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I’ve Been a Therapist for 40 Years. Here’s What I Can Tell You about Love
Before sitting down in my consulting room, Matt A. stepped forward and shook my hand. He was an athletic and handsome forty-seven-year-old man. He wore a white cashmere sweater, black Chelsea boots, and tortoiseshell glasses. His red watchband matched his socks.
Typically, people who come to see me for a consultation begin by describing a problem; Matt began by describing himself. He told me that he worked in Downing Street as a political strategist and consultant for then British prime minister Tony Blair. This was 1999. He had been married for twenty years and had three teenage children. He described his family—his wife, Jemima, a barrister, and his two sons and daughter—with tenderness and detail. He had a season ticket to Tottenham Hotspur football club and loved to take his children to watch Spurs on the weekend and then come home and cook for them. He especially enjoyed it when the children joined him in the kitchen, put on a CD, and bopped around.
He gave me vivid, affectionate portraits of his parents—his mother was a professor of German language and literature, and his father was a linguist now working as a civil servant at Government Communications Headquarters. Matt was part of a close, extended family, sixteen in all: his parents, their three children, their spouses, and eight grandchildren. This group celebrated Christmases together and spent two weeks every summer in St. Ives at his parents’ summer house. Matt was proud of his children’s close, loving relationship with their cousins and family.
Matt was successful and happy at work. The picture of his life was buoyant.
“Tell me why you’re here,” I said.
“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”
I have been a psychoanalyst for forty years. What I’ve learned in my work is that we deceive ourselves about love—the who, what, and why. But we also have the power to undo self-deception. Love’s labour is the work we must do to see clearly ourselves and our loved ones. It is our attempt to join the world as it is.
“Love,” Iris Murdoch writes, “is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” She goes on: “Love is the discovery of reality.”
Penetrating the familiar is hard work. The greatest obstacle to learning about ourselves isn’t ignorance but our “self-knowledge.” Love requires us to let go of how we see ourselves, to see ourselves in ways we may not like. Love’s labour is the ongoing task of reconsidering our story anew.
Matt sat in silence for a while. “I had sex for the first time when I was sixteen. It was with a girl, a friend of my sister. A few days later, I had sex with a friend from school, a boy.”
Until his final year at university, he had regularly slept with both women and men. In his last term, he met Jemima. She was also in the history and modern languages course. When things got serious between them, she broke off a two-year relationship with a postgraduate student to be with Matt. Matt stopped having sex with other women but continued to have sex with men. During their twenty-year marriage, except in the months after the children were born, he and Jemima had sex once or twice a week. He also had sex, once or twice a week, with men.
He loved Jemima, he explained. He enjoyed her enjoyment of sex, her having an orgasm, but for him, only sex with men was sex. It was “disinhibited,” he said.
I asked Matt if Jemima knew he felt this way.
He’d been open with her from the start, he explained. The first time they slept together, he’d told her that he also had sex with men. “Oscar Wilde, Alan Turing, Joe Orton—the biographies on my nightstand were a bit of a giveaway.” He’d always been honest—he had to be; they were both worried about HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. “She doesn’t want to know the details, and I don’t volunteer them. I tell her, ‘I have a meeting after work.’ She understands.”
I waited for him to say more. He explained that he felt marriage and sex were antithetical to each other. “Gay marriage is a contradiction in terms,” he said. “If it’s a marriage, it’s not gay.”
“Does Jemima know how you feel about marriage and sex?” I asked again.
“I’m not going to hurt her deliberately,” he said. “I love her.”
“But you haven’t told her the truth.”
“I haven’t lied to her.”
Because he hadn’t told Jemima an outright lie, Matt believed he was being honest. Jemima appeared to accept his desires for sex with men—her rule seemed to be no sex with other women. Because he didn’t want to hurt her, Matt hadn’t told her he preferred sex with men. I remembered something Sigmund Freud wrote: “Where they love, they do not desire, and where they desire, they cannot love.” I thought this might be Matt’s predicament and told him so.
Love, Matt told me, is an equivalence of power, an agreed understanding between two people about their desires.
He disagreed. He told me that he loved Jemima and that he loved many of the men he had sex with too. Love, Matt told me, is an equivalence of power, an agreed understanding between two people about their desires. This equality can last years—as it had between him and Jemima—or a few minutes during a brief intense sexual encounter. “Love ends when the balance of power breaks down, when one partner feels exploited.”
“I think you’re describing intimacy,” I said.
“Aren’t they the same thing?”
“The important thing is you think they’re the same thing.”
We came to the end of our time together. I didn’t know what Matt wanted from me or psychoanalysis. So, I asked him.
“I can see how other people feel—I don’t feel that way.”
“Can you say more?” I asked.
“I feel slightly unreal,” he said. Then he fell silent.
Matt had created a way of being which kept certain aspects of himself cut off from each other. In his most intimate relationships, he was never altogether himself. “Are you asking for my help to be gay?” I said.
“I would never leave Jemima and the children. Separation is not on the menu.”
“Are you asking for my help to give up sex outside your marriage?”
“Why should I?”
I tried again. “You want me to help you accept your bisexuality.”
Matt looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.
“So I can wear a pink T-shirt and attend pride? Are you joking? Why would I want to be bi?”
“Maybe what you want,” I replied, “is a place where you can bring all of yourself.”
Matt sat back in his chair, his posture softened. He agreed.
To make sense of how and why we have sex the way we do, we must look closely at our personal history, especially our earliest relationships. Deeply buried or hidden in plain view, our feelings about these attachments guide our sexual behaviour much later in life. In a way, our sex lives can be thought of as a solution to the problems given to us by our earliest fears, longings, and animosities.
Over the first months of Matt’s psychoanalysis, we discovered that his sexual behaviour was organized by his emotions rather than by his sexuality (whatever that is). Matt did not think of himself as straight, gay, or bisexual. As far as I could tell, he did not think about his sexuality at all. On the one hand, he treasured the deeply reassuring rhythms and rituals of his life with his wife and children. On the other hand, sex with men was an essential, intensely pleasurable part of his self. “It’s not just the sex,” Matt told me. “If I were straight, I wouldn’t have these friendships.” Over the years, he’d developed relationships with a science fiction writer from Seoul and a homicide detective from Trondheim. One of his oldest friends was a male porn star with Asperger’s from the Balearic Islands.
Our sex lives can be thought of as a solution to the problems given to us by our earliest fears, longings, and animosities.
Why was Matt’s personal life organized like this? Two things struck me. Matt’s sex life was busy, hectic even. The other thing: he didn’t lose his temper or get angry. When I pointed this out to him, he replied that he came from “a long line of people who don’t do anger.” His parents were “never angry” with him.
In Matt’s childhood home, experiencing feelings of hatred meant one had lost control over one’s body. It was akin to temporary insanity. If Matt became angry, his parents reacted with alarm and anxiety. “My mum reacted as if I was terrible, defective, or as if she’d failed as a mother. The atmosphere was awful.” Instead of learning how to hate, Matt learned to try not to hate at all.
Psychoanalytic research teaches us that it is vital that our children learn to express their hate and love. Parent and child must be able to hate each other appropriately. As the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott points out: “Shall I say that, for a child to be brought up so that he can discover the deepest part of his nature, someone has to be defied, and even at times hated, and who but the child’s own parents can be in a position to be hated without there being a danger of a complete break in the relationship?”
One day, after more than two years of psychoanalysis, Matt sent me an email. It was the first time he’d written. After complaining about something I’d said to him in that day’s session, he concluded:
You don’t like me. I don’t like you. Your psychoanalytic silences make me feel boorish. Whenever I try to speak to you directly, you don’t respond, or your response is totally insipid. You make me feel stupid, superficial, odious and unlovable. I get it. I’m not your type of patient. You don’t want to see me. You want to see someone clever and attractive. Jemima is more your type. You don’t understand me. You hate me. I hate you. I’m an idiot for continuing to see you, but I do. So, I’m the fool.At the start of his next session, Matt apologized for his email. He’d accidentally hit send. Sometimes, he explained, he’ll write an email or a letter, then delete it.
I told him I was pleased he’d sent it. “You told me what you feel,” I said. “It must be exhausting being nice all the time.”
Matt laughed. “It is.”
Abigail B.’s birth was an accident. Shortly after she was born, her father told her mother: “You wanted her, you deal with her.” Abigail had three sisters—ten, eight, and six years older—who told her this story. She didn’t need to hear it. She’d always felt her father was angry with her. He was affectionate with her sisters but never with her.
Abigail was clever. She went to the local Newcastle grammar school and then to Cambridge to study classics. When she was twenty-two, she won a Fulbright Scholarship to do a PhD at the University of Chicago. After six years of postgraduate study and postdoctoral teaching, Abigail returned to England to take up a position as a university lecturer. It was a beginning, a first-rung academic post.
Shortly after she started her new job, Abigail had a breakdown. When her psychiatrist referred her to me, she was on a medical leave of absence for depression. Abigail wanted to quit work altogether. In fact, after a half dozen sessions, she wondered aloud if there might be a way to live without a regular job. When I asked her how she would support herself, she laughed. It was then that she told me that while she was a PhD student in Chicago, she was also a sex worker. (The first London psychotherapist she consulted did not believe her. “You feel you were a prostitute,” Abigail reported her saying.)
When she was fifteen, Abigail told me, she fell in love with boys. She loved the way they knocked about together, their restlessness and daredevilry. “I craved excitement, and I found it hanging around boys,” she said. At university, she’d had a succession of boyfriends. When she left Cambridge to start her PhD in Chicago, she found herself feeling isolated, lonely. She was also anxious about money and didn’t want to ask her father for help. During her first term, Abigail became friends with another graduate student who made extra money dancing downtown at a place called the Candy Store. The Candy Store was a front for a brothel. After several months of nude dancing behind glass in a booth, Abigail started working at the brothel.
“Men would come to reception.” Abigail said. “They were mostly from the financial district, college grads. We’d come out, line up, then the client would make his choice.” She continued, “I wasn’t the prettiest or the sexiest, but I was the girl most men chose. Men chose me because I looked like what I was: a university student. Young. Bookish. I’m blond, wholesome. I had a bit of baby fat. I didn’t wear much makeup. I don’t have tattoos. I didn’t wear lingerie or heels; I wore a white T-shirt and white pants. I looked like someone they’d want to date.”
Soon, Abigail had regulars. “I gave 100 percent,” she said. Clients fell in love with her. Money poured in. “Watching it literally pile up was so gratifying; for the first time in my life, way more was coming in than going out.” But there was more than money to the job. Abigail tutored the son of one workmate; when another co-worker’s four-year-old son unexpectedly died of a congenital heart condition, she cared for her and helped arrange the child’s funeral. Abigail felt valued.
After Abigail finished her PhD, her thesis adviser encouraged her to apply for a new lectureship in London. As best I could tell, Abigail hadn’t thought about how she would feel without the community she’d created in Chicago. She threw herself into her new job, but after several months, she struggled to sleep and eat. A panic attack sent her to her doctor, who put her on antidepressants and referred her to a psychiatrist. Worried about Abigail’s anorexia and her thoughts of suicide, he changed her medication and asked me to see her five times a week.
Soon, her mood stabilized. After several months of psychoanalysis, Abigail began a session by telling me the Greek etymology of the word “antidote”: a remedy counteracting poison. Then she said, “Sex work was an antidote to my father.” Each time a client chose her, Abigail felt “special.” When Abigail gave a client an orgasm, she felt she had “looked after him,” “quieted him,” “made him happy”; if he became a regular, she’d “won him over.” These were the very feelings she’d longed to have with her father. “Sex work cured me of my father.”
Sex work, I told her, had not cured her of her father. He still filled her mind. We discussed him more than anyone else. Because her father did not love her, she hated him. Another way to understand her sex work was as a consuming revenge drama directed at her father. Abigail then remembered that sometimes, when seeing clients, she would catch herself thinking: “I get to do this, and you can’t stop me.” At the time, she thought the sentence was a bit of “mental chatter.” Now, she realized, she was probably speaking to her father. After a silence, she said, “I’m talking to him in my head all the time.”
She let out a long breath. “I don’t see how we will ever change this,” she said.
“We’ll do what we just did,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“We recognize the problem. Take it seriously.”
“Then?” she said.
“Then we talk about it.”
When you were a small child—vulnerable, full of need—what did you learn about intimacy?
Abigail absorbed the fact that she was unlovable, a painful truth that was reinforced daily by the way her father treated her. Her feelings of longing for her remote father and her feelings of hate were buried so deep in her that she thought she’d rid herself of them. But those undetectable feelings gathered together and became a mighty unseen force directing her sexual behaviour.
How we think is who we are. Years later—after Abigail had married, become a mother, and achieved some success as an academic—when we were coming to the end of her psychoanalysis, she told me that the realization that she was incessantly talking to her father in her mind was a turning point. She began to think about him and herself differently. “As he decreased in size, I had more room in my head for my own life.”
Matt learned that hate ruins everything. His sexual life was his solution to the problem of not feeling free to hate the person he loves. Because he always had to be “nice,” he was always in motion—moving between Jemima and various other sexual partners. This activity helped him reduce the risk of feeling hate toward her. (An affair, masturbation, sex workers—all of these can be used to keep aspects of oneself from one’s partner.) Matt had organized his life so that his animosity could be split off and directed away from those he loved. His work as a political consultant allowed him to hate those at a distance, his political enemies. Because he could not express his hate, his closest relationships felt artificial and shallow—to use his word, “unreal.”
These patients came to me in various states of despair. Love can cause us to feel vulnerable and helpless. Maybe it is only in this state of mind—when we are unsure of what to do, when we no longer know which way to go—that we are motivated to understand ourselves better.
We can only make sense of our sexual selves if we travel toward ourselves. This inward expedition leads us back and forth through time. As we remember, we discover. Discovering, we remember. Knowledge of our heart must come from our heart. We don’t receive this knowledge. We find it at the end of a journey no one else can make for us.
Adapted and excerpted from Love’s Labor: How We Break and Make the Bonds of Love by Stephen Grosz. Copyright © 2026 Stephen Grosz. Published by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
The post I’ve Been a Therapist for 40 Years. Here’s What I Can Tell You about Love first appeared on The Walrus.
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