The Love Goddess Blog

To Bed or Not To Bed: That is the Question

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

THE SEX CHALLENGE

        I'm sorry to have been away for so long….I was visiting people who needed the Love Goddess in

Wales

, and having trouble getting onto the net, what with internet connections being what they are deep in continental farmland! Anyway I'm back, and have just read The New York Times for the first time in weeks. I see that a

Texas

pastor, Rev. Ed Young, is getting great publicity by suggesting that marriage gets better when there's more sex. He recommends to his throng that they vow to make love every day for a week in order to get the (metaphoric) show on the road.

        What strikes me here is the number of phone calls and e-mails I've received this morning asking whether I think it's a GOOD idea or a BAD idea to encourage wedded bliss through more sex, as the Reverend Ed Young is doing. Yes indeed. I think it's a good idea; a really good idea.

         Here's why.  Whether one agrees that encouraging daily sex is a Christian endeavor is irrelevant. So too is whether daily sex opted for the way one opts for a vitamin regime or a workout program is, at first, appealing. What's important is that several amazing things happen in the process of the opting itself--even if it's opting consciously for something that we all have come to believe should come naturally. For one thing, in a busy family, it doesn't come naturally. Second, you're signing on for something that is, after all, fun.

         Did you know that the people who marry to have fun actually have the most fun? It's true. I once did a survey and five-thousand people responded, and the ones who married for fun (about a third of the respondents) remained happier together than all the others. And had more fun.

         Now, if it hasn't been fun in awhile, and you've pulled away from each other because of , oh, kids and work and built-up anger and feelings of aging and all the things that can interrupt good sex (and pretty much everything can) and now there's a certain amount of dread involved in breaking through the barriers in order to get back to the fun--then facing the dread rather than letting it deaden you forever is important (even if it's scary). Because what happens ( unless there's so much rancor between the two of you that the very idea of closeness has become anathema, in which case neither of you is going to say yes to this "sex challenge" anyway) is that your senses literally recall how much they like being close, and your body remembers how easy it once was to fall into that closeness, and the closeness itself does the magic that closeness always does.

      It's like the old saw about riding a bike. No matter how long ago it was you were on one, your body never forgets how. Better still, once you get on it again (or, in our case, get it on again), the whole world of fun associated with it, and with the wonderful world you experienced when you did so, comes back to you as sense memory. And it is delicious.

      So too with lovemaking.  The first day may be so strained you don't want to do it the next day. But you made a promise! The next day may be even harder, because you're dragging yourself to each other with even more dread than the first day because of the "failure" yesterday. But here's the genius of the sex challenge. You do it again, or maybe a fourth time, and a wondrous thing happens. Your body remembers. How to please this guy you may be estranged from but whom you loved enough to marry. How to relax into sexual pleasure. How to allow pleasure in. How to enjoy even the goofiness of coming together again after a long time. Yes, your skin remembers the joy of being touched. Your sense of humor returns. His sense of humor returns. The whole pattern of intimacy that was shut down by disuse returns just by making the effort. Even if the sex itself isn't all you'd hoped it would be, you're back in the saddle again, and you know, what's more, that you'll be back at it tomorrow.  

        Sex, you remember in the deepest part of you, is simply adult play. And here you are, playing with your favorite playmate. The one you chose to play with forever but stopped playing with. Once the game, which you thought was over, begins again, the fun comes back into your whole life.

       So yes, yes, yes, The Love Goddess approves of your sex challenge, Rev. Ed Young! To my mind, any church that encourages pleasure, that wants fun for its people, encourages all that's most wondrous about the word "marriage."    

    TLG

    

Putting The "Spark" Back in a Relationship....part 2

We're talking once again about the old saw that couples must keep the "spark" in relationships. In fact, the idea of infusing "spark" into a relationship only makes me celestially anxious. It's as if we're supposed to reinvent a comfortable relationship into one that has an "edge"--or one, rather, that once had us on edge. It's a no-win proposition: You can't unknow someone. Oh, and watch gender differences click in when you ask people how they think they should put the spark back. Ask a man, and he'll think immediately of Ciala commercials. Or jewelry. As if thirty-six hours and a new bracelet are spark and not plain endurance.  

    Asking a woman to inject spark into her relationship makes her think face lift. And then thong. Why? Because your culture equates "spark" with newness, youth, beginnings, which makes us reflexively believe that any other kind of woman (besides a young one) is sexual dud, doomed to put out, not start, fires. A woman who is not in a new relationship and hence is not "new" herself, starts to worry about she appears; as if changing her appearance (and her underthings) will change the dynamic between her lover (who is also not new, by the way) and herself.

          Jewelry and thongs, face lifts and Cialis, are all fine--but they have little to do with correcting the "boredom" we hear about in relationships. The idea of asking couples to please each other with these generic tools, well, they feel like odd, loose ends; unconnected pieces of a huge puzzle. If they're elements in a decision to talk more, have more fun together, play more--even a movie and a pizza would do for me, if I lived down there--then reinjecting "spark" doesn't sound so impossible, so sadly undo-able. Because "spark," my friends, is sex--right? And what is sex if not adult play?

         TLG      

 

Where The Spark Has Gone, part 1

 

               Yesterday I heard it again:  someone speaking about her marriage as "boring." My first instinct when I hear this about marriage and boredom  is always to wonder if the couple has stopped talking. For I've long found that when talk goes, sex often follows. (Sex is, after all, a conversational connection, using bodies and voice.") So while magazines still talk about putting the "spark" back into marriage as though lacy thongs will do the trick, I still talk about where the "spark" first left. The talk. When Joan Didion said that the essence of her very alive and successful marriage was conversation, I thought, yeah, that's the thong that no lace can create.  

              We're grownups, so we know that familiarity can have its way with spark, but not until that familiarity erodes the daily conversation does it really put out the fire. Not till you realize that the three things you've said in a day are: "What time will you be home? Will you pick up dinner? And Is someone around here going to do the laundry, ever?" before the tv goes on at night, you realize you're gone; you've vanished; the content of conversation has become an exchange that either of you might have had with a new secretary.  

            Not that we don't try to keep talk alive. Generally speaking, though, women raise more topics of conversation with men than the reverse. Scholars have long studied this imbalance--and one, Pamela Fishman, pointed out that women "raise many more topics than men because so many of their topical attempts fail." This failure is not due to the content--which "is often indistinguishable from men's" but "due to the failure of men to respond, to work at turning the attempt into a developing conversation." She goes on to say that women use a variety of strategies to get men to listen--asking questions, for example, is the famous one, to force some kind of response--that men rarely have to use. Why don't they have to use it? Because women are so much more likely to want to engage in the first place, men needn't resort to devices. They just need to want to talk.

        So it's no coincidence, if we follow this thread, to hear that married women are the most depressed population, and married men the least depressed. It's odd, when you think about it, since these happiness and depression figures refer to people who exist in the same marriages. It cannot all be problems with roles, this huge discrepancy in marital depression between men and women; because more and more couples are sharing roles that used to be divvied up. And yet the discrepancy remains. No, I believe it has to do with what happens over time to conversation.

       We'll talk more about it next time!

        Speak out, my darlings! Talk to each other!

         TLG