Intimacy and Closeness by The School of Life / Тесная связь и Близость

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One of the frequent and painful paradoxes of romantic life is that the more we get to
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know and love someone, the harder it can be to summon up any sincere wish to sleep with
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them. Intimacy and closeness, far from fostering deeper sexual desire, can be the very ingredients
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that destroy excitement – whereas having only just recently met a person and not feeling
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too much for them can set up awkward yet compelling preconditions for wanting very badly to take
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them to bed.
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The conundrum is sometimes colloquially referred to as the ‘madonna-whore complex.’ It
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can sound offensive and reactionary phrased like this – as if the problem applied to only
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one gender and might at some level condone or even promote the very dynamic that it described.
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And yet the phrase circles something highly significant, always contemporary and of relevance
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to every gender (it might, for heterosexual women, be known as the ‘saint brute complex’).
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It was Sigmund Freud who first drew attention to our difficulties connecting love with desire
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in an essay of 1912 titled ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’.
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Of many of his patients, he wrote: ‘Where they love, they have no desire, and where
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they desire, they cannot love.’ In seeking to explain the division, Freud pointed to
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two facts connected to our upbringing: first, in childhood, we are generally brought up
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by people we love deeply and yet towards whom we cannot express sexual feelings (frightened
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as we are by a strict incest taboo); and second, as adults, we tend to choose lovers who in
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certain powerful (though unconscious) ways resemble those whom we loved most dearly as
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children.
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Together these influences set up a devilish conundrum whereby the more deeply we come
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to love someone outside of our family, the more strongly we are reminded of the intimacy
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of our early familial bonds – and hence the less free we instinctively are to express
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our sexual desires without fear or reservation. An incest taboo originally designed to limit
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the genetic dangers of inbreeding can thus succeed in inhibiting and eventually ruining
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our chances of enjoying intercourse with someone to whom we are not in the remotest way related.
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The likelihood of the incest taboo’s re-emergence with a partner increases greatly after the
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arrival of children. Until then, reminders of the parental prototypes on which our choice
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of lovers is subconsciously based can just about be kept at bay. But once there is a
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pram in the hallway and a sweet infant referring to the person we once tied up or explored
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with a sex toy as ‘mummy’ or ‘daddy’, both parties may significantly start to take
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fright, complain of feeling tired and turn in early.
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A dichotomy grows between the ‘pure’ things one can do with a partner one loves and the
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‘dirty’ things one still longs to do – but can only imagine being free enough to do with
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a near stranger. It can feel untenably disrespectful to want to make love to, or to put the matter
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at its sharpest, fuck the kind person who is later going to be preparing lunch boxes
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and arranging the school rota.
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To start to overcome the problem, it pays to observe that not all childhoods are equal
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in their tendencies to generate sexual difficulties for people in later life. A parent who is
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very uncomfortable with their body may send out covert signals that sex is invariably
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dirty, bad and dangerous – and thereby lends their child an impression that it truly can’t
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belong within a loving relationship. A more integrated and mature parent on the other
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hand may suggest that they are reconciled to their desires and relaxed about some of
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the proto-sexual things that small children naturally and innocently do: make a great
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deal of noise and mess, take an interest in their bodies and (at a certain age) talk about
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poo a lot. The feeling that one can be naughty and still loved and ‘good’ is one the
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great gifts a parent may bequeath to their child.
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A lot of the work to repair the love/sex dichotomy can, strangely for something so physical,
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be done in the mind. We can conceptually start to rehabilitate sex as a serious and in its
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way entirely respectable topic that good people who love their children and their jobs and
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are invested in an upstanding life can be profoundly interested in; that there need
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be no conflict between a longing to be filthy and depraved at some points and decorous and
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respectable at others. We can contain multitudes: the us that wants to flog or be debased or
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smear and the us that wants to advise, nurture and counsel. One can be whore and madonna,
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brute and saint. Rather than seeking out different partners, we might settle, less disruptively,
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on merely adopting different roles. A child cannot express love and sexuality to a parent;
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and vice versa. But it is one of the privileges of adulthood, that we no longer have to be
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hampered by such a paradigm. Our lovers need not be only cosy co-parents and responsible
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sweet friends, they can for a time – in the very best transgressive sense – also be something
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else that is hugely important to our mental well-being and the survival of our relationships:
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partners in crime.
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