Sex and Love

Just in case anyone imagines that the post below means that I have turned into that aforementioned well balanced, sensible and rational woman who has sex in perspective, I will tell you about last night.

I had a completely unwarranted moment of confidence and hope, attempted to initiate spontaneous sex with my partner, and got firmly and kindly rejected.

Yes. I know. Again.

And did I take it graciously? Did I think "Well, better luck next time" and get on with being happy? No. I smiled sweetly and understandingly. I appeared not to take it personally. And I spent the rest of the evening, after my partner and baby had gone to sleep, lying on the poor-me sofa, weeping and feeling extremely sorry for myself. And giving myself a little southern comfort, if you know what I mean.

As Digger has so poignantly written, masturbation is a pretty limited solution. Sometimes it actually makes you feel worse. But sometimes its all we have.

And I am still feeling sorry for myself this morning. I have wrapped up my poor, neglected, despised body in one of those horrible passion-killer wife-nighties. I have returned to my woe-is-me sofa. If I had any sackcloth or ashes, I would apply them liberally.

Now, one of the sources of my self pity is one big regret I have about my life: the separation between sex and love. As in, surely one of the great things people have to look back on in life is the time when they loved their partner, their partner loved them, and they had great sex together. Love fed their eroticism. Eroticism fed their love. The two were beautifully combined, creating sex that was not just hot but soul-touching, passionate and intimate.

That experience may pass, it may fade, but at least they had it.

And I have never had that experience.

I was a virgin when I met my partner. I was in love with my lovely then-boyfriend. And we were good Christian young people who, although we had been in love for more than a year, did not sleep together. And yes, that was very difficult at times. But I had this idea that we were "saving up". Yes, we were making a short-term sacrifice that would make our married sex life all the sweeter. Then the relationship failed, and my relationship with my now-partner changed.

Now my now-partner was very sexually experienced. He is one of the few ordinary (as in, non-rock star, non-swinger, etc) men I know whose number of previous sexual partners was well into triple figures. So, having worked through some of my previous theological and other barriers to a non-married sexual relationship (its a long story), having established a close, intimate, loving relationship with a previously very sexual man, I was looking forward to what I thought would be a stellar sexual future. I had been saving up, I had been a good girl, and now I was ready!

And he got sick a few weeks after we got together. And I loved him too much to leave him over the sex issue.

And we had a lot of love, but not much sex.

Then we broke up. For three years, I did have other sexual partners. And you know what? I never loved any of them. I liked them. I fancied them. I was even quite infatuated at one point with one of them. But I did not love them. I had sex without love.

I was surprised, in a way, that casual sex came so easily to me. You'd think that someone as inexperienced as me would have found it too difficult to separate sex and emotions. But in fact, it wasn't difficult at all. The sex was variable. Sometimes it was fantastic. Sometimes it was just okay. But I enjoyed it all, pretty much. For a while there, I was like a dieter let loose in a world of chocolate cake. I was so busy rolling around and rejoicing in the icing that the lack of real sustenance didn't worry me at all.

But ultimately, I grew tired of just sex without love. It really did become kind of empty. I discovered the old truism that love without sex will get you through the hard (ha!) times better than sex without love.

But, you know, now I'm back with my partner, I still have this same old separation. I have love without sex. I hate this separation. I hate the fact that my partner loves me so much but so rarely desires me. I hate the fact that I love him so much but am so sexually unfulfilled so much of the time. I hate spending so much time feeling sorry for myself. And there is so little that I can do to change the situation. I hate that, too.

I had this strange, and only tangentially related, thought this morning. I read some bloggers (eg, the previously mentioned Fade to Numb and Tajalude) for whom issues of porn have loomed large in their relationship. I understand what people who quit porn are trying to achieve by quitting. I respect them for it. I undertand that porn creates expectations that cannot be fulfilled and that this exacerbates problems.

But I sort of wonder why, for instance, you don't get many female bloggers talking about their struggle to give up the stuff that feeds our fantasies? The romantic books, movies. etc. After all, don't most women want more romance than most men give them? Don't we complain about how our partners don't measure up? Don't our fantasies about incredibly powerful, incredibly rich, incredibly handsome men named Brick or Randy (ha!), who just have to have us and always know what to do to turn us on, create expectations that don't reflect real life and can't be met?

Why is porn so disapproved of, regarded as so evil, and romance novels regarded as just a silly, but fairly harmless, female weakness?

Does our society just separate sex and love as well?

Why aren't there any blogs named, just for an example, Dark, Satanic Mills (and Boon)?