Why is it that being comfy and cozy with your partner isn't sexy? Why is it when we finally possess the object of our infatuation, when the chase is over and we at last have the closeness that we've longed for, our passion for that person often starts to fizzle out?
These are the questions that I'm asking this week. In the near future I want to return to the topic I've been exploring the last few weeks, how we can validate our erotic selves and that of our partner by acknowledging "the third," "the manifestation of our desire for what lies outside the fence" (Mating in Captivity 188). But for now, let's talk sizzle to fizzle and vice versa.
Here I am, sitting in the front pew at church, watching my Preacher Man do his thing. And I have to admit, I’m finding him sexy as hell. I may even squirm a bit in my seat.
And this isn’t just a one-off. There’s just something about the way he carries himself when he’s utterly confident in what he’s doing. The way he controls the room, captures his audience’s attention and keeps them rapt as he weaves storytelling, history, and admonition. Authority, a certain alpha-maleness, comes off him in waves, and I can’t help but squeeze my thighs together.
He cuts a fine figure in his slim-fit suit pants, as they accentuate his lean legs and tight ass. I watch and admire his lean form as he paces a bit while he speaks to the room. His tie and neatly trimmed beard have an academic quality, but his wavy, floppy locks retain a hint of boyish mischief and rakish charm.
But it’s more than just his good looks. Yeah, sure, if he were a stranger on the street, I’d give him an appreciative glance. But it’s something else — he’s got an aura about him. A certain dominance. He‘s like a magnet, and I can’t take my eyes off him.
Dear lord, he’s good at public speaking and expertly plies his craft. And if brainy is the new sexy, he’s got that base covered as well. While, like any other hot-blooded HET woman, I definitely check out a nice male figure, I’m a sucker for smarts.
He gets this slight curve to his lips when he’s saying something he finds amusing — almost a smirk, really — and it makes him look just a bit naughty, at odds with his profession. Which brings me to the climax, ladies (pun intended) — his mouth.
I sit here admiring the entire package, and yet that’s where my attention gravitates and remains. His god-damn, sexy as hell mouth, with its full lips and prominent Cupid’s bow. I find it mesmerizing. And while he’s behind the pulpit, reading aloud the Bible passage for today’s sermon, I’m thinking about all the wicked things he can do with that mouth. I know firsthand how skilled those lips and tongue are. His eyes flick to mine for just a moment and I swear to god my clit twitches.
I don’t know if he has any idea what’s on my mind, but I determine that I will steal a moment of his time and whisper my naughty thoughts in his ear after the service ends. If I don’t do it here and soon, if I wait too long, I’ll get distracted. I’ll forget. Or with the moment sufficiently past, I’ll feel embarrassed for my wayward musings and won’t tell him.
I don’t know when I stopped appreciating my partner, nor can I pinpoint when I started to once again. Drinking in the Other. And letting him see my lingering looks and pondering glances. But I do think a renewed awareness of PM as a sexual being was tied to a reemergence of my own sense of self. A reacknowledgment that I'm not just a partner and mother. I once again started to see myself as a whole person, one with my own passions and dreams that want pursuing. And part of this whole person that is me is my sense of self as an erotic being.
Don't get me wrong. I don’t always have these types of lustful thoughts about PM. Most of the time, amidst the chaos of our family life and the daily routines we keep in an attempt to hold the chaos at bay, I don’t notice him. Or, worse, he’s a source of frustration. Of hurt feelings. Or, perhaps worst of all, sometimes he‘s the choice I made when I didn’t really know myself or what I needed or wanted out of life.
But, very often, he’s my best friend. The keeper of my secrets. The warmer of my ice cold feet on a winter’s day. The ignorer of my ratty sleep shirt and random torn pajama bottoms. He’s the one who tells me my hair looks like it needs washing. The one who makes me a coffee then ignores me while he drinks his own and reads on his phone. He’s the one I argue with over who’s turn it is to wipe the toddler’s ass and clean out the potty. He is the calming presence to my anxious energy. The voice of reason when I feel out of my depths. He’s the purveyor of the mundane in our messy little world. And together we are a unit in the face of the many trials and tribulations of raising children in a modern world.
These are the things in our relationship that form the stuff of intimacy. They speak of closeness, stability, a sense of certainty. Things that I need in my life. But they’re not necessarily sexy. As much as I appreciate them, am grateful for them, they aren’t the things that inspire passion in our relationship. I love him in spite of his quirks and weaknesses, and sometimes I even love him for them, but all the stuff of marriage and family life, more often than not, tend to stamp out the sparks of desire and arousal.
Why is it that good intimacy doesn’t necessarily translate into good sex? Psychotherapist and author Esther Perel asks this very question and has concluded that, in fact, intimacy will easily smother passion if the latter isn‘t nurtured with intentionality.
I know I’ve talked a lot about Perel’s groundbreaking book Mating in Captivity. But it’s not often I come across something that shifts my entire perspective on things. Perel's dissection of intimacy and desire in modern-day marriage has shed light on the ebbing in our sex life over our years together and has simultaneously made sense out of why we have, all of sudden, seemed to recapture a steamy passion for one another.
PM and I have been together for over twenty years and the nerves and awkwardness of sex have long since passed. It was a sort of sick irony to find that having finally achieved with one another a sense of real comfort and acceptance, we were no longer seeing each other as objects of desire, no longer as eager to get up in one another’s business. Why is it that at one time I quite literally felt an ache to be near this man, to feel his touch, but now that he’s always near, those feelings too easily all but disappear?
As a married woman raising young children, it had been easy to write off this lack of excitement for my spouse as a function of “low libido.“ As I’ve shared our journey toward reclaiming passion with a select group of friends, multiple vulva-owners have told me that they just don’t have an interest in sex at this point in their lives. And I don’t think we’re alone in feeling this way.
But PM and I have, over the last year and a half, turned up the heat. It is lit up in our house. But our lives, in general, are very much the same as they have been for the last six years or so. There haven't been any radical changes to our lives, our relationship or the state of our family life that I could point to as a catalyst for what's happening between us. So the question is, what’s changed?
I don't want to write off chemical changes in our bodies over time. Low libido can truly be a thing. Or sometimes we are just too tired or stretched too thin or too frustrated by our partner over the stuff of life to think about working on one more thing, especially when that thing doesn’t seem too enticing to us in any case.
It wasn’t long ago that I felt that, at this point in our lives, perhaps PM and I were just a bit mismatched in terms of our libidos. Or that maybe this is just what a long-time couple's sex life eventually becomes.
I mean, shit. With all the managing of schedules and trying to keep the house from turning into an utter disaster and making sure everyone has clean underwear and worrying about One’s anxiety and… well, everything…it‘s easy to simply see PM as another obligation that needs attending.
To be sure, looking at my spouse through the lens of our family life may warm my heart, may strengthen my feelings of intimacy, but it isn’t doing anything for me in terms of making me want to jump his bones. Perhaps the busy-ness and stress of our daily lives simply reduced my once raging libido. And yet my own journey and rediscovery of desire and lust that I knew two decades ago as a young, carefree woman makes me wonder if these erotic feelings were perhaps never truly lost in the first place. If Perel has indeed uncovered the real problem that so many committed partnerships are facing when they love one another but no longer burn for each other, PM and I had become too close. I had lost the ability to see him as separate from me and our family, an individual that exists apart from our life together.
And it wasn't just PM that I was no longer seeing. My own sense of self –– as a woman, as a human being with her own desires and passions and dreams –– had become swallowed up, lost within my roles of life partner and caregiver, wife and mother. If I could no longer see myself clearly, it's not surprising that I would lose track of my spouse as an individual, a man with his own set of needs and wants that exist apart from our relationship and the melee of our lives. If I can't see myself, I can't really see him either.
Perel calls this "merging," and it's a natural evolution in intimacy. Romantic love demands closeness, but merging kills eroticism. There were a host of things that attracted me to PM in the beginning of our relationship. He was so very different from me, a mystery I wanted to solve. But as the he and she became a solid "we" (only further cemented with the advent of children), I lost the ability to see the person that he is outside our partnership.
Esther Perel talks about the common denominator of when her patients find themselves most attracted to their spouses. She tells us that what all of these people have in common –– whether owners of penises or vulvas, whether straight or gay or queer –– is that they are most drawn to their significant other when their partner is engaged in something without them, seeing their beloved do or be something that doesn't involve them. When we have enough distance between us that can see them as separate persons, with an identify outside of our relationship with them. When, for a moment, we see them afresh, as if through the eyes of someone else.
PM and I had become so close over our years together that I could only see the half of him that was glued to me, as it were –– the part of PM that's intricately tangled into my life. I have to really crane my neck to get a glimpse of the other side of him, the side where we're not connected at the hip. And in terms of appreciating the whole picture of him, the separate individual so different from myself that I fell for so many years ago? Well, that's a tough ask. How could I possibly see that whole multi-faceted person when we've, for all intents and purposes, merged into one unit?
It's incredibly easy to allow myself to get so caught up in my roles and responsibilities that I no longer can see myself as an erotic creature. And unable to separate PM from these responsiblities, I can't see him as an erotic being either. I forget that I am a person capable of wanting and being wanted. I forget that PM is a individual, his own person apart from me.
And if I've lost myself, merged as I have become with PM in our relationship and life together, I'm also no longer a separate person for him to desire. Perel tells us that just like fire needs air, desire needs space. At a comfortable distance from one another, as independent separate persons, we can want and be wanted again.
As I have gained a renewed sense of self that is separate from my relationships and roles, I am once again able to get a glimpse of PM as separate. Without meaning to, I reestablished a psychological distance from my spouse, which Perel tells us is a precondition for desire.
As I sit in the front row of pews and consider this man who I think I know so well, I am forced to recognize that there are still many aspects of him that I don't know. I may know what his favorite dessert and music choices are. I may know his exact routine when he walks in the door, putting his keys and wallet in the hutch drawer so he'll know where they are later. I know his pet-peaves. I know what his buttons are.
But do we ever really know another person? As close as we are, I'm not in PM's skin. I don't know all the ins-and-outs of how he perceives world. While he may share some things with me, I'm not privy to all his secret thoughts, his inner dialogue. I don't know who he's looking at as he goes about his day. Nor do I know what others see when they look at him. And when I acknowledge our separateness, when I allow myself to recreate a psychological distance between us, I find once again that I want to know this person. And I want this person to turn his attention to me.
As Perel puts it, when I acknowledge the erotic separateness of my partner, that his personhood and sexuality exists apart from me and is not all about me, I open up a new space for us to explore together. "Suddenly you're no longer familiar. You're no longer a known entity that I need not bother being curious about. In fact, you're quite a mystery. And I'm a little unnerved. Who are you? I want you" (Mating in Captivity 199).
As I watch PM get out of the shower and go about his routine of getting ready for the day, I love to watch that ass flex and move. The male hips and ass are so different. Mine are all curves and dips and softness. Made to stroke and to caress. (And I like to think of it as the perfect amount of cushioning I need for getting pounded into the mattress.) Theirs are angles and muscle. Made for utility with not much to spare.
I want to sink my teeth into that ass. And I’ll admit that, much to the annoyance of PM who’s just trying to get ready for the day damnit, I often do. Bite it, I mean. 😆
And as I see him go about his day, engaging with others and even at times being on the receiving end of their admiring gaze, I'm once again drawn in. I'm attracted to this man about whom I fooled myself into thinking I know all there is to know. And I want him.
Until next time, stay kinky 😉
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