Evolutionary psychology helps us understand why we are ashamed of having forbidden thoughts that make us feel like lousy people. It tells us that these shameful feelings are hardwired—strategies that led to success on the Pleistocene savanna.
By
Kathleen McGowan,
Ken Gordon, published on January 01, 2004 - last reviewed on September 18, 2008
Jennifer Elison, McGonigle's coauthor, struggled with another version of this ambivalence: The day after she asked her domineering husband for a divorce, he died in a car accident. Nobody in her small town understood her conflicted emotions, since her husband had been a well-respected doctor. In this type of situation, says McGonigle, "We feel confused, guilty, ashamed and—because we may not be able to share this feeling—isolated."
Adulterous Fantasy "It's not cheating if it happens in my head."
Sex is as much between the ears as it is between the sheets, and mature adults often celebrate the power of fantasy. "I am rarely with the person I am with, so to say," Truman Capote wrote in one of his novels. "I'm sure that many of us, even most of us, share this condition of dependence upon an inner scenery, imagined and remembered erotic fragments, shadows irrelevant to the body above or beneath us."
Sexual fantasies are nothing you can't hear people blabbing about on daytime TV. Yet when images of former (or imaginary) lovers intrude into our sex lives, they can set off a chain of worries. If I'm fantasizing that the wife is the sexy new nanny, does that mean I no longer love the missus? Or if I pretend that my spare-tire-sporting boyfriend is Brad Pitt, could that mean I'm really capable of cheating? Fantasies seem to tell us more about our potential behavior than we'd like to admit.
But most experts dispel the idea that hot thoughts lead to betrayal—in fact, sex therapists routinely encourage their clients to fantasize. So are sexually confident 21st-century adults supposed to share their most intimate reveries? Not necessarily. "These fantasies are almost always best kept private, because if there's one thing more common in human beings than fantasizing, it's jealousy," says Michael Bader, author of Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies.
In contrast, Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and the author of Everything You Know About Love and Sex Is Wrong, says that honesty is the best policy—as long as the subject is approached with discretion. She advises sharing fantasies "delicately, modestly—until you work up to the big dark cosmos of eros and see if your partner can take it." While being truthful about your fantasy life is tough, Schwartz says that candor is "usually intimacy-producing, and therefore gratifying. But that is a leap that surprisingly few take."
Tags:
adultery,
bad taste,
controversial theory,
dylan evans,
evolutionary psychologist,
fantasy,
good question,
guilt,
penchant,
persistence,
predilections,
raw material,
repression,
savanna,
shame,
taboo,
university of bath,
unmentionables,
virgin mary
