This post is addressed to people who (a) currently live in the world of sex-positive dating, which often includes kink and polyamory, and who (b) have begun to feel that all this sex and sociality is fun, but that Romantic Love is missing, and its absence matters more and more. Hence the title: “Moving from Sex-Positive Dating to Seeking a Relationship.” 

Yes of course, those two things can be the same. It is indeed possible to keep on “playing in the scene” and eventually manage to meet somebody within it who also wants to find an enduring, central love. Sex-positive social politics: check. 

Having said that, let’s notice the equally obvious truth that living a lifestyle of erotic adventurism and searching for a Primary Partner can be two very different things. And if you think you might want to attempt a permanent monogamous commitment with somebody awesome who feels uniquely suited to your nature, then they’re very different things.

Let’s draw on Greek mythology for a moment, to explain this in a more vivid way. What you’ve been doing is sampling the erotic individuality of a large number of people, and in pagan terms (which will likely suit you better than the relatively sex-negative monotheist worldview), that’s like living in a valley presided over by Aphrodite, the Goddess of sexuality and thrilling infatuation (also known, in the poly world, as NRE, “new relationship energy”). Since you’re also prioritizing consent, Aphrodite shares the place with Artemis, protector of women and girls. Wonderful.  

But where is Hera? She’s the Goddess of marriage, of long-term reliable continuity, of compatibility and all the wisdom we only really learn by voyaging deep into that other region that includes commitment, time, aging, and death. It’s where you get to really know someone else, and be really known. So it is also the place where someone’s feelings about you mean the most, because they’re based on the fullest knowledge of what and who you actually are: they really know you, and instead of running away, or friend-zoning, or attacking… they bring you acceptance, loyalty, and desire. And they let you know them just as deeply, and if it goes well enough, the whole thing becomes gloriously mutual. Well, that’s where Hera presides; that’s her realm, located somewhere over there, beyond Field and The League and Fetlife, beyond all those apps and “play parties.”  

There are two different metaphorical voyages involved: the second voyage is the LTR (Long Term Relationship) itself. But to reach its starting point, you must make the voyage that comes first, out and away from what you’re now doing and being (the nasty term for it, if you’re a man, is “fuckboy”—but such slut-shaming is quite unnecessary, especially if your Ethical Non-Monogamy has indeed been ethical, not deceptive), and into Hera’s country, where meeting Ms-or-Mr Right becomes much more likely, for inner and outer reasons.  

This first voyage is what I’m talking about, and what makes it difficult are the uncertainty and the rejections. You don’t know how long it will take, or exactly how best to go about each particular piece of it. And each encounter has four basic possibilities: you like them and they don’t like you, which is rejection, your least favorite. Or they like you and you don’t like them, which is disappointment; better than rejection, but awkward and boring. Or neither of you is interested, which is usually a bit better still, since nobody is hurt. Or the jackpot is hit, the gimmel on the dreidl: you like each other. 

Now I’m going to say something you already know. Why? Because the point is not to convey information, but to calm the anxious part of you that dreads rejection and uncertainty. Your head might find the repetition tiresome, but your heart needs it because that’s how emotional reassurance works. Here it is: the person you’re trying to get a date with is living their own life, populated by thousands of factors and people and exes and ailments and plans that you know nothing about. They might not reject you at all, but if they do, these unknowns would probably amount to a robust explanation for why you got turned down, one that has nothing to do with your value, your game, your charisma, or your prospects for finding love and happiness. As I once said to a lonely gentleman who’d just been turned down by a lady he liked: She’s on Planet Her. 

But what if the rejection actually is about you? Well, if it’s got any hostility in it, and you didn’t do much to warrant that, then it ain’t really about you. People’s hostility discredits itself. If they’re the sort of person who would say something hurtful or aggressive just because there were no fireworks between you two, then that’s obviously somebody you don’t want to be around anyway. You “dodged a bullet.”

Between that kind of egregious static, and a better result, there is only a thin band of genuinely relevant personal criticism that is not untrue and not unkind—and therefore worth taking seriously, and difficult to hear. But that’s also the stuff you can actually learn from. For example, people need to feel heard, and listened to—especially women, whose conversational style and expectations make many of them quite sensitive to being interrupted by a man, or spoken to at length without enough turn-taking. When a man is given constructive criticism about this issue it can be quite unpleasant for him, but if he can incorporate the advice into his manner, a great deal is to be gained. “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off…”

In relationship-oriented dating, an interaction that turns out to be a rejection is a bit like a pretty tree that turns out to be one of those stinky gingkos: it’s appealing from a distance, and then, up close, you realize what it is. But remember: they are part of the native foliage of the very terrain you are trying to cross. Be glad those experiences are there, because they tell you you’re in the right region, headed in the right direction. “Where grows the danger,” wrote the poet Hölderlin, “there also grows the power of salvation.”

As the years go by, each of us builds up an ever-growing stock of memories, associations, references, songs, jokes, and anecdotes. When we tell other people any one of these for the very first time, it might indeed have quite a good effect—they laugh at your joke, or they’re gratified by your complement, or your question lands just as you intended it. The story you tell feels apt, relevant, and beneficial. Nicely done! Now, this post is about the way these bits of conversation can sometimes turn out to have a shorter shelf-life than you might assume. And while this pitfall may seem obvious, I’ve never seen anyone mention it, so here goes.  

Precisely because it was so well received the first time around, that same piece of discourse gets added into long-term storage, as part of your growing social repertoire. But it turns out that making new use of tried-and-true material years later can be a bit risky. Suppose a new situation—a meeting, a date, a party, an interview, etc.—presents itself that has some feature in common with that old one where your stored stuff worked so well. Let’s say, the joke you told two years ago amused some people from the very same overseas country to whose other citizens you’re talking now. Or you once deeply moved an elder person with a story about your childhood, and now here’s another octogenarian, so you figure the same story ought to prove just as successful today. Some feature of your audience, or of the situation, is familiar enough to trigger a specific piece of material that proved to be scintillating in the past.  

It might be just as charming or poignant now as it was back then. But think twice before you wheel it out and redeploy it. Why? Because the slightest congruity between past and present can be powerfully tempting: surely this is a chance to validate old good stuff, to prove to yourself the value of what you’ve accumulated, and to be good-with-people without having to make a renewed effort. This temptation can cause you to overlook the important new factors that distinguish this moment from its distant precursor, and these new people from the ones you knew before, and this social context from the one that’s long gone. It can make you forget what you’ve learned, even if you’ve learned it well: all the political shifts, changes in social mores, gender dynamics, and codes of interpersonal presentation that the culture has seen in the meanwhile.  Even apart from that issue of long-term cultural change, individuals are always distinct; these particular Australians are not the same ones you dealt with last week.

The old story, or joke, or comparison, might indeed be a delightful contribution once again, despite the passage of time. But very often indeed, it’s worth slowing down for a moment beforehand, to silently check-in with yourself about just how appropriate such a repetition is likely to be. The world changes every day, and each person you meet is different from the rest. You, too, have changed, and you can indeed thrive without those extra scraps of continuity you might be tempted to snatch from Time’s hand. “Be yourself” is still very good advice—but this self need not be exactly the same as yesterday’s.

People have an evolved need to be part of something – to belong to a family that belongs to a tribe. Anyone who doesn’t have that can become susceptible to whatever offers itself as a substitute, even if the eventual price of belonging is unclear at the outset, and turns out to be too high. We are a profoundly social species, and the more isolated somebody is, the greater their risk for getting absorbed into a company that has cult-like features—especially if these only become obvious after some time has passed, and ties have been formed.  

In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam showed that people in the USA used to be connected to large numbers of neighbors and peers, by all sorts of clubs and civic groups and religious institutions that were larger than the household, but smaller than the state—the Elks Club, the Knights of Columbus, Boy Scouts, B'nai B’rith, and so on—and that since the 1970’s, most of these have shrunk or even vanished. For my MFT internship (2012-2016), I trained in Gestalt therapy at a Los Angeles nonprofit called The Relational Center whose motto was and is: Isolation hurts. We help. See also Johann Hari’s excellent book on this issue, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions.  

Our drive to be part of something larger than ourselves is a core need that’s sometimes fulfilled in wholesome ways, even today. If we’re fortunate, it can arise where we earn our daily bread. Teamwork on the job, if it goes well, feels good and works effectively. It’s not necessary to spoil it with cynicism by deciding that it’s all a swindle, just because management planned it for the purpose of maximizing the owners’ profits and the shareholders’ return on their investment. Yes, management did set up a personnel structure, with its cooperative and competitive dynamics; and yes, they did so mainly with those financial motives. But it’s a wasteful mistake to use this fact to empty-out the value of a collaborative experience. Enjoying your job doesn’t make you the dupe of exploiters—unless your employer happens to be exploitative. So it’s pretty important to have some criteria for that category.  

If the company’s internal communications are laced with the rhetoric of family life, does it feel icky and bogus?  

Prioritize your physical and mental health, and take a close look at the effects of your current employment on those two factors.

Is it a permissive environment, where bad interpersonal behavior has no consequences? Or an over-policed one, where H.R. feels overzealous and unpredictable?  

Do rewards for extra hard (or extra good) work go to everybody, not just the suits in the suites?  

Are you stuck in your current role, or can the leadership be convinced that they could make better use of you in another one where you feel you’d add more value? If you contribute advice for improving processes, products, or practices, does that get rewarded or punished?  

Do you feel misled about important aspects of your role, or are they frank with you where it counts?  

Bonuses and raises are not the only genuine sort of rewards—there’s paid time off, broader choice of tasks and teammates, more control over your schedule and remote work, and so on. Be wary if you put in a heroic chunk of overwork, and they either ignore it, or pay you in symbolism, praise, and thanks, but nothing more.

Consider that the ideal job, the real peach on a high branch, gives you three things:

·      enough meaning

·      enough money

·      adequate work-life balance  (WLB) 

Awful jobs are missing all three, and are way too close to what sociologists have called “social death,” in which one’s humanity is under dire assault by some combination of abuse and neglect. The late Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a poignant bestseller called Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, about such jobs, and the vexing struggle for upward mobility. More recently, in Democracy Awakening, professor Heather Cox Richardson has taken account of the way access to opportunity waxes and wanes cyclically through the history of the United States.  

A good job can provide you with any two of these, but not all three—and if the one you need most is the one that’s missing, the job’s not so good. Sociologist David Graeber made a splash with his Jeremiad on corporate culture, Bullshit Jobs, which he defined thus: “…a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” Bullshit jobs pay plenty, and they don’t take over your whole week—but their lack of meaning takes on a creeping toxicity the longer you work there, because the company culture requires you to fake it. Even if the work is (relatively speaking) socially and environmentally harmless, you still come to feel you are selling your integrity because you have to bullshit other people, and yourself, that the work is not, in fact, the bullshit it really is. This is sometimes called “golden handcuffs.” 

If there’s work-life balance and meaning, but not much money, it may be possible to add a lucrative side-hustle without becoming exhausted. If there’s good money and real meaning, but you’re frazzled and sleepless, that strategy’s not available; you may need to negotiate more time away, or build an exit ramp.  

Aristotle wrote a book of ethics for his son, where he states: Happiness is not amusement, it is good activity. Ideally, work is a form of serious play that gives us a role in the community and compensation for our labor in that role. On your way to a vocation that really suits you, remember that the gatekeepers will be behind you one day; that the stepping-stones are temporary phases of your life with something to teach you, however unpleasant; and that you must steer your life in the direction where you want it to go.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

What’s “hoarding”? Well, the DSM-V includes hoarding in its section on obsessive compulsive disorders. There’s OCD, which is a pattern of behavior and inner experience, and there’s OCPD (Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder), which includes that pattern, but also extends to deep-seated and pervasive concerns with order, regularity, and tight control. You exert unnecessary and excessive control over variables you can actually affect, like neatness or punctuality, but your opportunities to do so are often subject to other variables beyond your reach, like the weather, traffic, or other people’s actions. This brings plenty of episodes of frustration, when highly charged efforts at maintaining order get interfered with by unpleasant surprises from outside. The irony is that someone suffering from OCD or OCPD is exercising what can look like a heightened personal mastery over their immediate environment, but it’s actually a type of helplessness: they cannot control their relentless need for control.  

OCD tends to start in childhood, but like most personality disorders, OCPD usually (not always) shows up a bit later, in adolescence or early adulthood. Hoarders typically don’t have OCPD. They don’t care much about order; their environments tend to be chaotic, and they often hold onto broken or incomplete items without repairing or maintaining what they insist might someday come in handy. Their problem is classified next to OCD because it’s a maladaptive behavior pattern they can’t regulate, with a thinking style that’s distorted to legitimize it. Of course, this fits addiction, too (so does disordered eating), and compulsivity is part of addiction—especially behavioral addictions that aren’t drug use, like shopping, sex, or gambling. Psychological diagnosis and “nosology” (the part of our science that divides human troubles into discreet categories) are not entirely scientific, and plenty of books (here’s a favorite) rightly criticize the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for the limitations of its ever-changing categories (a more nuanced and humane approach has produced the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual, or PDM, by Vittorio Lingiardi and Nancy McWilliams). We do need some way of talking about what ails people; imprecision is inevitable; and imprecise terms are far better than none.  

Like many ailments, hoarding occurs on a spectrum of severity. It can be a light nuisance, a serious problem that impinges on one’s life-possibilities, or a severe mental affliction with potentially dire implications for physical health. Like some other conditions, it’s a distorted version of some natural and necessary mental functions. In the deeply ancient world, long before civilization, people generally kept almost nothing, or only what they could carry. When the Paleolithic (“Old Stone Age”) became the Neolithic (“New Stone Age”), the first settlements were established where people lived for an entire season, or even year-round, storing food and artifacts. Evolutionary psychology of this sort can easily jump to mistaken conclusions, but it seems likely that somewhere along the line it became adaptive to try and hang onto stuff that might be useful later on. A temperament that disposed people to a more retentive attitude became partly heritable—despite the fact that it could also cause trouble, like plenty of other genetic traits. Even if OCD were entirely DNA-based, which it isn’t, activating it would still require a releasement mechanism in the form of a lived experience. Such mechanisms are usually traumas of one kind or another, having to do with some kind of scarcity: food insecurity, inadequate love and affection, episodes of being robbed or cheated—all these can make someone err “on the safe side” by keeping too much stuff.  

Obsessions are a cognitive thing, with affective (i.e., emotional) dimensions, manifest as intrusive repetitive thoughts, preoccupation with certain themes or figures, or recurring words that take up too much mental space for no good reason. Compulsions are behavioral; often they’re involuntary rituals, involving repetitive counting, arranging objects in spatial patterns, or “checking” again and again that one really did lock the door or turn off the stove, far beyond the point where you’ve already secured that important information. There’s usually some misery in it, along with efforts to conceal the problem. Hoarders rarely have people over to visit, because shame is usually involved—unless the person is oblivious to other people’s judgments, or to their own disorder, two features of more severe presentations. If you suspect you may be hoarding, it’s likely a good thing that you’ve got the perspicacity to be concerned.  

It’s a lot easier to deal with hoarding when it’s got other meanings to it besides the traumatic, maladaptive ones. If you’re a collector—of art, musical instruments, rare handmade tools, antiquities, autographs—you may manage to sublimate the underlying anxiety into a life-enhancing fascination with some aspect of culture that speaks to you. A “philatelist” collects stamps, a “numismatist,” coins. Book collectors may be captive to their enormous holdings, and being only human, they don’t have the necessary centuries to read every book they own—but come on, it’s the cumulative wisdom of the world on those shelves, not, say, a hundred pairs of shoes (ok, I’m a bit of a bibliomaniac myself). Then again, hearing a balanced, articulate shoe collector hold forth about his or her favorite specimens might be interesting enough to earn a guest’s instant respect. There’s something cool about a passion that builds expertise and a refined capacity to appreciate the larger meaning, history, and design of what appeals to you, however esoteric it might be. But there are limits. 

When there’s no unifying theme to the possessions, when they’re not in good shape, when their owner can’t find anything, and the space is cluttered to the point that the room is hard to cross without knocking things over, when dust is a major issue, when acquiring and retaining things has crowded-out self care, sociality, and financial prudence—and above all, when there is no joy in having all this stuff, well, that’s obsessive-compulsive hoarding disorder.  

Aristotle recommended “the golden mean,” the sweet spot between the extremes: “nothing in excess.” It may seem odd that people who endure opposite insults like “neat freak” and “slob” will find their problems listed on the same pages, but remember the horseshoe metaphor? The extremes have more in common with each other, than with the center. Dante put the Spendthrifts and the Misers in the same circle of the Inferno, where they taunted each other forever, shouting “Why hoard?” and “Why squander?” That’s also the soundtrack of the hoarding experience whenever it’s time to try and escape it: the first question is your exasperation at all the junk you’re living with, but as soon as you pick up any single item of it and try to throw it away, the second question kicks in.  

Let’s linger on that a moment. You’ve just picked up one of your hoarded objects… an extra audio speaker, a bundle of obsolete cords, a chipped tureen, the wrong-sized pair of old new shoes you never got around to listing on eBay. You’re holding it in your hands. The pleasure of keeping it is only a very brief moment of relief at not having to part with it. But the pleasure of removing it lasts, because you keep noticing the cleared space you freed-up by releasing it. Suppose you hang onto a belt sander for eight years because you might have a carpentry project one day. Then you get fed up, or you’re given an ultimatum by a lover or a landlord, and finally manage to fetch $40 for it on Craigslist. A week later, your favorite aunt Facetimes you out of the blue, about the wooden stairs at her place—how they keep giving her splinters, and they need “a coat of varnish or something.” Waves of self-reproach come flooding in from your inner tyrant: How could I let myself give up that sanding machine, after keeping it for eight years! Now I need it! I knew this would happen. The people who urged me to get rid of it were wrong! Now I’ll have to spend a hundred dollars to buy another one! 

Persuasive as that mighty voice may seem, it doesn’t know the whole truth. And the part it does know, isn’t helping you. Sure, you could buy a new sander, but you’ve just learned that the need for this tool arises about once per decade. And for under $40 per day, you could rent one and be rid of it when the job is finished. Look around the living room, the garage, the storage unit. Of all the objects you see, what percentage of them have suddenly come in handy the way the belt sander just did? Wrapping paper will get reactivated on holidays, and candles are a good hedge for a possible blackout. But the extra speakers, the orphaned USB cables, the chipped tureen? Almost no foreseeable scenario will turn their lost importance back on again, and what you see when you look at them is stagnation, anxiety, and reluctance to govern your own affairs without excessive fear of being caught without a tureen, just in case a soccer team drops by with five gallons of soup in a bucket. Giving up that belt sander was a victory. It turned out you could’ve saved some money by keeping it, after all. But there would have been value in getting rid of it years ago, to enjoy the freedom of choice, and the decluttered living space, its absence would afford you.  There are hidden costs to hanging onto things you don’t need now, even if there’s a chance (and there’s always a chance) you might need them in the future.

Suppose you do throw out some usable item, and some years go by. Then the phone call comes, announcing a sudden occasion to make use of what you sold, or gave away, or threw out so long ago. Suppose there’s no option to rent a new one, and no cheap replacement waiting for you on some website or a thrift shop. If you want to do the project, you’ve got to spend $50 that you could’ve kept if you’d only continued hoarding the thing. Well, consider the $50 a small fee you pay for those years of being unencumbered by the thing.  

We know some of the neural correlates of Hoarding Disorder, and there are medications that can be useful components of treatment. While there’s currently no 100% effective psychopharma for it, HD often occurs with depression, so any successful treatment for that mood issue can alleviate HD, sometimes significantly.  

If you believe you may have a milder degree of trouble with hoarding, it may help to watch some of the documentaries and reality TV shows that have been made about cases much worse than what you’re contending with. That can make unpleasant viewing, but it can jolt you into firmer resolve to make some changes.  

An excellent psychodynamic treatment approach for OCD in general is George Weinberg’s book, Invisible Masters.  

Some cultural resources that may help anybody who needs them include Swedish “death cleaning,” which builds on the truism that “you can’t take it with you,” and Japanese housekeeping, which emphasizes an elegant minimalism.  

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Licensed in NY, NJ, TX, and CA. www.drjameyhecht.com