What is Mutually Assured Seduction?
“Wait so you didn’t go to therapy during the relationship?”
“We broke up, and I went to therapy, and I’m a completely changed person now. I miss her but I’m doing good.”
“Wait so you didn’t go to therapy during the relationship?”
“No.”
“And she asked you to?”
“Yeah.”
This makes me very sad.
Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes going to therapy really does feel like the wrong thing to do in a relationship.
Having a third person hear and interpolate the story of your relationship, when you are having a hard time and likely do not have a shared story of the relationship with your partner can be pretty disorienting.
If you don’t have a story you like with your shared intimacy person, having a third person come in can make you feel even more alienated from your own life than you are already feeling.
Another aspect of not going to therapy is people feeling like they have permission to work on themselves without judgment only in the context when they are not in a relationship.
But there should be things you can do during the relationship rather than only after the relationship dissolves. Relationships, when they are good, are also long, and that means that “working on yourself” being a practice only in between relationships means that this process halts during a pretty good relationship!
The dichotomous choices of do nothing and feel alienated from your own life and relationships and go to therapy and feel alienated from your own life and relationships seems like a bad situation.
I had been writing this blog because I want to catalog a third thing.
Mutually Assured Seduction, the blog, came after Mutually Assured Seduction, the book.
The book was an explanation of the Sexual Cold War, and what can be done about it.
(www.sexualcoldwar.com is another website I have to build, Mutually Assured Seduction was meant as a softer and broader facet of that more pointy project.)
It’s still not done. I wasn’t sure how to bound the book, while keeping it connected to the larger project I had in mind.
Starting the larger project (the blog and broader community) in January 2025 has been fun for me, and seems now to be an important step for finishing the book. Knowing what is not in the book, because it is here, is helpful for triangulating what should go in the book.
The blog makes the book make more sense, and the book makes the blog make more sense.
But none of you have the book yet.
And so, writing a post every so often about what this blog is meant to be doing, for me at least, seems like a good thing for me to do.
I have a belief that people can be regularly in conversations with frameworks, books, movies, and their own bodies in ways that help them grow. I think that these conversations can help with inspiration and problem solving in their most important relationships.
I don’t think that this process needs to be lame or self-flagellating. I think it can be fun to be in the process of meaning-making with other people, in ways that illuminate blind spots and increase your felt sense of your action space. Increasing agency and responsibility usually feels good, and makes the people around you happier.
That’s why this blog has so far been a mashup of eclectic things I am looking at. There is an emergent point of it all. I hadn’t even written about the representation of children in Iranian films yet. But the point of that post would be to have a third thing to look at that isn’t just the conflict you might be having with your partner about children!
Often people are not having a nutritious enough diet of strange things that exist, or connecting those strange things to real things that real people are feeling and experiencing.
David Lynch for example isn’t just a strange surreal filmmaker — he was trying to make coherent some of the strangest memories from his life through his films. The images there are not loose. They are tethered to something very real for him — very core to his life.
People break up for many reasons. Sometimes people break up when the story of them being together stops making sense to them as a story that is good. Sometimes people break up when they can’t imagine staying themselves, or completing a story arc they care about, while being in a shared story with another person.
In that way, having materials to “make good stories out of” or “check your bad story against” can be extremely useful, and limiting your materials and checks to “only what is inside the relationship” both hinders your ability to problem solve and reroutes what your partner is saying through your own biases and frameworks too harshly in a way that is likely to distort them. You need third things to really hear what your partner is saying. You need to notice what in the real world they are choosing to look at because they think it’s cool or choosing to ignore because they think it’s wrong or bad.
Your partner is affected by things other than you. To really know them you have to notice how their affect and affectations route into each other.
It’s a messy sentence because it’s a messy set of ideas. People are disproportionately affected by the people closest to them, to the point where they look at other things often though the lens of their partner and what would make their partner happy, and what would keep them attractive to their partner. Family as well, certain friends, certain loved ones and lost loved ones—people form allegiances and those allegiances and loyalties are real.
And that’s why the Third Thing is important. Therapy is meant to be the Third Thing, a lot of the time. But the therapist is also a person, and sometimes people don’t want to get entangled with another person, or entangled in a set of techniques they aren’t sure how to navigate, in that way.
(Foreshadowing a post about how to navigate therapists in a way that minimizes their weaknesses and maximizes their strengths)
This is understandable, but then you can pick another third thing. Because everyone around you is enmeshed and is responding to third things all the time, even if they like you a whole lot more than the rest of the world!
I am still self-conscious about posts like this, so I will end it here and be grateful for its existence. I am hoping to keep making posts like this every so often, to get and share deeper clarity about the project.