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. 

This post is addressed to people who (a) currently live in the world of sex-positive dating, which often includes kink and polyamory, and who (b) have begun to feel that all this sex and sociality is fun, but that Romantic Love is missing, and its absence matters more and more. Hence the title: “Moving from Sex-Positive Dating to Seeking a Relationship.” 

Yes of course, those two things can be the same. It is indeed possible to keep on “playing in the scene” and eventually manage to meet somebody within it who also wants to find an enduring, central love. Sex-positive social politics: check. 

Having said that, let’s notice the equally obvious truth that living a lifestyle of erotic adventurism and searching for a Primary Partner can be two very different things. And if you think you might want to attempt a permanent monogamous commitment with somebody awesome who feels uniquely suited to your nature, then they’re very different things.

Let’s draw on Greek mythology for a moment, to explain this in a more vivid way. What you’ve been doing is sampling the erotic individuality of a large number of people, and in pagan terms (which will likely suit you better than the relatively sex-negative monotheist worldview), that’s like living in a valley presided over by Aphrodite, the Goddess of sexuality and thrilling infatuation (also known, in the poly world, as NRE, “new relationship energy”). Since you’re also prioritizing consent, Aphrodite shares the place with Artemis, protector of women and girls. Wonderful.  

But where is Hera? She’s the Goddess of marriage, of long-term reliable continuity, of compatibility and all the wisdom we only really learn by voyaging deep into that other region that includes commitment, time, aging, and death. It’s where you get to really know someone else, and be really known. So it is also the place where someone’s feelings about you mean the most, because they’re based on the fullest knowledge of what and who you actually are: they really know you, and instead of running away, or friend-zoning, or attacking… they bring you acceptance, loyalty, and desire. And they let you know them just as deeply, and if it goes well enough, the whole thing becomes gloriously mutual. Well, that’s where Hera presides; that’s her realm, located somewhere over there, beyond Field and The League and Fetlife, beyond all those apps and “play parties.”  

There are two different metaphorical voyages involved: the second voyage is the LTR (Long Term Relationship) itself. But to reach its starting point, you must make the voyage that comes first, out and away from what you’re now doing and being (the nasty term for it, if you’re a man, is “fuckboy”—but such slut-shaming is quite unnecessary, especially if your Ethical Non-Monogamy has indeed been ethical, not deceptive), and into Hera’s country, where meeting Ms-or-Mr Right becomes much more likely, for inner and outer reasons.  

This first voyage is what I’m talking about, and what makes it difficult are the uncertainty and the rejections. You don’t know how long it will take, or exactly how best to go about each particular piece of it. And each encounter has four basic possibilities: you like them and they don’t like you, which is rejection, your least favorite. Or they like you and you don’t like them, which is disappointment; better than rejection, but awkward and boring. Or neither of you is interested, which is usually a bit better still, since nobody is hurt. Or the jackpot is hit, the gimmel on the dreidl: you like each other. 

Now I’m going to say something you already know. Why? Because the point is not to convey information, but to calm the anxious part of you that dreads rejection and uncertainty. Your head might find the repetition tiresome, but your heart needs it because that’s how emotional reassurance works. Here it is: the person you’re trying to get a date with is living their own life, populated by thousands of factors and people and exes and ailments and plans that you know nothing about. They might not reject you at all, but if they do, these unknowns would probably amount to a robust explanation for why you got turned down, one that has nothing to do with your value, your game, your charisma, or your prospects for finding love and happiness. As I once said to a lonely gentleman who’d just been turned down by a lady he liked: She’s on Planet Her. 

But what if the rejection actually is about you? Well, if it’s got any hostility in it, and you didn’t do much to warrant that, then it ain’t really about you. People’s hostility discredits itself. If they’re the sort of person who would say something hurtful or aggressive just because there were no fireworks between you two, then that’s obviously somebody you don’t want to be around anyway. You “dodged a bullet.”

Between that kind of egregious static, and a better result, there is only a thin band of genuinely relevant personal criticism that is not untrue and not unkind—and therefore worth taking seriously, and difficult to hear. But that’s also the stuff you can actually learn from. For example, people need to feel heard, and listened to—especially women, whose conversational style and expectations make many of them quite sensitive to being interrupted by a man, or spoken to at length without enough turn-taking. When a man is given constructive criticism about this issue it can be quite unpleasant for him, but if he can incorporate the advice into his manner, a great deal is to be gained. “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off…”

In relationship-oriented dating, an interaction that turns out to be a rejection is a bit like a pretty tree that turns out to be one of those stinky gingkos: it’s appealing from a distance, and then, up close, you realize what it is. But remember: they are part of the native foliage of the very terrain you are trying to cross. Be glad those experiences are there, because they tell you you’re in the right region, headed in the right direction. “Where grows the danger,” wrote the poet Hölderlin, “there also grows the power of salvation.”

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.