was proximity with her attachment object, in the face of separation anxiety.
The hormones dopamine and oxytocin were having their wicked way with her eagerness system, pushing her toward the attachment object who would never commit to her and who therefore chronically activated her attachment 20system’s need for safe haven.
This is the dark side of pairing stress and attachment: the “I am lost” feeling, which motivates us to stabilize our connection with our attachment object—“I am home.” Therapist and author Sue Johnson calls this “solace 21sex,” sex that’s motivated by your desire to prove that you are loved.
Now in a relationship with a man who is kind and attentive and committed, Isabel’s “I am lost” fire is not burning—which is a good thing! —and it can’t, therefore, ignite desire. Which doesn’t feel so good.
Solution? Isabel needs to advance the plot. attachment and sex: sex that advances the plot We never get to see Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester have sex, but I imagine it would be similar to the sex in modern romance novels, metaphorizing penile-vaginal intercourse in terms of that “pursuit of wholeness.” As if Edward Rochester’s penis is the key to the lock of Jane’s vagina, which opens the door to her heart. Modern romance novels thrive on this kind of thing.
Many romance novels these days are not like Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice. They have sex in them. A lot of sex. Some of them have so much sex, they’re basically Porn For The Ladies. But the best romance novels are the ones where the sex isn’t just gratuitous for the sake of entertainment. In the best romances, the sex advances the plot, carrying the hero and heroine, against all odds and in the face of many obstacles, through one of the behavioral markers of attachment.
As just one example, the heroine of Laura Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm keeps trying to leave the hero and return to her father, but as she rides away she grows “more uneasy every mile” (separation distress) “until she turn[s] her back on her father and return[s]” to the hero (proximity seeking) 22and reunites with him, with, ahem, “rough vigor.”
Romance novels are about the narrative of stressed attachment, from “I am lost” to “I am home,” and sex has a starring role as an attachment behavior.
I’ve been discussing this idea of sex that advances the plot with my women friends, and every time, their eyes widen and they say something
like, “And after you’re married, the story’s over. Happy ending, no more plot. Oh.”
Which . . . yeah. But it makes the solution obvious. Add more plot!
So if you’re thinking to yourself, “Oh, crap, that means that only in either brand-new or else dysfunctional relationships will the sex ever be exciting,” there’s good news—and also bad news, and then more good news.
The first good news is that sex you crave often isn’t sex that feels good —remember, enjoying and eagerness are not the same thing. Sue Johnson describes this “solace sex” as “soothing but unerotic,” in contrast to 23 “sealed-off sex,” which is “erotic but empty.”Solace sex can feel like a relief, because you’re easing fear. But let’s not mistake relief for pleasure.
Like imagine that you need to pee really, really badly, and you have to wait and wait, and then finally you pee, and it’s almost pleasurable because it’s such an intense relief. Sex to advance the plot in unstable relationships is like that. It doesn’t feel good when you experience fear and instability in your relationship, just as it doesn’t feel good to have to pee really badly. It just feels like a relief when you can finally do something about it.
And don’t we want our relationships and our sex lives to be about more than just . . . relief?
So the good news is that if you’re missing this kind of intense craving for sex in your relationship, it’s no loss.
The bad news is that, yes, most of us will find it easier to crave sex, for what that’s worth, when our relationships are unstable—either new or threatened. But the second good news is that there’s a bunch of spectacular research on what people can do to increase their craving and pleasure (eagerness and enjoying) with sex in a stable, happy relationship. I’ll talk about how to do this in chapter 7, but first let’s come to grips with the individual differences that influence how you manage attachment in your relationship.
When Laurie told me about her vacation fiasco and the ugly cry surprise, I asked, “What happened after the hot and dirty sex?”
She said, “I fell asleep for three hours . . . which was almost as good as the sex. I just wish I hadn’t had to cry to make it happen.”
“It sounds to me like crying let you discharge the accumulated stress that was hitting your brake, which freed up your accelerator.”