What is the Fantasy Trap?
People who come to me for therapy are often stuck in this trap.
Simply put, the fantasy trap is when you invest so much energy or belief in your sex fantasies that real life experiences never quite measure up.
The people you meet and/or date are nothing like the ones in your fantasies. They don’t act the way you imagined they would. And now instead of feeling fulfilled, you’re frustrated about your real-world experiences.
It can make you feel needier, hornier, lonelier than before. It can make you angry and jealous. Other people seem to find their joy, why not you?
How Does it Start?
Many of us figure out what to do with our built-in feel-good buttons in adolescence. And most of us rely on fantasies to fuel our masturbation. This may make us unique among all species. Our fantasies are precious dreams that can arouse to the point of mad excitement.
It’s an excitement that we hope to simulate in real life. Some of us are lucky enough to find partners who can fulfill those fantasies right off the bat. Most of us have to date and sleep around to find a person who really does it for us. However, some people become so trapped in their fantasies that they’re unable to make a successful sexual connection.
Fantasies Carry Risk
The best thing about sex fantasies is that they free us in our own minds. You can have anything you want in a fantasy, and you can get it from anyone you want, whether it’s an actor you pine for or the high school crush you never forgot. And of course, they say and do exactly what we want them to.
But the very thing that is so fabulous about them can also make them risky. The risk is that we get so fixated on having what we fantasize about that no real person will ever be good enough. Fantasies don’t have room to accommodate reality.
We’ve all seen the results, haven’t we? The sub who never seems to find “the right dominant”. The dominant who never finds “the perfect sub”. They find good people, just not people who perfectly fit their fantasies. It happens in the straight sex world just as often.
The Kink Fantasy Trap
There’s a danger when fantasies become our model for how reality should work. We can end up trapped by our own desires.
Marvin consulted with me after years of not wanting to have sex with his wife of 20 years. We talked and talked and finally he revealed that he was turned off by her nipples. He only liked petite, pink nipples. Her were dark and “as big as pancakes.”
In his mind, her nipples had become as big as the Berlin Wall and just as effective at stopping him from entering her territory. He developed this fantasy in his teens about what a woman’s nipples should look like. He couldn’t shake it off. In fact, he didn’t want to. He would rather ruin his marriage than let go of his fantasy.
The same thing happens with kinky people:
- The fetishist with a fantasy so exacting that no real-life partner could fulfill them, and they end up alone
- The male subs who went to an endless stream of prodommes, always disappointed they didn’t fall in love with him and take him on as a personal slave
- The doms who had fixed ideas about “the perfect sub” and kept getting rejected because no one he met was as masochistic as the person in his fantasies
Life is Unscripted
Fantasies are scripted. Life is unscripted. Real people have their own ideas, their own feelings, and they come up with things that don’t fit our scripts.
Fantasies are wondrous: in our imagination we can do all the things we want with all the people we want. We don’t have to use birth control, safe sex isn’t a consideration, and everything happens just as we imagine.
But then there’s reality. We can try to fight reality but we’ll lose that war. And that means we all need to accept that real people won’t conform to our every fantasy. To live in reality (in order to make genuine connections with real people) is to give up the illusions and obsession about how it “should be”. To learn to cope with what it is — somewhat random and generally unpredictable.
Cary screwed his way through hundreds, maybe thousands, of people, never finding more than pleasant companionship. He accepted that reality and made the best of it. Then one day, a paid escort showed up at his door and to his amazement, that person felt totally different to him. It wasn’t that they fit some fantasy Cary had been nurturing. It was that when he met and talked to them, he suddenly felt something he’d never felt with anyone before. Objectively, they were imperfect and by now he wasn’t seeking any kind of long-term relationship. Two years later, he married them; five years later, they are still in love.
Break the Fantasy Trap
There are people who think “tough love” will help you make the change you need. They’ll say “grow up” or “look at the common denominator, it’s you!” But shaming people doesn’t lead to them making positive change.
When you’re trapped, it means you can’t break out of the cycle that prevents you from forming connections with real people. It means you can’t or don’t want to let go of your fantasy. It means, perhaps, that reality is too painful for you and fantasy is the relief you rely on. These are serious problems that must be untangled to find the joy you deserve.
Whether you’re hiding your porn activities from your spouse, isolating with your toys instead of meeting new potential partners, or suffering depression over your inability to live the life you want, the healing will never come from someone telling you to “grow up,” but rather from you working out the problem and making a conscious decision to escape your trap.
You deserve compassion. You deserve guidance to find genuine connection. And you deserve someone who can guide you to break out of the prison of your own fantasy making.
I can be that person for you. If you’re ready to make a change, email me now.
