Sexual dysfunction: What’s love got to do with it?
In clinical discussions, we simplify desire as if it were libido.
The question has many dimensions: social, economic, aesthetic, recreational, sexual, medical, time-to-death, and more. In their first romantic relationships, people generally prefer not to think in these terms. Their embarrassment dissipates with experience.
This ordinary process can be more clearly perceived after a relationship ends by breakup, divorce, or death and the person begins anew with someone. The person then can deliberately weigh the factors that will determine his or her involvement. When an arrangement is worked out, each person perceives what has been offered by the partner. Of course, perceptions vary in accuracy.
Anticipating making a deal can be very exciting, and once the deal is formally accepted, people often feel a celebratory degree of pleasure, interest, and sexual desire. They think that life is good. In cultures where parents make the deal, the couple courts in the hope that they will fall in love by early marriage.
4. Love is an attachment. Love also means the presence of a bond or attachment. People weave their psyches together and begin to feel a hunger to be with the other person. They think of themselves as belonging with and to the other.
Sexual activities—particularly those that lead to orgasm—facilitate attachment, but the bonds within each partner’s mind do not necessarily develop at the same time or solidify at the same rate. Thus, some people are unable to answer, “I love you, too,” when the partner reveals feelings that are summarized as love.
5. Love as a moral commitment. The rituals that sanctify marriage emphasize clearly that love is a commitment for couples to try to realize the grand idealized ambition (see “Love as an ambition”). The rituals are public promises to honor and cherish each other through all of life’s vicissitudes.
This love as moral commitment instantly restructures life by generating a new set of obligations. Many hostile, disappointed, and seemingly asexual spouses who have not felt pleasure and interest in a partner for a long time will tell their doctors they love the partner. They mean they remain bound by their moral commitment.
6. Love as a mental struggle. Love’s original emotions are stimulated by an idealized version of the partner. This image is internalized early in the relationship. As time passes, discovering our partner’s limitations gradually attenuates our idealization. We think of our earlier appraisals as naïve. Even so, disappointment does not quickly cancel our commitment because of our:
- ambition to love
- obligation to live through bad moments
- ability to love the idealized version of the partner
- moral commitments to raising our children.
The moral commitment to love can sustain people for a lifetime, despite grave disappointments. It also explains the persistent guilt many feel as they contemplate extramarital affairs, divorce, and the agonizing dilemma between their commitment to live with their children and their wish to be free of unhappiness with their partner.
“I love my partner, but I am not in love with him/her,” means, “although I’m still committed, I have lost my ability to idealize my partner.”
7. Love as a force of nature. Love is a force in nature that creates a unity from two individuals. It casts our fates together, organizes reproduction, and remains vital to adult growth and development and to the maturation of children. This love is a backbone that supports the sexual and non-sexual processes of our lives.5
Among older couples, “I love my partner but I am no longer in love with her/him” may mean, “We have shared so much of our lives that my partner is an inextricable part of me. I could never be free of my partner, even though most of the pleasure is gone.”
8. Love as an illusion. We create love for our partner by internal private processes, maintain it by prudent diplomatic dishonesties, and can lose it without the partner’s knowing. To remain in an intimate relationship, the processes of love require defensive distortions of a person’s feelings, thoughts, and perceptions.
As individuals gain experience, many look back and see that their assumptions about love were self-serving illusions. When entire relationships are dismissed with “what was I thinking?” the person usually means that now I can perceive that I created illusions so as not to admit to the depth of my disappointment with my partner.
9. Love as a stop sign. When a person says, “I love you,” the listener is challenged to discern its meaning. The emotions and motives behind the sentence can be very difficult to accurately perceive. Some love relationships, after all, are deceptions.
