This is an excerpt from What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire, Chapter 5.

In Isabel’s small Manhattan apartment, Eric had run her a bath, strewn it with salts, surrounded it with candles, and considerately left her to lie alone in it. When she stepped out of the bathroom, she found her bedroom lit with more candles. And on her bed was a deluge of rose petals arranged in the shape of a heart. Through a fair amount of conscious effort, she managed to be seduced by this gift: while Eric took her place in the bathroom and showered, she lay back on the bed, brushed the petals across her lips, and dropped some onto her shoulders and breasts. When he emerged from the shower, she did feel pleasure as he went down on her, slid his broad shoulders up her body, and slid inside her. But the pleasure was precarious. And on many other nights what she felt was merely patience or something worse than that.

She loved him, she was certain. She said, “I remember the first time I brought Eric home to St. Louis to meet my dad and my stepmother and my grandmother. She’s eighty-eight years old. She helped raise me when my parents were divorced. We call her The Patter. If she sits next to you, she’s going to find some part of you and pat it. She’s going to pat your hand or your knee or your arm. Pat-pat-pat as you sit there. She’s incredibly special to me. She’s incredibly affectionate. She’s deaf, mostly. I think that’s one reason she’s so tactile; her ability to communicate is hampered. There’s something very child-like about her. And one afternoon during that visit, I walked into the living room, and she and Eric were sitting on the couch, holding hands. He looked totally comfortable. There was nothing ironic in his expression. I think they had been talking, but talking is labor-intensive with Granny, and now they were watching TV. Probably she’d been patting him, and they’d wound up holding hands. I think most men would have been highly self-conscious. Holding hands with her like that would have been an ironic exercise. But for Eric it was natural.”

She also said, “The shades in my bedroom let in a small amount of light, and he likes to sleep with something over his face. A T-shirt, a pillow, an arm, all three—I don’t know how he breathes. It’s kind of hilarious. In the mornings, I have to peel away layers to get to where his face is. I want eye contact.” She endured sex once a week but yearned for this every day. “I’ll find his eyes under everything and wait for his eyelids to open, and then I’ll find space for my body right against his.”

She was transfixed by the tenderness of his gaze and tormented by the fact that her lust for him had waned within a few months of their starting to date; she sensed that his proposing might happen any day. She dreaded it. She was in her early thirties. She believed that she couldn’t afford to make the wrong choice, and amid all the truths she tried to weigh rationally, it was impossible for her not to compare her situation with Eric to the two years she had spent with her previous boyfriend. When she had dressed for Michael, she had selected her clothes while subjecting herself to a silent inquisition. “Am I a doll?” she had asked herself as she stood in front of her mirror, or as she lingered in a boutique’s fitting room, deciding whether to buy. “Am I a fantasy?” Michael’s preferences weren’t extreme, but they were pointed. High-heeled boots, a short skirt. Or tight jeans and a T-shirt slung halfway off one shoulder, sizeable hoop earrings, dark eyeliner.

He was ten years older. And he was particular, though his requests were never demands. What she put on was her choice. He let her know, keenly, precisely, what he liked: the black lace bra through which her nipples showed. But the decision about whether to fulfill his wishes belonged entirely to her.

The problem was that she wanted to fulfill them all, though his taste in clothes was not hers. What was she collapsing into? She had berated herself. Yet it didn’t feel like collapse. There was strength in sliding on the lace thong that matched the bra, in pulling on the jeans or skirt, the boots. He would be riveted. She had that power. An alertness spread through her body as she dressed for him. An awareness suffused her skin.

With Eric, she didn’t have to accuse herself of any capitulation. He liked what she liked, and she counted this as a sign. When they went out in summer, she often wore a loose-fitting pastel green dress she’d bought on a trip to Guatemala. It was girlish, she knew, and she laughed at herself because of it. But Eric cherished this quality in her. To be who Michael had wanted required stepping off a precipice, dismissing the voice that warned her against inhabiting his wishes, plummeting over that edge. Women who dressed with urgent, ungoverned need for the desire of men could set off, inside her, a flurry of disdain, like an instinctive aversion to a weakness or wound. Yet whenever she walked into a restaurant where Michael waited for her at the bar, his focus seemed to pluck her from the air, midfall, and pull her forward. His eyes held a thoroughly different kind of constancy than Eric’s later would. Eric adored her. Michael admired her. She was a possession, the heels of the boots she picked for him taking her across crowded rooms toward her owner. The boots were like the frames and pedestals he chose for the photography and sculpture in his gallery. He had specific opinions about how she was best displayed.

Her mind was already reeling by the time they sat down to dinner, yet she kept the appearance of balance. The display that pleased him depended on a degree of agility. In conversation and body she maintained dexterity, but when his breath or hand grazed across her in any way, or even when there was no contact at all, only proximity, she could become so frantic with need she grew almost angry. “If you don’t touch me right now, I’m going to scream,” she would plead silently. “Please, God, touch me right now. Please, God, something’s got to be done here.”

She came quickly, repeatedly, when the dinners were at last over and they were in bed. The certainty of her coming guaranteed it; she didn’t have to doubt, so doubt never got in the way. Her mind never obstructed; it had been unspooling since the evening’s start.

Michael’s effect on her had been all the more enthralling because of the way she viewed her own body. The sharpness of his eyes had somehow cut her body to a better outline. Eric didn’t have that ability. He was gentle, while Michael had been gentlemanly; he was empathetic, while Michael was at once solicitous and commanding. Michael’s admiration had convinced her of her allure; Eric’s telling her she was beautiful couldn’t quite make it so.

The relationship with Michael had ended only because she understood he would never commit to her, never marry her or even live with her, but it didn’t end cleanly at all. Months after breaking things off, she met him for dinner, and afterward, outside, he turned up the collar of her overcoat, hailed her a cab, and five minutes later sent her a text: I’m following you. Soon she was buzzing him into her building. There were lapses like that, lapses and lapses. The end point she had announced to her friends took forever, it seemed, to become fact, until she could no longer bear to confess her failures to them.

“I could not part with him,” she said. “I couldn’t get him out of my skull.”

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Empathy, closeness—these were supposed to be the paths. For researcher Marta Meana, these paths might lead to lovely places. Lust, though, wasn’t likely to be one of them.

“Female desire,” Meana says, “is not governed by the relational factors that, we like to think, rule women’s sexuality in contrast to men’s.” She was about to publish a study built on long interviews with women whose marriages were sexually bereft. It might be right, she said to me, that bad relationships can kill desire, but good ones don’t at all guarantee it. “We kiss. We hug. I tell him, I don’t know what it is,” she quoted from one subject. “We have a great relationship. It’s just that one area”—the area of their bed.

It was important to distinguish, Meana went on, between what was prized in life and what was most potent as a source of lust. Women might set a high value on ideals of togetherness and understanding, constancy and permanence, but “it’s wrong to think that because relationships are what women choose, they’re the primary source of women’s desire.” Again, she spoke of narcissism and the wish to be the object of primal need.

The attainment of this wish, she argued, required not closeness but a measure of distance. An object of lust was, by necessity, apart. She warned against the expectation or even the hope of reaching popular romantic dreams: of “merging” with a partner, of being able to say “you complete me.” This was the wrong standard for love. This kind of bond, or just the striving for it, could suffocate eros. Melding left no separation to span, no distance for a lover’s drive to cross, no end point where the full force of that drive could be felt.