The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book about Relationships

by Neil Strauss

“I now pronounce you man and wife,” the priest says. As soon as the words leave his lips, a cold shroud of fear envelops me. Something irreversible has taken place in just seconds and I’m overcome with regret because I know I can’t reciprocate what Ingrid feels. I wake up with a sense of doom hanging over my head.

“Because your example was your dad, and he never stood up for himself. And his father didn’t stand up to his mother either.”

It’s no wonder cheating came so naturally to me. I’d given myself permission long before I’d ever had a girlfriend.

“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.”

“But the avoidant’s behavior has consequences,” Lorraine continues, “and chief among them is something most of you are familiar with: getting caught. And that shatters the fantasy for the love addict, who experiences her biggest nightmare: abandonment, which replicates her original wound.”

“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.” She pauses to let it all sink in, then concludes, “Only when our love for someone exceeds our need for them do we have a shot at a genuine relationship together.”

I’m not doing a very good job of taking my recovery more seriously, but in her depiction of a relationship, all the highs and peak experiences of life have to be sacrificed in the name of intimacy. And that doesn’t seem like a goal worth aspiring to.

“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.” She looks at me and Troy and Adam and Calvin, then concludes: “Life’s not worth living if you’re living someone else’s life.”

“I haven’t been connecting with Ingrid.” The tears come harder. I can’t believe I’m bawling like this. Again. “Every time I have sex with her, I’m thinking about some random woman I didn’t have sex with. I’m not letting her in.”

I used to think that intelligence came from books and knowledge and rational thought. But that’s not intelligence: It’s just information and interpretation. Real intelligence is when your mind and your heart connect. That’s when you see the truth so clearly and unmistakably that you don’t have to think about it. In fact, all thinking will do is lead you away from the truth and soon you’ll be back in your head, groping with a penlight in the dark again.

There’s one thing I’ve been striving for all my life: with sex, with writing, with surfing, with partying, with anything and everything. And that is to be free. It’s the one feeling I never had growing up.

They say that a man is as faithful as his options, and in this moment I know it to be true. So I switch the phone off. It’s too much. Even Jesus had only three temptations.

I decide to search the Internet to see how her start-up is doing, and I come across a photo of her in a bikini. Five minutes later, I’m on PornHub watching videos of Asian women who look like her while stroking myself. I know I shouldn’t be doing this. It’s clearly compulsive. But it’s too late to stop: That’s how compulsions work. Besides, I went to rehab for cheating, not for porn.

And I’m frustrated because I shouldn’t have to defend myself if I want to have an orgasm without her. Sometimes my inner child is going to want to play with himself.

Instantly, I’m filled with remorse. I don’t know why I just did that. Is it because I’m feeling smothered by Ingrid? Is it because I would have felt guilty letting Belle down on her birthday? Or is it because I need more intensity in my life?

“Your problem is that you worry too much about the future,” she says, her voice confident, her eyes wise, her hand tender. “You could die in a car crash, or there could be an earthquake right now and the house could collapse on top of us. There’s no guarantee we’ll be here tomorrow. So let’s just love each other in this moment and appreciate each other in this moment. We can deal with the future when we get there.”

“You’re as faithful as you decide to be if your brain is healthy. If your brain is not healthy, then you’re as faithful as your options. And we’re going to make your brain healthy.”

That’s when I understood why some people spontaneously jump off rooftops and bridges and window ledges: They do it because it’s easier than almost everything else in life. It’s easier to jump than divorce your wife, easier to jump than try to win a girlfriend back, easier to jump than ask your boss for a raise, easier to jump than deal with your growing pile of unpaid bills, easier to jump than face your wife and kids after letting them down, easier to jump than spend every day in meetings and therapy trying to be someone you’re not. It’s easier—and quicker. It solves every problem with certainty, swiftness, and finality.

The love I see shining there is like a bear trap, snapped shut on my soul to keep me from straying. I am a prisoner of fear.

And in that moment, I realize that the self-destructive impulse I’ve had lately is not actually about wanting to hurt myself. It’s about freedom. It’s about not wanting to live under constant scrutiny, to be responsible for her feelings, to feel guilty if I happen to have a sexual thought that’s not about her, to feel like my every word or expression is a red-hot brand that may scar her.

I told Belle I was in a relationship, but she kept sending flirtatious messages. And though I didn’t encourage her again, I didn’t do enough to discourage her either—and I definitely fantasized about her a lot. I should have ignored her or blocked her number, and had the courage to immediately apologize to Ingrid after I fucked up the first time.

So of course it’s a struggle to focus 100 percent of my sexual attention and desire on Ingrid. I’m fucking normal. There’s something liberating about that thought. Because I’m tired of beating myself up every day.

In the meantime, my relationship with Ingrid has become a roller coaster. One minute we’re laughing together and staring lovingly into each other’s eyes, the next we’re either arguing or not speaking. Most nights, I end up sleeping on the couch.

“The mystery is whether the path you’re embarking on is authentic or you’re operating out of a wound.” “How will I know the difference?” “Wounds bring drama and trauma. They don’t bring comfort.”

“We all have six core needs: emotional, social, intellectual, physical, sexual, and spiritual. And if they’re being attended to and enhanced, then you’re doing the right thing.” “If this choice is coming from a healthy place, then you’ll find that it leads to lasting happiness,”

“Remember,” Lorraine urges, as if reading my thoughts, “anything that doesn’t bring you alive is too small for you.”

Why is she not enough? Why can’t I just be happy with her?

This is it, then: I must make a decision. A lifetime of monogamy with the woman I love. Or a lifetime of dating who I want, of doing what I want, of having complete and total freedom. It doesn’t mean I’ll never have a girlfriend or a child or a family. It just means I’ll have them on my terms, not those of this repressive society that expects you to cut off your balls as soon as you say “I do.”

Rick Rubin once told me that 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. And I’m throwing it away.

I’m on the threshold of the freedom I’ve been fantasizing about for the last year, yet now it feels like plunging off the edge of that rooftop bar.

But for some reason, that’s not what I’m doing. Instead, I’m relaxing in solitude. I didn’t even know I’d missed myself. I finished a book last night and I’m deep into another one this morning. I haven’t read this much in years, or enjoyed it quite so much. The bed feels clean and spacious, the sun warm and comforting, the Cinnamon Toast Crunch soulful and decadent.

I feel loneliness at times, sadness occasionally, and a hovering sense of doom without Ingrid, as well as guilt for subjecting her to all my doubt, resentment, and struggle for nothing. But, still, I’m happier alone. Just me and the Survivor. At least the Survivor will let me water other plants.

Perhaps the people who hurt you the most when they leave are the ones you shouldn’t have been with anyway, because they do it without compassion.

I can move in any direction I want without anyone stopping me, holding me back, being hurt by it, or even just asking where I’m going or to wait for her.

I wonder why I feel like I can’t handle marriage, but I can handle fatherhood. I think this is because it’s not the responsibility I mind, it’s the exclusivity. You can raise a child and still have one or two or ten other children. And growing apart and separating is the nature of that relationship, so over time everyone gains more freedom.

Fucked up, insecure, neurotic, and . . . enlightened. Because I’m done sitting here with these spineless men, most of whom don’t even enjoy the marriages they’re struggling so hard to save.

Loneliness is holding in a joke because you have no one to share it with.

For most men, what’s tougher than breaking up is the moment when their ex finally falls out of love with them and lets go, perhaps because it triggers a childhood fear—a psychological terror—of losing the first woman whose love they needed: their mother.

When your wife is tired of making the effort to understand you, when she’s fed up with hearing the same stories coming out of your mouth, when she holds so much resentment that it poisons every conversation, when she’s nicer to telemarketers than she is to you, when the only time she’s passionate anymore is when she’s criticizing you—that’s when you want a mistress. Someone whose eyes glisten with attraction when she looks at you, whose ears perk up when you speak, whose hands crave the feel of your skin, whose thighs moisten when you kiss her—someone who actually appreciates your presence and treats it like a gift instead of a punishment.

Because every yes is the gateway to an adventure.

In life, whoever has the strongest reality wins. Lose your moral certainty and lose the ground you stand on.

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.

I make out with her passionately. I don’t know why I keep touching people’s filthy lips, but I crave the intimacy and connection more than the anonymous sex. Maybe I am polyamorous—because it’s not just free sex I’m searching for, it’s free romance, free connection, free relationships, free getting-naked-with-someone-you-enjoy-and-who-enjoys-you-and-then-getting-to-know-each-other-even-better-afterward.

I suppose if I technically wanted total freedom, I’d let him go to town. But, I realize, the goal isn’t sexual anarchy. It’s that I want the rules around my sexuality to be self-imposed, not externally imposed. That’s the key difference—perhaps in everything.

The goal, then, is liberation: to be the master of my orgasm. I don’t want my partner to own it, which would be monogamy, but I also don’t want the orgasm to own me, which would be addiction.

For a millisecond, I consider stopping. I should probably get back to the hotel and check on Anne anyway. Then I think, No. This is amazing. I don’t want to stop this. So I’m selfish. Let me be selfish. They can leave and I’ll deal with it later. I’m learning how to take care of my own needs for a change. In moments like these, the true nature of one’s soul is revealed.

Connected sex is a spiritual experience, but not in the way the Tantra polys describe it. It is spiritual because it’s a release from ego, a merging with the other, a discorporation into the atoms vibrating around us, a connection to the universal energy that moves through all things without judgment or prejudice.

Only fear is restrictive. Love is expansive.

Even if someone is your perfect match, it’s unlikely to work if your core values are different.

Whatever we are looking for, we will find—if it doesn’t find us first. However, the result will not be what we’re consciously looking for, but what we’re unconsciously seeking.