Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning

Sigh. These were my people now that I was a writer, people who didn't understand anything. I mean, they understood perfectly the thing I cared most about - books - but basically were moron-level elsewhere.

It must suck to be you. Wait, what? Every time we fight I can see you going down the road to divorce. I can see you weighing it in your mind. It’s all over your face. I do ? I guess I do . Don’t you? No, because I didn’t have your weird childhood. Well I mean divorce IS an option. It’s not supposed to be an option ALL the time , sometimes you’re just supposed to be married. I can’t help it. I never feel like it’s a done deal. Well if it's not a done deal, how about we get separated?" He was giving me a choice . He was refusing to let me drift along, passively being married, passively being discontented. I would have to choose.

Whatever your opinion of frequent sexual congress, let us assume for the purpose of this study that sensual sex should provide an increase in personal happiness, which was a widely held belief during the era we are discussing. A visual expression of the data we compiled regarding the subject's sexual activity shows happiness decreasing as sexual activity increases.

An aside on the question of pleasure. The subject didn't really get much pleasure from all this fornicating she was doing. The compulsion wasn't to feel good, it was to enjoy the feeling of making someone want her, of making someone else feel good. Frequency of condition was high, in fact constant.

When the subject was 14, late in the year of 1980, she began to pursue male attention, like the cartoon cat who turns around and begins to chase the dog. From there on out, her pursuit was dedicated, the subject was never without a boyfriend, or several. She seemed to need to stack them, like cordwood, for winter. Sexual activity was ongoing, occasionally fervent, but usually desultory, or mechanical, or dutiful. What this study is attempting to ascertain is why. Why did she do this?

Jess herself seemed resolutely asexual, though I later of torrid affairs, and complex intrigues. This quality of holding back was very important for me to see. She'd held herself apart a little. She didn't pretend she wasn't beautiful, there was nothing coy in her, but she wasn't very interested in using her beauty's power. That fascinated me. I had never thought of that as an option. Just letting your beauty lie around, unused. She was a model of a different way of being.

Don't worry about your orgasm. Don't care about it. You've had a million orgasms in your life. Want only this. Want only total obliteration. In this way too, you are returning to the girl you were -- the girl who didn't care about orgasms, but just wanted to fuck, and fuck, and fuck, without even knowing why. Those adult years of dutifully chasing clitoral orgasms -- they seem alien in retrospect. Now you just want sensation, less definable than orgasm, and weirdly more satisfying, more total.

Food was wearisome. We’d been dealing with food, planning it buying it growing it storing it cooking it serving it, for years, for decades now. By the time it was our moment to eat, we were sick of the sight of it. Fuck food. Food looked a little better, though, when it wasn’t inside our houses. We bought salads with meat in them because we knew we needed protein—it was as if we were our own toddlers. The way I remembered it, that was the main objective with toddlers: the posting of protein into them.

If you’re not a good cook by the time you’re our age it’s a serious character defect, and it means something bad, something ungenerous, about your personality. Sorry to break the news.