Deeply, Truly (but Not Physically) in Love

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.”

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Christopher Silas Neal

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.

Farting in love

It's a dreaded but inevitable stage in every relationship: Admitting the basic fact of our human digestive tracts

(Credit: DUSAN ZIDAR via Shutterstock)

I placed headphones on my boyfriend’s ears with a sheepish grin, picked the most beat-heavy tune I could find and cranked up the volume. Then I went into the bathroom of our rented Lagosian cottage and yelled, “Babe! Baby! Can you hear me?” No response. But just for good measure, I turned on the shower. Then I sat down on the toilet and spent the next several minutes staring right at a framed note beseeching me to please conserve water.

There’s nothing like a vacation to bring a relationship to the next level. I’m not talking about novelty, shared adventure or lifelong memories — although, yes, those things are important. I’m talking about flatulence, y’all. From that point on during the rest of our stay in those tight quarters, we developed a code: “I’m gonna go take a fake shower now,” he would tell me. Or I would ask with a knowing look, “Could you go somewhere far, far away?” The subtext always being: Noises are going to come out of my butt, and I don’t want you to hear them.

We had managed to admit to each other the fact of our human digestive tracts, and there was no going back — not even when we returned home to our separate apartments and bathrooms. He quickly adjusted to this free world of farting, but I still clung to gas-less — or at least noiseless — feminine illusion: “Plug your ears,” I told him, holding my bloated stomach. “Tight!” He humored me by twisting his hands to put his thumbs in his ears while his forefingers pinched his nose closed. I’ve taken the same slow, tortured path in every relationship of mine: Total fart denial, enforced ear-plugging and then — boom — Windy City. They’re like Freudian stages of development that I’ve had to go through anew with each boyfriend.

I’m far from alone in this, thankfully. In a wickedly funny scene in “Love and Other Disasters,” a therapist tells her patient that “relationships are best measured by farting.” She describes several stages: Stage one “is the conspiracy of silence,” she explains. “This is a fantasy period where both parties pretend that they have no bodily waste.” Much further along there is “the fart honeymoon, where both parties find each other’s gas just the cutest thing in the world.” But, as she warns, “no honeymoon can last forever,” and soon comes “the critical fork in the fart”: “either the fart loses its power to amuse and embarrass, thereby signifying true love, or else it begins to annoy and disgust, thereby signifying everything that is blocked and rancid in the formerly beloved.”

Of course, that isn’t a true psychiatric evaluation of the importance of flatulence in relationships, but it certainly rings true. On the most basic level, we refrain from farting around loved ones because we’re sensitive little buggers worried about rejection. That fear was substantiated in my friend “Tracy's” past relationship, in which her live-in boyfriend told her that she “farted too much and it grossed him out.” All we really want is to be loved for our flaws, and our farts — but fearing we won’t be, we come up with absurd solutions like “fake showers” or the very real odor-eliminating Better Marriage Blanket.

He added, “I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also” and signed off with, “Goodnight, my little farting bae.” Aw, kind of!

I put out a call on Twitter that read, “Let’s talk about farting. In relationships. Thoughts, feelings, trauma? Talk to me. #importantworldnews.” In response, David Ujah, a 32-year-old newlywed told me he hasn’t farted in front of his wife of two months and he plans to maintain the ruse “as long as possible!” (Exclamation point his.) He explained, “It’s akin to staying in shape. I don’t want to gain 50 lbs. & get complacent, either. I want her to be turned on by me.” Green says he dreads the idea of his wife one day looking at him and thinking, “Oh boy, the paunchy fart machine wants to bone.” Another Twitter follower told me, “Married 10 yrs and have never intentionally farted in front of her. It’s hard enough to get a BJ, farting wouldn’t help.” Another man opined that farting is “the second big hurdle in a relationship,” right after “I love you.”

Teachable Moments for kids...

A teachable moment is a point in time that there is an opportunity for a teacher, parent, or mentor to share a piece of knowledge with their student.  They are a point in time when due to circumstances that are not planned, the student is most receptive to learning a particular lesson. Teachable moments are spontaneously generated, and the moment may or may not be repeated.  This once in a lifetime aspect of teachable moments mean that it is important for adults to take advantage of each and every teachable moment that occurs in their student’s life. 

While it is important that all parents take advantage of teachable moments, it is particularly important for homeschooling parents to utilize these opportunities because they are not only parent but teacher.

There are three things that parents and teachers must do to have maximum impact during teachable moments.

Encourage the child’s natural, inquisitive nature. When children are encouraged to ask questions, and are given answers that are age appropriate to questions, they learn that inquiring is not only acceptable, but
encouraged.  Consider the time period when children are learning language, and they point at an item, a ball
perhaps.  The young parent immediately jumps in and supplies the word ball.  In the moment when a child discovers the item has a name, she is encouraged to ask what other things are, and colors, shapes.
There seem to be many teachable moments when a child is very young, because they have so much to learn.  If
the parent fosters a child’s curiosity when the child is young, then there will be more teachable moments as the child grows older.  If the parent is unresponsive to the child’s desire to learn, then there are likely to be fewer teachable moments as the child gets older.

Be engaged in your child’s life.  While teachable moments are spontaneously generated opportunities, if the parent is not attentive to the child’s circumstances it is easy to let a teachable moment pass by unnoticed.  If a parent is too engrossed in the television, internet, or smart phone, then that parent is probably missing opportunities to teach their children.  A parent or teacher needs to know a child, understand what the child is going through at the time, and watch for chances to add insight to the child’s existence.  The dinner table is a classic time for teachable moments.  Find out how your child’s day went, find out about the moments during the day when your child would have been receptive to learning.  Be gentle in leading the child to the answer.  Remember that teachable moments are not lectures, but moments of guidance, when the parent or teacher helps the child come to the correct conclusion or understanding. 

As the teacher, be knowledgeable.  It is true that teachable moments are generally spontaneous.  It is not possible to know when a moment might occur, but it is possible to be aware of when a teachable moment might
occur.   This may sound confusing, but perhaps an example will clarify.  If a parent were to take her child to a Civil War battlefield as a field trip, it would be in everyone’s best interest for the parent to study up a little bit.  The parent should brush up on their history of the location and the period.  Learn something about the major figures associated with that battle field.  Read a little about the politics, medicine, and ammunition of the period.  By being
well read on the subject, the parent will be able to help the child learn, in the moment when the child is most engaged, in this case, when the child is at the battlefield.  The more knowledgeable a parent is, in general, the less likely he is to be caught off guard.  While it is permissible to tell the child you don’t know, and can look it up when you get home, it is preferable to teach in the moment.  Your child is more likely to remember if they get an answer when they ask the question instead of hours later.

Teachable moments are the parents or teachers responsibility.  The children do not necessarily know what they don’t know and therefore don’t know what they need to ask, or what they should learn in a certain situation.  Teachable moments should not be lectures, and they do not have to be associated with something traumatic.  The classic example of traumatic teachable moment is driving by the scene of an accident, indicating the injured person being loaded into the ambulance, then stating that if they had used their seat belt they would not have been injured so badly. Teachable moments should occur when a child is interested and receptive and traumatic teachable moments, while memorable, may not occur when the child is most receptive to learning.