The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book about Relationships

by Neil Strauss

When I’m single, I want to be in a relationship. When I’m in a relationship, I miss being single. And worst of all, when the relationship ends and my captor-lover finally moves on, I regret everything and don’t know what I want anymore.

Even the rare friends who’ve remained happy in their marriages admit, when pressed, to being unfaithful at least once.

“I’m not an addiction specialist,” she says. “But if you’re cheating on your relationship, if you’re visiting porn sites, or if you’re masturbating, that’s sex addiction.”

The thought occurs before I can stop it: These groups are a great place to meet women. Carrie is sitting here divulging the exact strategy by which she can be seduced. There’s nothing a man with low self-esteem loves more than a beautiful woman who doesn’t know she’s beautiful.

He looks like his neck is in a guillotine and he’s waiting for the blade to fall. No one seems to have much of a problem with cheating here, just with getting caught.

Lying is about controlling someone else’s reality, hoping that what they don’t know won’t hurt you.

I stop there. I decide not to mention the other option I’m debating: to just say, “Fuck it, this is my nature,” and not get in another monogamous relationship, to be free to go out with who I want, when I want.

The blood drains out of my face and my bones feel hollow. Something in me has just been cut loose. It is fear. It is panic. It is sadness. It is guilt. It is pain. It is every bad emotion at once. I’m as light as cotton, yet I don’t have the strength to move.

“Being overcontrolled as a child sets you up to lie as an adult,” she concludes. “So the theory of sex addiction is that when you feel out of control or disempowered, you sneak around and act out sexually to reestablish control and regain your sense of self.”

She strokes her hair, which is as prodigious and thick as Rick Rubin’s beard, and asks a question that will alter my entire understanding of my childhood: “Was she there for you . . . or were you there for her?”

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.

“A relationship should be about what you both want, not about what you both don’t want each other to have.

“When your mom is emotionally dependent on you and has intimate discussions with you that she should be having with her spouse, there’s a name for that.” Joan looks at me like a prizefighter sizing up a dazed opponent, then lands her final blow. “It’s called emotional incest.”

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

We’ve come a long way as a culture in five hundred years. Now, instead of calling them witches and killing them, we call them sluts and kill their reputations.

Then I order a stack of books from Amazon, the classics in the field of consensual nonmonogamy—The Ethical Slut, Opening Up, Sex at Dawn, Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits—as well as a lesser-known book from a more therapeutic perspective, Love in Abundance: A Counselor’s Advice on Open Relationships, by Kathy Labriola.

We’re interrupted by a naked rabbi who lives on a poly kibbutz in Israel and is in some way dating the woman who’s either sleeping, dead, or meditating in the hot tub. He stands up, pours a glass of wine, and sings a prayer over it in a deep, beautiful voice as his dick swings in the air like a metronome.

1. Turn judgment into compassion and acceptance. 2. Transform shame into reassurance. 3. Change criticism to appreciation. 4. Replace blame with understanding.

“I think the mistake you made with her,” Nicole jumps in, “is that you made it all about you wanting to be with other people. You should have made it instead about wanting to have sexual adventures together. This way, you can include her rather than making it seem like a failing on her part. That’s what worked on me.”

“Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.”

“I’d been in a monogamous marriage before and it didn’t really work for me,” Lawrence replies. “The whole time we were together, I was faithful. But I felt physical pain in my body from not having all that juice and excitement and connection in my life. When I came out of that, I decided I wouldn’t ever do that again.”

“If you’re feeling insecurity or jealousy, that’s for you to manage,” Lawrence answers. “It’s not her job to manage your discomfort—unless she’s doing something that’s disrespectful or hurtful. One tool I’ve used is to understand that even if Leah deeply loves another person, it can only be additive to our relationship.” “In what way?” “Think of it like this: You have a love muscle, and if you work it out more, it increases your capacity to love. And you can bring that energy and quality back to your relationship. The alternative to that would be my marriage, where I shut down my capacity to love and feel and have sex in order to stay monogamous.”

“In life, we are born innocent and pure, beautiful and honest, and in a state of oneness with each moment. As we develop, however, our caregivers and others load us with baggage. Some of us keep accumulating more and more baggage until we become burdened by all the weight, trapped in beliefs and behaviors that keep us stuck. But the true purpose of life is to divest yourself of that baggage and become light and pure again. You’ve been searching for freedom this whole time. That is true freedom.”

once your desires are fulfilled in your imagination, the need to live them out in real life suddenly doesn’t seem so urgent. Once the brain’s reward center has gotten its hit of dopamine, it doesn’t need another one—at least not for a little while.

The only problem is that after the orgasm, I’m still stuck with myself—and my mistakes. I think about Ingrid’s footsteps clomping outside the front door, her mocking shouts of freedom, the glee she took in blocking my path when I tried to enter a room, and the warmth of her body, heart, and spirit. All she tried to do was bring joy and laughter into my life. And in return, I gave her the best of what I had to offer: resentment.

“Not exactly. I would never be unfaithful. But in relationships, I feel limited because I’m missing out on other things. It’s a bit tragic. You can be with someone that you really, really like and still feel a bit sad that you can’t have anything else.”

“All the things you’ve been trying to get from these relationships—freedom, understanding, fairness, acceptance—are exactly the things that you never got from your mom. So every time you load all that unfinished business onto your partner, you’re setting yourself up for another disappointment. Because as an adult, the only person who can give you those things is you. Do you understand that?”

So I push through the pain and fight harder. It eats into my bank account, but in the long run I’m saving thousands of times this amount of money on bad dates, dramatic relationships, short-lived marriages, poor decisions, and the false friends I’m trauma-bonded to. I am motivated by the mistakes of the past, the hope of a better future, the desperate dream of Ingrid, and the feeling deep down that finally, after all this searching, I’m doing the right thing. Not just for Ingrid or for my relationships, but for me. Instead of trying to find other people to complete me, I am finally completing myself.

The next morning, I start filling him—and me—with the things I needed but never had as a child. When I have a negative thought about myself, I gently replace it with a positive truth. When I make a mistake, I forgive myself. When I’m too thin-skinned or thick-skinned, I gently guide myself back into moderate reality. And when I regress, I silently soothe myself as if teaching a child not to be afraid of the dark. Just as I told Anne to be a good mother to herself, I’m reparenting myself. It’s somewhat pathetic that at this age, I need to properly learn how to be an adult. But if the problems I have in relationships are the result of developmental immaturities, then by nurturing these stunted parts of myself into a growth spurt, perhaps I’ll finally attain the happiness and stability that have eluded me through them all.

Each day, I try to take care of the six core needs Lorraine told me about: physical, by surfing and eating healthily; emotional, by allowing myself to experience and express feelings without being either hypercontrolling or out of control with them; social, by spending time with Adam, Calvin, Rick, and other growth-minded friends; intellectual, by reading literature, listening to lectures, starting a film discussion group, and, most importantly, simply listening more; and, most alien of all for me, spiritual, through transcendental meditation, which a friend of Rick’s teaches me.

he tells me, “I think you’re going to understand what I mean now when I tell you the secret to being faithful.” “What’s that?” “Don’t trade long-term happiness for short-term pleasure.”

Many of the concepts can be found in the works of Pia Mellody, James Hollis, Virginia Satir, John Bradshaw, Kenneth Adams, Marshall Rosenberg, Marion Solomon, Harville Hendrix, Salvador Minuchin, Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, Robert Firestone, and others. I also recommend taking Patrick Carnes’s Post-Traumatic Stress Index test online to understand the ways your past haunts your behavior today. (Use the original PTSI test, not the revised PTSI-R.) And you may want to email Barbara McNally (the one in Venice, CA) and urge her to publish her own book, because her teachings and wisdom were a big influence as well.

www.neilstrauss.com/thetruth.

www.neilstrauss.com/goodtimes.