Overworked, Underappreciated, and Shamed: on relationships and the seasons of libido

From February 2009.  (Note: my daughter’s full name is Heloise Cerys Raquel.  We initially planned to call her primarily by her second name, and that’s what we were doing when this post was written less than a month after her birth.)

Amanda Marcotte has a short piece up at RH Reality Check on women and libido. For such a brief post, she manages to touch on two separate but interlinked issues: one, the problem with pathologizing low female libido; two, the root cause of widespread “lack of interest.” Here’s the marvelous final paragraph:

It’s an indicator of how male-dominated our society is that the fact that women have diminishing libidos and don’t seem to care that much about it is treated as the problem, when in fact it’s merely the symptom of a larger problem–that women feel overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, understimulated, and shamed about their bodies. If we treated the actual problems that women face, higher libidos would be the happy result, I’m sure. But in order to do that, we’d have to treat male domination like a problem to be solved, and since few people really want to do that, instead we’re left with articles that note women’s lack of libido, but carefully resist asking why.

That’s spot on.

The great sex therapist, David Schnarch, writes in his Passionate Marriage (the best sex advice book for couples in long-term relationships I’ve ever seen) that we do well to avoid the question “Why doesn’t my wife (or my husband, or my bf, gf, what-have-you) want to have sex with me?” The whole structure of the question, Schnarch says, misses the point. It assumes a strong libido is the default setting in any romantic relationship. Rather, we should ask “Why should my partner want to have sex with me?” And also “Why do I really want to have sex with him or her?”

This can be shaming, of course, if not asked rightly. Schnarch doesn’t want his patients following the “Why should my partner want to have sex with me?” with a sigh and an “After all, I’m unattractive, it stands to reason that they should have no reason to want me.” Buit it is a reminder, as I’ve written many times, that sex is never obligatory. The “I will” of the wedding day is not a blank check to be cashed daily, weekly, or monthly by whichever spouse has a higher libido. We ought to be answering Schnarch’s question not with “Because she’s my wife and it’s her job” or even with “Because we’re in love, and people in love are supposed to fuck a lot.” We ought to be answering it by having an honest discussion with ourselves (before we have one with our partners) about what it is sex means to us, what makes us in the mood, what we see as the purpose of sex in our lives.

I’m thinking about this in terms of my own marriage right now. My wife and I have a newborn. Though I wouldn’t normally share this sort of thing, it’s probably obvious that we haven’t had sex since before our daughter was born. My wife is recovering from a grueling physical experience, and is breastfeeding little Cerys on what seems like an almost hourly schedule. (And folks, thanks, but please spare us the advice about sleeping routines and so forth — we have tons of help.) I haven’t slept more than three hours straight in a single night since the baby was born, and am up changing diapers and soothing and cleaning at the strangest and most interesting hours. For a great many reasons, sex isn’t happening right now. Neither of us has a strong libido these days, though mine at the moment probably surpasses that of my wife. It’s an excellent opportunity for me to practice what I preach about self-soothing and about letting go of any lingering hint of entitlement and expectation.

One thing I learned in a liturgical church, and am learning all over again in my involvement with the Kabbalah Centre, is a great respect for seasons. We live differently, the great traditions tell us, at different times of the year. We have our penitential and reflective seasons, like Lent or the Omer; we have our seasons of celebration, like Easter; we have our seasons of activity and effort, like Sukkot and Pentecost. There’s a time and place, in enduring relationships, to fuck with violent abandon five times a day. There’s a time and place to make love reverently with thoughts of the divine (like midnight on Shabbat). There’s a time and a place, too, to take all of that carnality and put it elsewhere, focus it on some other aspect of living.

My wife and I are, like so many parents of newborns, like walking zombies much of the time. Last night, I changed Cerys after my wife had fed her, and I put my baby girl in her little night dress. We stood as a family at our bedroom window, looking out at the deck and the world beyond, and we placed Cerys between us. I held her so her head was near my heart, and my wife put herself around me in such a way that her heart and her chest was on the other side of our daughter’s head. Cerys nestled into us and we nestled into each other, skin to skin to skin. Let me tell you something: this is making love, making love of a different sort.

The imperious and real urges I feel are sublimated into something else, not because my sexuality is bad ever — there is never a season for shame, never a season for self-loathing. But they are sublimated because now is the season for sacrifice, for sleep deprivation, and for unconditional love. My wife’s libido is gone, for now, gone where it needs to go as she goes through the healing process and the mystery of first-time motherhood. Real love and real confidence is knowing it will return in due course, and that I will be fine in its absence. There is nothing to pathologize, nothing to doubt, nothing to question. All is as it should be, and right now, it’s all not about me.