Withdrawing projections learned with mother (mother projections) from later loved females must be a universal male challenge. After we split ourselves, primarily between being "good" and sexual, in order to keep her good graces and to keep some displaced contact with our genetic maleness, we exist with a primary gulf between love and sex. Both are powerful, yet we have learned early and long to divide them in service of our best survival. The near universal incest taboo--which may be the same thing--further reinforces this split.

The familiar lessened, resistance, or even dis-interest of wives in sex, the "not tonight, Henry" syndrome, further supports the old split, allowing us husbands the luxury both of continuing the early habit in large measure, and at the same time entertaining the illusion of having overcome the split, reuniting the love and sex parts of ourselves. We can easily think that we both really love and also are truly sexual with our wives, since they are resistant, supporting/cloaking the illusion of our belief in our present wholeness, the reuniting of our capacities for love and sex.

Until, that is, a wife heals her own split and becomes sexual herself, removing the resistance which protected her husband from his own illusions. The common result is a mere turning of the tables: as she becomes more openly sexual, he retreats into "love," shielding himself from confronting the illusion of self-wholeness (love/sex) which was so easy to maintain in the face of her resistance, her acting much as his mother once did (non-sexually).

Better though for a man to go ahead and face his illusions of himself, confront the real-but-cloaked split within, and continue the process of healing rather than retreating in the presence of wifely wholeness.