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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Neil Strauss
Read between
October 17 - November 13, 2020
How far would I go to protect my parents? Is it better to betray the people responsible for my existence or to betray that existence itself?
Because, all too often, the things that we’re the most resistant to are precisely what we need. And the things we’re most scared to let go of are exactly the ones we most need to relinquish.
Perhaps marriage is like buying a house: You plan to spend the rest of your life there, but sometimes you want to move—or at least spend a night in a hotel.
Evidently, women have eating disorders, men have sex addiction. I suppose both share the same obsession: women’s bodies.
Lying is about controlling someone else’s reality, hoping that what they don’t know won’t hurt you.
I suppose that’s what addicts do: They want something so badly, they’re willing to hurt others to get it.
Do you know what kind of people can’t control their behavior, even when they don’t enjoy that behavior anymore? Weak people? Addicts.
You don’t have time to think. If you ever want to be truly happy in this lifetime, you have to recognize that you’re using sex like a drug to fill a hole. And that hole is your self-esteem. Deep down, you feel unlovable. So you try to escape from that feeling by conquering new women. And when you finally go too far and hurt Ingrid, all it’s going to do is reinforce your original belief that you’re not worthy of love.
Intimacy is sharing your reality with someone else and knowing you’re safe,
and them being able to share their reality with you and also be safe.
“Self-deprecation is still self-worship,” she is telling Calvin. “It’s the flip side of the same coin. It’s still about self.”
It’s not about blaming but understanding . . . In summary, we each spend our adult lives running on a unique operating system that took some eighteen years to program and is full of distinct bugs and viruses. And when we put together all these different theories of attachment, developmental immaturity, post-traumatic stress, and internal family systems, they make up a body of knowledge that allows us to run a virus scan on ourselves and, at any point, to look at our behaviors, our thoughts, and our feelings, and figure out where they come from. That’s the easy part. The tough part is to
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“Intimacy problems come from a lack of self-love,” she continues. “Someone who fears intimacy thinks, unconsciously, If you knew who I actually was, you’d leave me.”
“The avoidant is very good at seducing, in the sense that he has an uncanny ability to find out what his partner needs and give it to her.
“A healthy relationship is when two individuated adults decide to have a relationship and that becomes a third entity. They nurture the relationship and the relationship nurtures them. But they’re not overly dependent or independent: They are interdependent, which means that they take care of the majority of their needs and wants on their own, but when they can’t, they’re not afraid to ask their partner for help.”
“There’s an unconscious part of ourselves we want to defend,” she continues, “and it’s been useful and helped us survive the difficult stuff we went through with Mom or Dad or the priest or the coach. But we don’t want it driving the car anymore.”
One of the biggest indicators of enmeshment, according to Lorraine, is when a mother tells her children that she lives only for them.
on their deathbeds, people don’t think about their work or their life experiences or the items remaining on their to-do list. They think about love and family.
We have so many contradictory, repressive, self-limiting beliefs about sexuality—and almost every one of them stems from a pathological need to dictate to someone else what they are and aren’t allowed to do with their body and heart.
This is not the case. It’s not about waiting for a certain quantity of time before having sex, it’s about waiting for a certain quality of connection.
Evidently it is customary for strangers who’ve shared the same woman to greet each other like gunslingers before a shootout.
The words cut me like a knife. Yeah, I think, I guess I am a fucking awkward loser deep down. So I’m going to cover up for that fact by making out with these two girls sitting next to me. That thought pretty much summarizes the last decade of my life.
An affair fills you back up when the marriage empties you.
“Once fear of loss is taken away, you get past jealousy.”
Some people live in an endless on-and-off relationship with control. Either they’re trying to exert it over their lives—by getting obsessive about a diet, a belief system, a phobia, a hobby, a need for order, a twelve-step program—or they’re completely out of control, making a mess of their lives.
Perhaps the problem is not that the people I date want to possess me, it’s that after sex I give them ownership out of guilt. I’m replaying an enmeshment script, pathologically accommodating to monogamy.
It’s not society that holds us back, it’s ourselves. We just blame society because not only is it easier but it’s a nearly impossible weight to move. This way, we don’t actually have to change. I thought I was fighting the system, but all I’ve really been doing is fighting myself: first my compulsions, now my inhibitions.
And monogamy? It’s like choosing to live in a single town and never traveling to experience the beauty, history, and enchantment of all the other unique, wonderful places in the world. Why does love have to limit us?
I used to think that a good relationship meant always getting along. But the secret, I realize, is that when one person shuts down or throws a fit, the other needs to stay in the adult ego state. If both people descend to the wounded child or adapted adolescent, that’s when all the forces of relationship drama and destruction are unleashed.
Bringing lovers together can evidently be like introducing cats. Everything must be done with care, thought, and precision, otherwise they’ll never get along.
Perhaps the secret to fidelity is knowing that the grass is crazier on the other side.
“Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.”
In the dance of infatuation, we see others not as they are, but as projections of who we want them to be. And we impose on them all the imaginary criteria we think will fill the void in our hearts. But in the end, this strategy leads only to suffering. It’s not a relationship when the other person is completely left out of it.
Fear of loss: It has motivated many weak people to make commitments they shouldn’t have.
There’s always something she’s excited about doing. From one week to another, it’s not usually the same thing. Her life passion is simply passion.
Perhaps on some level, the demand for exclusive love is an immature demand, the desire of the needy child who hungered to be the sole object of its parents’ attention, affection, and care.
The problem many people have is that the exact quality that originally attracted them to their partner becomes a threat once a serious relationship begins. After all, this quality was the open door through which the romance started, so now they want to close the door, lock it, and throw away the key before someone else tries to come in after them.
Perhaps this is the flip side of love avoidance: I have a need to feel needed, even if I don’t actually like it.
“If you’re in pain of the heart, enter into the pain and try to find its source rather than letting the pain drive you, or trying to escape from it or overcome it.”
But the only relationship that’s truly a failure is one that lasts longer than it should. The success of a relationship should be measured by its depth, not by its length.
A life is just one letter away from a lie.
Sex is easy to find—whether through game, money, chance, social proof, or charm. So are affairs, orgies, adventures, and three-month relationships—if you know where to look and are willing to go there. But love is rare.
It’s predictable, even stereotypical, that a love avoidant like me would hit a bottom and reach out to the love addict, only to start the cycle anew and waste another year of our lives. Or that a love avoidant, as soon as his next girlfriend says she wants to have a family together, would start pining for the one who got away.
Evidently, if you have long receptors in the brain’s reward center for the hormone vasopressin, then you’re more likely to be monogamous. If not, then you’re a born player.
Suddenly, Walum’s no longer a vaunted scientific researcher, but a guy just like me, trying to figure out why something as simple as loving someone is so complicated in real life.
“is it possible to live your authentic life if you have inauthentic people around you?”
“Love is something about a person, some connection with them, that makes you willing to change.”
the dichotomy between the false self and the authentic self that all these recovery people talk about is meaningless. It’s a value judgment that’s impossible to determine. A better way to think about it is the destructive self and the creative self: the you that damages your life and the lives of others, and the you that brings forth the best in yourself, is connected to others, and is in harmony with the world around you.
I’ve learned that with love, anything can bloom. But with ambivalence and fear, a living thing will die. So no one who truly loves and is loved can ever be in a cage.”
No matter what the situation may be, the right course of action is always compassion and love.
