Is it hard for women to write about sex? Really??

I saw an article in The Atlantic Monthly recently called "Why is it so hard for women to write about sex?"  You can find it here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/03/why-is-it-so-hard-for-women-to-write-about-sex/357574/

It's an interesting article, I guess, but I kept finding myself thinking, "Wait ... what?"  Many of the sex blogs I used to read (probably most of them, in fact) were written by women.  Some of them were beautifully written, exquisitely, evocatively.  So what is this author talking about?

Maybe she really means, Why is it so hard for her to write about sex?  She says she's working on a sex memoir, and that it is very tough going.  OK, that may well be true.  I'd probably find it tough going too.

But women?  Maybe reaching a bit too far there ....

Noble silence, part 2

When I wrote the first part of this post I said most of what I needed to say, but maybe not quite all of it.

• I said that this pause in my relationship with Debbie is like a meditational pause, a Noble Silence, and that’s true.
• I said that I find myself – unexpectedly! – relieved in some ways to be alone again, and that’s true.
• I said that this is because I have all these thoughts of spending my time and energy understanding what I want out of life, … and that’s true as far as it goes but there is more.

The other part of it is that I enjoy being alone.  At the same time that I enjoy falling in love, … at the same time that I find coupledom a very natural state, one that I fall and fit into easily, … I also really enjoy solitude.  These two sides of my personality are both very old.  They both have roots well back in grade school, if not before.  I don’t expect either of them to go away any time soon.

Only, … how exactly do they sit together?  More pointedly, how exactly do I honor my need for periodic solitude in a relationship with anybody, be she Debbie or the Lady of the Lake?  I found ways to get away from Wife from time to time, but my relationship with Wife is hardly where I want to turn for a model.  It was easy enough to get away from D because our only encounters were brief visits punctuated by long times in between.  (And you may recall that when our visits lasted as long as a week or more, they left me ragged and desperate to leave.)  I’m sure there is a way to get away from Debbie [if we ever get back together] or anyone else gracefully too, without jeopardizing the relationship.  Only … how?

Part of the reason I need to get away from people every so often is just for the rest, the peace and quiet.  Being around other people takes effort.  And I realized recently that what it requires in particular is the effort to be someone – to pay attention to who I’m with, to listen closely, to watch how she is doing (or he or they), to respond appropriately, all the while being the person I have to be.  I don’t mean anything deceitful here.  I’m not putting on a false face.  All of the persons that I portray when I’m around others are genuinely me.  Only, … when I’m with little old ladies I don’t tell dirty jokes and I try not to curse.  Fine, there’s a side of me that can be polite and serious, so he’s the one I play up.  Or when I’m around someone else, … well, maybe you get the idea.  Again, I’m not creating a false front.  All of these people are me.  But none of them – none of them – is all of me.  In fact I’d guess that “all of me” really isn’t anybody in particular.  He is by turns industrious and lazy, sensitive and callous, attentive and careless, polite and boorish, cheerful and depressed, sober and drunken.  Name a quality you think I have, and I can show you a time I display the opposite one. 

Nor do I think there’s anything special about me in this.  I’m sure it’s true of you too.  Only it’s not the kind of story we tell each other.  To make sense of our lives, to make sense of the world, we simplify reality by telling stories.  “Son 1 is athletic” – there’s a story.  “But I never was” – there’s another.  “Son 2 is adventurous” – see how easy it is?  But for every single one of these stories I can find a time when you would have sworn the exact opposite story was the true one.  You can play this game at home too, for what it’s worth.

My only point is that holding together an identity – any identity, even one that we believe is truly “Us” – takes work.  And when I’m alone, I don’t have to do it.  So being alone is a great relief, and a delicious one.  Yes, after a while with nothing but solitude I’ll start to get lonely: too much of a good thing, and all that.  I will surely need some relief from solitude in a while.  But in the same way I also need relief from company.

I’m still not sure what’s the best way to have my cake and eat it too.  Maybe with a little more silence and solitude it will start to come to me.

Wait ... what?

I want to jot down a couple of stories, quickly, just in case there is ever a legal inquiry about Wife’s competence.  If I know these are written somewhere, then I can retrieve them at need.

Wife has to fill out a form for Social Security, telling them how she spent the money they sent her last year on behalf of the boys.  She asked me for data and I sent her a bunch.  Only there was one bank transaction I didn’t recognize, so I listed it and said maybe she had withdrawn this money.  That was all in one e-mail.  A while later I realized this was a bank error that had been corrected later the same day, so I sent her a second e-mail explaining the error and giving her the correct figures.  It was to this, the second (corrected) e-mail, that she replied saying “I didn’t withdraw that money so I have no idea what it could have been.”

She also asked me to go online and order her a refill on her vicodin prescription.  I went online and couldn’t find any prescription to refill, so I sent her an e-mail saying so.  She replied thanking me for having refilled her vicodin prescription.

Wait … what?  Did you read either of these communications before answering them?  I’m guessing maybe not.

OK, I tried to explain better in both cases and we’ll see what happens.  But meanwhile I’m writing them down.  Bizarre behavior on the part of a soon-to-be-separated spouse should always be memorialized.

Why do we travel?

I'm spending the week in Peru, with Son 2.  Yesterday we went to Machu Picchu.  There's a story behind how this happened, and I'll probably tell it in a minute if I have the time and energy, but right now I'm trying to understand a basic question:

Why do we travel?

Don't get me wrong; in many respects the trip has been amazing.  It's the first time I've been to South America, for example.  And how often do you get a chance to see Machu Picchu?  Only, ... why is it that the chance to do that is so enticing?

Is it the chance to see new things?  I don't suppose I actually saw anything yesterday that I couldn't have seen in a book.  I don't suppose I learned anything about Machu Picchu that I couldn't have read in a book.  In fact, I had to keep referring to the tour book I brought to understand what I was looking at.

Is it that being in the presence of legendary places makes us feel awe?  C. S. Lewis makes this suggestion (glancingly) in The Abolition of Man, and again (through a negative example) in The Great Divorce.  But I was just getting over a 24-hour bug at the time (fever, diarrhea, the works -- you don't want the details) and everything I did at that altitude wore me out.  Machu Picchu is at 8900 feet -- that's 3700 feet higher than Denver.  Mind you it's downright coastal compared to Cusco where we went first because it has the only airport in the area: Cusco is at 11,000 feet above sea level, or more than two miles.  But even climbing up six or seven stairs was enough exertion that I had to bend over with my hands on my knees and rest for a minute before I could go on.  Did I mention that there are approximately fifty-nine thousand stairs at Machu Picchu, because the whole city is built into the side of the Andes which are the only mountains in the world that rise straight-up vertically from sea level?  (Sorry, I'm getting carried away.)  My point is that I felt physically crappy.  I kept trying to overpower my physical discomfort and exhaustion by telling myself "Hosea, you're at Machu Picchu for God's sake! Try to appreciate it!"  But if the reason we travel has something to do with hoping to generate a certain kind of feeling then we should really think harder about it for a minute or two because plenty of times that just ain't gonna happen.  (At least I didn't have to fight jet lag on top of everything else: Peru is on Eastern Time, as if it were New York.)

I asked Son 2 this question today as we were walking to a museum in Lima, and his first two suggestions were something like the two above.  I replied as I have replied here and asked him to think harder.  His third suggestion was that we travel in order to generate memories -- which we can't do from books and which have only a little to do with how we felt at the time.  (That part is true: I already feel better about visiting Machu Picchu than I did yesterday when I was actually there.)  I was about to ask him to flesh out this idea a little farther, but then I stepped sideways on a crack in the pavement and fell down, hitting my head squarely on the sidewalk.  To the everlasting credit of the city of Lima, I was immediately surrounded by a crowd of bystanders who asked me if I was all right, if I had been overcome by the heat, if I needed a doctor, ... everything.  I had to explain (through Son 2, since he speaks Spanish and I don't) that no, I had just twisted my ankle.  But in the time it took me to say that little, somebody had produced a cotton swab soaked in rubbing alcohol for me to sniff ... "in order to calm down and feel better."  They were very kind, and in a few minutes I had climbed back on my feet and we went on to the museum.  But in did kind of derail the conversation.

Anyway, I'm not actually griping about the trip.  I jumped at the chance to take it, and I don't regret the choice.  The thing that puzzles me is, I don't understand why I feel the way I do.  What is special about being there?  Why do we travel?

Suggestions are more than welcome.

Valentine haikus, part 2

Debbie responded a few hours later as follows.  I realize, incidentally, that she is the first girlfriend I’ve ever had who has ever written poetry back to me.

Relationship pause,

To contemplate and reflect,

Hoping for wisdom.

To honor the love

we shared over the past year,

Still appropriate.

Happy Valentine's Day

Valentine haikus

In Noble Silence

The mind floods with things to say.

But no need to speak.

“Practice in motion”,

An hour, a day, even months,

Stills distracted minds.

Stillness benefits

The mind that has not focussed.

Have a happy day.

Noble silence

It’s been another week since I last posted about Debbie’s calling a halt (or at least a stay) to our relationship, and I’m starting to think she might be right.  Maybe not in every detail, but on the right path at any rate.

I didn’t come to this idea right away.  My next theory (after the one I posted last week) was actually pretty unkind: I started thinking that maybe this is par for the course.  I don’t actually know how long her other relationships have lasted; but I’ve gotten the sense that most of them – with the exception of her second marriage, that lasted twenty-something years – weren’t all that long.  Maybe a few months, or a year, or three years … in any event, I was in the process of convincing myself that I wasn’t doing all that badly by making it to the one year mark (or almost, depending on when you start counting).  As I say, it was pretty unkind … but it sure did make things easier on my ego.

And then over the weekend I realized all of a sudden how relaxed I felt that I didn’t have to be planning around someone else.  Wait – what?  Then as I tried to follow that vagrant thought, I began to see the whole picture from another angle.

There are a lot of things that I’ve been meaning to do for some time now, and haven’t done.  Hell, I still have all my books in boxes instead of having unpacked them, and I moved into my apartment more than eight months ago.  What gives?  And what’s with all the other things, maybe more serious ones: like bringing my accounting software up to date, or making a proposal to Wife for how to split our assets, or getting some idea what I want to do with my life now that it’s up to me?  I’ve dragged my feet on all of these; and while there are always “reasons” one of the big ones has been that I’ve been preoccupied with Debbie.  We’ve been doing things together, or going places together, or talking, or writing each other.  Whatever we’ve been doing, my attention has been over there, with her.  Very little of it has been back here, with myself.  Is that where I want my attention?

Well, it’s not what I’ve been telling myself.  My whole story these days is that for the last thirty years I’ve made all my decisions focussed around Wife, and now finally it’s time to explore and see what I want to be when I grow up.  Who am I when she’s not distorting the picture?  Only, … doesn’t that mean that any other intense, intimate relationship will have the same effect?  Won’t it mean just swapping one external center for another?

I think that’s why I felt kind of relieved that I didn’t have to spend the weekend thinking about what to do with Debbie, what to say or write to Debbie, how Debbie would feel about this or that.  I just didn’t.  And I almost didn’t notice that I felt relieved … but there is was, a little wisp of a vagrant thought.  And when I chased it down?  Yup, that was it.

This noticing a subtle, vagrant thought made me see the time in another way.  After all, the whole point of meditation is that with enough quiet you can start to see all the energy the mind spends making up stories for itself … and then you don’t have to be entrapped by the stories because you realize that they aren’t the same thing as reality.  So then if taking a break from each other means I can notice feelings I would otherwise have overlooked, … then this whole interlude is really a kind of meditative exercise.  A kind of meditation.  It’s longer than a normal sitting meditation.  It will last weeks, months, years, … maybe the rest of my life.  But that’s what it is.  It’s a kind of prolonged Noble Silence.

I’m not quite sure that’s what Debbie was trying to say.  But in any event it helps me see a positive side to the experience.  I don’t have to spent my time feeling glumly sorry for myself.  And that has to be a good thing.

Oh, … I tried to distill these thoughts into a couple of haikus that I’ll send her tomorrow.  I figure haikus are a better choice than sonnets, both because they are a lot easier to write and because they are less passionate … more in keeping with the whole idea of silence and reflection.

But why, part 2

I’ve heard almost nothing from Debbie in the last week – one brief e-mail Monday morning to answer one of mine over the weekend, and then total silence – but I’ve spent some more time thinking and I see what might be another contributing cause to her calling it quits.  Remember that everything I write here is shit I made up out of my own head: it’s all based on things I heard her say (or thought I heard her say), but none of it came out of her mouth viva voce.  So there’s every chance it could all be wrong.

 

But I wonder if part of her having to call it off was because the two-hour distance between us put her on an emotional roller coaster.  Say (for example) we go two weeks without seeing each other and then have a weekend together.  In that two weeks she gets pretty used to me not being around.  Then suddenly it’s Friday night, we’re together, and I’m ready to pick up at exactly the same level of intimacy where we left off.  Only Debbie can’t change gears that fast.  She feels awkward around me and spends all of Saturday re-adjusting, meanwhile nudging me subtly to back off a bit and slow down.  By Sunday morning she finally gets back to where we were last time … to where I was trying to be when I climbed out of my car Friday night.  So we spend Sunday together in the rosy halo of adoring each other.  And then Sunday evening rolls around, … and suddenly I have to climb back into my car to drive two hours back to my apartment because I have to be at work first thing Monday morning.  So then Debbie feels the pain of separation for days, like a kick in the stomach.  She pines.  She sighs.  She e-mails me, and we talk on the phone.  One way or another she suffers a lot.  But after a few days she starts to get used to me not being there, and pulls herself out of it.

 

Rinse.  Repeat.

 

When I look at it that way, I can easily believe that it would get old fast.  It also helps me understand why she kept talking as if she wanted us to be in a more quasi-married state – living together or right next door – even though consciously we both agreed that there were a bunch of reasons it was impractical for us to marry.  But after all, if I lived there then she wouldn’t have to lurch back and forth between two different emotional worlds.  She admitted early on that she’s not good at compartmentalizing, and that it’s not something she wants to get good at.  She thinks compartmentalizing is a bad way to run your life.  Only, … if you are conducting a long-distance romantic relationship, compartmentalizing is awfully useful.  It saves you a lot of pain. 

 

This evening I also realized why she might not want to communicate with me.  Remember back before we started fucking, when we were just having lunch together a lot?  We both felt this huge emotional attraction … that’s part of why, even though all her principles told her to wait a couple of years (or more), she was willing to fall into bed with me after only a couple of months.  We had that effect on each other.

 

Well, suppose that now she’s in the situation where her heart is careening back and forth between two extremes, much the way I just described above.  She decides – intellectually, I mean – that the only cure is to detach herself from me.  But the heart is never so clever as the intellect.  Her heart is probably still crashing back and forth between extremes.  So, … what’s going to happen if we start talking?  If we meet for lunch, or talk on the phone, or e-mail back and forth?  She knows perfectly well what’s going to happen, because it’s exactly what happened a year ago under the same circumstances.  Only this time she can’t allow it.  So this means avoiding the situations that could elicit that response, much as an alcoholic on the wagon stays out of bars.

 

This might be all wrong, but it makes a kind of sense.  And it means I have to be more generous in my heart towards her silence.  It may be the only thing she thinks she can do ….

 

If I still love her – which I do – I have to let her have that.

 

 

UPDATE 2023-01-10 (yes, almost 9 years later): As a supplement, see also this post here. 

 

But why?

Ever since Debbie left Wednesday night, I have been trying to figure out why.  Oh, I know what she told me: that I have psychological work to do to recover from my last relationship … in reality my last two, I suppose, if you want to count both Wife and D.  That as long as I am married to Wife, even if it is purely de jure, it will tie up my energy in ways that make me not fully available to her.  And that there are social norms against a single woman carrying on with a married man.

 

Now I’ve conceded that maybe I have neuroses that have to be addressed somehow.  I wish I knew what they were, but I can’t rule out the possibility.  As for my energy being tied up, … well, maybe that was Debbie’s experience when she divorced.  I think a certain amount of my energy will always be tied up with Wife regardless of our legal status, because we have children together.  But then Debbie still talks about her ex-husband too, and checks Facebook to see what he and his new wife have posted there recently.  She has made a point, several times, of telling me (unasked, more or less out of the blue) that the two of them seem to be a good match for each other because they both drink heavily, that of course she doesn’t disapprove because they don’t seem to be hurting anyone and it’s not her place to have an opinion about how much they drink, and that she has completely outgrown the uncomfortable space she used to live in where she felt that his drinking reflected on her.  And so on.  (There’s generally more.)  Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I don’t think my own energy is a lot more tied up with Wife than that.

 

And then there is this concern about social norms, which just sounds absurd to me.  Debbie said, “Well maybe you don’t get it, but other people do. When we met all your relatives a couple weekends ago, I’m sure they would all get it.”  But of course they all know that I’m still legally married to Wife, and they welcomed Debbie with open arms.  So I can’t help thinking that’s an excuse.

 

An excuse to cover what, though?  What made her so uncomfortable that she had to call it off?  I’ve spent some time remembering things Debbie said here and there over the past year, and I have two theories.

 

The weaker theory is that, … well, she’s currently living and going to school two hours away from here and she spends a lot of time socializing with the people in her program.  Maybe she’s interested in one of them and wants to get closer to him but figured she couldn’t as long as she was involved with me.  And so maybe she decided that either I was going to take clear steps to where I could be only hers, or else I wasn’t offering her enough for her to pass up this other guy.  She’s never said anything quite that clear, of course.  But I’ve listened carefully when she has talked about her friends in the program, and at different times it has sounded like she is getting pretty close to one or another.  And the first weekend she spent here after moving, she waited until Sunday night and then said we had to have a long talk about “exclusivity”.  Later she said that wasn’t what she had meant at all, that it had just come out badly because she was tired and confused.  But naturally I have to allow for the possibility that maybe “exclusivity” is exactly what was on her mind, and then later she just decided to backpedal and obfuscate.  Debbie has said that she can’t be involved with more than one person at a time.  So that’s one possibility.

 

The other theory – the one that I currently think is more interesting and more likely – is that she just found herself feeling too nervous in the relationship.  Several times when we were first getting together she said that our relationship – even before it was sexual – was bringing up a lot of strong emotions for her, and she had to back down because they frightened her.  She said that when she was growing up she learned to associate strong emotions with being unsafe: her dad drank, her parents were violent to each other, and she herself did recklessly unsafe things when she was in the grip of strong emotions.  Later on, she told me that for a while she had contemplated entering a nearby Buddhist monastery as a nun, because the communal lifestyle appealed to her so much.  She picked up this theme of communal lifestyle later when she said it bothered her that I wasn’t part of any of her other circles of friends … and then she expanded on this to say that she found it very comfortable to meet her social needs in community – in circles of friends, or (presumably) in a monastery – but that the sheer intensity of a head-on, one-on-one relationship made her very nervous. 

 

And do you remember back when I talked to her about the idea that we pick out people like our parents to marry?  She could easily identify that her ex-husband (to whom she was married for twenty-five cool and passionless years) was a lot like her mother: proactive, decisive, matter-of-fact, reliable, ethical, but emotionally cold with no spark of divine fire making his blood leap and his spirit soar.  She could pick out several other lovers who fit the same profile.  But she had a very hard time placing me until I pointed out that I – much like her first husband (with whom she stayed only a year or so) – came close to fitting the way she described her father: emotionally warm, even passionate, but also more likely to be passive.  Her father is the one who drank himself to death.  Her father is the one who would rage at her mother when he was drunk, prompting Debbie to hop out her bedroom window and run down the block to sleep at a friend’s house.  (To be fair, apparently Debbie’s mother held her own in fighting back; but this made the house an unsafe place to be, and Debbie blamed her father for it. After listening to enough of her stories, I think I can see how he got to that place – a few years ago I might have been headed that direction with Wife. But that’s a digression.) 

 

So I wonder if it was the very intensity of our love, accentuated by the long gaps between seeing each other, that finally scared her off?  It was less than two weeks ago, after all – when we got back from the weekend visiting my aunt and uncle, after I left her apartment to drive home – that she texted me, “Hi Hosea, will you please text me when you get home to let me know you arrived? I’m feeling the same gut-wrenching feeling of missing you that I feel when [my daughter] leaves after [we’ve had] several days together. Love you.”  Whatever you call that, it’s not indifference.  It may have been just too much turmoil.

 

It’s always dangerous trying to explain someone in terms that are very different from how she explains herself.  It means thinking that I understand her better than she understands herself (or at least better than she is willing to discuss), and that’s an arrogant thing to say.  Moreover there’s a huge posibility of self-delusion.  Maybe the truth is really just exactly what she said it was.  If I can’t bring myself to understand or believe it, maybe that’s just my problem.

 

Still, I can’t help but wonder.