Ah, just when the Reverend Ed Young suggests that parishioners have daily sex for one week (as he did last week; see my blog, "The Sex Challenge") the writer Lauren Slater suggests, in today's New York Times Style Section) that married couples be given a reprieve from the focus on sex; and that she, for one, never much went in for married sex anyway. Protesting the notion that in order to be considered a loving wife she should want to love her husband physically--and that, as she puts it, "he wants hot sex. I turned tepid long, long ago,"--Ms. Slater asks not why couples don't go get it on daily, but rather, how about helping marriage with "a prohibition or two--no touching allowed until Tuesday--because longing springs from distance."
While the Reverend Young brought up the Unlikely--a minister urging his flock to go home and go at it--Ms. Slater brings up the Unspeakable, the true feelings behind the endless, tireless magazine articles exhorting readers to "Put the Spark Back into Marriage!" and "Ten Ways to Turn Him On!" as though love depended on figuring out how to stay or, in Ms. Slater's case, how to become, sexual. And, as though love-- all love-- was not sacred. The joys of love, she feels, are apportioned equally to the bedrooms of lovers and the bedrooms of your beloved, sleeping children.
I applaud these brave people--the minister, for hoping that, by getting married lovers into bed with each other they will want more sex, and the writer for admitting that, as much as she loves her man and her marriage, more sex isn't what she wants. Aren't we trying, all of us, to find as much love as we can in our lives together--by all the means of loving we have at our disposal? And shouldn't we applaud those who love with more sex AND those who love with less. Isn't it their own decision? Just as some of us have more of an impulse toward maternal love than others (and aren't allowed to admit it, for fear of seeming unwomanly) don't some of us have more of an impulse toward sexuality (ditto)? And who's to say which love is ultimately the more satisfying, or the more binding?
What do you think, dear readers?
--TLG
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