Being human means living with uncertainty, inner conflict, and contradictions—yet we grow up in a world that insists we should feel complete and certain about our desires. Bombarded by romanticized portrayals of love in social media and celebrity culture, we rarely pause to ask ourselves the uncomfortable questions: What do I truly desire? Why is my sexuality the way it is?
Psychoanalysis, though it has its own familiar patterns, doesn’t offer easy answers when done right. Instead, it creates a space where two people can be brutally honest, think together, and make sense of things. This process can reshape how we see ourselves—and in turn, change our lives.
When Matt A first walked into my consulting room, he stepped forward to shake my hand. A fit, good-looking 47-year-old, he wore a white cashmere sweater, black Chelsea boots, and tortoiseshell glasses. His red watchband matched his socks.
Most people who come for a consultation start by describing a problem. Matt began by describing himself. He worked as a political strategist—this was 1999—and had been married for 20 years with three teenage kids. He spoke warmly about his wife, Jemima, a barrister, and their two sons and daughter. He had a season ticket to Tottenham Hotspur and loved taking his kids to weekend matches, then cooking for them at home. He especially enjoyed when they joined him in the kitchen, music playing, dancing around.
He painted vivid, loving portraits of his parents—his mother a professor of German literature, his father a linguist working at GCHQ. Matt came from a tight-knit extended family of 16: parents, siblings, spouses, and eight grandchildren. They celebrated Christmases together and spent summers at his parents’ house in St Ives. He took pride in how close his children were with their cousins and relatives.
Professionally successful and happy, Matt’s life seemed full.
“So, why are you here?” I asked.
He was quiet for a moment. “I lost my virginity at 16—to a girl, a friend of my sister’s. A few days later, I slept with a male friend from school.”
Throughout university, he had relationships with both men and women. In his final year, he met Jemima, who was also studying history and modern languages. When they grew serious, she ended a two-year relationship to be with him. Matt stopped seeing other women but continued sleeping with men. Over their 20-year marriage—except right after their children were born—he and Jemima had sex once or twice a week. He also had sex with men at the same frequency.
He loved Jemima, he said. He enjoyed her pleasure, her orgasms—but for him, only sex with men felt like real sex. It was “uninhibited.”
I asked if Jemima knew how he felt.
He’d been open from the start, he explained. The first time they slept together, he told her about his relationships with men. “Oscar Wilde, Alan Turing, Joe Orton—the books on my nightstand were a clue.” He’d always been honest; they were both concerned about HIV and STIs. “She doesn’t ask for details, and I don’t offer them. I’ll say I have a work meeting. She understands.”
I waited. He went on, saying he believed marriage and sex were fundamentally at odds. “Gay marriage is a contradiction,” he said. “If it’s a marriage, it’s not gay.”
“Does Jemima know you feel this way?” I pressed.
“I’d never hurt her on purpose,” he replied. “I love her.””But you haven’t told her the truth.”
“I haven’t lied to her.”
Our sex lives can be seen as a way of addressing the fears and desires we developed early in life.
Because Matt hadn’t outright lied to Jemima, he believed he was being honest. She seemed to accept his interest in sex with men—her only rule appeared to be no sex with other women. He didn’t want to hurt her, so he never told her he preferred sex with men. I recalled something Freud once wrote: “Where they love, they do not desire, and where they desire, they cannot love.” I wondered if this was Matt’s dilemma and mentioned it to him.
He disagreed. He told me he loved Jemima, and he also loved many of the men he slept with. For Matt, love was about balance—an unspoken agreement between two people about their desires. This balance could last years, as it had with Jemima, or just minutes during a fleeting, passionate encounter. “Love ends when the power shifts, when one person feels used,” he said.
“I think you’re describing intimacy,” I replied.
“Aren’t they the same thing?”
“What matters is that you believe they are.”
As our session ended, I wasn’t sure what Matt wanted from me or from therapy. So I asked.
“I understand how other people feel—I just don’t feel that way myself.”
“Can you explain?” I pressed.
“I feel… not quite real,” he said, then went quiet.
Matt had built a life that kept parts of himself separate. Even in his closest relationships, he was never fully himself. “Are you asking for my help to embrace being gay?” I asked.
“I’d never leave Jemima and the kids. That’s not an option.”
“Do you want help stopping sex outside your marriage?”
“Why would I?”
I tried again. “Maybe you want help accepting your bisexuality.”
Matt looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “So I can wear a pink shirt and go to Pride? Seriously? Why would I want to be bi?”
“Maybe,” I said, “you just want a space where you can be your whole self.”
Matt relaxed slightly. He agreed.
To understand why we have sex the way we do, we have to examine our past—especially our earliest relationships. Whether buried deep or hidden in plain sight, these early attachments shape our sexual behavior later in life. In a way, our sex lives are a response to the fears, desires, and conflicts we experienced as children.
Over the first few months of therapy, we realized Matt’s sexual behavior was driven more by emotion than by his sexuality (whatever that meant to him). He didn’t identify as straight, gay, or bisexual—in fact, he rarely thought about his sexuality at all. On one hand, he cherished the stability of family life with his wife and children. On the other, sex with men was a vital, deeply pleasurable part of who he was. “It’s not just about sex,” Matt told me. “If I were straight, I wouldn’t have these friendships.” Over the years, he’d formed close bonds with a sci-fi writer from Seoul, a homicide detective from Trondheim, and a male porn star with Asperger’s from the Balearic Islands.
Why was Matt’s life structured this way? Two things stood out. First, his sex life was active—even chaotic. Second, he never got angry. When I pointed this out, he said 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, feeling hatred meant losing control—it was like temporary insanity. If he ever got angry, his parents reacted with alarm.Edgy and anxious, Matt recalled his mother’s reaction: “She acted like I was terrible or defective, as if she’d failed as a parent. The atmosphere was awful.” Rather than learning to hate, Matt chose to avoid hatred altogether.
I wasn’t the prettiest or most attractive girl, but I was often the one men chose because I seemed like someone they’d want to date.
Psychoanalytic research shows how crucial it is for children to express both love and hate. Parents and children must be able to hate each other in a healthy way. As pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott observed, “For a child to truly discover themselves, they must have someone to defy—even hate at times. And who better than their own parents, who can withstand that hatred without the relationship breaking entirely?”
In another essay, Winnicott wrote, “Without someone to love and hate, a child can’t understand that the same person can evoke both feelings. Without this, they can’t develop guilt or the desire to make amends. Without a stable environment, they can’t distinguish between destructive fantasies and reality.” If a child isn’t hated when they misbehave, their love—when they do something good—won’t feel genuine. “It seems they can only believe in being loved after experiencing being hated.”
After over two years of psychoanalysis, Matt sent me an email—his first. Frustrated by something I’d said in our session, he wrote: “You don’t like me. I don’t like you. Your silence makes me feel awkward. When I try to talk to you directly, you either don’t respond or say something meaningless. You make me feel stupid, shallow, and unlovable. I get it—I’m not your type of patient. You’d rather see someone smart and attractive, like Jemima. You don’t understand me. You hate me. I hate you. I’m an idiot for still coming to see you, but I do. So, I’m the fool.”
At our next session, Matt apologized for the email—he’d accidentally hit send. He admitted he often writes messages like that but usually deletes them.
I told him I was glad he’d sent it. “You told me how you really feel,” I said. “It must be exhausting being nice all the time.”
Matt laughed. “It is.”
Abigail B’s birth was unplanned. Shortly after she was born, her father told her mother, “You wanted her, you deal with her.” Her three older sisters—ten, eight, and six years her senior—repeated this story to her. But she didn’t need to hear it; she’d always sensed her father’s anger. While affectionate with her sisters, he was distant with her.
Abigail was bright. She attended a grammar school in Newcastle, then studied classics at Cambridge. At 22, she won a Fulbright scholarship for a PhD at the University of Chicago. After six years of postgraduate work and teaching, she returned to England for her first academic position as a university lecturer.
Shortly after starting her new job…Abigail had a breakdown at work, and her psychiatrist referred her to me while she was on medical leave for depression. She wanted to quit her job entirely—after just a few therapy sessions, she even questioned whether she could live without a traditional job. When I asked how she’d support herself, she laughed and revealed that during her PhD studies in Chicago, she had also worked as a sex worker. (Her first therapist in London didn’t believe her, saying, “You feel you were a prostitute.”)
At 15, Abigail told me, she fell in love with the energy of boys—their recklessness and thrill-seeking. “I craved excitement, and I found it by hanging around them,” she said. In college, she had a string of boyfriends. But when she moved from Cambridge to Chicago, she felt isolated and anxious about money, unwilling to ask her father for help. During her first term, she befriended a fellow grad student who earned extra cash dancing at The Candy Store, a front for a brothel. After months of nude dancing in a glass booth, Abigail began working there.
“Men would come in, mostly from the financial district—college grads,” she explained. “We’d line up, and the client would pick. I wasn’t the prettiest or sexiest, but I was the one most chose because I looked like a university student—young, bookish, wholesome. Blonde, a little soft, no makeup, no tattoos. I wore a white T-shirt and pants, like someone they’d want to date.”
Soon, she had regular clients. “I gave 100%,” she said. Men fell for her, and money piled up. “It was gratifying—for the first time, I had more coming in than going out.” But it wasn’t just about money. She tutored a coworker’s son and helped another arrange her child’s funeral after he died unexpectedly. She felt valued.
After finishing her PhD, her advisor encouraged her to apply for a lectureship in London. But she hadn’t considered how much she’d miss the community she’d built in Chicago. She threw herself into the new job, but within months, she couldn’t sleep or eat. A panic attack led to antidepressants and a psychiatrist, who adjusted her medication and referred her to me for intensive therapy. Her mood eventually stabilized.
Months into psychoanalysis, Abigail once began a session by explaining the Greek roots of “antidote”—a remedy against poison. Then she said, “Sex work was an antidote to my father.” Being chosen made her feel “special.” Pleasing a client made her feel she’d “looked after him,” “quieted him,” “won him over.” These were the feelings she’d longed for from her father. “Sex work cured me of him,” she insisted.
I told her it hadn’t cured her—he still occupied her thoughts. We talked about him more than anyone else. Because he didn’t love her, she hated him. Her sex work, in part, was a revenge fantasy directed at him. Then she remembered: sometimes, when clients fell for her, she’d think, “Take that, Dad.”While seeing clients, she would catch herself thinking, “I get to do this, and you can’t stop me.” At the time, she dismissed it as random mental chatter. Now, she realized she had likely been addressing her father. After a pause, she admitted, “I’m constantly talking to him in my head.”
She exhaled deeply. “I don’t see how we’ll ever change this,” she said.
“We’ll do what we just did,” I replied.
“What does that mean?”
“We acknowledge the problem. Take it seriously.”
“And then?”
“Then we talk about it.”
Mary was four when her pregnant mother died suddenly. Two years later, her father passed away from a heart attack. Sent from Dublin to live with her devout Catholic grandparents in County Sligo, she attended a local Catholic school and regular mass.
For as long as she could remember, Mary had wanted to live among women. At 19, a cousin—recently ordained as a priest—introduced her to a London convent. After a week-long retreat, she told the mother superior she wished to join. Advised to wait, she became a postulant at 21 and later took her vows.
By 51, Sister Mary began doubting her choice to live “apart from the world.” Plagued by depression, she started psychoanalysis four times a week at the convent physician’s suggestion, with her mother superior covering the costs.
Discussing sex was difficult for her. She confessed to a long-term sexual relationship with another nun—”I tell her what I want her to do.” Her order restricted conversations to certain times and forbade forming close friendships, so she frequently confessed to “breaking the silence” and having “a special friend.”
After two years of therapy, Sister Mary left the convent. She joined a support group for former nuns transitioning to secular life, where she met Patrick, an ex-priest, and they began dating.
Two months before their wedding, they argued about sex. Mary loved their intimacy but delayed penetrative sex, agreeing to it only on their wedding night. Yet she feared she might back out. “It’s not the sex itself,” she admitted. “I’m terrified of getting pregnant.”
Early in therapy, we uncovered her near-psychotic fear of pregnancy. “Can you imagine having a body inside yours?” she asked. “It could burst out.”
We traced her phobia’s roots—primarily her mother’s sudden death while pregnant. Other childhood events compounded it: at 11, a graphic childbirth documentary made her faint; at 13, her best friend Niamh died in a bike accident. Mary recalled Niamh’s mother wailing uncontrollably at the funeral. From then on, she believed motherhood would kill her—terrified of both birth and death.
Gradually, we realized Mary had become a nun to avoid pregnancy. Now, having left the convent, she faced that fear head-on.Through menopause, something in Mary had changed. She felt ready to leave the convent and rejoin the world. In the weeks before her wedding, we talked about her returning fear of pregnancy, and as we did, her anxieties about intimacy faded. Later, describing her wedding night, Mary called it “a healing experience—it left me feeling grounded and uplifted.”
When you were young—vulnerable and full of need—what did you learn about closeness? Mary learned that sex led to pregnancy, which could be deadly. Only after menopause and two years of psychoanalysis did she feel safe enough to leave the convent and begin a physical relationship. In other words, her fear of pregnancy shaped her entire sex life.
Abigail grew up believing she was unlovable, a painful truth reinforced daily by her father’s treatment. Her longing for his affection, along with her buried hatred, felt so deeply hidden that she thought she’d moved past them. But those unseen emotions gathered force, silently guiding her sexual behavior.
How we think defines who we are. Years later—after Abigail married, became a mother, and found success as an academic—she told me, near the end of her therapy, that realizing she was constantly talking to her father in her mind was a turning point. She began to see him, and herself, differently. “As he shrank in my thoughts, I had more space for my own life.”
Matt learned that hate destroys everything. His sex life was his way of coping with the inability to express hatred toward someone he loved. Because he always had to be “nice,” he kept moving—between Jemima and other partners—to avoid feeling resentment. (Affairs, masturbation, sex workers—all can be ways to hide parts of ourselves from our partners.) Matt structured his life so his anger was directed elsewhere—toward political enemies in his work. Unable to express hatred, his closest relationships felt hollow, as he put it, “unreal.”
These patients came to me in despair. Perhaps it’s only when we’re lost—unsure of what to do or where to turn—that we’re driven to understand ourselves more deeply.
We can only make sense of our sexual selves by turning inward. This journey moves us back and forth through time. As we remember, we discover. As we discover, we remember. True self-knowledge comes from within—it’s not given to us but found at the end of a journey no one else can take for us.
When I was young, I believed finding the “right” person would bring happiness. I didn’t understand that we’re each responsible for our own happiness—that if I didn’t treat myself with care, others likely wouldn’t either.
I misunderstood pain. I thought the heartache, longing, and grief that come with love were things to avoid, symptoms to fix. I didn’t realize pain is our sharpest tool for understanding what we truly want.
We lie to ourselves about love—who we love, why, and what it means. But we can also undo those lies. Love’s labor is the work of seeing ourselves and our loved ones clearly—an effort to engage with the world as it really is.
Names and identifying details have been changed. This is an edited excerpt from Love’s Labour by Stephen Grosz, published by Chatto & Windus on 4 September (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.Terms and conditions may apply.
FAQS
### **Frequently Asked Questions About *”Are You Asking Me to Help You Be Gay?”***
#### **Basic Questions**
**1. What is this book about?**
The book explores themes of sexuality, desire, and identity through the lens of a psychoanalyst’s 40 years of experience, focusing on how people understand and navigate their sexual feelings.
**2. Is this book only for LGBTQ+ readers?**
No, it’s for anyone interested in understanding human desire, identity, and the complexities of sexuality, regardless of orientation.
**3. What does the title mean?**
The title reflects a real question posed to the author, highlighting how therapy can help people explore their true desires without forcing an identity.
**4. Does the book encourage people to “become gay”?**
No, it encourages self-exploration and understanding rather than pushing any specific identity.
#### **Intermediate Questions**
**5. How does psychoanalysis view sexual desire?**
It sees desire as complex, shaped by personal history, unconscious thoughts, and societal influences—not just fixed labels.
**6. Can therapy change someone’s sexuality?**
Therapy helps people understand their feelings, not change them. The book critiques harmful “conversion therapy” practices.
**7. What are common struggles people face regarding sexual identity?**
Shame, confusion, societal pressure, and fear of rejection are common issues discussed.
**8. Does the book discuss bisexuality or fluidity?**
Yes, it acknowledges that sexuality can be fluid and doesn’t always fit rigid categories.
#### **Advanced Questions**
**9. How does early childhood influence adult sexuality?**
The book explores how upbringing, relationships, and unconscious patterns shape desires but doesn’t reduce sexuality to just childhood experiences.
**10. What’s the difference between sexual orientation and sexual preference?**
Orientation is about innate attraction, while preference can be more flexible or influenced by context.
**11. How does society’s view of sexuality impact mental health?**
Stigma, stereotypes, and repression can cause anxiety, depression, and self-doubt—topics the book examines.
**12. Can someone be “confused” about their sexuality?**
Yes, and the book explains that exploration is normal—not everyone fits neatly into categories.
####
