What makes you come alive?

Towards the end of Sex at Dawn (I have a note that says "page 291," but D has my copy right now so I can't check), Ryan and Jetha tell the story of a man they call Phil. Phil was married; Phil had an affair; Phil's marriage came caving in around his head. Untold destruction. A very bad scene. And Phil was upset. He didn't hate his wife. He didn't want to lose the marriage. But he had not been able to keep from having the affair. What he said about it (as near as I can quote without the book handy) was that the affair "made him come alive again." He had not realized how dead his life had gotten until his affair made everything bloom and blossom for him again. And he craved that coming alive so much that he couldn't stop himself.

When I read those words, I couldn't help but think of another post, a little over a year ago, where I quoted John Eldredge from his book Wild at Heart, saying, "Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Really? So what the world needs is more adultery? Maybe so -- sometimes it sounds like Ryan and Jetha are making exactly that case -- but I think Eldredge would be shocked to hear it. (If you check out his website, their current mission is fighting to save marriages.)

You know, when I first heard of Eldredge -- when a friend of mine first passed me a copy of Wild at Heart -- I found him exciting to read, absolutely thrilling, one of the best things to happen to the all-too-tepidly-communicated Christian message in decades. Looking over his website just now (as I went to find the links I have embedded here) I remember why I felt that way. Only, ... is he really telling me that I'll have a better, fuller, more joyous life yoked to Wife than I could have exulting with D? I'll have to think about that.


Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Faith and insecurity

I haven't heard from D in a couple of days. She has told me she is so busy with work that I should just call instead; but I called this evening at the time we set up and got no answer. I am sure that she is just crazy-busy working, and I'll be able to get a hold of her later. But of course I noticed that she set up the time, and then she was the one who couldn't make it. (In her defense, her job really is all-consuming.)

In the last letter I got from D, sent Saturday, she told me she had recently gotten a letter from her daughter. Her daughter graduated from college some years ago and has been working; but she [the daughter, call her "D Jr" for the moment] recently quit her job so that she and her boyfriend (who is supposed to be studying for the bar exam) could travel through Europe and the Near East for some extended period of time. [Note added in early 2012: I talk about this daughter often enough that I have to do better than "D Jr," so in the future I'll call her "Brittany".]

Apparently part of what D Jr wrote about was a criticism of how D has been handling her professional life -- not some kind of post-adolescent whine, but an independent evaluation by someone not wrapped up in the hear-and-now of it all. D told me she appreciated this criticism; I think she sees it as a contributing factor to the question, What is her story now? What is she to be doing? In any event, she wrote me as follows:

[My daughter's] letter was long and very newsy; she loves her travels and is learning and growing before my eyes. However, she has little patience with me and I appreciate her direct comments, although they also sting. I'll copy the first paragraph to give you a sense of her critique of my choice to remain at [the school where D teaches today]. I'll be interested in your response.

I got your letter and was quite saddened by it.... I feel very
distressed at this time to be so far away from you -- its hard to say as much as
I want in a letter. Here I am in Europe; I go from house to house, city to city,
looking at how people live, what brings meaning to their lives -- or
alternatively, what seems completely empty and meaningless about their lives --
and I try very hard to think and piece together what kind of a life (and how) I
would like to live when I return. And I wish you could do something similar,
because I am sure that would not structure your life the way it is now, if you
had space to reflect more on it. If you were one of the people I visited along
this road, I would be shocked to see such an intelligent woman enslaved to this
job that doesn't treat you right, that serves a mission you've lost faith in,
and that saps all your time so you can't do anything else. I hope that maybe you
can write me next about what keeps you from quitting tomorrow. I know that there
are financial pressures, but surely they can be dealt with, especially now that
[my younger brother] is almost graduating [from college, and therefore won't be
your financial responsibility any longer]. I think a really important thing I am
learning about on this trip is how to deal with discontinuities in life. Every
time I move, which is almost every other day right now, my surroundings change,
my schedule, everything is changed, and it can be difficult to adapt. Sometimes
we get stranded out in the middle of nowhere with no clue how we are going to
get to the next place but something always happens and brings us back around. I
think of all the people at my office who couldn't even imagine quitting their
job, their safety, let alone go and do what I'm doing, and I remember that it's
difficult for everyone, but the rewards are very great. The problem,
psychologically, is not being able to imagine what might come next, that life
continues, you keep living and acting, but you are not able to picture how or to
what end. Like, we will somehow get to [a certain town] tomorrow. I have no idea
how. I don't know what road we will take, or who will take us there, but it will
happen, I have learned that much by now.

My reply to D grew as I wrote it, and ended up wandering in directions I had never anticipated before I put my fingers on the keyboard. (Have you ever had that happen? It can be disoncerting.)

D Jr's comments are fascinating, and I find my thoughts heading off in a lot of different directions as I read them. My comments may be correspondingly scattered. I guess the first thing I observe, because it really is overpowering to me, is how much she writes like you. No surprise, of course. But phrases like, "I try very hard to think and piece together what kind of a life (and how) I would like to live when I return," sound like they could have come directly from your pen. It makes me wonder who I sound like. (smile)

A second thing I notice is that her critique is almost identical to your own. This may be why it made you squirm so much ... that you yourself have written exactly the same thing, expressed in only slightly different words, in any number of letters to me.

One difference between her critique and your own, though -- and this is a third thing that I noticed right away -- is that hers is obviously written by somebody young. She writes with a simplicity which is honestly more difficult for people our age, at least if they are self-reflective. I recognize it because I used to write that way too. But I also know that it takes a lot more courage now for me to simplify any issue quite so far.

Note that while simplicity is in some respects a virtue -- and particularly an intellectual virtue -- I do not say that her critique is thereby more accurate than it would be if it were more complicated. There are elements of the picture that I think she misses. Most basically, she identifies (implicitly) four reasons why you might work at [your school]: that the work might engage your creative intellect, that the people might treat you well, that you might believe in the mission of the place, or that you might need the money. She then dismisses the first three out of hand (unsurprisingly, as I assume you have told her stories of the place similar to the ones you have told me), and suggests that you have allowed the fourth to frighten you more than it should. But I can think of a couple of other reasons why you might not "quit tomorrow." One is that you did, after all, agree to teach this year, and I agree that at some level it is important to honor our commitments even when we have made those commitments to jerks. What's more, quitting a teaching job mid-year is not exactly like quitting a job at Starbucks or Barnes & Noble. It is a major problem for any school to replace any teacher mid-year; for [your school] to replace you teaching the classes you are currently teaching would be a catastrophic impossibility. It would be easier to replace a principal than that. And I am certain that your awareness of this fact is part of what will keep you there through June 2011. In addition, I know that you feel a certain commitment to (and even fondness for) a number of your students .... It is only natural that you would feel reluctant to turn your back on them. Nor is it true that you get nothing out of the job; it may not engage your creative or critical intellect, but I do think that it challenges your spirit in ways that demand a creative emotional response on a daily basis. How do you respond to the student scratching his pubic hair? What will you say to your classes to keep them on track when nine of their classmates are in jail? These are problems that you have to solve on the fly, and none of them is easy. Say what you will about this job, but it's never dull. And whatever you may say about it intellectually, at the level of spiritual warfare it is never stultifying.

Lastly, and perhaps most prosaically, it's not as easy as it sounds to find a job. I've been there, and I can vouch for this. You would not be the first person to stay at a job that makes you crazy because the prospect of finding another is so daunting.

I think this last point introduces another respect in which D Jr's letter sounds like the thought of someone young. You remember that Miss Giardino says it is important for the young to be cautious and conservative, because they have their whole lives to live with the consequences of their actions; but the old can afford to be impetuous, because how much difference can it make anyway? What is so striking about this opinion is that it is simultaneously so logical and so contrary to all our experience. What we see when we look around us is older people who become terrified of change because they have had time to see -- far more than the young -- just how badly wrong things can go. The young who have grown up under trying circumstances can know this too, of course; but for those who have grown up safely it can be easy to underestimate the potential for things to end up badly. Age brings a greater awareness of this pessimistic side of things, but I think at the same time it can make us too timid. To misquote Hamlet, "Thus knowledge doth make cowards of us all."

D Jr's letter shows an abundant faith in things working themselves out; I might almost say that it shows an abiding faith in special Providence: "we will somehow get to [a certain town] tomorrow, I have no idea how. I dont know what road we will take, or who will take us there, but it will happen, I have learned that much by now." This is what I used to say about finding a job, during the year and a half that I was unemployed. I didn't know where I would find work, or doing what, but I knew for a fact that there was a road marked out for me and sooner or later I would stumble upon it. And, sure enough, I did. It is easy -- and probably not altogether wrong -- to attribute this faith in part to youth, as I suggest above. I think it is also, paradoxically, a faith that it is easier to have when you are insecure. D Jr says as much when she says, "I think a really important thing I am learning about on this trip is how to deal with discontinuities in life." And I know for myself that it is a lot harder for me to have this faith now -- when my life is comparatively stable (because I have a job and I have reached a tenuous modus vivendi with Wife) -- than it was back in 2004 (when more or less everything was in question). It is strange. But I can vouch that the times in my life when I have felt most palpably the faith that things would turn out OK have been the times when everything was the most uncertain.

This insight, about faith in things to come as a concomitant of radical uncertainty, is something I hadn't thought of when I sat down to write this letter. I didn't realize I was going to say it. But as I started to write, I realized that my earlier theme -- harping on how easy it is for young whippersnappers to lecture us old geezers like this -- was false in an important way. Not entirely false, of course. There is a level at which is preserves some truth. But there is this other level too. From where I sit today -- where I have a job and a mortgage and my life is largely predictable -- I am particularly sensitive to the risks in what D Jr says. What if you quit and then can't find something else? What if you throw yourself on the beneficence of Chance, and then there is nobody to catch you? For that matter, what happens if D Jr herself decides finally that she wants This or That Kind of Life ... only she can't get it because her travels have caused her to miss the window? What happens if she decides she wants such-and-such a career, but the hiring authorities who guard the gates decide that someone who quits her job to go travelling like this is too unreliable to take on? The thing is, I even know the answers to all these fears. To take only the last one, the answer is obviously that any employer who is so rigid and unimaginative that he lets D Jr's travels constitute an insuperable barrier to hiring her is somebody she never wants to work for anyway. There will always be somebody else, somewhere, who can see the value she brings and will snap her up. And even if there is only one such employer in a hundred with a spark of imagination, it only takes one. Or she may choose not to work for somebody else at all, but to make her own way in a manner that she could never have done without the wider perspective of her travelling right now. See, I know all this intellectually. I'm even persuaded that it is all true. But from where I sit today, I can't feel it. From where I sit today, all I can feel is concern at the uncertainty into which she has launched herself, fear at her walking across that wire without a net, and anxiety at her trying to persuade you to do the same thing. If I were myself unemployed and cut adrift, I would probably feel a lot more sanguine about the whole thing, because I would be able to feel the hand of Providence far more palpably than I can right now.

What am I recommending? I don't know. On the one hand, I think of your repeated desire to live as if you really believed in God, not as a practical atheist, and I think (as I have said) that D Jr's advice shows a measure of faith in God's Providence which is denied by clinging to the Known for dear life. On the other hand, I don't think God exactly advises recklessness either. Even Jesus wouldn't throw himself off the highest spire of the Temple; is it not tempting God for us to throw ourselves blindly into the Unknown? Nelson Bolles, in his job-hunting guide, explains that you should always have a Plan B; as a counter-example he cites a family who stopped paying their rent because they thought the end of the world was at hand, and who were convinced that God would arrange a miracle to keep them from being evicted. They were evicted. So I don't know what this adds up to. Certainly I would never recommend that you quit mid-year, for all the reasons that I outlined several paragraphs above. But after June? I'm not so sure. Maybe you can get a clearer picture through prayer than I can possibly give you, because I realize I'm generating a lot more dust than light. It is also only fair to recognize that your job is merely one facet of your life, and maybe not the one that interests Providence the most right now. Certainly nobody could accuse you of "clinging to the Known" in your personal life these last two years. (small smile) Maybe that's where the focus is right now. I really don't know.

One last thing that I see in D Jr's letter, perhaps the most important point of all -- but also the most obvious, so I'm sure I hardly need to say it. But she obviously loves you very, very much. Nobody who did not care deeply about you could possibly write in such a way.

I don't know what D thinks of any of this. As I say, I haven't heard from her since. She may think it is all bullshit, for all I know. I do know that I had no idea what I was going to write before I started; so I also haven't had a lot of time to figure out if it is any good or even makes any sense. But I offer it to you all for whatever it may be worth ....

Promiscuous but choosy

One of the difficulties that Ryan and Jetha encountered in writing Sex at Dawn was the lack of a suitable word in English to describe the sexual attitude that they claim to have found in prehistoric times. What they settle on (somewhat reluctantly) is the word promiscuous. But they explain that it is not really suitable as normally used, because it implies undiscriminating sexuality. By contrast, what they wanted was a word that meant indefinitely plural but nonetheless choosy sexuality. And they couldn't find one.

If you think about it, the idea is not so strange. Ryan and Jetha talk about sex as a tool for binding together a tribe, for enhancing social relations among the members of a community. But these people already share more than just bodily fluids. A small tribe of human beings in a world of saber-toothed tigers would have to trust each other with their lives; and since food had to be hunted or gathered, everybody needed to pitch in. So the relationships among these people had to be intimate in more than the genital sense. When they fucked each other they weren't just scratching an itch, but making friends and allies on whom they would then depend in a very real way.

The same thing is true, interestingly enough, about the first fully-modern American example that Ryan and Jetha give of a similar approach to sexuality: the "swinging" lifestyle of the Air Force's "top gun" fighter pilots. These were men who faced death on every mission, and who knew implicitly that a third of them would never come back from the war. The way Ryan and Jetha describe it, they used group sex as a bonding experience, tying the men to each other through their wives; what is more, the clear but unspoken implication was that this bonding meant the survivors would take care of the wives and children of those who died. After all, they -- the surviving pilots and the widows of the dead -- had already been lovers, and some of the children carrying a dead man's name might belong to the living. In any event, more generally, they all belonged to the community of fighter pilots. Note again: highly plural sex used to tie together a small, select community ... but with nothing undiscriminating about it.

There is one more example of this kind of sex -- promiscuous but choosy -- that I can't help but think of. It's a literary example this time: the Nest established by friends and followers (water-brothers) of Valentine Michael Smith in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. (See also the Wikipedia entry here.) The dynamic in this story is slightly different, because Valentine Smith is willing to offer his way of understanding the world to anybody willing to put in the work to master it. But the effect is the same; as Jubal Harshaw reminds him, those who don't listen to him select themselves out by choosing to ignore him. So once again, the luxuriously plural sexuality reenforces bonds that hold together a select group in contradistinction to those outside.

I said in my last post that I never resented the sexual encounters Wife had with other lovers when I was included too. Well, it's fair to ask what about that? Did I never think to establish some kind of bond with her other lovers, so that it was somehow us against the outside world? If Ryan/Jetha and Heinlein are on to something, then why not?

The answer is that I thought about it from time to time, but it never worked out. Or almost never. The only two lovers with whom it would have been a possibility were Boyfriend 1 and Boyfriend 4, because those were the only ones who ever ended up in bed with Wife at the same time I was there. And Boyfriend 4 had been a friend of mine from high school, so he was really a special case. But I could never establish that kind of bond with Boyfriend 1 because we never trusted each other. He never trusted me because Wife kept telling him so many terrible things about me (as she did to everybody that would sit still to listen). I never trusted him because, ... well, partly because he wanted to take Wife away from me (based on all the horrible things she had said about me). And partly I just didn't think much of him. I guess he was a nice enough guy, from a distance, but he had absolutely no features that made him (in my eyes) an interesting person to talk to or be around. His tastes were boring and conventional, his conversation was shallow, and he never had a new idea. Other than the sex (and Wife complained to me about that), I couldn't tell what she ever saw in him.

I think I have mentioned that I had this trouble with most of her other lovers: they seemed like losers, at least to me, and I couldn't find anything much to recommend any of them. The exceptions were Boyfriend 4 (who was an alcoholic and recurrently unemployed, but also my friend from high school and a real mensch when sober) and Girlfriend 1 (who certainly seemed destined for better things, but who had absolutely no use for me at all). Whether this was my problem, or whether (as I suggested before) it reflected something significant about Wife's taste, I may not be objective enough to tell. But the upshot was certainly that none of these other models ever worked out for us. Of course, back then (say, when she first started fucking Boyfriend 1) I didn't know anything about the "swinging" fighter pilots; and naturally I had never heard of Ryan or Jetha. But I had read heinlein; and I remember feeling vaguely disappointed somehow that -- if she was going to fuck other men -- we couldn't turn it into some kind of Nest. I have to conclude that for Wife the whole thing was more like scratching an itch; or else that, as a narcissist, she really had no idea what to look for in other people that would constitute community-building qualities, ... nor really had any idea why they might be useful. It's sad.

There is one other conclusion from this line of thought, besides my personal moping. If the only way to make a sexual community work the way that Smith's Nest worked, or the way that prehistoric tribes may have worked, is to be choosy enough about the members that you can build a community where everyone can truly rely on everyone else -- can truly trust everyone else with his life -- then how on earth could it ever be possible to build such communities in the kind of complex and highly mobile society we have today? (I mean, outside of ultra-specialized enclaves like the Air Force in wartime.) Is this another sign that "it's strictly big boxes of bananas, all the way up Columbus Avenue"? Maybe so. But if anyone has any interesting ideas about how this could be possible, I would truly love to hear them.

Thinking through polyamory, 2: Prehistoric promiscuity

This post harks back to one of my early posts from 2008, "Thinking through polyamory." Back then I was trying to understand my marriage in light of my Wife's serial infidelities. Today, times have changed: I no longer care whom Wife fucks (although I do believe her when she says she hasn't had anybody for a long time), I myself am carrying on an affair with D, and quite recently I have been reading Christopher Ryan's and Cacilda Jethá's book Sex at Dawn. So if I am honest with myself, there is a lot that I need to re-evaluate.

The developments in my marriage, and the affair with D, have gotten a lot of discussion here over the last couple of years. But the book is new, and it has been a while since I have done any re-thinking about what it would be natural to expect in the abstract (rather than just moping about what I feel here and now). So that is where I want to focus today.

Two years ago, when I wrote about polyamory, I concluded as follows:

The problem is this: it is very easy to fall in love with multiple people;
but for most of us, it is very, very hard to have our partners fall in love with
multiple people! The whole point of monogamy turns out not to be about us at
all. The whole point of monogamy is that we forego some desires that call to us
profoundly and insistently – and we swallow the pain that this causes us – in
order to avoid hurting other people.

But now, after reading Ryan and Jethá, I have to wonder if it was always so. Did prehistoric man get jealous the way modern man often does -- the way I used to, back when I gave a shit -- or is sexual jealousy something new, a recent development?

Of course there is no way to travel back in time to answer the question for sure, so I began to think about the only data I could lay my hands on: how did I feel about Wife's infidelities? The exercise has made me think that Ryan's and Jethá's theory could be at least plausible.

In the first place, a minor consideration: I argued in this essay ...

that the meaning of sex is couplehood: fucking creates a couple
where there was none before; and ... this means a couple in which each
partner puts the other one first, in which each partner is a home or refuge for
the other from the storms of the world....

Only ... how do you feel when you come back to your home at long last,
after a day that has beaten and bruised you, and you find a total stranger at
ease in your living room, relaxing with his feet up, drinking your
beer, eating your chips, and watching your television?

Disoriented? Shocked? Violated? Betrayed?

Exactly.

This may be fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't really speak to Ryan's and Jethá's picture. In the social organization they describe, both partners will likely have other partners as well. So while neither partner may be able to rely on coming back to a single "home" for refuge from troubles, the odds are very high that at least one partner will be available. What is lost in exclusivity is made up in redundancy.

There is a second point, which is more interesting. We have all read stories where one guy (usually it's the guy) tells how hard it is to hear his girl in the other room, moaning in the arms of another lover. And it makes him crazy. What about this part? Wasn't this an issue back in the Stone Age, too? It's all very well to say that you have someone else too. But at a fundamental level shouldn't it have made guys crazy back then, too, when their girls were carrying on with somebody else? Heaven knows that attitude isn't even limited to guys, as the lyrical Marianne once wrote here.

Not only do Ryan and Jethá answer this question No, but they make it more pointed. They argue that the reason women have the capacity for multiple orgasm is to keep them in the mood, because back then they could very well have routinely had sex with several men one right after the other. They argue that the reason women moan in orgasm was to announce to other men in the area that sex was going on, so that they could come join the fun. Ryan and Jethá argue, in other words, that orgies involving one woman and many men could well have been the norm back in the Old Stone Age. (I won't give the genetic argument here, but it has to do with Darwinian selection through sperm competition.) The consequence is that not only would the typical caveman know that his woman was fucking the guy in the cave next door, but he would hear her and see her -- and even be there when it happened. And if anything, you would think this would be worse than merely knowing it in the abstract.

You would think so, but you'd be wrong. Or well, ... your mileage may vary. But here, too, I went back to some of what I had written before and found that this very case isn't quite so clear as it seems. Linking the tail-end of this essay with the beginning of its sequel, I wrote: ...

I don’t care if Wife takes a friend for an afternoon of shopping for shoes
(so long as the bill isn’t too high); in fact, if she invited me, I would
actively look for an excuse not to go. Why do I care if she takes a friend for
an afternoon of rapturous sex? It’s not the same, but why not?

At the most immediate emotional level, the answer is that I don’t want to
be left out. If there is rapturous sex going on some afternoon – at any rate, if
it involves Wife – I want to be part of it.

And this was true. But notice that this is exactly what Ryan and Jethá say: that paleolithic promiscuity, so far from being hidden, was out in the open where many suitors could join. If Wife and I had lived back then, I doubtless would have been right there participating any time she was fucking one of her other boyfriends.

The punchline is that this would have been OK with me. It happened a few times, long ago with Boyfriend 1 and then more recently with Boyfriend 4, that all three of us would end up in bed together. I never had the slightest interest in her boyfriends themselves -- sorry, but no! -- but I was perfectly willing to collaborate with them in bringing Wife to as many orgasms as she could manage. And yes, sometimes two guys can just do more for one girl than one guy can. It can work out.

And I never resented those encounters. I got plenty angry at Wife for her infidelities: jealous, despairing, crazy. But never for the nights (only a few of them) when we were all together. Those I always saw as an exception. And that is part of why later I decided that what had made me so upset was not the sex itself but her skulking behind my back, her lying, and her shutting me out in the cold. In other words, her cheating.

In other words, the same things she did in the non-sexual parts of our marriage that made me so crazy.

I can't say that Ryan and Jethá have proven their thesis. But when I look at it long enough, I can see how it avoids some of the big objections I used to have years ago to promiscuous sex as a lifestyle. So it is at any rate not obviously wrong. And it is certainly interesting.

On first looking into "Sex at Dawn"

Last Friday, I finished a first reading of Christopher Ryan's and Cacilda Jethá's latest book, Sex at Dawn. Then no sooner did I finish it than I left it with D while seeing her. I want her to read it because I think it will give us a lot to talk about. Anyway, I haven't thought deeply about it yet, but it is a really interesting book.

The basic thesis of the book is that humans evolved as a sexually promiscuous species. Even though we now (most of us) live in monogamous societies, our instincts haven't had time to catch up with the change yet so by and large we still want to sleep around. That's the gist of it, right there. All the rest is argument.

The arguments are interesting, and come from several directions. Ryan and Jethá spend a lot of time comparing human sexual behavior with that of our genetically-closest non-human relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos (neither of which species is even remotely monogamous).* They examine sexual and social behavior (so far as it is available to us) in foraging** societies that exist today or that we know from reliable documentation. They even explain (at some length) that the erect human penis has a number of highly unusual features when you compare it to the penises of the other great apes, and they draw relevant conclusions by thinking through what the purpose of these features could possibly be. On the other side of the bed, they offer a very long discussion of multiple orgasm and "female copulatory vocalizations."

It will be no surprise to anybody to hear that we all -- men and women alike -- find it totally natural to want to fuck multiple other people. The interesting part, to me at least, is the suggestion that early communities relied on this very impulse as a way to forge a social bond that held tribes together. In the past, I have argued that yes, it is natural to fall in love (or lust) with multiple others; but that it is also natural for your partner(s) to get jealous. (See, esp. part 3 of this series.) Ryan and Jethá say no, jealousy is not "natural" in the sense of being biologically inevitable. They agree that fear of abandonment may well be genetically-programmed. But who ever said that you were about to be abandoned, just because your partner went and fucked somebody else? That part -- the connection between fucking others and being abandoned -- is a cultural assumption and not a biological imperative. And they argue that early foraging societies held exactly the opposite assumption. It is a fascinating*** treatise.

The most important part, though, is what they do not say. I have seen reviewers write as if this book gives us all permission to run out and fuck the milkman and the dairymaid and our neighbors down the street, all because that's what they did in the Stone Age. In a way that could sound exuberant and delightful, but the authors don't say so. In fact, while they talk a good bit about the modern day, they are hesitant to make concrete recommendations of any kind. Right at the beginning they say explicitly that they do not know what to do with their findings. They do not know what direction we all ought to go, now that we know the things they tell us. The critical fact, to which they return again and again, is that Man is incredibly adaptable. Early promiscuity worked for foraging societies in the Stone Age. But everything about our lives has changed between then and now, including the special features of their communities that made promiscuity work so well. There is -- to put it gently -- very little evidence that it can work the same way today, except in a few isolated cases**** so specialized that they really don't disprove the rule. Of all the reviews they post on the book's website, I have found only one (by Stephen Snyder, M.D., a sex therapist) that truly seems to get this point. It is sobering to realize that knowing even so much can tell us so little.

But it is a fun book. By all means read it.


* I use the phrase "genetically-closest" very deliberately. I have two good friends who are both anti-Darwinians. Personally I don't understand why, but there it is. On the other hand, the genetic code is known and mapped; so regardless what you think about Darwin (or even evolution) it is indisputable that chimpanzees and bonobos have a genetic code that is closer to ours than any other animal.

** Ryan and Jethá use the term "foraging" society as a short-hand for "immediate-return hunting-and-gathering" society: i.e., a society that has no way to store food. Such societies are generally nomadic, because they have to wander to find enough to eat. They don't have much property, because too much crap is a bitch to carry around everywhere. And they probably represent what most human societies were like during most of human history.

*** The authors explain that the word "fascinating" comes from the Latin fascinum, which means an artificial phallus, often worn, e.g., as an amulet for good luck.



**** One of the most interesting to me was the "swinging" sub-culture of top-gun fighter pilots during and after World War Two.

How often do I say "I love you"?

So now that my date with D is over and I am at my conference for work, I am back to writing her e-mails. Only I really don't have much to say. After all, I was there in her house just a couple days ago, ... and it's not like this conference is exciting enough that I have a lot to say about it.

But then I started to think about it, and I realized tonight is not all that unusual. There are numerous times I don't really have much to say. Either nothing has happened that sounds remotely newsworthy, or else I do have news but nothing else. And a letter of chatty news itself sounds pretty superficial, or it can.

So I wrote to her this evening about this very conundrum, and explained that I realize "neither kind of letter [i.e., vacuous or merely newsy] ever says what I really want it to say. But then sometimes I'm not sure that what I really want to say is even expressible in a letter in the first place. Sometimes I think that the whole business of writing letters is just ever so slightly beside the point, even if it is all we've got most of the time. I write to you that I love you, but after a while that has to read like some kind of conventional formula -- surely nothing deep or gripping."

I thought about it some more, and it came out like this:


How often do I tell you "I love you"?
Sometimes I feel I never say 't at all.
Oh sure, I sign off letters thus, it's true;
But words dashed off by rote too quickly pall.

How can you know you're always by my side,
And that I talk to you throughout the day?
Or arch an eyebrow, crack a smile, confide
My fleeting, silent thoughts along the way?

Or if I steal myself a moment’s rest
Before I hurry off from Here to There,
Your spirit snuggles up within my breast,
And I can hear your whisper in the air.

How can you know you're every instant here,
If all I say is "I love you, my dear"?

Thirteenth date

This was a legitimate business trip -- two trips, in fact, back to back, so instead of flying home for the weekend (all day Saturday one direction and all day Sunday the other) I flew a much shorter distance (halfway between my two destinations) and visited D at home.

I had never been to her home before, the little duplex she rents near where she works and two hours away from the big house she owns with her husband. So I was eager to see it. She was a little apprehensive: "Will he like it?" But of course I did. Of course it was darling. And the day-and-a-half that I spent there were very sweet.

We didn't do a lot. She drove me over to see the school where she teaches. I read aloud to her. We cooked and ate and washed up. We talked endlessly. And we fucked, of course.

The sex continues to be great. Educational, even -- I mean, before this weekend I never knew it was possible for a woman to flush all the way down to her pubic hair. But it is.

I realized something else too, something that I guess I have known for a long time but I never articulated in words quite this way before. When I read salacious stories written from a guy's point of view, they are generally about what she does to him to arouse him, stimulate him, tantalize him, whatever. But that's not the kind of thing that does it for me. I realize that I am far more aroused by what I can do for D than vice versa. I don't so much care about her doing this or that to me, to spark or excite me. What I really care about intensely, what excites me more than anything else is her writhing in orgasm, ... her uncontrollable moans, ... the flush down her neck and her breasts and beyond, ... her eyes staring stabbingly straight through me and through the walls and out of this world into the face of God for all I can tell. That's why I write so often, and with such gratitude, about how deeply responsive she is -- because it is her ecstasy that resonates with me more potently than any other stimulation possibly could.

We talked about this, and D said that her ecstasy when we fuck is so intense she is convinced that there is something deeply holy about it. She doesn't pretend to understand it; after all, she still believes strongly in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and this is still adultery. There are no two ways around that. And it's not like she thinks it is central to salvation, like the bread and the wine. But she does find something deeply more-than-natural about it.

I don't understand it either. If I did, and if I thought I could take all the credit, I'd find it really flattering. But as it is, I'm just in awe. Really good sex is a wonderful blessing ....