How sex can change your life

I feel really dumb writing this, but I've been thinking recently about a pattern that I think I might be seeing in my life. Let me start by sketching it in the baldest possible terms.

Part One: Long ago, in a galaxy far far away, I applied to a couple of different graduate schools. I got into one of them and made plans to attend. In mid-August of that year, I first met Wife. Within a week, we were fucking; within a couple of weeks, I was spending the nights at her apartment. And then a month after we met, I got on a plane and left for graduate school. Only I didn't stay. Something like a week after that, I dropped out of the program and came back home ... more or less to move in with Wife. And about a year after we met -- to the month if not the day -- we were married.

Part Two: Last fall, after twenty-five years of a marriage marked by profound difficulties and chronic infidelity from Wife -- but by total sexual fidelity on my side -- I began an affair with D. And now, as if by the most remarkable coincidence, I look at my marriage and cannot see anything living in it. And I have begun the process of getting legal advice on dissolving the marriage, something that I always told myself I would never do. But times change.

And the pattern? Looks simple, doesn't it? Hosea starts fucking somebody new, and his life turns on a dime. All his old plans and resolutions fly out the window, and it's a whole new world. Or, more summarily, Hosea is ruled by his dick.

That's not really how I want to see myself, of course. But when I look at the whole picture that schematically, it sure does look that way. So maybe that's all that is really going on. Maybe all the drama in my life -- all the internal wrestling with what to do next -- is just so much window dressing. Maybe my choices really are simply ruled by my dick.

In my own defense, both parts of the story are more complicated. Back in Part One, I was never really that committed to the graduate program in question. The only reason I ever applied was that I couldn't find a job and didn't know what else to do with myself -- but hey, I sure was good at Going To School! So maybe I could do that for a while longer, and put off having to make any real decisions about my life. As long as I didn't have anything else to do instead, why not ...?

When I met Wife, what our involvement gave me was an option ... or a reason to make an option. Before her, there was nothing going on back home to hold me there. So if I wasn't doing anything anyway, it didn't make the slightest difference where I was while I wasn't doing it; and graduate school offered the prospect of being kind of interesting, maybe. Once I met Wife, however, it did make a difference because I did have somewhere I wanted to be. So it was worth it to me to try a little bit harder to find work (which I finally did, after a fashion), and to plan out my future together with somebody else rather than just fantasizing impossible things in a vacuum. Once I met Wife, my choices mattered, they were meaningful, in a way that simply had not been true before. So yeah, I dropped out of graduate school before classes even started ... but I had never really wanted to go in the first place. Yeah, I flew back home and scrounged together a couple of crummy part-time jobs ... but I came home every evening to (and woke up every morning with) someone I loved. And at the time it didn't seem like a bad trade.

Fast forward by a quarter century. Was everything hunky-dory in my marriage before my First Date with D? You all know better than that, and so did I, even then. My marriage sucked. If I squinted my eyes real hard, I could still see little nuggets of value, or at least I could make spots swim in front of my eyes that looked like little nuggets of value. But I knew that Wife was never going to grow into a fully-functioning adult with any kind of normal emotional infrastructure or sense of personal responsibility. I knew it was never going to get better. If it were going to get better, exactly how many marriage counselors would it have taken for us to make progress, for us to stop repeating the same conversations in counseling sessions year after year? Not as many as we went to, that's for damned sure. And conversely, if we had to keep going to that many different therapists, it could only mean that things were never going to change. (How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but the lightbulb has to really want to change. And Wife didn't want to change.)

So why didn't I leave? I gave a variety of answers to that question, none of them very helpful. (This one is as good as any of them.) But the real answer is that I had no motivation to leave because I had given up hope. I figured that if I put my head down I could slog through it, and if I died before anything got any better ... then oh well. Shit happens. Nobody promised me any better. And so on -- the whole litany of depressed, melancholic excuses for not doing anything. There were other factors as well, of course -- largely a concern about the boys. But my fundamental reaction to the suggestion that Wife and I divorce was "Oh hell, why bother?"

What I think I have gotten from D, therefore, is not a whole new reality but simply courage and hope. The word "hope" doesn't mean that I necessarily hope to marry D some day ... I may not marry again at all. And I don't delude myself for a minute that a match with D would be completely untroubled, either. All I mean is that I am willing to move off of dead center. It's not easy -- honestly, lethargy is still way too much of a temptation for me. But I think I am finally seeing through the bullshit. I think I am seeing that it just ain't worth it. And so there is nothing to gain by waiting. It is time to push forward. It's over.

All of this interpretation is a lot more flattering than the schematic one I sketched out above, so my cynical side questions whether it is true. Maybe it's just a story I made up to make myself look better; maybe all these complications are just excuses to disguise the fact that I let my libido steer my life. Maybe, but I don't think so. I think what I am seeing here instead is that sex can change your life (or at least mine) even if I'm not simply ruled by my dick. I think what I am seeing is that sex can create value where it wasn't there before -- that seemingly out of thin air it can generate hope, and courage, and life, and joy.

Not bad things, huh?