I COULD chalk it up to getting older, the fact that sex interests me
these days about as much as playing checkers. But the fact is I’ve never
much liked sex, even though it has, on occasion, captivated me. Says my
proverbial therapist: “Sex threatens you, Lauren. You feel overcome.”
Another distinctly less sexy possibility is that I have never much
liked sex because, when all is said and done, there’s not much to like. I
mean, really: What is the big deal? Especially when it’s with the same
person, over and over again; from an evolutionary standpoint, that
simply couldn’t be right. I, for one, have always become bored of sex
within the first six months of meeting a man, the act paling for me just
as the sun pales at the approach of winter, and as predictably, too.
I
met and fell in love with my husband for his beautifully colored hair,
his gentle ways, his humor. We were together many years, and so sex
faded. Then we decided to marry.
Predictably, almost as soon as
the engagement ring slid onto my finger, I fell in love with someone
else. I fell madly, insanely, obsessively in love with a conservative
Christian man who believed that I, as a Jew, was going to hell. We
fought long and hard about that, and then had sex. This is so stupid, it
pains me to write about it.
And yet this affair, I sensed, was
necessary for me to move forward with my marriage. It was a test. I
believed, but could not be sure, that just as sex had cooled for my
soon-to-be husband and me, it would cool with this man, with any man, no
matter what or whom — in which case my fiancé was the person I wanted
to marry.
Except suppose I was wrong? Suppose there was someone
out there with whom I could have passionate sex the rest of my life? So
I continued with my conservative Christian, and we had fantastic,
obsessive sex while the whole time I waited to see when (or if) this
affair would run out of fuel. I prayed that it would, so I could marry
the man I loved.
Actually, I never had intercourse with this man,
though we did just about everything else. He did not believe in sex
before marriage. Therefore, when my fiancé asked me if I was “having
sex” with someone (why was I coming home at 3 a.m.?), I could answer
“no.” On the Christian man’s end, when his God asked him if he was
having sex with someone, he also could answer “no,” and so we both lived
highly honest, righteous lives filled with perpetual sex.
But
then the inevitable happened. Sex with this man turned tepid, then
revolting. While the revolting part was particular to this crazy
relationship, the tepid part was wholly within my experience and proved,
for me, that there is no God of monogamous passion. Thus freed from the
tethers of this affair, I returned to the gentle arms of my pagan
husband. We are going on our 10th anniversary. He wants hot sex. I
turned tepid long, long ago.
A University of Chicago
study published in 1999 found that 40 percent of women suffer from some
form of sexual dysfunction, usually low libido. There are treatments
for this sort of thing: Viagra
or a prescription for testosterone. But the real issue for me is that
I’m not sure I have a dysfunction. On the one hand, I am miserable about
our lack of a sex life because it makes my husband miserable and cold
and withdrawn, and it is so unhappy, living this way. “Have sex with
someone else,” I tell him.
“The problem with that,” my husband
says, “is falling in love. If you have sex with someone else, you just
might fall in love with them.”
“I’d kill you,” I say.
Of course I wouldn’t. But I just might kill myself.
I
have no answers for how one exists with almost no sex drive. A gulf of
loneliness enters the marriage; the rift it creates is terribly painful.
My sincerest hope is that once we make it through these very stressful
years, assuming we come out the other end, my husband and I will be able
to reconnect.
Until then, I could get treatment, but I’ve had so
much treatment — for cancer, for depression — that in this one small
area of my life, can I claim, if not health, then at least the absence
of pathology?
My first orgasm happened decades ago when I was 19, in a rooming house
with a broody bad boy who had a muscular chest and a head roiling with
glossy curls. We both loved the Grateful Dead.
Every time I slept over, we woke in the mornings and listened to
“Ripple,” the clearness of the music, the pure simplicity of it,
affirming for me again and again that I was part of a people, a species,
capable of creating great beauty.
We’d gone out all summer before the start of our respective freshman
years: Not once did he ask me for intercourse, even on our last night
together. The very absence of his question underscored its implicit
presence. When?
I confided to my roommate that we had not yet
done the deed. Hers was a pause of shock. I was afraid. I didn’t want to
bleed. Sheer fear of that plunging pain is what held me back.
Instead of telling my would-be lover the truth, I made up an elaborate
lie. I was raped. Too traumatized to have sex. I needed more time.
Remembering
this now, for the first time in a long time, I do not judge myself. I
consider it a great deal to ask of a relatively newly minted woman that
she offer her intact body up for this frankly difficult deed.
I
also find it interesting that shame, an emotion that’s supposedly deeply
rooted in the human limbic system, untouched by time or class, is in
fact very much subject to time, class and culture, too. In the 19th
century, to be raped was to be shamed, forever. In the late 20th
century, to be a virgin was to be shamed. And so I lied, to save my
skin.
Except one time, on a May night, through the open window,
warm liquid breezes poured over our naked bodies, and then he touched me
just so and I tipped into the orgasm and was grasped. This was
different from whatever I’d achieved on my own. This was softer,
gentler, full of a wide-open love, a deep falling-down love. When it was
over, I hated him. I hated that man (that boy, really). The intimacy
was too much, too wrenching and shameful.
There is nothing so
intimate as the sounds of sex, which are a shared secret between lovers,
part of the glue that binds them together. We have our regular speaking
voices, and then we have our sexual voices. While these voices may be
odd, disturbing, even disorienting, especially if overheard, they serve a
special purpose: to bring us close.
My husband’s sounds draw me
near to him, when he allows himself to have them, when I do. In the
right situation, with the right sanctions, these nighttime sounds — what
we say and what we do not — would be preserved, bottled, so they did
not wash away with the laundry, the toothpaste foaming down the drain,
the home from work at 9 p.m. nights, you angry, me angry.
In our
culture, sex has lost its sacred quality. If I were mayor or president, I
think I would institute some rules for the good of the American
Marriage, a prohibition or two — no touching allowed until Tuesday —
because longing springs from distance. It is ironic but also absolutely
understandable that proximity can kill sex faster than fainting.
I’ve always found it odd that on a Tuesday night you might go about the
bodily act of having sex and then, the next morning, amid a chattering
group of children, eat Cheerios. It seems to me that if sex were
separated out from the daily wheel of life, it might survive monogamy
more intact.
I am a woman in love, but I am not in love with sex. I
am in love with glass and stones, with my children, my animals. I am in
love with making, as opposed to making love. Someday, I hope to build a
house. And inside this house I want to live with my family — my
children and animals and husband, whom I love so imperfectly, with so
many gaps and hesitations.
The Grim Reaper, who for me is not
death but mental illness, visits me from time to time, drawing me down
with his sword. And each time this happens I never know if I will return
to love. And each time I do I am more grateful than the time before.
And so I see my life — my large, unwieldy, disorganized life — as a
banquet. So much! So rich!
I AM captivated by things, by solid,
actual concrete things that can be assembled, made, whether books or
babies. For me, sex does not even come close to the thrill of scoring
gorgeous glass for a window I will use, of hearing the grit as the
grains separate and the cut comes clean and perfect.
Sex cannot
compete with the massive yet slender body of granite I excavated last
week, six feet long, this stone, packed with time and stories if only it
could speak. I’m going to spend months carving it with a silver chisel.
I am going to figure out a way to make this stone into an enormous
mantel under which, in the home I share with my husband and the babies
we made, our fire will flicker. The stone will give off waves of warmth
in the winter, and it will keep the night-coolness captive all through
the summer days.
I imagine my mantel, my windows, my glass, my
gardens. I cannot believe how lucky I am. I have so very much to do,
such wide and persistent passions, so little time in which to explore
their many nooks and curves. Here. Now. Don’t bother me. I’m busy.
