Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage (3 page)

when I was a teenager, I felt completely

at a loss as I tried to negotiate that space between what was expected of me and how I felt as my own sexual impulses started to kick in. How on earth was I supposed to figure out what men wanted, what I wanted, what was “right” when I couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone or anything?

“It’s strapless,” my mother said when I came out of the dressing room, wearing the dress I had been admiring for

weeks, the dress I longed to wear to the homecoming dance the fall of my junior year. “And it’s way too sexy.”

“Come on, Mom. Everyone’s wearing dresses like this.

They’re in every magazine.”

“I’m calling your father,” she said. He was already on his way home from work, and we decided to wait at the store for him to arrive.

“Dance with me,” my father said when he saw me standing there, wearing the dress of my dreams.

“What?” I asked, stunned.

“Come here. Dance with me.” I lifted my arms and put them around my father’s neck. We rocked back and forth for a couple of steps, and then he stopped and winked at me. “You pass,” he said, dropping his arms and patting my shoulder. My mother and I must have looked completely perplexed. “It stayed up. So as far as I’m concerned, she can wear it.”

My mother grumbled, but she let me get the dress. I imagine now that it must have been a confusing time for her as a parent, having been a college student in the ’60s, when free love and sex reigned and drugs and rock ’n’ roll were de rigueur. And here I was, growing up in this new era of AIDS and television programming that would have been considered scandalous just twenty years earlier.

“The world is changing so fast, Jenny,” she would say to me. “I just want to protect you.”

“You can’t always protect me, Mom.”

“I know, but I have to try. It’s all too sexy—the clothes, the TV, the music.” Strange how those words ring in my ears now, more than twenty years later, as I try to raise a daughter of my own in a world that makes that one look like the Cleavers’ by comparison.

This constant theme rang true throughout my upbringing—my parents seemed torn between allowing me to do what I wanted, because only I could know what was best for me, and keeping me under lock and key to protect me from exploring all of the things they had had no experience with during their own upbringings. It was a brave new world, and it made my mother much more nervous than it did my father.

Since I’m writing a book about my own open marriage, it seems imperative to address my parents’ marriage and how it impacted my worldview. My parents were married for thirty-three years, but they are no longer together. My dad left my mom when I was thirty, and, though it’s hard for me to admit this, he seems happier than I have ever seen him. My mother, on the other hand, continues to struggle with the breakup, even many years later. Looking back, I think my parents loved each other, and I believe they were happy—sometimes. I also know that they disagreed a lot, and that pretty early on, I sensed he was staying in the marriage for my sister’s and my sake. He left my mother for a short while when I was twelve, and then came back when my mother was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy

and stayed for eighteen more years. But things were the same, possibly even worse. I don’t blame either of them for how their relationship played out. As far as I can tell, it was simply a marriage that didn’t work.

My parents weren’t physically affectionate with each other, although they were with Rachel and me. I distinctly remember the first time I saw my best friend’s parents kissing: They looked at each other in a way I’d never seen my own parents act. I was embarrassed at first, wondering,
Is this the way parents are supposed to be?
Once, I saw the dad swat his wife on the butt with a dish towel. She giggled like a little girl and hugged him, the way the couples did on
The Love Boat.
I wanted that; I knew that much. We probably learn more about what we desire from seeing what we don’t want than from seeing what we
do
. The lack of affection in my parents’ marriage made me yearn to have a relationship in which I’d be hugged and kissed and looked at in “that way.” I knew I didn’t want any yelling. I knew I wanted to be happy. But the greatest lesson I took away from observing my parents was that I knew I wanted to have a marriage in which I could express my wants and needs.

I would argue that I had a better than average childhood with better than average parents. And despite their not seeming to support each other emotionally with complete success, they did support us—not perfectly, not entirely, but respectably. My parents were, like so many others are, I imagine, trying their best to do what they thought was right

for their kids, sometimes hitting the mark and sometimes not. I grew up feeling confident, smart, happy, healthy, and loved, from my alphabet blocks to my college applications, just as my liberal, freethinking, ex-hippie parents had hoped I would. I also grew up thinking for myself, believing in my ideals, and questioning everything that was presented to me, regardless of the source or the subject—including sex, though I don’t ever remember any real discussion of the topic. It was the late ’70s and early ’80s, and no one I knew had parents who talked to them much about sex. We were exposed to it everywhere, but somehow no one seemed to know a damn thing about it.

I grew up Jewish, and my father was a rabbi. I don’t remember my dad or the synagogue ever telling me where Judaism stood on sexuality issues. I do, however, remember being part of a national youth group that organized several retreats each year. Various families from the hosting congregations would put us up in their homes, and I was always amazed that they would allow boys and girls to sleep in the same room together. Although plenty of making out went on, the group dynamic seemed to keep things fairly innocent. There weren’t any orgies or drinking fests, nothing like the parties students from my high school held when their parents were out of town, which often resulted in the neighbors’ calling the police. Interesting what happens when you give people—yes, even teenagers—freedom, instead of attempting to control their every move.

So I didn’t get much in the way of sex ed.
The Joy of Sex
was on the shelf in our family room, and I remember leafing through its pages when I was ten or eleven and being perplexed by how the mechanics worked, and why anyone would do such things. The line drawings seemed so foreign and exotic. But the book’s frank descriptions, and its placement next to other titles like
Captain in a Day: How to Sail Your Own Boat
or
Macramé the Easy Way: Ten Steps to Creating Perfect Plant Hangers,
made me believe that sex was just another leisure activity—nothing to be embarrassed about, nothing to hide.

The only sex talks I got from my parents came too late—like the one during Thanksgiving my freshman year of college. I brought my boyfriend home with me, and as we waited for the train that would take us back to school, my mother asked me to take a walk with her, a request that was generally not a good sign. I have never seen a volcano erupt, but the way the words gushed from my mother’s lips—with a ferocity I have never seen before or since—must have been akin to what the witnesses of Vesuvius experienced.

“I don’t know if you’re having sex or if you’ve ever had sex or if you’re planning on having sex and I know I’m not the person you would talk to about it even though I wish I was and I don’t know if you’re being careful if you know what I mean by being careful of course you know what I mean by being careful you better know what I mean by being careful but people die from sex now and when I was

young you could get pregnant or need a shot of penicillin but not die and now you die but not always but you can and you’re too young to have a baby and I want so much more for you and I know you want so much more for yourself and I don’t know if you’ve had sex or are planning to have sex but I want you to be careful. . . . ”

“I lost my virginity to Kevin last spring, and I went on the pill immediately,” I finally interrupted. I was sure she would be very happy and proud.

“What?” she screeched. “Under my roof?” Thankfully, the train came not two minutes later, and she never, ever brought it up again.

The sex talk with my father happened that summer, when he picked me up from school to bring me back home. “You’re using condoms, right?” he said, apropos of

absolutely nothing.

“Uh-huh,” I answered.

“Good. So, do you want to catch an Orioles game tomorrow night?”

The only other conversation my mom and I had had was when I’d gotten my period, but she’d said little more than that it meant I was growing up, and that it was a happy thing that I shouldn’t be scared of or embarrassed about. I have pitiful memories of trying to teach myself how to use a tampon, waddling through my aunt’s house like a penguin because I didn’t quite understand how the damn things were supposed to work. As for sex, my friends talked about

“doing it,” but none of my close friends seemed clear on just what “it” was until high school—where the mixed messages became even more baffling.

I went to a Catholic high school. It was the best private school in the area, and my dad taught Judaism classes for the Jewish students. The nuns and priests preached abstinence before marriage, and advocated antihomosexuality. I remember Father Keith coming into the classroom one day to talk to us about the AIDS epidemic. It was 1986. “The good thing is, you kids have nothing to worry about because, of course, you are not involved in any sort of . . . ” (here he lowered his voice and looked at us sternly) “ . . . sexual behavior. It’s a gay disease, really; it’s God’s punishment for behavior that forsakes him and his great love for us.”

I was sixteen years old, and one of my best friends, Theo, was gay. My parents had never had any problem with homosexuality. They raised us to believe that everyone is equal, regardless of age or race or sex, and certainly regardless of whom they love. I was both appalled and indifferent. Father Keith’s comment struck me as awful, yet I wasn’t affected by it, either, mostly because I chose to ignore what he was saying. I had enough brains and experience at that point to know that he was off base, and that I didn’t agree with him, but not enough to take him on in front of my whole class.

Plenty of kids I knew were having sex in high school. And I wanted to. I didn’t know why; it just seemed—like

a lot of things—to be the thing to do. I just never had the opportunity. Although my best girlfriend, Janelle, was the head cheerleader and I could sit anywhere I wanted to in the cafeteria, I was never invited to any parties or asked out by any football players. The guys whom I imagined I would want to have sex with didn’t even know I existed. I felt like I was waiting for the right person, right time, right something, but it wasn’t quite clear what.

“You’ll know,” Janelle told me. “How?”

“Trust me. You just will. You’ll know he’s really into you and won’t fuck you over.”

“That’s what I’m looking for? Someone who won’t fuck me over?”

“Well, that’s not the only thing. You also want it to be someone you love and trust, and who loves and trusts you and all that. But you don’t want to be the talk of the entire school the next day, do you?”

“I don’t know. No,” I managed, though it seemed as if I was the only girl at school who hadn’t had sex yet.

“Yeah. Once you do it, that’s fine. But you have to act like you haven’t, and like you never would, because nice girls don’t give it up until they’re married.”

“Oh,” I said. I must have looked as confused as I sounded, because Janelle came over and started to French braid my hair—1984 girl-speak for
There, there, everything’s going to be okay.

“You have to be cool. That’s all. It’s cool to do it, but not for people to know. Except for the right people, and then they’re not supposed to know everything—otherwise, it’s not special.” I was glad she was sitting behind me, because I could not have hidden the look on my face for all the money in the world. If I had looked perplexed before, I can’t even imagine how mystified I must have seemed at that moment.

In a way, not much has changed for me this many years later. I feel equally baffled by contradictory signals and societal messages that make no sense whatsoever. Some things never change. But I did survive growing up, as most of us invariably do, despite all those puzzling notions about looks and love and sex and relationships. And, like so many other young girls, I thought I could and would eventually fall in love with a man who would fulfill every desire I’d ever had, and that I’d never want to be with anyone else. I thought we would live out the ideal I’d been raised to believe in. If people had told me back then that someday I’d be in an open marriage, and that I would be the one who had prompted it, I would have laughed in their faces. I had every irrational reason to believe, despite the fact that I was still a virgin, that my special someone—The One—was out there. All I had to do was wait, and someday my prince would come.

Chapter 2

my orgasm, my self

When she was seventeen, she lost her virginity to a guy who told her that she was responsible for her own orgasms. She set off for college feeling confident about her sexuality; she had several relationships and many lovers, and she was happy.

during my senior year of high school,

I finally “knew,” in exactly the way Janelle had told me I would, that I had found the guy I was prepared to lose my virginity to. Believe it or not, he was someone my mother set me up with—under the guise of helping me find a summer job.

23

“He’s a counselor at a boys’ camp, and his mother said the girls’ camp is looking for someone to create a theater program for them. You’d be perfect for that!” my mom gushed. I knew right away that she was up to something. She said I would be “perfect” for something only when it had nothing to do with me, and everything in the world to do with her. I agreed to meet the guy just the same. It wasn’t as if I was having any luck finding a boyfriend on my own.