They say that it takes about 30 days to form a habit. For me, not mentioning sex; not making double entendres; not making suggestive comments or giving suggestive looks took a lot more than 30 days.
Eventually a person who fasts looses their appetite.
Do you ever lose your sexual appetite? If you are a male and under 60?
Each of us, as human beings, are perhaps millions upon millions of generations old. If we had the information, we could trace our family tree back, perhaps, 500,000,000 generations: to the first humans, then further back through the chimps to the first lemur-like mammals, and further again, finally going all the way back to some virus-like proto-life form.
And the amazing thing about our family trees is that at EVERY SINGLE generation, our ancestors successfully reproduced. 500,000,000 generations worth.
The odds are astronomical! How many other organisms could have come into being but didn't because they didn't have that hunger, that drive, to reproduce?
The two or three billion years that life has existed on earth has meant generation upon generation of not just "survival of the fittest" but "survival of the randiest". After all, what were those organisms that Darwinianism deemed "fittest" the fittest for? They were fittest at passing on their genes -- at reproduction! Of course that meant that they were better at gathering food, and at not becoming food themselves. But inevitably it had to mean that our ancient trilobite ancestors that preferred catching up on the local fishy gossip to doing a bit of proto-fornication ended up losing out in the genetic race to other trilobites who showed a bit more initiative.
And so it was generation after generation for millions, even billions of years.
And yet, despite this deep programing, so often libido (male or female) is seen as debuachery, as sick, as a perversion.
It seems to me that a healthy libido is about as "sick" as a healthy heartbeat. It is as much a part of who we are as our fear of death: both the inevitable result of astronomically improbable survival in a single uninterupted web of reproduction and survival that reaches all the way back to the very first reproducing proteins that emerged from Earth's primordial soup several billion years ago.
=============
So every day I bit my tongue, crossed my legs, and marked off my calendar.
No mention of sex. No hint of romance. No lascivious looks.
And my libido lingered, despite promises from self-help gurus that after 30 days of practice, a habit could be broken.
Sex is no habit. It is our genetic heritage.
But I soon realized that although 30 days was an eternity to me, it was a flash in the pan to Susan. She had long felt that making love once a fortnight was an onerous over indulgence. For her, going a month without sex was merely missing a single date.
That was the difference between us.
We made love roughly once a fortnight or so. But for her this meant she was having sex several times more often than she would have liked, whereas for me, it meant I was having sex several times less often than I would have liked. (She had, she used to like to say, about as much appetite for sex as an anorexic has for a stack of deep-fried chocolate bars.)
So for her to go a month without sex meant missing out on a single sexual encounter that she was never that interested in in the first place. For me, it meant missing out on about 10 or 12!
So, I realized she would barely notice the month.
I needed to extend the timeframe.
Soon it became in my mind the stretch goal of 99 days.
The days dragged on.
I marked the calendar daily.
Sometimes I had good stretches where I would go two, or even three days without marking it down.
That was rare. More often, I would go over and count the days and the weeks. Where was I up to? Was it close enough yet to call it 5 weeks? Can four weeks and four days be psychologically considered to be virtually reaching five weeks? Perhaps not when three days can seem like 30.
Several times, I wanted to hold her, to cuddle her, to caress her so much that it was all I could do to hold myself back. I could see it all slipping away, and I didn't care. But then I would remember her angry lashing out at me, and my stubborn resolve meant that I would hold on a bit longer.
It was like a 12 steps program! Only, I didn't have the advantages of a mentor, of any literature, of meetings. And alcoholics have the advantage of not having a bottle of whiskey undressing in front of them and climbing into bed next to them every night!
At about 10 weeks I told a friend what I was doing. He applauded my efforts.
By then I realized that even 99 days was not going to cut it.
I was going to have to hold out for a whole year.
Wow.
In part of me, it was almost like a test. A referendum on our relationship.
"Ok, baby, you don't want me to mention anything about sex. You're on. I've been asking, begging, pleading for over five years. I'll leave it alone for a year. After that..."
After that... what? Would I leave her? Do you leave someone just because they have no libido?
Back in the old days when people had to provide reasons for getting divorced, a number of states allowed "impotence" as a legitimate justification. (I wonder if any allowed frigidity?)
Even in prudish 19th century America, sex was seen as that much of a cornerstone of marriage.
But then many couples live long and happy lives without sex. For one reason or another, the sex drops off, and they both deal with it and move on. Before viagra, there would have been millions of couples like that. Presumably a lot of those couples were even happy; even content!
Was it wrong of me to have that thought in the back of my head? The thought that if she did not show some interest in sex after a year, that that would be it for us? Is that frightfully shallow?
Could sex be reasonably considered the "a la mode" on the apple pie of life? Or was it a slice of the pie itself?
Hey! I'm only 39! I am too young to be turning my back on sex!!!
I don't know what will happen at the end of a year without sex. But I do know that at some point in those first two months, I began to realize that 99 days wasn't really going to cut it.
It was going to have to be the king daddy: a year without sex.
I don't think it is something I could ever do cold turkey.
Writing this blog gives me a focus and purpose for that year. A focus and purpose that would make lasting the distance meaningful.
And I realized even then that my drought may not last nearly so long.
Both Christmas and my birthday were coming up, so I rather thought I would be getting some action!
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Sunday, January 4, 2009
The plot thickens...
So... here we are, this couple where SHE has no libido, and HE is very frustrated. It almost sounds like a sit-com set up that we've all seen a million times before.
I had learned not to ask her about it too often (fortnightly was ok). But over the next couple of years, her libido fell and fell and fell, until it went == SMACK == onto rock bottom. But the gods of perverse torture were not content with giving my life partner NO libido. No, that would be too simple. Too humane. Too... manageable. So, instead they decreed that she should have LESS than no libido. Sex should, apparently, become not merely a clinical thing that one experienced dispassionately -- perhaps like taking some vitamins. Rather, it became something negative. More akin to swallowing a large dose of castor oil.
The troubling thing was that she did not know why. But she didn't like to discuss it. She said she would see the doctor about it, but she didn't. And she didn't. And she didn't. I tried to stay cool about it. Lay low. Not make a big deal of it. But I asked her one day, and she exploded at me. Said I was badgering her about it and couldn't leave it alone.
Whew!
So, I decided that I would not mention it again.
No asking if she had gone to the doctors.
No suggesting that we make love.
No double entendres.
No suggestive looks or touches.
As a lawyer might say: No hints, references, or inuendos of any kind, verbally, non-verbally, explicit or implied in any way shape or form.
Suddenly, it was like sex had fallen off the map.
I decided to give it 30 days and see what happened.
It was EX-cruciating! Every day I marked off on the calendar. Reguarly, I counted the days and weeks.
Some days -- or perhaps just parts of days -- it was easy. I didn't think about sex and the time passed quickly.
Other days... well, I didn't quite get to the stage of counting the hours, but it was pretty damn hard at times!
Sometimes I wanted so badly to cuddle her in bed. To talk about things. To ask her what was going on.
How I got through that, I will never know. But I do know that it was the right thing to do. I had been asking that question for five years, and for five years, she had no response. She had said she had wanted to change, to get her libido back, and she had said she was willing to do what it might take (e.g., go to the doctor), but somehow it just never happened. We had been down that path. I needed to try something new.
So down the lines when, crossing off day by day until I got to day 30.
But long before I got to day 30, it began to dawn on me that 30 days might just not be enough...
I had learned not to ask her about it too often (fortnightly was ok). But over the next couple of years, her libido fell and fell and fell, until it went == SMACK == onto rock bottom. But the gods of perverse torture were not content with giving my life partner NO libido. No, that would be too simple. Too humane. Too... manageable. So, instead they decreed that she should have LESS than no libido. Sex should, apparently, become not merely a clinical thing that one experienced dispassionately -- perhaps like taking some vitamins. Rather, it became something negative. More akin to swallowing a large dose of castor oil.
The troubling thing was that she did not know why. But she didn't like to discuss it. She said she would see the doctor about it, but she didn't. And she didn't. And she didn't. I tried to stay cool about it. Lay low. Not make a big deal of it. But I asked her one day, and she exploded at me. Said I was badgering her about it and couldn't leave it alone.
Whew!
So, I decided that I would not mention it again.
No asking if she had gone to the doctors.
No suggesting that we make love.
No double entendres.
No suggestive looks or touches.
As a lawyer might say: No hints, references, or inuendos of any kind, verbally, non-verbally, explicit or implied in any way shape or form.
Suddenly, it was like sex had fallen off the map.
I decided to give it 30 days and see what happened.
It was EX-cruciating! Every day I marked off on the calendar. Reguarly, I counted the days and weeks.
Some days -- or perhaps just parts of days -- it was easy. I didn't think about sex and the time passed quickly.
Other days... well, I didn't quite get to the stage of counting the hours, but it was pretty damn hard at times!
Sometimes I wanted so badly to cuddle her in bed. To talk about things. To ask her what was going on.
How I got through that, I will never know. But I do know that it was the right thing to do. I had been asking that question for five years, and for five years, she had no response. She had said she had wanted to change, to get her libido back, and she had said she was willing to do what it might take (e.g., go to the doctor), but somehow it just never happened. We had been down that path. I needed to try something new.
So down the lines when, crossing off day by day until I got to day 30.
But long before I got to day 30, it began to dawn on me that 30 days might just not be enough...
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Sex. The average male thinks about sex once every 12 seconds. (In high school, my girlfriend's parents assumed I was thinking of sex 12 times a second... but that's another story.) Unfortunately for the average male, he's having sex a LOT less often. Once every 12 hours if he is particularly lucky and particularly energetic. Once every 12 days if he's been married for a few years. And once every 12 months if he is me.
Sure, I'd like to be like the other guys, making love to my beloved every few days but my wife seems to have other ideas.
In the 70's and 80's TV show "One Day at a time," Schneider observed that if you put a jelly bean in a jar for every time you made love during your first year of marriage, and then took a jelly bean out of the jar every time you made love after that, then no matter how hard you tried, you would never get all of the beans out of the jar.
When I heard that joke, I didn't laugh because I was too young to get it.
Now I don't laugh because it's too true to be funny!
When Susan and I got together eight years ago, I was reading the book, "Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps." It listed the sexual habbits of couples around the world, noting the average number of times couples from different countries around the world made love each year. It started off as a bit of a joke, but Susan and I kept track for that year -- how many times DID we make love? We didn't put any jelly beans in the jar, but we counted nonetheless. And it came out to a stunningly average 120-something: exactly where couples in most western countries rated.
It made sense. We made love perhaps every second day or so. Sometimes it was daily, and sometimes one of us would be busy, stressed, or out of town at a conference, and we would go for a few days without. So, it averaged out, over the course of a whole year, at 2-3 times per week.
By the end of that year, the joke was long-since stale, and we stopped counting.
And then the jelly-bean effect kicked in.
Things started dropping off markedly (no pun intended). Before, our libidos matched each other, er. . . tit-for-tat (as it were), and we had the relaxed comfort of knowing that we were there for each other. But after a year, things began to wind down. I was left like a boy who was served a meal with only half a dessert: not unhappy, not dissatisfied, but still craving that little bit extra to feel just right.
Things picked up a bit a few months later when we started talking about having children. Suddenly sex had a utilitarian function, and Sue's interest picked up a bit.
A few more jelly beans came out of the metaphorical jar.
When Alex was born, of course things quieted down substantially! They say you're supposed to wait six weeks after the birth of a child. We did. Those six weeks seemed an eterntiy to me. As if the crying, pooping and sleep-deprivation weren't enough to take!
In those days, of course, breasts were off-limits. Too tender, too sore, nipples too cracked, mommy too tired in any case.
By the time Alex was two, a light was beginning to shine in the end of the jelly-beanless tunnel. It was not so much a spotlight, a beacon of hope, or even a ray of sunshine. From a sexual point of view, it was more like a firefly quietly buzzing faintly in the distance.
But then our second son Rick came along, and that firefly of hope was promptly swallowed up by the enormous wart-encrusted bull frog of post-partum reality.
Healed nipples were cracked: again. Sleep deprivation became the rule, not the exception: again. And the seductive smell of expensive perfume that means, "someone is going to get lucky tonight" got replaced with eau-de-dirty-diapers. Again.
The six weeks of complete abstinence that follows a birth was merely an h'ors d'ouvre of the smorgasborg of asexuality that was to follow.
---
The children got older. Alex went to school. Rick was in day care two days a week. Sleep started returning to normal. The "I'm just sooooo tired" explanation just didn't make sense any more.
And still her libido dropped.
It made no sense. She had long since stopped breast feeding, but still she didn't want me to touch her breasts. ("I never really liked it even in that first year," she said.) She wasn't too interested in me touching any of her other bits, either, no matter how hard I tried to focus just on her pleasure.
Our love making dropped to once every two weeks, putting us well behind the league tables for couples from other countries, and not even on a par with the extremely shy Japanese.
But even our bi-monthly trysts were work. It took me days of planning, orchestrating, cajoling, wheedling, begging and seducing. It's probably not right to use "seducing" and "begging" in the same sentence, but I certainly tried them both, even if not at the same time.
And the response to all of this? Her libido -- if it was possible -- fell even further. For her, sex had already fallen from something vaguely enjoyable (like eating a nice bowl of oatmeal when you're vaguely hungry), to something more akin to a mechanical act (like flossing your teeth). But now it became something that was downright unenjoyable. Something to be endured. A Trial of Womanhood to be gotten through. As womanly trials go, it was different from childbirth not in kind, but merely in degree.
Did I ask her what was the matter? Why things had changed for her so much? What I could possibly do on God's Green Earth to make things just a small bit better? Of course I did. In much the same way as any healthy 13 year old boy would happily exchange his left arm for his first sexual experience, so was I willing to do whatever it took to sex a part of my life once more.
I racked my brains for a solution. We talked. We saw a counsellor. We saw a doctor. I would have seen an Indian Chief if I thought it would have helped.
Sue said she wanted her libido back, too. She didn't know where it went, or why it went. But she was interested in getting it back. Not determined to get it back. Not committed to it. Just. . . interested.
But, having a degree of pent-up sexual frustration as I had not experienced since I was 13, I didn't have the skills to gently nurture her butterfly-like interest, cultivating it into the fierce robustness of an eagle.
Instead, it seems, I squashed it like a mac truck going 80 miles an hour.
At least, I guess that's what happened...
Sure, I'd like to be like the other guys, making love to my beloved every few days but my wife seems to have other ideas.
In the 70's and 80's TV show "One Day at a time," Schneider observed that if you put a jelly bean in a jar for every time you made love during your first year of marriage, and then took a jelly bean out of the jar every time you made love after that, then no matter how hard you tried, you would never get all of the beans out of the jar.
When I heard that joke, I didn't laugh because I was too young to get it.
Now I don't laugh because it's too true to be funny!
When Susan and I got together eight years ago, I was reading the book, "Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps." It listed the sexual habbits of couples around the world, noting the average number of times couples from different countries around the world made love each year. It started off as a bit of a joke, but Susan and I kept track for that year -- how many times DID we make love? We didn't put any jelly beans in the jar, but we counted nonetheless. And it came out to a stunningly average 120-something: exactly where couples in most western countries rated.
It made sense. We made love perhaps every second day or so. Sometimes it was daily, and sometimes one of us would be busy, stressed, or out of town at a conference, and we would go for a few days without. So, it averaged out, over the course of a whole year, at 2-3 times per week.
By the end of that year, the joke was long-since stale, and we stopped counting.
And then the jelly-bean effect kicked in.
Things started dropping off markedly (no pun intended). Before, our libidos matched each other, er. . . tit-for-tat (as it were), and we had the relaxed comfort of knowing that we were there for each other. But after a year, things began to wind down. I was left like a boy who was served a meal with only half a dessert: not unhappy, not dissatisfied, but still craving that little bit extra to feel just right.
Things picked up a bit a few months later when we started talking about having children. Suddenly sex had a utilitarian function, and Sue's interest picked up a bit.
A few more jelly beans came out of the metaphorical jar.
When Alex was born, of course things quieted down substantially! They say you're supposed to wait six weeks after the birth of a child. We did. Those six weeks seemed an eterntiy to me. As if the crying, pooping and sleep-deprivation weren't enough to take!
In those days, of course, breasts were off-limits. Too tender, too sore, nipples too cracked, mommy too tired in any case.
By the time Alex was two, a light was beginning to shine in the end of the jelly-beanless tunnel. It was not so much a spotlight, a beacon of hope, or even a ray of sunshine. From a sexual point of view, it was more like a firefly quietly buzzing faintly in the distance.
But then our second son Rick came along, and that firefly of hope was promptly swallowed up by the enormous wart-encrusted bull frog of post-partum reality.
Healed nipples were cracked: again. Sleep deprivation became the rule, not the exception: again. And the seductive smell of expensive perfume that means, "someone is going to get lucky tonight" got replaced with eau-de-dirty-diapers. Again.
The six weeks of complete abstinence that follows a birth was merely an h'ors d'ouvre of the smorgasborg of asexuality that was to follow.
---
The children got older. Alex went to school. Rick was in day care two days a week. Sleep started returning to normal. The "I'm just sooooo tired" explanation just didn't make sense any more.
And still her libido dropped.
It made no sense. She had long since stopped breast feeding, but still she didn't want me to touch her breasts. ("I never really liked it even in that first year," she said.) She wasn't too interested in me touching any of her other bits, either, no matter how hard I tried to focus just on her pleasure.
Our love making dropped to once every two weeks, putting us well behind the league tables for couples from other countries, and not even on a par with the extremely shy Japanese.
But even our bi-monthly trysts were work. It took me days of planning, orchestrating, cajoling, wheedling, begging and seducing. It's probably not right to use "seducing" and "begging" in the same sentence, but I certainly tried them both, even if not at the same time.
And the response to all of this? Her libido -- if it was possible -- fell even further. For her, sex had already fallen from something vaguely enjoyable (like eating a nice bowl of oatmeal when you're vaguely hungry), to something more akin to a mechanical act (like flossing your teeth). But now it became something that was downright unenjoyable. Something to be endured. A Trial of Womanhood to be gotten through. As womanly trials go, it was different from childbirth not in kind, but merely in degree.
Did I ask her what was the matter? Why things had changed for her so much? What I could possibly do on God's Green Earth to make things just a small bit better? Of course I did. In much the same way as any healthy 13 year old boy would happily exchange his left arm for his first sexual experience, so was I willing to do whatever it took to sex a part of my life once more.
I racked my brains for a solution. We talked. We saw a counsellor. We saw a doctor. I would have seen an Indian Chief if I thought it would have helped.
Sue said she wanted her libido back, too. She didn't know where it went, or why it went. But she was interested in getting it back. Not determined to get it back. Not committed to it. Just. . . interested.
But, having a degree of pent-up sexual frustration as I had not experienced since I was 13, I didn't have the skills to gently nurture her butterfly-like interest, cultivating it into the fierce robustness of an eagle.
Instead, it seems, I squashed it like a mac truck going 80 miles an hour.
At least, I guess that's what happened...
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