“Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth. But, it’s usually too battered with rules to be heard, and bound with pretenses so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies.” -Jim Morrison
I love sex. There is little else in life that eclipses the culmination of release, joy and satisfaction that I experience every time I make love.
There, I said it.
Moreover, I would even go so far as saying that, my sex life saves me, restores me to my better self each and every time I open to engaging with it. This is not a minor statement for a woman in her fifties who has been making love to the same man for over 30 years. In fact, it flies in the face of a good deal of current literature on the topic of sexual satisfaction and long-term relationships. Here I am, coming out of the closet, living proof that sex can get better and better with the same partner over decades. This truth is both one of my best qualifications for my chosen profession and the driving force in trying to spread the love. I know from first hand experience, every week and if I am lucky, twice a week, that amazing sexual connection is at the top of the pyramid when it comes to almost any metric of life satisfaction.
In fact, one could argue that I have built my whole life around this conviction. I originally started Good Clean Love in my kitchen to save my sex life years ago as the products then available made having sex often too painful to say yes. On the nights I did agree and I would end up soaking my burning vagina in a tub for hours, I was worried. I knew then, subconsciously, what I am totally conscious of now, that losing my ability to have satisfying sex with my husband would make the rest of our issues totally unmanageable. In the weeks that went by without sex, living together was challenging at best and, when our sex less time stretched longer than that, it only got worse. I am not sure we would still be together if I hadn’t started inventing love products. He cringes when he hears this, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
You can spot the couples who have given up on their sex lives miles away. There is a hardness between them, a disappointment that is palpable even if no one will say it out loud. There might not be a more hurtful rejection than not being sexually connected to your partner. Even the person rejecting is bound by what is lost between them. Truth is, I don’t know very many people who refuse having sex that end up staying together. Many of our closest friends’ marriages succumbed and it is the number one reason cited for the dissolution of a relationship.
There is a literal bonding, like in the way that glue works, which happens in our physical union that is as unique in its tenacity as it is in the crazy acts that make it up. At the remarkable juncture where we fully come to our senses and completely forget our egoic self, our erotic capacity is unleashed. It is where we are most animal and yet so completely human. The argument that we lose this space of intellectual abandon and emotional freedom to the familiar confines of long-term relationships is a tragic and, I believe, false conclusion. The struggle to be sexually vulnerable and witnessed by our long-term partner is common. I often have heard comments like, “How could I do that with him when I sit at the table with him every night?” or “How could I do that to her when she is the mother of my children?”
We have little experience and even less cultural education to reconcile the wild in us with our accustomed roles. And yet when we lose our erotic nerve with the people who most intimately inhabit our lives, we are left with little choice but to solicit illicit relationships to discover and reveal our erotic selves. Then, instead of our intimate relationships reveling in the amazing elasticity and strength that provocative eroticism and wild sex contributes to our lives together, we are stuck with the shame of betrayals and longing for sexual recognition that is always just out of reach.
It isn’t like this dichotomy between my sex crazed self and the woman cooking dinner is lost on me. Coming up for air after the increasingly risqué and surprising sexual acrobatics that my fantasy life leads me on with my partner of 30 years often has me covering my eyes. We lay entwined in the dim candle light, without words to process what we just did together. And then, after a time, one of us gets up and quietly we slip back into the middle-aged, long-married couple weighing our options of salad and sardines or going out for dinner. Before long, too short a time for me, the intensity of our sexuality tucks itself away, just out of sight.
This may be one of the first pages of my new book- coming out in 2015- Sex That Works- Surrendering to Our Erotic Souls. Let me know how your own search for your erotic soul shapes your relationship and your life…. Or why you won’t give into it?
