How to Think More About Sex (The School of Life)

i. Infrequency

1.

Let’s picture a couple, Daisy and Jim. They have been married for seven years and have two small children, Mary (age 2) and William (age 6). At nine-thirty on a weeknight, in a bedroom in South London, they are reclining on their marriage bed, Daisy on one side, Jim on the other. The television is switched on to a travel programme about Italy and its cuisine, which Daisy is not paying much attention to, for she is occupied by plucking her eyebrows with the help of a pair of tweezers and a small mirror. The brows are vigorous in their growth, a feature that Jim admires and superstitiously interprets as a reflection of his wife’s sexual energy.

Daisy had a shower a little while ago and is now lying loosely wrapped in a white towel that leaves her breasts exposed. Although during their early courtship Jim spent a great deal of time trying to imagine what these breasts might look like, and though he lost all command over his rational faculties on first encircling their areolae with his tongue, they now rest placidly before him without advancing a claim to be considered any more deserving of note, remark or excitement than, say, a thumb or a shin. Eroticism seems, in the end, to have very little to do with simply being unclothed: it springs instead from a promise of mutual arousal, an eventuality that may elude two people who are naked and in bed together or, conversely, may take hold of another pair as they are ascending a mountainside in a chairlift, dressed in thick ski suits, mittens and woollen hats. While on screen the presenter praises a pistachio cornetto, back in the room the nakedness on the marital bed has some of the same sterile, affectless quality of a Baltic nudist beach.

The programme comes to an end, and Daisy sets aside her tools. Jim reaches across the bed, takes her hand and holds it lightly in his. Neither of them makes any further move. To a casual observer, the scene might look innocuous enough, but a significant event is in train: Jim is attempting to initiate sex.

Logic might suggest that being in a long-term relationship or being married must automatically guarantee an end to the anxiety that otherwise dogs attempts by one person to induce another to have sex. But while either kind of union may make sex a constant theoretical option, it will neither legitimate the act nor even ease the path towards it on any particular occasion. Moreover, against a background of permanent possibility, an unwillingness to have sex may be seen as constituting a far graver violation of the ground rules than a similar impasse might do in other contexts. Being turned down by someone we have just met in a bar is, after all, not so terribly surprising or wounding; there are methods for dealing with such a rebuff. Suffering sexual rejection by the person with whom we have pledged to share our life is a much odder and more humiliating experience.

It has now been a full four weeks since Daisy and Jim last made love. The entire country has emerged from winter during the intervening month. Bluebells have burst forth, new generations of robins have taken their first flights, bees have begun their tireless patrolling of the capital’s flowerbeds. Long though this latest gap might seem, such lapses are not unusual for the couple: the one before stretched out to six weeks, and the one before that, five. When it comes to sex, Jim has developed a madman’s memory for dates. In the whole of the previous year, he and his wife had intercourse only nine times.

For Jim, these statistics feel like a shameful reflection on some essential aspect of his self. In part, no doubt, it is a matter of injured pride, but it also has something to do with our larger culture – and, more specifically, with the extent to which recent history has placed a priority on the liberation of desire, on making sure that people no longer have to disguise their bodies in ill-fitting garments, or fear the prospect of raising unwanted children, or regard sex as being anything more or less than an emotionally enriching and innocent pastime.

It doesn’t help that Jim feels unable to talk to anyone about the state of his and Daisy’s sex life. Dinners with friends give him no opportunity to bring up a topic at once so serious and so inconsequential.

‘You must be sleepy,’ he now says to her, by which he means, ‘I beg you to show me that you want me’.

‘I had a really early start,’ replies Daisy with a yawn – a statement that Jim’s thirty-nine-year psychological history leads him to interpret as, ‘I am thoroughly revolted by you.’

They shut off the lights and lie quietly side by side in the dark. Jim can hear and feel his wife turn over a few times before she finally finds a comfortable position, curled up with her back to him. There are noises outside – car horns, cats mewling, the occasional scream, the laughter of passers-by returning from an evening out – but within Jim, just the dull thud of his own misery.

2.

To begin with, and most innocently, the paucity of sex within established relationships typically has to do with the difficulty of shifting registers between the everyday and the erotic. The qualities demanded of us when we have sex stand in sharp opposition to those we employ in conducting the majority of our other, daily activities. Marriage tends to involve – if not immediately, then within a few years – the running of a household and the raising of children, tasks that often feel akin to the administration of a small business and that draw upon many of the same bureaucratic and procedural skills, including time management, self-discipline, the exercising of authority and the imposition of rules upon recalcitrant others.

Sex, with its contrary emphases on expansiveness, imagination, playfulness and a loss of control, must by its very nature interrupt this routine of regulation and self-restraint, threatening to leave us unfit or at the least uninclined to resume our administrative duties once our desire has run its course. We avoid sex not because it isn’t fun but because its pleasures erode our subsequent capacity to endure the strenuous demands that our domestic arrangements place on us. Our repudiation of lovemaking may thus be likened to a mountain climber’s or a runner’s not wishing to luxuriate in the lyricism and hypnotic grandeur of a great poem, perhaps by Walt Whitman or Tennyson, just before scaling a peak or starting a marathon.

Sex also has a way of altering and unbalancing our relationship with our household co-manager. Its initiation requires one partner or the other to become vulnerable by revealing what may feel like humiliating sexual needs. We must shift from discussing practical projects – debating what sort of household appliance to acquire or where to go on holiday next year – to making the more challenging request that, for example, our spouse should turn over and take on the attitude of a submissive nurse, or put on a pair of boots and start calling us names. The satisfaction of our needs may force us to ask for things that are, from a distance, open to being judged both ridiculous and contemptible so that we may prefer, in the end, not to entrust them to someone on whom we must rely for so much else in the course of our ordinary, upstanding life.

The commonsense notion of love typically holds that a committed relationship is the ideal context in which to express ourselves sexually – the implication being that we won’t have to be embarrassed by revealing some of our more offbeat needs to the person we have betrothed ourselves to for eternity, at an altar in front of 200 guests. But this is a woefully mistaken view of what makes us feel safe. We may in fact find it easier to put on a rubber mask or pretend to be a predatory, incestuous relative with someone we’re not also going to have to eat breakfast with for the next three decades.

While the desire to split people into discrete categories of those we love and those we can have sex with may seem a peculiarly male phenomenon, women are far from innocent on this score themselves. The madonna/whore dichotomy has an exact analogy in the no-less-common nice-guy/bastard complex, wherein women recognize the theoretical appeal of warm, nurturing and communicative males but are at the same time unable to deny the superior sexual attraction of those cruel bandits who will take off for another continent the moment the lovemaking is finished. What unites the ‘whore’ and the ‘bastard’ in these two scenarios is their emotional and actual unavailability and therefore their power not to act as permanent witnesses to, and evocators of, our sexual vulnerability and strangeness. Sex may sometimes be just too private an activity to engage in with someone we know well and have to see all the time.

3.

Sigmund Freud went far beyond this. It was he who first, and most starkly, identified a much more complex and deep-seated reason for the difficulty many of us experience in having sex with our long-term partners. In an essay written in 1912 and bearing the awkwardly beautiful title ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’, Freud summed up the wrenching dilemma that seemed so often to afflict his patients: ‘Where they love, they have no desire, and where they desire, they cannot love.’

By Freud’s reckoning, our sex life will gradually be destroyed by two unavoidable facts connected to our upbringing: first, in childhood, we learn about love from people with whom taboo strictly forbids us to have sex; and second, as adults, we tend to choose lovers who in certain powerful (though unconscious) ways resemble those whom we loved most dearly when we were children. Together these influences set up a devilish conundrum whereby the more deeply we come to love someone outside of our family, the more strongly we will be reminded of the intimacy of our early familial bonds – and hence the less free we will instinctively feel to express our sexual desires with him or her. An incest taboo originally designed to limit the genetic dangers of inbreeding can thus succeed in inhibiting and eventually ruining our chances of enjoying intercourse with someone to whom we are not remotely related.

The likelihood of the incest taboo’s reemergence in a relationship with a spouse increases greatly after the arrival of a few children. Until then, reminders of the parental prototypes on which our choice of lovers is subconsciously based can be effectively kept at bay by the natural aphrodisiacs of youth, fashionable clothes, nightclubs, foreign holidays and alcohol. But all of these prophylactics tend to be left behind once the pram has been parked in the hall. We may remain ostensibly aware that we are not our partner’s parent, and vice versa, yet this awareness will have a habit of becoming a more porous concept in both of our unconscious minds when we spend the greater part of every day acting in the roles of ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’. Even though we are not each other’s intended audience for these performances, we must nevertheless be constant witnesses to them. Once the children have been put to bed, it may not be uncommon for one partner – in one of those slips of meaning Freud so enjoyed – to refer to the other as ‘Mum’ or ‘Dad’, a confusion that may be compounded by the use of the same sort of exasperated-disciplinarian tone that has served all day long to keep the young ones in line.

It can be hard for both parties to hold on to the obvious yet elusive truth that they are in fact each other’s equals, and that however off-putting the thought of having sex with a parent may be, this is not really the danger they are facing.

4.

When men and women abandon long-established relationships to take up with new and younger lovers, their actions are often interpreted as being motivated by a simple and rather pathetic search for lost youth. The deeper, subconscious reason, however, may be far more poignant: those who leave may be endeavouring to escape the parental ghosts that seem to have subsumed their partners and, as a result, rendered impossible any sexual intimacy with them.

But when sex becomes mired in the incest taboo, the way out is not of course to begin all over again with a different partner, for fresh candidates will themselves end up morphing into parental figures, too, once the relationship has taken root. It is not a new person we require, but a new way of perceiving a familiar one.

How can we best go about effecting such a shift? One answer may be found in a sexual practice that can only ever appeal to a small minority, but which nevertheless carries an underlying moral applicable to all long-term relationships.

There are some couples who take pleasure in together selecting a third person, a stranger, to have sex with one of them while the other watches. The voyeur willingly cedes his or her rightful position and derives erotic enjoyment from bearing witness to the induction of his or her spouse.

This is not an act of altruism. Rather, the new actor has been brought in for a particular purpose: to remind the voyeur of what is arousing about his or her partner. The voyeur uses the stranger’s lust as a map to trace the way back to desires long obscured by the fog of routine. Through the agency of the stranger, the voyeur can feel the same excitement for a partner of twenty years as on the night they first met.

A variant on this approach involves one partner taking nude photographs of the other, posting them on a dedicated internet site, and then soliciting the frank comments of a worldwide audience.

Tradition, jealousy and fear are sufficiently strong to prevent such practices from ever catching on in a big way, but they show us with particular clarity certain mechanisms of perception that we would be wise to incorporate into all of our relationships. The solution to long-term sexual stagnation is to learn to see our lover as if we had never laid eyes on him or her before.

A less threatening and less dramatic version of this act of perception is readily available by checking in to a hotel room for a night. Our failure to notice the erotic side of our partner is often closely related to the unchanging environment in which we lead our daily lives. We can blame the stable presence of the carpet and the living-room chairs for our failure to have more sex, because our homes guide us to perceive others according to the attitude they normally exhibit in them. The physical backdrop becomes permanently coloured by the activities it hosts – vacuuming, bottle feeding, laundry hanging, the filling out of tax forms – and reflects the mood back at us, thereby subtly preventing us from evolving. The furniture insists that we can’t change because it never does.

Hence the metaphysical importance of hotels. Their walls, beds, comfortably upholstered chairs, room-service menus, televisions and small, tightly wrapped soaps can do more than answer a taste for luxury; they can also encourage us to reconnect with our long-lost sexual selves. There is no limit to what a shared dip in an alien bath tub may help us to achieve. We may make love joyfully again because we have rediscovered, behind the roles we are forced to play by our domestic circumstances, the sexual identities that first drew us together – an act of aesthetic perception that will have been critically assisted by a pair of towelling bathrobes, a complimentary fruit basket and a view out of a window onto an unfamiliar harbour.