
The Two Choice Dilemma, Marital Sadism and the Mercy Fuck
January 13, 2008Some of you will love this and some of you won’t. This is the part where we finally weigh in on the cost of being an avoider.
Basically in life we tend to not like making the hard choices. We like making choices where it is win-win. The lose-lose propositions require a certain amount of pain. So we avoid making those choices, hoping that a more favorable option eventually comes around. Sometimes it does. But in the area of sexual disparity, it mostly won’t, at least without making a choice.
To quote Schnarch:
“Pop psychology tells us what we want to hear: you should expect your partner to accept, understand and validate your position even if he doesn’t agree– he should even say you make sense! That strategy works as long as there’s enough room for everyone to have his or her own feelings and act upon them. But many marital therapy approaches don’t work in the bedroom because they try to avoid two-choice dilemmas. We can agree to disagree as long as we are focused on feelings and perceptions. When the issue is behavior, however, flexibility is reduced significantly. You can’t agree to disagree about sex. When your spouse says he or she is never doing a sexual behavior– or never having sex again– you don’t feel like saying, “Thanks for sharing!”
When we say we have no choice, what we’re really saying is that there is no choice we want. There is always a choice, but it is often a choice that we don’t want. What we really want to do is make a choice that suits us at the expense of the other person. Some people think monogamy is a great thing…for the other person. The choice to not have sex is based on the assumption that the other person will not exercise their choice to have sex.
In the ’60’s and ’70’s it was popular to say that it was unrealistic to expect one person to meet all of your needs. The have-it-all saying was based on avoiding the 2 choice dilemma. In fact, that’s at the crux of the “Have-it-all” mentality. It pretty much avoids the whole reality of making hard choices and the economic reality of the principle of scarcity.
So we have this couple who we can call Digger and Arwyn. Schnarch names them Audrey and Peter. Arwyn seems to care less about sex while Digger is frustrated at the lack of sex.
Arwyn’s gambit is based on the idea that she can not have sex because there is too much pressure. She says that if there wasn’t so much pressure, she might be more open to sex. Plus, with Digger initiating she never has a chance to initiate. So Digger agrees not to initiate and thus not to pressure Arwyn. So a week goes by and Arwyn does not initiate because then she would simply be responding to the pressure of the agreement. Another week goes by and she does not initiate. As time passes, Digger’s frustration grows and Arwyn knows it but does not initiate because she is feeling pressured by her own thoughts of having to do what she does not want to do. She doesn’t want to want Digger while she does want him to want her. New “if only’s” surface as she continues to try to hold out just enough hope to keep the marriage intact. She may even try to improve in other areas in order to compensate for this one marital lack.
So where does that leave Digger? Anything he possibly does will increase pressure. Damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. So now he faces a 2 choice dilemma. No sex or force growth through making a choice whether or not to have sex.
2amsomewhere referred to this a bit earlier in a comment about those bloggers who choose to have affairs. They essentially take the choice away from their partner while trying to have their cake and eat it too. Two choice dilemmas are a pathway to growth and an affair essentially robs themselves of that opportunity as well as that of their partner.
So I get that I’ve helped enable this sad state of affairs in perpetuating a sexless marriage. Arwyn holds all the cards, sexually speaking. What little sex we’ve had over the past few years has been not so good so I’m not really wanting it too badly from her at the moment. I’d like to be in a monogamous sexually-fulfilling marriage but it remains to be seen whether I’m willing to pay the freight in order to get there.
The scenario described in chapter 11 perfectly matches where I’m at with Arwyn more or less. It’s irritating that I had to read through so many other chapters to get here, but here I am.
What really drove me mad getting to this chapter was the section on marital sadism. I know I have a very thick red line of sadism running through me. A very bad nastiness that has nothing to do with the good nastiness of sex. It’s in all of us and it occurs in pretty much every marriage. Deep down, in our heart of hearts we hate our spouse. That bit was hard to grapple with as I read it, but the realization of it lead me right into that old saying: the opposite of love isn’t hate, it is apathy. Hate seems like maybe we’re putting it more strongly than it really is, but our squeamishness about that is a result of some false beliefs. Namely we think that love and hate can not coexist. Where hate is, love can not be and where love is, hate must be absent. This belief leads us into denial which pretty much guarantees that we’re going to behave worse towards our chosen spouse. The fact is, hate exists in the world of love and love exists in the world of hate. We have to confront that evil nasty side before we can move on. The whole idea behind the reflected sense of self is so that other people won’t make a fuss about the nastiness we have inside of us. We want to be loved by others so that we can love ourselves. By focusing on how great we are (through listening to what our itching ears want to hear) we can deny our evil nasty side.
Differentiation comes from confronting our evil side and truly repenting. That’s my take, not Schnarch’s but this is a dot that he left to be connected. We get all self-righteous and inflict cruelty on others to justify ourselves. We elevate ourselves by depressing others which isn’t exactly a recipe for self-respect. On the other side, we constantly compromise our integrity by accepting the bullshit of others. The perpetrator/victim mentality has gotten me no where.
In this section we encounter the mercy fuck and the mind fuck. I’m willing to wager that most of you know exactly what I mean, at least if you’re married. This is not to be confused with the pity fuck that Chelsea Summers wrote about recently.
The mercy fuck is the penultimate of marital sadism. Basically the mercy fucker says, “Okay, I don’t want to have sex with you but I’m going to allow you to mount me and I’ll do the minimum to get you off. You’d bloody well better appreciate it, too!”
This is followed by the mind fuck, where the mercy fucker doesn’t respect the fuckee because he is so willing to accept such poor sex. “See? This only proves that all you want is to use my body!” when that is all that is ever offered.
The person who is offered the mercy fuck is basically given a choice between sex even a hooker would be ashamed of giving or no sex at all. The only real way of dealing with the mercy fucker is to stop doing it.
Then we have the woman who fakes orgasms and then resents her husband for feeling so good about the job he’s doing. That’s a mind fuck. “Yes dear” is a mind fuck because we all know that it means “Yes, but don’t complain if it’s not done with enthusiasm.”
Basically, marital sadism allows partners to screw each other two ways at once. Lousy oral sex technique while feigning ignorance and other passive-aggressive war mongering techniques are all part of “normal” marital sadism.
We hate our partners, but that is a reflection of how much we loathe ourselves. We need to deal with our self loathing in order to get along with each other. We need to confront our hate and deal with it. Notice I’m not saying make it go away, I’m saying deal. Stop blaming and start standing.
What that means for Arwyn and I remains to be seen. But I’m digesting this and thinking about it. I’m sure you all might have something to add to this discussion in the way of experiences. You can read pretty big chunks of that chapter here, if you want.
D.