one of the frequent and painful paradoxes of romantic life is that the more we get to know and love someone the harder it can be to summon up any sincere wish to sleep with them intimacy and closeness far from fostering deeper sexual desire can be the very ingredients that destroy excitement whereas having only just recently met a person and not feeling too much for them can set up awkward yet compelling preconditions for wanting very badly to take them to bed the conundrum is sometimes colloquially referred to as the Madonna [ __ ] complex it can
sound offensive and reactionary phrased like this as if the problem applied to only one gender and might at some level condone or even promote the very dynamic that it describes and yet the phrase circles something highly significant always contemporary and of relevance to every gender it might for heterosexual women be known as the saint Brut complex it was Sigmund Freud who first drew attention to our difficulties connecting love with desire in an essay of 1912 titled on the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love of many of his patients he wrote where they
love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love in seeking to explain the division Freud pointed to two facts connected to our upbringing first in childhood we are generally brought up by people we love deeply and yet towards whom we cannot express sexual feelings frightened as we are by a strict incest taboo and second as adults we tend to choose lovers who in certain powerful though unconscious ways resemble those whom we loved most dearly as children together these influences set up a devilish conundrum whereby the more deeply we come to love someone
outside of our family the more strongly we are reminded of the intimacy of our early familial bonds and hence are the less free we instinctively are to Bres our sexual desires without fear or reservation an incest taboo originally designed to limit the genetic dangers of inbreeding can the succeed in inhibiting and eventually ruining our chances of enjoying intercourse with someone to whom we are not in the remotest way related the likelihood of the incest taboos re-emergence with a partner increases greatly after the arrival of children until then reminders of the parental prototypes on which our
choice of lovers is subconsciously based can just about be kept at bay but once there is a pram in the hallway and a sweet infant referring to the person we once tied up or explored with a sex toy as mummy or daddy both parties may significantly start to take fright complain of feeling tired and turn in early a dichotomy grows between the pure things one can do with a partner one loves and the dirty things one still longs to do but can only imagine being free enough to do with a near stranger it can feel
untenable disrespectful to want to make love to or to put the matter at its sharpest to [ __ ] the kind of person who is later going to be preparing lunch boxes or arranging the school rotor to start to overcome the problem it pays to observe that not all childhoods are equal in their tendencies to generate sexual difficulties for people in later life a parent who is very uncomfortable with their body may send out covert signals that sex is invariably dirty bad and dangerous and thereby lends their child an impression that it truly can't belong
within a loving relationship a more integrated and mature parent on the other hand may suggest that they are reconciled to their desires and relaxed about some of the proto sexual things that small children naturally and innocently do like make a great deal of noise and mess take an interest in their bodies and at a certain age talk about poo a lot the feeling that one can be naughty and still loved and good is one of the great gifts that a parent may bequeath to their child a lot of the work to repair the love sex
dichotomy can strangely for something so physical in the mind we can't conceptually start a rehabilitate sex as a serious and in its way entirely respectable topic the good people who love their children and their jobs and are invested in upstanding life can be profoundly interested in that there need be no conflict between a longing to be filthy and depraved at some points and decorous and respectable at others we can contain multitudes the us that wants to flog or be debased or smear and the us that wants to advise nurture and counsel one can be a
[ __ ] and Madonna brute and saint rather than seeking out different partners we might settle less disruptively on merely adopting different roles a child cannot express love and sexuality to a parent and vice versa but it is one of the privileges of adulthood that we no longer have to be hampered by such a paradigm our lovers need not be only cozy co-parents and responsible sweet friends they can for a time in a very best transgressive sense also be something that is hugely important to our mental well-being and a survival of our relationships partners in
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