Why desire does not survive being monitored

It used to be there. Now, when you look at your partner, you check for it, and it is not. You kiss them and monitor for the feeling and find nothing. And the nothing has become the most frightening piece of evidence in the whole case, because if you felt nothing for the person you chose, what does that say about what you are?

I want to explain what has actually happened, because it is one of the most consistent features of this theme.

Attention and feeling cannot happen at once

Desire, like most feelings, arises in the middle of experience. It is there when your attention is on the person, the moment, the touch. Turn attention inward to check whether it is there, and it goes, not because it was absent but because checking and feeling use the same attention and you have just moved it. This is true of enjoyment, relaxation, amusement, and every other feeling that people try to inspect. Try to check whether you are enjoying a piece of music while it plays, and the enjoyment thins, because you have stopped listening to the music and started listening to yourself.

Testing for a response is close to the most reliable way to abolish one. And in SO-OCD, you have been testing constantly.

What the test does

The thought arrives: what if I do not feel this any more? You look at your partner and monitor. The monitoring removes the feeling for the duration of the check. You find nothing. The nothing is read as confirmation. The confirmation produces more fear, more checking, and more nothing. Within weeks, a relationship that felt fine has become a site of constant, terrified inspection, and the inspection has manufactured exactly the absence it was afraid of.

Meanwhile, the same monitoring aimed at other people produces the opposite artefact. Anxious attention aimed at your own body will find sensation there, whoever you are and whatever you are afraid of. So the check for a reaction to someone of the feared orientation finds something, and the check for a reaction to your partner finds nothing, and both results are products of the checking rather than of anything about you.

Every direction incriminating

Feeling nothing for your partner proves it. Feeling something for someone else proves it. Feeling nothing for anyone proves you are suppressing. There is no result the test could return that would count as innocent, which is why you have been running it for months without ever getting a verdict that held. The test cannot produce evidence, only more tests.

What returns when the checking stops

Desire generally comes back as the checking stops. I say generally rather than always, because this is not a promise so much as an observation about how attention works. Once you are no longer inspecting the feeling, attention goes back to the person, and the feeling arises where it always did, in the experience rather than in the inspection. People are often astonished by this, because they had concluded something permanent from what was a temporary artefact of monitoring.

What treatment does with it

In CBT with exposure and response prevention for this theme, the check is one of the first compulsions we withdraw. The practice is to be with your partner without monitoring, to let the question "do I feel it?" arrive and go unanswered, and to notice the urge to test and decline it. This is uncomfortable, because the test feels like the only way to know. But the test has never told you anything, and declining it is what lets the feeling come back.

I will not tell you that you love your partner, or that you are attracted to them. That would be reassurance, and it would last an hour. I also have no view about what your orientation should turn out to be, and I will not be assessing it while you talk. The target is the testing, not the question, and the goal is a life where you can be in your relationship without a running commentary.

If the nothing has become your evidence, there is more on how I treat sexual orientation OCD, and this artefact of attention is one of the first things we cover.