Love and Marriage (and Sex!)

NSFW post. Adult themes up the ying-yang, graphic language, probably a trigger or two, reader discretion is advised, etc.

"Hardon You"

I know my constant horniness gets hardon you
Sometimes it seems I'm always in the mood
If that is so, I truly beg your pardon, too
It wasn't my intention to be rude
My love is like my horniness, in that it never quits
But I'd love you if you didn't have those tits

Men have only got the one thing on their mind
It gets so repetitious it's a crime
Somebody said a hard man is good to find
As long as you don't find him every goddamn time
You are not only something that I lust for, that I hunt
I would love you if you didn't have a cunt

I'm neurotically erotic, with a taste for the exotic
And your body is hypnotic when it's next to me
I'm dementedly attentive, and in need of no incentive
But you know you represent much more than sex to me. . . 

You know that I was horny for you from the start
And that's the way it's always gonna be
But you ought to know your sexiness is just a part
of the value you will always have for me
It may have been what caught my eye, it ISN'T why I stick
I would love you if I didn't have a dick.

--words and music by Spider Robinson

Want to get a bunch of people you have never met and will never meet really pissed at you? Dare to tell them the obvious: there's more to love and marriage than sex.

To me, this is a statement so self-evident that it shouldn't require a word of explanation or clarification. But I have found over time that it's precisely those unquestioned axiomatic assertions that trip you up. Say online, for instance, that sexual attraction is NOT a prerequisite for love any more than the other way around and holy shit. I mean I had a hundred people downvote me in fifteen minutes and some freakishly nasty comments. Nothing I haven't seen before, nothing that even rattles me, but nasty, nonetheless.

I could just walk away from it. These are nobodies hiding behind screens. Give a hundred monkeys keyboards and in short order they'll be flinging shit around online, right?  But since shit washes off, I figure I may as well try to engage them. A little. If I get through to one monkey and elevate his consciousness a wee bit, I'll have done something productive with my day.

And so. I explained how love and sex work for me. And I hope to Christ there was one silent monkey in the crowd who got it, because the cacophony and renewed shit-flinging fair drowned me out. THAT was when I walked away, head held high...but having taken note of the distinctive flavour of shit.

I'm rambling, and I haven't even started yet. Great.

I have a low libido by male standards. It's by no means nonexistent: there are days when I could cheerfully fuck a beehive. But it is and always has been subject to wild swings. My antidepressant has made the lows even lower and the spikes less frequent (still there, but once a month instead of once a week). This is, I gather, supposed to bother me as a male, because my self-worth is supposed to be all tied up in the sex I'm having *coughbullshitcough*.

It doesn't bother me much. Oh, I'd be a liar if I said I was completely unfazed, but if I have any reservations about sex, they tend to revolve around my perceived inadequacies, the ones hard-wired into my personality.

I think it's because I never had a sibling.

Screaming left turn there. Hang on, folks. *smile*

Seriously, though. I watched my nieces frolic around the house yesterday. They bring such joy wherever they go, but they're typical sisters: even at not-quite four and one, you can see at a glance how much they love each other...and hate each other.

Because that's what siblings do, right? I love you so much, you are my PERSONAL punching bag. Anybody else punches you, I kill them. Punches from me are love taps.

I never got that love-hate thing. Still don't, at all. My twin died when he was two days old and I grew up an only child. Love is love and hate is hate and the two things can't be further apart on the emotional spectrum for me.

This has had profound implications on the kind of lover I am. My love is completely devoid of anything that might require a pinch of hate as an ingredient. I can't do power trips. I can't degrade--even if it's something I've convinced myself is degrading and my partner disagrees. I can't talk dirty, I feel like a fool if I do and nothing kills a boner faster than embarrassed laughter. My top speed is barely out of second gear: as soon as I hit third I leak transmission oil everywhere. Get me on one of those fuck-a-beehive days and I'll leak transmission oil if you pop me out of park. You people who can tear around the track for five hundred miles, redlining all the way...how do you do that? I'm in awe, man. Seriously.

Ven vee are havink ze sex, is to try to pretend vee are someone else, says the sex therapist who lives in my head.
Why would I do that? (I talk back to the voices in my head. Don't you?)
Because zen vee could experience all ze Hollywood sexy things. Vee could do angry passion. Vee could be rough. Vee could zay thinks like "fuck me, bitch". 
But none of zat...excuse me, none of THAT... is sexy, I say. And if I'm pretending to be someone else, I'm not me. If I'm not me, why not just let her go be with someone else who has that soupçon of hate that lets them be not so fucking boring? Or boring fucking, I mean?
No, no, vee can't do that! the therapist says. If vee do, then it means vee are not goot enuf--
Oh, go fuck yourself, Freud, and that's the end of that until the next time I see a movie where Mr. Alpha Sixpack Stamina is dominating the screen/wench beneath him and said wench is deep in Planet Orgasm. ASS always has the same look on his face, like sex is a matter of life and death, a test he must pass, and the woman is just the paper for him to spread his ink on.

These aren't porn movies, by the way. This is standard Hollywood fare. I can barely watch porn because of how utterly degrading it almost always is. Where's the porn where they cuddle and go slow and kiss everything that quivers, even a little? Show me porn where the woman is ravished and worshipped and lovingly sipped instead of jackhammered and whee! libido problem goes bye-bye. Does that porn exist?

I am good at what I do, or so I have been told, occasionally by people who are out of breath at the time. (Stroke that ego and watch it grow, but for god's sakes don't put it in third gear or there'll be a mess.)  It's just that what I do is not the full scope of Things That Are Done.

We happen to live a life that makes allowances for this. People assume that it's why we practice ethical nonmonogamy, because sometimes she just wants to ride shotgun in the Indy 500. Nice fringe benefit, to be sure, but not even close to why.

See, bring up polyamory in the context of sex and you must be a cuckold, a guy who gets off on the idea of his wife being with other men. I'm the furthest thing from that. That stuff is private. I couldn't tell you about it if I wanted to, because I don't know it, any of it, and don't care to know it any more than you do. Am I happy she's happy? Of course. Do I get some kind of sexual thrill out of it? Really, really, really not. The same thing will operate in reverse should I find another partner and become sexual: what happens in the bedroom stays there. Compersion--joy at another's joy that had nothing to do with you--does not have to have a sexual component.

In truth, neither does marriage. Ours does (and that's the sum total of information you're going to get about that)...but "I'd love her if I didn't have a dick". There are lots of married people on the asexual spectrum, as well as men who are "impotent" and women who are "frigid"--would you get a load of the heaping helping of judgment loading down both those words? As if whether or not a man can have sex has something to do with his potency. As if a woman who does not have sex can't possibly be warm and loving. As if.

There are lots of good reasons to get married. Passion is one of them: in a passionless marriage you are housemates and little more. It's not everything. It's not even most of the things.

 Sex may be very important to you, and that's fine. You may regard it as the glue that holds your relationship together, and if you both agree on that, who am I to say otherwise? But consider: even the horniest couple can only spend a tiny fraction of their lives fucking. I would think there's got to be something more, something stronger, that keeps you together other than ugly-bumping. Call it...call it love.

There are people who view sex as a pastime. They don't remember the names and faces of their partners, and don't care to. I accept this...but I find it sad. Sex as sport is all well and good (and I sure don't remember all the people I've played hockey with), but for me there's so much more there. It's about deep connections, for me.  I don't understand how you can connect to someone on such a fundamental level and then...just...move on.

It sometimes feels as if I am alone among men in that sex and love are inextricably linked for me. I've met more than a few women for whom sex need not involve any amount of love, too. It all goes back to that love-hate thing, the power dynamic in which I would much rather yield than wield the power. Sex without love feels much worse than, say, masturbation. (I mean, I love myself...at least a little!) It feels, again to me, as if "any hole will do" and the person attached to the hole is an afterthought, if she's a thought at all. I recognize there are probably nuances to this I don't get, but since I don't get them, I don't know how to overcome them.


I fall in love with people from the inside out: always have, always will. That hole? It happens last.

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Next post is going to be a continuation of this one, on a topic I'm incredibly unqualified to pontificate about. It'll be about a man who does have that pinch (and slap, and choke) of hatred in him.

It'll be about Jian Ghomeshi.