Abstract
As a working husband and wife team, Helena and I were saddened to hear of the separation of the married actors, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who starred in the film, Eyes Wide Shut. To us, this is one of the most important movies of the last 30 years for its understanding, unparalleled in popular culture, of sexuality and relationship—which is what sexuality is, at heart. After seeing the film, we wondered what effect playing such roles might have on the real-life couple. We empathise with them, since while preparing seminars and workshops on relationships and sexuality over the years, we have experienced a force come between us that seems to have the power to rip us apart. We have only recently been learning how to deal with this.
Previously, we described the difficulty of counselling couples while our own relationship was having difficulties. Both our professional and our private lives compelled us to look for ways to put the jigsaw of human sexuality together. In this issue, I discuss Eyes Wide Shut, since it appears to map out a direction which westerners must take, if we are to develop away from the obsession with fantasy and image-based sexuality and the epidemic of relationship break-ups in our culture. To introduce the context within which I see this film, I first present an outline model of sexuality, with which we now work.