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way of taking care of a marriage.”
    By refusing to acknowledge anything that falls outside the accepted range of behavior, Charles and Rose had achieved the opposite of what they were seeking. Rather than making their love more secure, they had, in fact, made it more vulnerable. But allowing both of them to reveal heretofore segregated parts of themselves was not without risk. The very foundation of their relationship was at stake. Each of them would have to tolerate the unfolding of the other, even if it took them beyond their range of comfort.
Dismantling the Security System
    We often expect our relationship to act as a buttress against the slings and arrows of life. But love, by its very nature, is unstable. So we shore it up: we tighten the borders, batten down the hatches, and create predictability, all in an effort to make us feel more secure. Yet the mechanisms that we put in place to make love safer often put us more at risk. We ground ourselves in familiarity, and perhaps achieve a peaceful domestic arrangement, but in the process we orchestrate boredom. The verve of the relationship collapses under the weight of all that control. Stultified, couples areleft wondering, “Whatever happened to fun? What ever happened to excitement, to transcendence, to awe?”
    Desire is fueled by the unknown, and for that reason it’s inherently anxiety-producing. In his book
Open to Desire
, the Buddhist psychoanalyst Mark Epstein explains that our willingness to engage that mystery keeps desire alive. Faced with the irrefutable otherness of our partner, we can respond with fear or with curiosity. We can try to reduce the other to a knowable entity, or we can embrace her persistent mystery. When we resist the urge to control, when we keep ourselves open, we preserve the possibility of discovery. Eroticism resides in the ambiguous space between anxiety and fascination. We remain interested in our partners; they delight us, and we’re drawn to them. But, for many of us, renouncing the illusion of safety, and accepting the reality of our fundamental insecurity, proves to be a difficult step.

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More Intimacy, Less Sex
Love Seeks Closeness, but Desire Needs Distance
    Love and lust are inseparable parts of a larger whole for some, while for others they are irretrievably disconnected. Most of us, however, express our eroticism somewhere in the gray areas where love and lust both relate and conflict.
    –
Jack Morin, from
The Erotic Mind
    I N ANY FIRST CONVERSATION WITH a couple, I always ask how they met and what attracted them to each other. Since we associate therapy with problems, people usually don’t come to me when they are still in the initial thrall of love. Sometimes they need a gentle reminder of what once was. It can be difficult for estranged or distressed couples to focus on what drew them together, but within every couple’s “creation myth” lies the key to understanding the unfolding story of their relationship.
    “She was beautiful.” “He was so smart and funny.” “He had pizzazz, and he exuded such self-confidence and style.” “For me it was her warmth.” “For me it was his gentleness.” “I knew she wouldn’t leave me.” “I loved his hands.” “His dick.” “Her eyes.” “His voice.” “He made great omelets.” The attributes that describe an idealized lover are always luxurious and bountiful. Love is anexercise in selective perception, even a delicious deception as well, though who cares about that in the beginning?
    We magnify the good qualities of those we love, and confer on them almost mythical powers. We transform them, and we in turn are transformed in their presence. “He made me laugh.” “She made me feel special, smart.” “We could talk for hours.” “I knew I could trust her.” “I felt so accepted.” “He made me feel beautiful.” Such comments highlight the magnificence of the beloved or illuminate his capacity to enlarge us, to lift us from