Just Tell Me You Want Me: How the Longing for Affirmation Cost Me Everything
By: Hugo Schwyzer
Tags: Sex Work, Validation, Sex, Addiction, Teaching

When I came back to therapy, my primary complaint was my absolute inability to move past the grief over losing the teaching career. Nearly six years on from my resignation, I felt and often still feel stuck in a loop, tormented by happy memories of a deeply satisfying job — and by the guilt over the reckless decisions that took that career away and hurt so many others in the process.

Dr. C, on the other hand, always likes to circle back to the sex work, to a point that sometimes exasperates. I told her about that part of my past during my intake months ago, when she first became my therapist. I’ve shared it publicly, so it no longer wears on me as my Great Secret; I think of myself as at peace with what happened to me in the last few years of my teens.

Turns out, doc was on to something.

Today was a breakthrough. I’ve always known that what drove me to seek out sex with much older men when I was a boy was my own obsession with validation. Lust of course had something to do with it, and the extra spending money was nice, but the real driver was being wanted. There was and is no drug I’ve ever taken quite like seeing craving in another person’s eyes.

Dr. C spelled it out for me today in two sentences:

“As a teen, you were willing to risk contracting AIDS and being assaulted — or worse — in order to get your ‘fix’: sexualized validation.”

“As an adult professor, you were willing to throw away your career — and your marriage to the mother of your children — in order to get that same affirmation.”

So obvious! And yet, I’d never seen it before.

What I see after today’s session is that the most destructive and dangerous decisions of my life have always been rooted in a desperate need to be affirmed as desirable. It wasn’t sex itself that drove me: sex without evidence of the other person’s craving has always held little interest.

(I’ve often said that I’d infinitely rather have sex with a person whom I find repulsive but who wants me, than have sex with a person I find incredibly attractive, but who has little desire for me. My greatest fear is being given a “mercy fuck.” Happily, none of that is a worry today.)

Maybe my friends who know my story had already figured this out, but I hadn’t realized until now how closely the sex I had with my younger female students so perfectly mirrored the sex I had as a teen with much older men.

In both instances, consent was problematic (with the men, because I was underage and often under the influence; with the women, because they were enrolled in my classes.) In both instances, the story I told myself, perhaps unconsciously, was the same: that I couldn’t say no to someone else’s desire. Or rather, that being desired — be it by a 60-year-old businessman or a 20-year-old with a starry-eyed crush — was my fatal flaw, my Achilles heel.

“Are you saying I should blame the loss of my career on being a sex worker?” I asked Dr. C. “No,” she replied, “but I think there might be a link there, one that’s worth exploring.”

And since I’m presumably not ever doing a proper memoir, it is only right I tell you about that link now.