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Feminist Theory

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Research article

First published online April 8, 2026

Erotic attachments and cruel optimism: Sexual fantasy as affective impasse

Maha Khawaja https://orcid.org/0009-0009-7245-1648 [email protected]View all authors and affiliations

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https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001261434085

Abstract
Introduction
Sexual fantasy and the promise of repair: Mapping cruel optimism in post-liberation discourse
Theoretical framework
Chrononormativity and the climax horizon: Erotic time under neoliberal progress
Recalibration, shame and the affective maintenance of the erotic impasse
Declaration of conflicting interests
Funding
ORCID iD
References

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Abstract

Sex is routinely framed as a site of repair: with the right communication, technique or therapeutic work, intimacy will heal damage and secure coherence. This article asks what happens when that promise wears thin. Reading Berlant and Edelman's Sex, or the Unbearable alongside Berlant's later work and Freeman's notion of chrononormativity, I theorize contemporary sexuality as a scene of maintenance structured by cruel optimism and organized by time. I argue that erotic optimism now attaches not only to the fantasy of ‘better sex’ but also to a chrononormative arc in which desire should build, crest, resolve and, with sufficient labour, eventually arrive. Therapy culture, sex education and platformized dating translate structural non-relation into ongoing self-regulation, recoding endurance as an ethical project of continuous improvement. Drawing on disability and illness discourses, I show how crip and sick temporalities trouble this mandate by improvising non-teleological tempos that dominant scripts then misrecognize as lack. Across these sites, sexual subjects are compelled to stay ‘in circulation’ – tracking, optimizing and narrating their erotic lives – even as the structural mismatch between what sex is asked to do and what it can do persists. In this way, swipe culture, intimacy industries and therapeutic sex education materialize cruel optimism in erotic time.

Introduction

Sex everywhere is pitched as curative: a balm for trauma, a shortcut to intimacy, a passport to self-knowledge, even a wellness metric that one can track, optimize and display. Yet the rise of advice columns, therapeutic podcasts and self-tracking gadgets has been shadowed by an equally pervasive rhetoric of erotic disappointment: stories of sex that heals nothing, fails to satisfy and leaves its participants more freighted with shame than with pleasure. This disquieting coexistence of promise and frustration is not an anomaly to be solved by better technique or more progressive politics; it is, I contend, constitutive of sexuality itself.

Lauren Berlant names this structure cruel optimism: an attachment to objects and scenes that are experienced as necessary to survival but that, in practice, impede the flourishing they promise (Berlant, 2011). In this way, optimism is not simply a hopeful attitude but a binding to a fantasy of ‘the good life’ that organizes attention, labour and endurance even as that fantasy becomes increasingly untenable (Berlant, 2011). Sexual culture is one of the most intimate sites where this dynamic becomes visible. The fantasy of sex as self-repair solicits ongoing investment (i.e. more communication, more self-work, more techniques) precisely because it fails to deliver stable satisfaction. The more one strives for fulfilling intimacy, the more the horizon of fulfilment recedes, and the idea that ‘better sex’ will heal psychic and relational damage keeps people invested in practices of communication, self-discovery and improvement that rarely resolve the trouble they are asked to fix. Desire becomes less a path to liberation than a way of staying attached to a scene that continually disappoints.

In Sex, or the Unbearable, Berlant and Lee Edelman push this insight further by taking sex itself as the event where optimism and its failure are most starkly exposed (Berlant and Edelman, 2014). For both, sexuality functions as an encounter with what they call the ‘unbearable’: a moment in which enjoyment undoes the subject's sense of coherence and control. Edelman's account of negativity and the death drive insists that sex does not repair structural damage as it repeats the subject's confrontation with what cannot be made whole (Edelman, 2004). Berlant does not contest this negativity. Instead, they turn towards the ordinary work of living on with it, theorizing cruel optimism, slow death and the ‘inconvenience drive’ as names for the ways that people remain bound to scenes that exhaust them because those scenes are also how they endure (Berlant, 2007, 2011, 2022).

From this, I argue that contemporary sexuality is the scene where cruel optimism is infrastructurally and temporally organized. Drawing together Berlant's account of impasse, Freeman's theorization of chrononormativity and Foucault's notion of the dispositif, I show how sex under neoliberalism operates as a technology of optimized maintenance: subjects are bound to erotic futures that never arrive through institutionalized regimes of therapy, coaching and self-tracking that convert endurance into an ethical and economic obligation. By distinguishing optimized from lateral forms of maintenance, and by situating therapy culture and digital intimacy as key infrastructures of sexual survival, the article extends Berlant's trajectory – from Cruel Optimism through Sex, or the Unbearable to On The Inconvenience of Other People – to account for how the labour of ‘staying in the scene’ has itself become a central mechanism of governance in contemporary erotic life. My aim also is not to adjudicate between Berlant's and Edelman's positions but to inhabit the space between them. I retain Edelman's insistence that there is no erotic outside to structural negativity, while following Berlant in tracing the small adjustments, recalibrations and compromises through which people continue to live in that impasse.

Sexual fantasy and the promise of repair: Mapping cruel optimism in post-liberation discourse

To understand how sexuality becomes a site of cruel optimism, it is necessary to trace the dispositif that binds erotic life to the promise of improvement. For Foucault (1976), the dispositif, translated variously as ‘apparatus’ or ‘deployment’, names the heterogeneous network of discourses, institutions and practices through which power produces subjects. The dispositif of sexuality incites people to speak, analyse and manage desire as the privileged route to self-knowledge. From this, sex becomes the means through which one becomes intelligible to oneself and to others. The result is an enduring structure of optimism and an affective investment in the idea that the right articulation of desire will yield freedom.

This optimism was codified during the Enlightenment, when knowledge and confession were cast as instruments of moral progress. The 18th-century subject was invited to tell the truth about sex as a means of liberation, inaugurating what Foucault (1976) calls the scientia sexualis. Rather than repressing sex, modernity made it speak as doctors, clerics and educators demanded confessions, generating endless commentary about bodies and pleasure (Lister, 2021). The conviction that self-disclosure could perfect the self became a normative structure of feeling, and is what later generations would inherit as the fantasy of sexual liberation. By the mid-20th century, this dispositif had not exactly been dismantled but had been largely reshaped and remoulded. Erotic life was most certainly recoded as both political and therapeutic. Herbert Marcuse's (1955)Eros and Civilization and feminist self-help texts such as Our Bodies, Ourselves (1979) (Boston Women's Health Book Collective, 1979) promised authenticity through erotic literacy, and legal milestones appeared to enshrine desire as a civil right. Yet these liberatory gestures continued to operate within the same structure of confession and optimization: the subject must keep discovering, naming and improving sexual truth. Liberation thus remained tethered to the dispositifs of expertise, pedagogy and self-regulation that had always governed it.

What this history does is clarify why cruel optimism adheres so easily to the erotic. What Foucault describes as the institutional mechanism of the dispositif (i.e. its production of docile, self-narrating bodies), Berlant (2011) translates into cruel optimism. The dispositif of sexuality does not merely discipline from above as it binds from within. Its power is maintained through optimism where the belief that each confession, adjustment or new technology of intimacy will finally deliver the satisfaction that eludes it. Subjects sustain the dispositif through their own yearning for repair.

Notably, this optimism has not always taken its modern form. In other cultural frameworks, erotic discipline aimed at balance and reciprocity rather than self-optimization. The South Asian Kāmasūtra (3rd–5th centuries CE) situated pleasure (kāma) within an ethical triad alongside virtue and material well-being, presenting sexual knowledge as an art of living and not a metric of progress (Desmond, 2010). Chinese Daoist bedchamber arts (fangzhongshu) emphasize harmony between yin and yang and mutual pleasure as a practice of nourishing life (Zhang, 2024). Islamic sexological works (ʿilm al-bāh), including al-Nafzāwī's The Perfumed Garden and al-Suyūṭī's The Medicine of Coitus, frame erotic technique as part of divine balance and care (Musallam, 1989; Downham Moore, 2021; Dunn et al., 2004). In these spheres, erotic regulation exists but its telos is relational equilibrium instead of isolated and reduced to individual productivity. The dispositif here fosters relational ethics; in modernity, it has become an apparatus of self-surveillance.

Under late capitalism, the confessional dispositif is repackaged as an injunction to optimize. The moral vocabulary of repression gives way to the managerial idiom of wellness and efficiency. Sex therapy, coaching and digital intimacy platforms translate the search for truth into a system of metrics, be it through libido indices, arousal trackers or mindfulness homework, as will be expanded on in depth later (Lupton, 2014, 2016). Freedom is now expressed through compliance with the technologies that promise it. As Foucault (1976) observed, power succeeds not by forbidding pleasure but by compelling subjects to participate in their own regulation. The affective consequence of this transformation is what Berlant (2007, 2011) calls slow death: the attritional labour of maintaining life within systems that exhaust it. Within the neoliberal dispositif, the erotic subject becomes both manager and managed, performing constant self-surveillance in pursuit of intimacy's ever-deferred coherence. The mechanisms that promise liberation then ensure ongoing dependence, and this is precisely bolstered by the affective logic of cruel optimism: the subject remains bound to the dispositif of sexuality because it is through that binding (i.e. through confession, optimization and adjustment) that one feels most alive.

Theoretical framework

Really, the next question is what remains of sex once that promise cannot be sustained. Berlant and Edelman's (2014) Sex, or the Unbearable begins precisely from this impasse. Rather than taking sex as a scene of liberation or repair, they treat it as the event in which the fantasy of repair encounters its structural limits. In doing so, they are not offering a new program for sexual flourishing but instead work within this tension to create an account of what it means to keep living with sexuality when optimism about its redemptive potential has worn thin.

Berlant and Edelman call sex ‘unbearable’ because it exposes the subject to something that cannot be mastered, narrated away or definitively resolved. Enjoyment in their account negates popular accounts as a surplus of pleasure in favour of it being an encounter with the breaking point of one's own coherence, i.e. the threat of ‘what exceeds and undoes the subject's fantasmatic sovereignty’ (Berlant and Edelman, 2014: 2). Sex is therefore unbearable not because it fails to satisfy but because it so overtly stages the impossibility of ever being securely satisfied. It is precisely this scene where the subject is most tempted to believe in repair (‘this will bring us closer’, ‘this will prove I am desired’), a temptation that overlaps with sexual growth beliefs – the conviction that sexual difficulties can be worked through with effort – as opposed to sexual destiny beliefs, which presume instant, effortless fit based on compatibility (Maxwell et al., 2017). Growth beliefs are often framed as healthier, but in the context of cruel optimism they can easily become the affective engine of endurance: every misattunement is read as evidence that more work is warranted, that the good sex is still ahead (Maxwell et al., 2017). Destiny beliefs, conversely, may blunt this loop – if partners ‘just aren’t sexually compatible’, there is less reason to remain attached to a fantasy of eventual repair – which is to say that not all subjects are caught in the same optimistic circuit. The unbearable, then, names the ordinary structural mismatch between what sex is asked to do and what it can actually do, even when the subject is armed with ostensibly adaptive beliefs about improvement.

Edelman's contribution to this joint project extends his earlier work on negativity and the death drive. In No Future, he argues that modern culture is organized around an insistence on positivity and redemption, a demand he theorizes through the figure of ‘reproductive futurism’ (Edelman, 2004). In Sex, or the Unbearable, this critique is folded back into sexuality more explicitly. Sex is not the site where wounds are healed or where conflicts are finally resolved as it is instead the repetition of what he elsewhere calls the ‘non-relation’, the structural impossibility of a relation that would fully secure the subject (Edelman, 2004; Berlant and Edelman, 2014). The crucial point here is that this negativity is entirely a structural failure and that no amount of communication, technique or optimization can turn sex into a stable guarantor of meaning or connection. As Edelman puts it, ‘the undoing is not […] productive. It doesn’t move us toward final synthesis or overcome our differences. And it doesn’t give us comfort, as if it were an absolute good in itself’ (Berlant and Edelman, 2014: 8).

From this, the optimism that surrounds contemporary sex, meaning its packaging as cure, growth and wellness, appears as a refusal of negativity and an insistence on transforming impasse into progress. For Berlant, the impasse names a stretch of ongoing crisis in which movement is still felt as necessary even when no clear direction remains; cruel optimism arises when that suspended state is converted into a fantasy of forward motion, so the stuckness itself becomes the scene of attachment (Berlant, 2011). Edelman's work cuts against this grain as he refuses the injunction to redeem sex, insisting instead on what cannot be smoothed out, and he provides a language for naming the limit against which sexual optimism repeatedly breaks. Where the dispositif of sexuality promises that better tools will eventually align pleasure and coherence, Edelman insists that there is no such alignment to be had.

To be clear, Berlant does not dispute Edelman's claim regarding negativity; they absolutely take the non-relation as a real limit. They pivot the question though by stating that if negativity is inescapable, then the real intellectual work is to see how people live inside it. Across Cruel Optimism (Berlant, 2011), ‘Slow Death’ (Berlant, 2007) and On the Inconvenience of Other People (Berlant, 2022), they show that subjects stay bound to scenes that wear them down because those same scenes are where they patch together continuity, recognition or just-enough pleasure. In Sex, or the Unbearable they name their interest very clearly: ‘I am more concerned with that muddled middle where survival and threats to it engender social forms that transform the habitation of negativity's multiplicity, without necessarily achieving “story” in his terms’ (Berlant and Edelman, 2014: 5). In other words, they want to describe the small adjustments, retimings and sideways moves through which people make an unfixable situation breathable and liveable. Seen from there, sexuality becomes a particularly vivid site for tracking those ‘muddled middle’ practices: it is full of attachment to what won’t deliver, but it is also thick with techniques for pacing, cushioning or stretching the disappointment. These do not undo the structural negativity Edelman insists on; they shape how it is inhabited, how long it can be borne and how it is narrativized as trying rather than failing.

What On the Inconvenience of Other People clarifies is that Berlant's (2022) interest in ‘the muddled middle’ is not just in survival but in the ongoing, often tiring work of receptivity – taking in other people, situations and scenes that never fully suit us (Berlant, 2022). For Berlant (2022: 2), inconvenience names ‘the affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation’, the way other people and the world keep disturbing our fantasy of sovereignty and yet have to be dealt with anyway, and it is through films like Last Tango in Paris and Happiness that they emphasize this. Interestingly, even in empirical work, this idea appears as the gendered labour of accommodating other people's desires. Fahs and Swank's (2016) study of women's ‘third shift’ of sexual emotion work details how participants fake orgasms, tolerate sexual pain and reframe ‘bad sex’ as acceptable in order to sustain a relationship, exemplifying the tiring receptivity that Berlant describes.

This is ambivalence in Berlant's late key: not simply love/hate but living with ‘incommensurate wants’ (Berlant, 2022: 9) towards the same object – to want sex as intimacy, to resist the costs of that intimacy and to keep circling back to it. Read in this way, the unbearable in sex is not only the shock of negativity that Edelman names; it is the durational pressure of having to keep adjusting to an object that we still want, even as it repeatedly proves inconvenient.

Thus, I follow Edelman in refusing to treat sex as a latent site of repair that could be redeemed by better politics, pedagogy or technique, as there is no version of sex that steps outside structural inequality, historical trauma or the non-sovereignty of desire. At the same time, I follow Berlant in treating the ways that people live on with sex as neither trivial nor merely deluded. The rituals that organize contemporary life cannot be reduced to false consciousness as they entirely are the everyday forms through which subjects negotiate their attachment to a scene that both sustains and depletes them.

From this angle, contemporary sexuality is best understood as a scene of maintenance structured by cruel optimism. Sex functions as a technology and mechanism of endurance as people remain attached to the fantasy that intimacy will repair them, even as the effort to approximate that repair becomes another vector of exhaustion. Cruel optimism is the name for what it feels like to inhabit a dispositif that has long promised freedom through the very practices – confession, self-analysis, optimization – that bind the subject to its norms. What remains is to clarify how this scene of maintenance is organized: through what rhythms, expectations and temporal forms subjects are bound to keep trying. Berlant's vocabulary of the ‘crisis ordinary’ already suggests a temporality, a stretch of time in which mere adjustment is positioned as an accomplishment (Berlant, 2011: 10). To survive within the unbearable is to live in suspended repair, continually recalibrating without arriving.

Chrononormativity and the climax horizon: Erotic time under neoliberal progress

Adjustments that involve recalibrating expectations, adopting new techniques and narrating setbacks as ‘work in progress’ all presume a tacit injunction that eventually something must arrive. That ‘arrival’ can be orgasm, intimacy, healing or self-integration but contemporary erotic culture repeatedly casts the present as preparatory time. Classic sexological models such as Masters and Johnson's four-phase sexual response cycle script sex as a linear build-up towards climax (Blyuss and Kyrychko, 2023; Masters and Johnson, 1966). This linear arc underpins diagnostic frameworks that define dysfunction in temporal terms: orgasm that comes ‘too early’, ‘too late’ or not at all. (American Psychiatric Association, 2013; Graham, 2009; Hevesi et al., 2020). Feminist and sociological work on the coital and orgasm imperatives shows that young adults routinely describe ‘real sex’ as intercourse that progresses through foreplay to penetration and orgasm, with encounters that do not reach or mistime this endpoint narrated as incomplete, disappointing or failed (Frith, 2015; McPhillips et al., 2001; Opperman et al., 2013; Regan, 2024). Chrononormativity helps explain how this arc appears natural and obligatory, binding bodies to sexual timelines that equate climax with value. Within this frame, departures register as delay, dysfunction and failure to keep time (Freeman, 2010).

Notably, chrononormativity temporalizes the cruel optimistic bind as it converts the promise of fulfilment into a schedule and instructs subjects to inhabit the interval between disappointment and anticipated arrival as a zone of ongoing labour. Erotic time thus comes to resemble a hedonic treadmill: each effortful ‘gain’ in intimacy or pleasure is quickly normalized, so that the horizon of ‘better sex’ recedes even as the subject is compelled to keep up the pace (Diener et al., 2006).

Chrononormativity dovetails with neoliberal progress narratives in which perpetual self-upgrade is taken as moral common sense, such that sex is ‘good’ sex insofar as it can be rendered incrementally better. Popular sex manuals and media advice present sexual life as an open-ended improvement project, promising ‘amazing’ or ‘optimal’ sex as only a few techniques away and framing sexual work on oneself as both desirable and necessary (Gupta and Cacchioni, 2013; Ménard and Kleinplatz, 2007). In contemporary erotic culture, this appears as scalar enhancement – longer, more intense, more frequent, more reliably orgasmic sex – underpinned by pedagogies that train readers to strengthen muscles, master bodily responses and cultivate a ‘technology of sexiness’ to ensure ‘orgasmic success’ (Frith, 2015: 310). Mediated sex-advice cultures extend this logic by offering ever more finely segmented repertoires (e.g., lists of tips, skill drills and techniques) through which ‘better sex’ is imagined as a matter of continuous self-optimization and sexual entrepreneurship (Barker et al., 2018). Escalation becomes the mechanism of endurance in which each new method renews commitment to a horizon that continually recedes. Chrononormativity thus sustains erotic optimism by converting delay into a sign of progress.

What this temporalization of sexual success does, however, is distribute failure unevenly. We know that in heterosexual pairings the orgasm gap persists, and popular discourse reliably individualizes it as a matter of technique or communication; but similar logics surface in queer, trans, disabled and racialized sexual cultures when orgasm, versatility, endurance or scene completion are treated as the non-negotiable signs of having done sex right (Gesselman et al., 2024; Jóhannsdóttir and Guðrúnar Ágústsdóttir, 2024; Silva et al., 2025). In those accounts, structural conditions like hetero and androcentric pacing, whitened desirability hierarchies, ableist assumptions about stamina and platformed porn norms recede (Gupta and Cacchioni, 2013; Han and Choi, 2018), and the shortfall is routed through individualized time work: you didn’t practise enough, disclose early enough, regulate your body enough. That is exactly the structure that Berlant names: cruel optimism in erotic time, where the more one labours to synchronize with the ideal arc, the more one experiences the inevitable mismatch as personal failure (Berlant, 2011).

As we have established thus far, chrononormative climax exerts particular pressure on those whose capacities do not align with normative arcs of arousal and release, such as people living with chronic pain, disability, fatigue or hormonal flux. Accounts from disability and illness communities describe choreographing intimacy around medication cycles, flares and exhaustion, inventing non-teleological tempos that are slow, discontinuous or episodic (Rainey, 2011; Silva et al., 2025). Alison Kafer's notion of crip time names precisely these counter-temporalities, where time is reorientated around access, care and unpredictable embodiment rather than developmental or productivity schedules (Kafer, 2013). Johanna Hedva's ‘Sick Woman Theory’ similarly frames chronic illness as a mode of political and affective life lived out of sync with neoliberal demands for visibility, productivity and mobilization, insisting on the everyday labour of enduring in bodies paced by pain, fatigue and medication (Hedva, 2022). Yet dominant scripts continue to treat orgasmic resolution as the measure of ‘healthy’ sex, so improvised tempos are often narrated as lack. The disappointment is chrono-political, an effect of being misaligned with the sexual timetable that organizes cultural legitimacy.

Recalibration, shame and the affective maintenance of the erotic impasse

I do not treat Berlant and Edelman as offering interchangeable accounts. From Edelman I take the floor: sexual negativity is structural, and no amount of technique or communication dissolves the non-relation (Berlant and Edelman, 2014; Edelman, 2004). From Berlant, especially in On the Inconvenience of Other People, I take the interest in how people nonetheless stay in relation, developing small, ambivalent practices that make ongoing non-sovereignty breathable (Berlant, 2011, 2022).

Optimized maintenance: intimacy as self-upgrade

Sex therapy protocols and intimacy exercises: There is a specifically sexualized and neoliberalized iteration of ongoingness, in which the labour of ‘keeping the relation going’ is routed through therapy culture and sold back as self-betterment. In Desire/Love, Berlant (2012: 15–17) already notes the emergence of a therapeutic milieu that tells people that they ‘both can and need to fix themselves’, surrounded by purchasable expertise for managing desire's unruly effects. Under contemporary conditions, this diffuse injunction hardens into a norm in which erotic boredom or mismatch is not cast as an ordinary friction but is underpinned as a deficit to be remedied through work on the self. Analyses of ‘therapy culture’ argue that emotional and relational difficulties are increasingly framed as matters for professional intervention and continuous self-monitoring (Furedi, 2004), while feminist critiques of sex manuals show how sexual dissatisfaction is recoded as a health risk that responsible subjects must address through ongoing ‘sexual improvement’ (Gupta and Cacchioni, 2013). Even external to therapy culture, this paradigm appears in tech-infused sex toys that promise insights and expertise towards sexual behaviours and orgasms, like from We-Vibe and Womanizer. What Berlant (2007: 770) calls ‘an activity of maintenance, not making’ is thus re-coded as an ethical temporality: the good contemporary subject is not the one who has ‘solved’ intimacy but the one who is visibly in process, working on desire, working on communication, working on attachment. Here the sexual field is doing very Berlantian work but under a different sovereignty: it sutures people to scenes that wear them out, but now explicitly within an optimization regime that renders this wearing-out meaningful as growth.

Therapeutic discourse is the key translator. It takes what, in Berlant and Edelman's terms, would register as encounters with erotic non-resolution and reframes them as long-duration projects of self-regulation and skill building. In clinical sexology, low desire is redescribed as ‘responsive desire’ that can be cultivated through appropriate conditions and practice (Basson, 2000), while mindfulness-based sex-therapy protocols for women with low desire prescribe multi-session programmes combining psychoeducation, mindfulness exercises and at-home ‘homework’ to gradually increase desire scores and reduce distress (Brotto and Basson, 2014). Classic sensate-focus regimes similarly organize couples into graded exercises over several weeks – starting with non-genital touch, progressing to genital touch and eventually to intercourse – explicitly structured as a series of steps towards ‘reigniting’ intimacy and correcting dysfunction (Weiner, 2022). In the broader couples-therapy marketplace, clinics routinely advertise packages that promise milestones such as ‘improved communication’, ‘rediscovered connection’ or ‘reignited passion’ as the outcome of sticking with the programme. The present is always preparatory – a not-yet relative to a more integrated erotic future. As part of optimized maintenance, the labour of ‘staying in the scene’ (continuing to have sex, narrate sex and attempt intimacy despite exhaustion) is captured and reorganized as a sequence of sessions and upgrades. Berlant's (2011: 10) ‘crisis ordinary’, in which ‘just getting by’ counts as an achievement, is thus reprocessed as a therapeutic timeline whose checkpoints promise to convert bare endurance into progress.

Foregrounding political economy clarifies what is otherwise too easily moralized. Platforms, clinics and wellness enterprises profit from time-elongated problems, and this profitability is of course unevenly distributed and unevenly accessible: capitalism differentially targets middle-class, often white, coupledom as the ideal consumer of therapeutic intimacy, while racialized, working-class, disabled and migrant subjects are more often disciplined for relational ‘failure’ than resourced to sustain this ongoing work (Barker et al., 2018). Chrononormativity here is not only the social imposition of certain temporal rhythms (Freeman, 2010) but also the market-formatting of erotic time. Desire is made to move on billable, trackable time. Neoliberalism supplies both tempo (continuous improvement) and stakes (relational competence as part of your human capital), such that erotic non-resolution is no longer a structural limit to be acknowledged – Edelman's point – but a summons to further labour. You have not done enough yet.

In Desire/Love, Berlant (2012) notes that subjects are encouraged to imagine that their difficulties in love can be managed by purchasing access to expert models and scripts. In the contemporary intimacy industries, this becomes an effectively infinite subscription to endurance: sex and relationship coaching, app-based psychoeducation and digital courses promise ongoing support for ‘healing attachment wounds’, ‘reclaiming your erotic self’ or ‘rewiring desire’, reformatting non-resolution as a programme of continuous self-improvement (Barker et al., 2018; Gill and Orgad, 2018). Yet this subscription model presumes a subject for whom individualized, clinic- or app-based care is culturally desirable and economically feasible. Studies on mental-health help seeking in Pakistan and among South Asian and diasporic communities show that many women prefer family, religious or community support, and that stigma, cost and cultural dissonance make formal counselling unattractive and inaccessible (Husain et al., 2020; Prajapati and Liebling, 2022). In those settings, managing distress is imagined as collective and often faith suffused rather than as an endlessly self-upgraded couple project. The diagnosis is rarely that one expects too much of sex and is more often that one has not yet performed sufficient therapeutic labour to unlock what sex promises. Maintenance becomes a monetizable affect and one unevenly available across classed, racialized and geopolitical locations.

As Berlant's more recent work reminds us, professional help can widen the tolerability of being with others (Berlant, 2022). The point is that therapy culture now plays a double function in the dispositif of sexuality: it can authorize lateral, non-transcendent maintenance, and it can also reproduce the demand to remain optimistic about repair. To refuse that demand, as in to say that ‘this will not be healed and that is not a failure’, is easily rendered as pathology. Seen from this angle, therapy culture is one of the primary renewal mechanisms of the sexual dispositif: it teaches subjects how to interpret sex's failure, how to pace further attempts and how to metabolize disappointment as a call to more work.

Sex education as self-audit: Much contemporary Anglophone sex education, especially the material that circulates through podcasts, Instagram therapists, popular manuals and online courses, asks people to learn sex by learning themselves. It packages desire as a system that can be made legible through reflection and tracking: identify your accelerators and brakes, map your attachment style, name your turn-ons and turn-offs, schedule sex to match your nervous system. Authors like Nagoski popularize this through the dual-control model (Nagoski, 2021); clinical and mindfulness-based approaches echo it when they tell clients to monitor stress, trauma cues and relational atmosphere; couple-therapy manuals do it again when they break erotic life into weekly tasks. The payoff is non-trivial: people hear ‘you’re not broken, you’re contextual’. What underpins this is Berlantian in exactly the way that diagnosing occurs: instead of letting desire's unevenness stand as an impasse, sex education reframes it as a technical problem solvable through educational labour. You don’t just have desire; you maintain it. You don’t just have sex; you prepare for it.

What this elevates is one very specific genre of sex education – individualized, secular/psychological, literacy- and device-based, usually orientated to a two-person couple who can do homework together. It 's not that other communities don’t practise sex education – they absolutely do, through kin networks, religious and moral teachings, auntie/peer pedagogies, disability community knowledge about pacing, even migrant women's informal counselling circles – but those forms don’t look like worksheets, app prompts or self-tracking dashboards. For instance, Angelica Lindsey-Ali's ‘Village Auntie’ project offers online and in-person teaching on menstruation, marital sex and fertility that explicitly frames sexual knowledge as part of Islamic piety and African diasporic womanhood, reprising the role of a community auntie who prepares women for wedding nights, childbirth and ongoing intimacy (Gilger, 2024). When platformed sex education is treated as the model, those other pedagogies get read as absence, resistance or ‘not modern’, and the work of sustaining intimacy is privatized back onto the individual woman or couple with the time, money and bandwidth to self-audit. In that sense, the apparatus of contemporary sex education doesn’t just teach people about sex; it helps reproduce the broader dispositif in which intimate life is something you are always improving – on your own, with purchased guidance, inside structures that reward those already closest to neoliberal therapeutic norms (Barker et al., 2018; Gill and Orgad, 2018).

Seeking partners online: Dating platforms are the clearest infrastructural version of optimized maintenance: they make staying available into a rolling, time-stamped task. Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and their kin organize desire into rapid cycles of appraisal, micro-contact and abandonment. Structural and quantitative analyses of Tinder show how its swipe interface, notification system and freemium business model are explicitly designed to rationalize encounters into high-speed, quantified interactions and to maximize ongoing engagement rather than resolution (Paché, 2025; Thomas et al., 2023). Recent survey work on dating apps documents ‘compulsive’ use patterns – an increasing impulse to check, swipe and respond – and links these to mixed emotional outcomes: users report heightened anxiety and sadness alongside moments of excitement, as positive feedback (matches, messages) coexists with a sense of depletion (Gao et al., 2024). What looks like casual hedonism – endless choice, frictionless flirtation, a marketplace of bodies – is, on inspection, a highly disciplined hedonic economy: pleasure is promised, but only if you keep logging in, keep refreshing, keep updating the self as a commodity.

Journalistic accounts increasingly name the lived outcome as ‘dating-app burnout’ or ‘dating as a second job’: users describe spending hours each week swiping, maintaining micro-conversations, managing ghosting and optimizing profiles, and a recent Forbes Health / OnePoll survey reports that 78 percent of Gen Z daters feel emotionally or physically exhausted by app use (Cernik, 2023; Prendergast Carley, 2025). Yet to leave the apps is to risk falling out of the field of recognizability as a desirable subject. Platformized dating thus temporalizes availability itself: it slices relational hope into small, schedulable actions (clear the inbox, swipe today's stack, boost visibility) that can be tracked and monetized. As Paché argues, dating apps operate as a ‘logistics of desire’, cultivating compulsive usage patterns to drive engagement and revenue rather than to secure lasting matches (Karasu et al., 2025; Paché, 2025). In this sense, swipe culture materializes cruel optimism at scale: subjects do not merely believe that the next match might finally deliver recognition; they are put to work reproducing the very conditions under which that belief can continue to be capitalized.

Lateral maintenance: staying with the impasse

Berlant's work also gives us a vocabulary for forms of maintenance that are less easily subsumed into optimization. In ‘Slow Death’, they describe lateral agency as the small acts and adjustments through which people ‘make a space for living on’ within attritional conditions (Berlant, 2007: 759). On the Inconvenience of Other People further emphasizes the difficulty of being with others – our need for, and friction with, ‘inconvenient’ others who never match our projections yet cannot be dispensed with (Berlant, 2022). In the erotic sphere, lateral maintenance might describe the ways that partners negotiate low desire, chronic incompatibility or non-eventful sex as part of an ongoing shared life, without always treating these as problems to be solved.

One place where this emerges is in narratives that normalize reduced or intermittent desire without promising transformation. Discussions of responsive desire, for example, sometimes frame scheduled or context-dependent sex not as a phase on the way to ‘spontaneous’ passion but as an acceptable, ongoing pattern (Nagoski, 2021). Likewise, relationship advice that endorses ‘good enough sex’ or acknowledges that some partnerships will be ‘low sex’ indefinitely can function as a permission to remain in the impasse rather than to convert it into a permanent self-improvement project. Here, maintenance means arranging a life that accommodates uneven or minimal erotic charge, rather than striving to fix it.

Another locus of lateral maintenance can be seen in the accounts of users who scale back or withdraw from dating apps due to what is now commonly termed ‘dating-app fatigue’. Articles describing swiping as unpaid emotional labour register not only burnout but a tacit critique of optimized maintenance itself. Some users adopt deliberately slow or constrained engagement (‘only on Sundays’, ‘one match at a time’) or delete apps without immediately replacing them with a new platform. These gestures do not abolish cruel optimism; the fantasy of romantic fulfilment remains culturally dominant. But they do mark a recalibration of how much temporal and affective labour one is willing to expend in its pursuit.

For disabled and chronically ill subjects, lateral maintenance often takes the form of accepting that certain sexual norms – frequency, spontaneity, orgasmic resolution – may never be reliably achievable. Alison Kafer's notion of crip time foregrounds temporalities organized around access needs and fluctuating capacity rather than normative productivity or development (Kafer, 2013). When applied to sexuality, crip time might describe practices that prioritize comfort, slowness or partial engagement; that allow for aborted encounters without reading them as failure; or that treat non-sexual forms of intimacy as central rather than compensatory. These are not glamorous scenes of liberation; they exemplify what Berlant calls ‘compromised endurance’ (Berlant, 2011: 13). Yet they also point to modes of staying in relation that are not entirely overcoded by growth imperatives.

Maintenance, capture and the politics of staying:

The contrast between optimized and lateral maintenance is analytical rather than empirical; most contemporary practices mix elements of both. Psychoeducational discourses that aim to destigmatize low desire simultaneously generate new tasks of self-audit. Intimacy exercises that make space for non-demand, non-orgasmic touch are packaged as steps on the road to ‘better sex’. App fatigue can lead either to a quiet refusal of the dating treadmill or to a search for a ‘better’ platform that promises to make the labour more efficient. What Berlant helps us to see is that maintenance itself has become a central site of cruel optimism: the world now asks subjects not only to endure but to optimize their endurance.

The point of distinguishing these forms of maintenance is not to romanticize non-optimized survival nor to condemn all therapeutic or technological support. Rather, it is to register the tension between Berlant's attention to the small labours of staying in the scene and the contemporary capture of those labours by neoliberal governance. Endurance has become both an ethical necessity and a marketable skill. To be a responsible subject is to be ‘working on’ one's intimacy, managing one's desire, updating one's relational competencies. Cruel optimism thus names not only the attachment to obstructive fantasies but the way that attachment is organized as a schedule of ongoing self-regulation in which sex functions as a key infrastructure.

In light of this, the argument of the article can be restated. Sex under late capitalism is not merely a disappointing route to fulfilment, as this must be understood as a form of endurance through which subjects are taught to convert structural impasse into an endless project of maintenance. Optimized and lateral forms of maintenance alike testify to the difficulty of abandoning erotic hope, and to the labour of living with others who are always, in Berlant's sense, inconvenient. The question then, is not how to exit cruel optimism once and for all but how to recognize when the work of ‘staying with the trouble’ becomes indistinguishable from the work of keeping the optimism machine running – and whether it is possible to inhabit maintenance in ways that do not wholly capitulate to its capture.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

ORCID iD

Maha Khawaja https://orcid.org/0009-0009-7245-1648

References

American Psychiatric Association (2013) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edn. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing.