When Love Turns Sour
Rediscovering Eros When a Relationship Flounders

By Douglas Sadownick
From Genre Magazine March 1999

Carlos and Jim fell head over heels in love at a friend's 1998 Halloween party. The two jocks became a West Hollywood model couple, gainfully employed as film execs, in their mid-20s, with "six-pack abs for days," according to Carlos. So why not get married, right?

The sexual attraction felt at first was awesome and filled with intoxication, wonder. The only problem is that now Carlos, a sultry gym boy from East Los Angeles, and Jim, a bright-eyed marathon runner from the Midwest, no longer had sex. They'd try some routine fucking and sucking, but having pulled one too many fake orgasms it seemed easier to cuddle (and resort to Jeff Striker).

They came to couples counseling with me because they wanted to save the relationship. "This is an old pattern," Carlos complained. "I get turned onto some guy, worship his body, but if I really start to go out with him, I lose interest."

The tips they expected to get - wear boxers; watch porn together; exchange massages - they had already tried. (Getting high didn't help either.) I took a different approach. Rather than make the priority saving the relationship, I suggested each go on a journey inside his own mind to redeem and resuscitate his own erotic gay soul. Nothing else had worked, so they gave it a whirl.

Tip1: Entertain the notion that you have an erotic gay soul figure inside the unconscious waiting to get it on with you.

Carlos and Jim had potent ideas in their heads of someone like each other long before they met. "I go nuts over hot, sleek Latin guys," Jim said. Added Carlos: "Uptight WASP guys with a nasty secret side do something for me." In other words, they carried a living ghost-image, a visceral template, of Mr. Right inside long before they met one another. Carlos and Jim were wonderful screens for these living movies.

Tip2: Identify that it's homophobia that keeps this gay soul figure fagged out.

This secret Hot Muscular Stud Within, who can soothe us during times of stress and guide us during times of inspiration, isn't consciously felt by most gay men due to the crippling homophobia, we're subject to from the womb. Our natural, essential life energy isn't allowed to blossom in infancy during which it is first experienced. Unlike black or Jewish kids raised by their own kind, gays are raised by people who deny the small child's affectional feelings, devoutly wish for something different, and refuse their child an enlightened witness. So Carlos and Jim, in opening up their hearts to each other, are going to open their hearts to the unfinished family business of violently repressed toxic shame and internalized homophobia.

Tip 3: Learn how to feel into the shame.

Because Carlos and Jim learned as children to push shameful feelings away so as to protect themselves from more abuse, they ended up pushing each other away, too. Feelings that don't get felt get violently rejected; so does anyone who is going to provoke shameful feelings. Shame isn't bad to feel - it humanizes and opens the heart if it's worked with. It's shame about having shame that creates the kind of rigidity and uptightness that kills sex and love. Carlos and Jim had slick ways of avoiding shame when they first came to see me. They'd say things like, "Don't go there," or they'd make jokes about each other's hurt, like "grow up." Through practice they learned that if each could goad the other into feeling a bad feeling, a powerful journey into a private hell took each into a deep emotional opening that helped to save their love.

Tip 4: Be excruciatingly honest.

Carlos and Jim felt repulsive as people deep inside. They began to project these icy feelings onto each other and experience each other as vampiristic, disgusting and evil. It was by daring to be honest and not managing the other person's reaction to this honesty that they could overcome the silence about speaking of their homophobic revulsion. Their best sex took place after such confessions, proving that feelings once named and felt, move the energy around - and get the Dick hard.

Tip 5: Identify the inner mother and father; set limits on them.

Carlos, with his neediness and cooking skills, was adopting the role of his mother to woo his neglectful father. Jim, with his cold and exacting, meticulous qualities, just reminded himself of his own punitive father. The appearance of the inner parents can seem charming at first, but they blot out the gayness by re-creating a heterosexual family system that isn't about allowing the gay spirit to reach its highest potential. Since Carlo's and Jim's biological parents were not particularly pro-gay, it stood to reason that their inner parents could do without hot homo sex, too.

Tip 6: Cultivate each other to own his own soul figure.

Carlos and Jim were under the impression lovers must be everything to each other. This put a burden on them. When each discovered that each other had a soul figure who was each other's primary lover, they breathed easier. I encouraged Carlos to cut out pictures of naked men who reminded him of the very thing Jim provoked when he first met Jim. I encouraged Jim to write poetry to his inner Angel Buddy. Although each man had to wrestle with feelings of envy and hurt about the other's inner romantic interest, they eventually saw that it makes sense to honor the gay spirit that brought them together as bigger than them, more apt to nurture and cultivate their human love with transcendent good fortune.

Tip 7: Seek supports from like-minded others.

Gay men are hungry for a new approach to lovemaking that suggests that warm bodies are spiritual and that working with feelings can be erotic. Games that promote separation aren't nearly as effective as techniques that open the heart. Carlos and Jim rediscovered the elixir of erotic love that brought them together. But they didn't find it without continual struggle. The homosexual soul figure will always provoke backlash from the demon of internalized homophobia. By working these two inner personalities from the inside out, they discovered that romantic love was a path toward self-realization, transforming the two in a way that dreams of white picket fences couldn't even touch.

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