KO’d By Freud in the Fifth Redux

The Best of the Zola System

Last year, I almost married a woman, with whom I had forgettable sex. She was my ‘type,’ the kind of woman who makes me drool: brown hair, dark eyes, olive skin. When we were having sex, it just wasn’t very good, and I was still thinking of marrying her until the day we broke up.

We were standing in a bar once and she made a comment about us staying for another drink.

“Of course, let’s have another!” She said. “The only way I’d leave now is if I had our infant in my arms,” This is the exact way that I wanted her, cradling my child. Later, we went back to my apartment and had very plain, pedestrian sex. It was a pattern: discuss our future, plan a vacation, forgettable sex.

Whitney cleaned up the apartment, bought me food, left notes of things she wanted done before she came home (Just like my real Mother!) The more she mothered me, the less interest I had in her sexually – although I still wanted to marry her.

She wanted me to take control in bed of but would never let it happen. In truth, I had almost no thoughts about doing anything else with her except the plain vanilla. Whitney told me that she wanted me to sodomize her one drunken night but I couldn’t. It’s not like I haven’t performed that act before or was unwilling to do it again. I kept seeing this woman as the mother of my children and her demands just made her seem less attractive. I began to remind myself of Robert DeNiro’s mob boss Paul Vitti in the movie Analyze This. When asked by Bill Crystal’s character, a psychiatrist why he had a girlfriend Vitti replied “She does things my wife can’t. She kisses my kids goodnight with that mouth.”

How did this happen? Wasn’t I just on vacation, visiting friends, with an open bottle of Pinot Noir, overlooking the Chesapeake , sending her Text Messages?

Women are now CEO’s, movers, shakers and trend setters. The Mary Wollenstonecraft version of feminism has won out in the past 50 years: women are being afforded the same opportunities as men. They have achieved the label of ‘Decision Maker.’ Men, it seems, still can’t separate the concepts of wife, mother and lover.

There are certain women, it seems, who encourage this sort of male behavior. The first stage of Madonna’s career saw her playing both sides – the whorish tramp look of her first album and the pristine white gowns of her second album, Like a Virgin. This Good Girl/Bad Girl dynamic seems to be a direct response to the male Madonna/Whore fantasy.

A friend set me up with a woman named Molly, who asked me to take her to a Barry Manilow concert on our first date. On our second date, Molly took me to a Junior League event, a clothing sale of some sort, coupled with a cocktail hour. She held up a clingy long white nightgown. She asked me if I thought she would look good in it. I managed a shrug. I wanted to see her in a nifty little thong; I could live without the wrapping paper. “But Alex, I’ll look virginal in this.”

“Virgins are overrated,” I shot back and we both laughed.

After both dates, I walked her home and didn’t’ even get a kiss on the cheek. The woman who set us up took her out for drinks to find out how it was going. Molly, it turns out, liked me and she wanted to be a good girl. She didn’t like to sleep with men she liked. I wanted Molly in my bed, not feeding her own fantasies of being a ‘good girl’ in a Victorian Romance so I would marry her. No matter how hot the constant presence of her white pearl necklace made me, I finally decided to break it off.

I had enough trouble dealing with my own Freudian issues; I didn’t need hers as well.

Although if Molly and I would have ever found a way to work it out, got married and had kids, they would have gone into therapy for completely different reasons than their parents. Mother always told me that was the hallmark of good parenting.