So we hide. We're afraid that if we let our real selves, our real beliefs, our likes and dislikes, our thoughts, hopes and dreams, show, we'll be rejected for them, and that we can't bear. It's too much exposure. It's easier to go with what the culture tells us we should like and do and think. As I said, most of us lead lives that are predominantly motivated by fear. We'd rather rely on pundits to tell us what to think, on style mavens to tell us how to decorate our homes, and on advertisements to tell us what to wear. We'd rather surround ourselves with what's cool than with those things that address our individual needs.

You can see the catch-22 at work here. We're afraid that we're not inherently special or unique, so we willingly cooperate in eliminating the things about us that make us special and unique. This is how fear actually exterminates the part in us that is most worth saving. Fear causes us to conform, when in fact, the thing we should be most afraid of is losing ourselves. If you're not going to be yourself, why come into this challenging world in the first place? And what do we really lose when we pretend to be someone we're not?

Let's say that you never show your true face to your spouse. You hide your insecurities and preferences and deepest self from him or her because you're afraid of rejection. What have you really gained? Your husband or wife is in love with a stranger, a construct. Is there anything more lonely than the knowledge that you're not loved for who you are? You're really more alone than you would be if you showed that person your innermost self and got rejected for it. Then at least you'd have the courage of your own convictions. So you have someone to watch television with in the evenings. Congratulations.

I counseled a husband who has an addiction to pornography. He came to see me because of my well-known opposition to it and its destructive consequences for marriage and relationships. He was hoping through our conversations to wean himself off the corrosive addiction. When he told me how bored he was with this marriage and how desperate he was for an erotic thrill, I asked him, "Have you ever discussed your erotic needs with your wife?"

"I'd never do that," he told me. "She'd think I was a sicko." I have met countless husbands in the same boat. They're terrified that if they expose their male libidinous needs to their wives, they'll be rejected. So instead they develop a subterranean and damaging erotic life, one that pulls them further and further from their marriages.

Our greatest fear should be not that we will lose our lives, but that we never lived because we became somebody else.
I am certainly no stranger to the desire to conform out of fear, and I have struggled with this problem over and over again in my own life and work. This fear is sometimes magnified when you're part of a close-knit religious community.
When I first published Kosher Sex, a book whose success in many ways changed my life, I never expected it to appeal to my own religious community. I wrote it for the world at large, to teach them how their physical lives could become more intimate and redeeming.

I was amazed by the number of staunchly religious people who wrote to me secretly, sometimes with fictitious names, telling me of their moribund sexual existences within marriage and asking for counseling. In most cases, the people writing wrote secretly, in the fear that their spouse would discover that this was an issue of importance for them. They were embarrassed: They thought spiritual people shouldn't be so eager to fulfill a "base" physical need. It seems incredible to me that we can be so fearful in our lives that we tremble even before the person with whom we share our children and last names.

A woman who had conducted a secret affair, regretted it and was desperate to reconnect with her husband, asked me what she should do. I told her, "It's essential that you tell him what happened. You have to right the wrong and regain his trust."

"Impossible," she blurted out. "I'm terrified of his reaction." "By being afraid of him," I answered, "you wrong him doubly. It's bad enough that you betrayed him. Now you wish to betray him as a human being by portraying him as an ogre with whom you cannot share a confidence."

As we talked further it became evident (as is often the case), that the principal cause of her unfaithfulness was her deep marital dissatisfaction and her inability to talk about that dissatisfaction with her husband. Finding a lover seemed a lot less frightening than confronting the problems in her marriage.

Another woman wrote to me that she is convinced, two years into her marriage, that she has married the wrong man.
"I know that in your books you're completely opposed to the idea that we might have married the wrong person, saying that if so, we must have had the wrong children. But I'm convinced that in my case it is so. I was raised in a traditional home and did what was expected of me, including dating and marrying the son of my father's old schoolmate, whom my parents adored. I did not have the heart to let my parents down or challenge their presumption to know what's best for me. But I do not love or respect this man."

This woman's fear of standing up for herself to her parents made her passive in the face of the most important decision of her life.

Copyright Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, 2005

*This article was originally posted on Saturday, January 31, 2004