Mating in Captivity (15 page)

“Sex is hard, isn’t it?” I asked her.

“What do you mean? Hard to talk about or hard to do?” she answered my question with a question.

“Hard to own.” I replied.

“It’s easier for me to have sex than to talk about it.”

“And with Nico?”

“With Nico it’s easier not to have sex than to talk about it.”

“Tell me.”

“Sex
is
hard. I don’t want it a lot of the time, which is strange because I’ve always thought of myself as a sexual person. I read about women with low desire and I don’t identify with them, even though it sounds like me lately.”

“Was it easier with other men?”

“Oh, God, no—but in the past I never had to talk about it. It was never something I had to work on. Either it came naturally and we clicked, or the relationship wasn’t going to last anyway, so why bother? Now I’m with a man I love. I think he’s beautiful, he treats me like a queen, and I don’t want to have sex with him. He gets frustrated when I reject him day after day, and I don’t like the fact that I’m so indifferent to sex. I’d like to think it happened when I got pregnant with our daughter, but to be honest I was kind of relieved to have an excuse. ‘I’m pregnant’ turned into ‘I just had a baby’ turned into ‘I’m nursing’ turned into ‘I need my sleep.’ Truthfully, as you know, it’s been a problem from the beginning.”

“Shall we take the plunge?”

“I’m tired of avoiding it, of waiting for something to change. I can’t swap Nico for a new model. I make it work with him or I shrivel up.”

Maria grew up in a working-class family, the daughter of a policeman and a substitute teacher. Religion was central, and she attended all-girl Catholic schools through high school. “We never talked about sex at home. My grandma had ten kids and never knew
women could have orgasms. Can you imagine? I haven’t seen my mother naked since I was three. I’ve never seen my father naked. I’m the youngest of five, and each of us rebelled in our own way—though my brothers never had to face the injunctions reserved for the girls.”

Maria sheds light on the pervasive all-or-nothing, feast or famine sexual culture in America. “I was seventeen when I lost my virginity; and for Catholic girls, once you’ve slept with one person you might as well sleep with the whole town—and, frankly, most of us did.” she tells me. “I know it sounds archaic, but it really was like that where I grew up. Staten Island is like a nature preserve for endangered Catholics. The message was clear: sex is a sin unless you’re married.”

“Right. Like the old adage, ‘Sex is dirty; save it for someone you love,’” I say.

Maria moved away, went to college, became a casting agent, and today lives in a world vastly different from that of her childhood. But all this intellectual broadening has not succeeded in dismantling the prohibitions: carnal lust is sinful, and especially for women. Despite twenty years of brief encounters, seasonal relationships, and steady boyfriends, the vestigial messages cling obstinately to the sinews of her body with a subcutaneous tenacity. Acting liberated doesn’t necessarily mean being liberated. When she was still single, Maria could circumvent her latent sexual uneasiness. It was easier to be uninhibited when she had less invested emotionally. But once she chose to live within the geographic limitations of a family, the murmurs of her past began to echo.

“Once every six months or so I’ll bring it up with Nico. I’ll say, ‘Nico, our sex life sucks. We need to do something about it. I want you to read this book.’ But he doesn’t want to read a book. He hates those books. He’ll say, ‘It’s not my thing. Let’s just make some time to be together. The more sex you have, the more sex you have, right?’ That’s his stock answer.”

“I’ve recommended books to you before, but in this instance it sounds like you’re using them to hide behind. Why is it so hard for you to talk about yourself? To be your own advocate? What would happen if you said, ‘Nico, I want to tell you about myself—what I think and feel about sex, about myself sexually?’”

“The whole subject is so emotionally overwhelming it makes me sleepy.”

Maria was taught that nothing is free; everything must be earned. Privilege is for those who’ve never had to work hard, and it’s morally suspect. The credo was: you sacrifice for the good of the family. Her reluctance to put herself forward is particularly strong in the sexual realm.

“It seems OK to ask for what you really need,” I explain, “but to ask for something just because you want it or like it is selfish. Pleasure itself, unless you’ve earned it, is dubious. It also raises the question of how much you feel you deserve and are worthy of receiving—just because you’re you. But eroticism is precisely that: it’s pleasure for pleasure’s sake, offered to you gratuitously by Nico.”

Together, Maria and I work on cultivating a healthy sense of deserving that spans sitting down in the morning when she drinks her coffee, reading the paper while the kitchen is still dirty, and going out with her friends even if it means Nico has to spend two nights in a row taking care of the baby. She is to take a break from the idea that pleasure must be paid for, in advance, by the performance of duty. We chisel away at this complex system of fairness and merit, where everything has to be perfectly equitable in order to neutralize selfishness.

Maria has taken hold of this idea. “I think my ‘low desire’ is, more than anything else, related to my lack of ownership around sex and my conflict with pleasure, especially pleasure with my husband. I can’t explain why I’m so uncomfortable opening myself up
to Nico erotically. What I do know is that family is never where I’ve gone to get anything extra.”

“Right. For you, family is about self-sacrifice, not enjoyment. But a healthy sense of entitlement is a prerequisite for erotic intimacy.”

Only when Maria starts to look at what she brings to the erotic stalemate does Nico’s contribution become apparent. She asks him some of the same questions we have hashed out in our sessions. “What does sex mean for you?” “How was sex treated in your family?” “What are the important events that shaped your sexuality?” “What would you like to experience most with me sexually, and what are you most afraid of?” They spark conversations that are provocative and inspiring, that focus on possibilities rather than on problems.

Maria learns that, for Nico, sex is both liberating and connecting, an eloquent mark of love. When she rebuffs him, he feels unloved. Nico is not a talker. Instead, he expresses caring by doing things: washing the dishes, shining her shoes, always keeping chocolate in the refrigerator. He makes sure that they get out of the house on the weekend, guilt-free (which Maria finds difficult), and don’t get bogged down with interminable housekeeping. He is generous with his affection, both with Maria and with their daughter. But the caresses stop when the sex starts. While he likes sex, he’s less in his element with seduction. “He’s so eager to get to the
sex
part of sex, where he knows what he’s doing, that he tends to gloss over the pursuit and the romance. The games, you know. I wind up feeling rushed. It takes Nico about two minutes to go from watching TV to being completely physically and emotionally ready to have intercourse. I need a slower buildup. And in my typical way of trying to take care of him, I don’t want him to feel bad, so I try to get turned on really fast. It’s a total fiasco.”

For Nico, sex is a play in one act. For Maria it is a continuum of pleasures, a successive unfolding. The problem arises when they
become trapped in a linear, goal-oriented focus on intercourse and orgasm that bypasses eroticism. In this setup she struggles with the idea that lingering is implicitly selfish and shamelessly greedy. Her lack of prerogative and lack of self-affirmation are met with Nico’s hurriedness, which further reinforces her notion that she is not worthy of attention. Of course she wouldn’t worry that she was taking too long if she thought he was into it. But for Nico slowness inspires a different kind of anxiety, a fear of inadequacy that he won’t perform well enough.

I suggest to Maria that she and Nico liberate themselves from this task-oriented performance model of sexuality with its rigid requirements for mutual orgasm. It’s a pass-fail approach that smacks of seriousness and takes much of the fun out of sex.

“Remember making out?” I ask her. “When’s the last time you did that?”

“It’s been years. You know, I remember in the very beginning we spent an evening making out, French-kissing on the boardwalk at Coney Island. It was amazing. We don’t do that anymore.”

“Well, then, there you go.”

The intricacies of the dynamics between Maria and Nico are subtle, and this is true for most of the couples I meet. It’s never just one thing or one partner. Maria says she wants to be seduced, yet she resists seeing Nico as seductive. “My relationship stands in the way of my attraction to him. Sometimes I’ll look at him, like when he gets out of the shower or comes home from the gym, and I’ll think, ‘God, he’s hot.’ Why is he so attractive until I remember he’s my husband?”

I explain to Maria that it’s scary to be both erotically exposed and emotionally intimate with the same person, especially when you hold the belief that sex is somehow shameful. “There’s a whole part of you that hasn’t yet entered your relationship. In fact, the psychic energy involved in keeping it tucked away is enough to
make you exhausted. No wonder you’d rather go to sleep than make love to your husband.”

Like many of us, Maria grew up learning to hide her erotic reveries and idle daydreams. Keeping our pleasures secret is a central component of our sexual socialization. Maria recalls the shame of getting caught as a child in a delicious moment of erotic exploration, and the disgust on her mother’s face as she said, “Stop that right now.” Even those of us fortunate enough to have parents who recognized that sexual play feels good are still likely to remember with a wince the admonishment, “Keep it private.” It is hard to bring out in the open that which we spent years trying to hide.

Not surprisingly, Maria struggles to bring into her relationship the erotic imaginings she was taught so early to suppress and defend against. Sensing Nico’s receptivity, it is precisely what I encourage her to do—to own the wanting, and to believe herself worthy of being cooed over. At the same time I encourage her to bring to Nico a fresh curiosity. “It is too easy to encase him in the role of husband, with all the attendant domestic qualities, and then complain about a lack of desire. He has a whole interior geography and you’re just hanging around in the same old neighborhood.”

This is the challenge of sexual intimacy, of bringing home the erotic. It is the most fearsome of all intimacies because it is all-encompassing. It reaches the deepest places inside us, and involves disclosing aspects of ourselves that are invariably bound up with shame and guilt. It is scary, a whole new kind of nakedness, far more revealing than the sight of our nude bodies. When we express our erotic yearnings we risk humiliation and rejection, which are equally devastating. I have witnessed the painful scene when a person’s preferences are condemned and labeled by his or her partner as perverse, deviant, and disgusting. It is no wonder that many of us prefer the security of workable sex as a shield against this harrowing scenario. We may
be far from passion, but at least we feel normal. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a bad compromise. But then there are those who long to be known differently, to give themselves over and risk crossing that threshold. They muster the courage to confront the cultural prohibitions against sex—exuberant sex—at home. They hunger for full expression in the erotic realm, and resist the urge to withhold. For them sexual communion is far from dirty, but rather a sacred melding that puts us in touch with the divine.

Erotic intimacy is the revelation of our memories, wishes, fears, expectations, and struggles within a sexual relationship. When our innermost desires are revealed, and are met by our loved one with acceptance and validation, the shame dissolves. It is an experience of profound empowerment and self-affirmation for the heart, body, and soul. When we can be present for both love and sex, we transcend the battleground of Puritanism and hedonism.

Grown-ups never understand
anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

–
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
, The Little Prince

So, like a forgotten fire
, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

–
Gaston Bachelard

A
HOST OF INSTITUTIONS LOOK
out for our best interest. Religion, government, medicine, education, the media, and pop culture all labor tirelessly to define and regulate the parameters of our sexual well-being. The incentives and prohibitions surrounding the voluptuousness of the body are the mother’s milk of society. Much of what we learn about sex comes from the street, the movies, television, and school. But before any of these reach us, our family gets to us first. We are members of a society, but we’re also the children of our parents. (This includes grandparents, stepparents, guardians, foster parents, and anyone else who is entrusted with our early well-being.)
No history has a more lasting effect on our adult loves than the one we write with our primary caregivers.

The psychology of our desire often lies buried in the details of our childhood, and digging through the early history of our lives uncovers its archaeology. We can trace back to where we learned to love and how. Did we learn to experience pleasure or not, to trust others or not, to receive or be denied? Were our parents monitoring our needs or were we expected to monitor theirs? Did we turn to them for protection, or did we flee them to protect ourselves? Were we rejected? Humiliated? Abandoned? Were we held? Rocked? Soothed? Did we learn not to expect too much, to hide when we are upset, to make eye contact? In our family, we sense when it’s OK to thrive and when others might be hurt by our zest. We learn how to feel about our body, our gender, and our sexuality. And we learn a multitude of other lessons about who and how to be: to open up or to shut down, to sing or to whisper, to cry or to hide our tears, to dare or to be afraid.