Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Send?: A Meditation on the Loneliness of the Sexes - Tapa dura

Why do men tend to keep love letters in files along with their other correspondence, whereas women often keep them with their clothes? And if a letter is written but not sent, at whom is it really directed? As Darian Leader shows, such questions go to the heart of sexual desire, which is never addressed to our flesh and blood companion, but always to something beyond him or her.
Why Do Women Write More Letters than They Send? is a provocative inquiry into the fundamental loneliness of each sex. Although a woman is essential to a man's sexual life, why is the reverse far from the case? Why should relationships frequently run aground on the trivial question, "What are you thinking?" If a man chooses as his partner a woman unlike his mother, why does he try to make her behave toward him exactly as his mother did when he was a boy? Why might a woman decide not to spend the night with a man after seeing his apartment, whereas for a man this would be unthinkable? And have you ever loved someone who did not make you feel guilty?
A unique contribution to the study of the sexes, Why Do Women Write More Letters than They Send? moves from high to low culture as it teases out the intriguing, at times startling, insights of contemporary psychoanalysis.

Darian Leader is Senior Lecturer in Psychoanalytic Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University.