The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships

by Neil Strauss

90 percent of couples report a decrease in marital satisfaction after having their first child. Speaking of which, more than 3 percent of babies are not actually fathered by the male parent who thinks he did.*

“What’s the difference between guilt and shame?” I ask. “Guilt is just about your behavior. Shame is about who you are.”

I look at his legs, built by some super genetic stock and, probably, by a strict dad who loved him only when he scored goals.

Evidently, women have eating disorders, men have sex addiction. I suppose both share the same obsession: women’s bodies.

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.

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

Do you know what kind of people can’t control their behavior, even when they don’t enjoy that behavior anymore? Weak people? Addicts.

In this life, we don’t meet many people who truly love us, who accept us for who we are, who put us before themselves.

These therapists must be stopped. If they succeed in bullying women out of dressing beautifully, we might as well all move to Iran.

I’m trying to get something out of this. I really am. But the accusations and diagnoses fly around so quickly that it’s hard to accept them just on faith. You come in as an alcoholic or a sex addict, and you leave as an alcoholic codependent sex addict love avoidant with PTSD, OCD, and ADD. We’re all suffering from low self-esteem, so I don’t see how making us into walking DSMs helps.

“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.”

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.

“I think you’re intellectualizing to be able to control the overall addiction,”

“I once interviewed a woman who was going through a sex change to become a man,” I tell him. “And she told me that as soon as the testosterone therapy kicked in, she suddenly understood men, because she wanted to fuck everything that moved.”

I’m following the rules but missing the point.

In the past, I would have thought this was the most beautiful thing in the world to say. Now, instead, I worry that wanting to give up “anything” for someone else’s happiness is a dysfunctional symptom of love addiction and codependence. Then I worry that being scared by her selfless caring is a symptom of my own love avoidance. They’re really screwing up my mind in here.

mood-lifting mascot.

“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.”

“Only when our love for someone exceeds our need for them do we have a shot at a genuine relationship together.”

Out here, there’s just too much reality:

If they turn being male and horny into some kind of brain cancer that’s covered by health insurance, they’ll be billionaires.”

They’re all just words, made up by people with degrees, to enforce social norms.

Fisher says that this natural ebbing of romance and sexuality can be prevented. The solution, she elaborates, is for couples to do novel and exciting things together (to release dopamine and get the romance rush), make love regularly (to release oxytocin and sexually bond), cut themselves off from cheating opportunities, and, in general, make sure their partners are “continually thrilling” enough to keep all three drives humming.

Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was so notorious for cheating on his wife with attractive women who attended sobriety meetings that his colleagues later started calling this type of lechery the thirteenth step.

I’m so bad at commitment, I can’t even commit to being uncommitted.

“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.”

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.

This is truly the blackest day of my life: I’ve been kicked out of an orgy for eating popcorn.

I trust Pepper as an authority—even after I learn that his last name is Mint.

Maybe this is where all the women hang out who actually like it when guys text photos of their dicks.

“Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.”

So far, not a single alternative relationship that I’ve closely observed appears to be free, intimate, and healthy.

A criticism Rick once gave me flashes through my mind: You create the image that you’re a good person as opposed to actually being a good person.

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.

“So let me see if I understand this. You’re cheating on your wife with your affair partner. And now you’re also cheating on your affair partner with your wife?”

“Just remember,” she adds soothingly, “that the only people who can be abandoned are children and dependent elders. If you’re an adult, then no one can abandon you except you.”

The complete satisfaction of all instinctual needs is not only not a basis for happiness, it does not even guarantee sanity.”

The person who is too smart to love is truly an idiot.

“Don’t trade long-term happiness for short-term pleasure.”

People want love, but after they get it, they become scared or bored or uncertain or resentful.