillusion would be agonizing, but it would do him a world of good. Disillusion is the way out of illusion, and some illusions can be extremely hard to escape because their logic has a seamless continuity that conceals the exits. Of course I want to live in a giant mansion; of course more money is always better, ad infinitum; of course a higher status will enhance my success at anything I could possibly undertake in life, including finding a mate. It is because these assumptions seem so obvious that their fundamental error is so hard to detect.

Freud taught that the purpose of psychoanalysis (it applies to mental health treatment in general) was to help people to love and to work. The idea that more-is-always-better has serious drawbacks on both sides. In work, it threatens what we call “work/life balance” and risks work addiction, in pursuit of ever-more earnings, far beyond our ability to enjoy them. In love, more-is-better can mean either of two troublesome things. It can mean I am stuck in a compulsive accumulation of temporary partners, building my “body count” without checking its effect on my wellbeing. Or it can mean I am doing what Gatsby did, pursuing just one partner, but using means that are accumulation-based: if I have more status than these competitors, then I’ll win the competition for her. What gets neglected here is the way my toys and my success can upstage the merely human, unique individual I actually am. I also may fail to notice how much my attention is diverted from my “Daisy” onto the men with whom I’m busy competing, jockeying for position, comparing the size of our houses (paging Dr. Freud), etc.

If such a disillusioned Gatsby can survive the disillusioning experience, he may win the real prize, one more valuable than the solid gold toilet, or the victory over his male rivals, or even Daisy herself. The real prize is a mature freedom: freedom from the endless compulsion to accumulate ever more status and wealth, and with it, freedom from the need to woo the kind of person who remains focused on that kind of stuff. Whoever escapes from the prison-house of status-seeking gets to love and be loved by people who are also free of it.

There are plenty of good reasons for a couple to want lots of money, or for a single person to want wealth in an eventual marriage. Raising kids, running a small business, keeping a theater afloat, endowing a community’s nonprofit, all these require plenty of cash and become impossible if there isn’t enough, and the list goes on and on. What’s not so good, is chasing wealth as a substitute for self-love, and hoping that the display of this wealth will attract somebody else who has the same confusion between wealth and love.

People who are unconsciously afraid of love might not be able to tolerate getting the love they really need, but do not want. So they collude with similar people to form relatively loveless couples, held together not by deep affection, acceptance, and desire, but by the glue of status, purchasing power, and the conspicuous display of resources. Real love is associated with eventual death, because if I fall in love with one unique, mortal, individual person, I will one day lose them and it will matter to me. If I marry someone I really love who really loves me, I move forward on what Kierkegaard called “the stages on life’s way,” and this means leaving youth behind and getting closer to the end. Focusing on status and trophies can instead create the illusion that I am outside of the arc of the life cycle, that my world is one of endless youthful playdates and context-free experience, often of a dissociative, thrill-seeking kind. Diverse pleasures have their place, and there’s nothing inherently bad about thrills. But it’s worth checking: am I doing this as a defense against something else? Might I be partying quite this much because I am avoiding something?

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.