On Authenticity in Sex and Love
Authenticity gets spoken about as if it were a lifestyle choice. Something you express through language or aesthetics. Something that can be curated with discernment. This makes authenticity sound effortless, but anyone who has tried to live it knows the opposite is true. Authenticity is earned. It requires an encounter with discomfort that most of us have been trained to avoid.
When people arrive in therapy and say that they want to be more authentic, the desire often sits on top of something more acute. They are tired of hiding. They are exhausted from performing. They know what they feel, yet the thought of saying it aloud feels dangerous. The struggle is not a lack of truth, it is the fear of what truth may cost.
I rarely define authenticity as full disclosure or spontaneous self expression. That interpretation often becomes another performance. What I see instead is a lifelong practice of facing oneself honestly and choosing from that place, even when it threatens approval, comfort, or control. It is a quiet form of integrity.
We learn the opposite long before we ever use the word authenticity. We learn what earns belonging and what invites scrutiny. We learn to be agreeable or competent or sexually appealing, but not too appealing. We learn to be wanted, but never to want too much. The lesson is subtle and persistent: parts of you are welcome, other parts are not. So we adapt. We overfunction to earn security. We detach from our needs. We perform confidence. We have sex we do not want or avoid sex altogether because the real conversation feels perilous. These strategies are protective at first, then numbing. After years of self betrayal the self becomes difficult to locate.
The realm of sexuality makes this particularly visible. Authenticity here is rarely about desire that is constant or enthusiasm that never falters. It often begins with naming the absence of desire and trusting that one’s refusal matters. It is less about availability and more about inquiry: What do I want, what do I need, what do I fear. It is less about pleasing a partner and more about choosing intimacy that includes oneself.
Inside existential therapy, authenticity often looks undramatic. It sounds like a pause that is not immediately filled. It feels like two people sitting with the discomfort of honesty rather than smoothing over tension for the sake of harmony. Sometimes it is the slow realization that one has been wearing a mask designed for survival rather than connection. The philosopher Kierkegaard once noted that despair is the sickness of not being oneself. The therapy room is often where that sickness first becomes visible.
The difficulty is that being real disrupts the roles we have built our relationships around. If you stop performing the version of yourself your partner expects, something must shift. If you voice what you actually want in bed instead of what is familiar or flattering, the erotic field changes. These shifts do not guarantee comfort. They often invite conflict. Yet conflict born from truth is categorically different from the quiet deterioration that follows years of pretense. Being loved for a performance is not the same as being loved.
There is a grief that accompanies the return to authenticity. To reclaim one’s truth is to acknowledge the years spent hiding and the relationships built on partial versions of the self. It is to recognize that some people may not choose you once the performance ends. This grief is not a punishment. It is evidence that you are waking up to what your life has been costing you.
Therapy becomes a space where this awakening can occur without demands for resolution. People rarely begin in clarity. They begin in numbness or confusion. Over time a client stops saying that they are fine and begins to speak in specifics. A couple stops pretending that sexual compatibility is simply a matter of technique and begins to ask what sex has come to symbolize in their lives. Someone who once treated desire as performance begins to recognize it as communication. These movements are small in appearance and enormous in consequence.
The work is not to fix a person. It is not to shame them for the years spent surviving through performance. It is to witness what is real, to expand the space around it, and to allow the self to emerge without coercion. From here intimacy becomes possible in a different register. Not the intimacy of skill or seduction, but the intimacy of recognition.
Many people arrive at this work simply because they are tired of faking their own lives. They sense that something in them has been traded away for acceptance. What they seek is not freedom from discomfort, but freedom from self abandonment. That freedom is costly, yet the cost of not pursuing it is greater. It is the quiet erosion of one’s own reality.
To live authentically is to include the parts of oneself that were once exiled. It is to grieve what was lost, to risk being misunderstood, and to choose connection that does not require a mask. It is the slow reconstruction of a life that can bear the weight of one’s own truth.
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