"
A little later, with a child and then two children sleeping across the hall, I found I couldn’t lose myself in s/m scenes anymore, even with the door locked. Besides, by that time, my husband was too familiar to me.
The night self relies on the torment of strangers.
What I want from my husband now seems to be comfort, unadulterated.
***
I often think of these lines by Alice Munro: I come back again and again to the center of my fantasy, to the moment when you give yourself up, give yourself over, to the assault which is guaranteed to finish off everything you’ve been before. A stubborn virgin’s belief, this belief in perfect mastery; any broken-down wife could tell you there is no such thing.
***
In the dailiness of long-term intimacy, where does the night self go? Not long ago, out alone for lunch, I sat near a man and woman who were clearly married but not to each other. When she said, “I can’t do this anymore,” I thought I knew the conversation they were about to have. I was mistaken.
"—
So I read this on Isabel’s recommendation, and it is really good, but it’s also been bothering me all morning.
I think it’s because the dichotomy it presents is in some way my worst nightmare—the idea that when you get comfortable, you lose the wildness, the abandon, the WANTING that comes with being with someone when it’s new and rare.
(The flip side of my worst nightmare is that I am forever the girl that men want desperately for the first few months or so and then leave for the comfortable girl. Or the girl you look at over your glasses and think about alone at night but never ever try to actually be with.)
What I want, more than anything, is to believe that it’s not a fucking dichotomy. That there is always more to what is portrayed so often as a choice of two options.
This story, which is beautiful, also still contains with it threads that are old-ass narratives—former stripper/phone sex worker gets married, has kids, gives up s/m sex for the comfort of a nice husband. Her story complicates it a bit, arguing for the importance of secrets and strangers rather than renouncing them, but still somewhere here is the same old story. The wild sex is a thing you do with the people who don’t last; the comfort is the thing you have with the person you marry.
I just don’t believe that.
I want the person who comforts be to be the person who holds my arms down and leaves bruises on my thighs. I want to believe I can have all of those things. I have had all of these things. I want to believe I can keep them.
(Silly girl, how dare you want more.)
I relate, though, to this—I was into s/m myself when I was young, barely out of high school even, and the older I got the more forced it seemed to feel. I realized the real risks were more raw and less costumed.
It wasn’t that I gave up the wildness for falling in love. It was that I realized that the real wildness in me wasn’t coming from kink, it was coming from someplace else.
Sure, you can’t forever have sex three times a night each time you see someone, you can’t go at those rates forever, but I don’t want to believe that I can’t negotiate a love that still has rough desire at its base.
Then again, what do I know, I’m hardly an expert at making relationships work.
do you think I am asking too much?
