What Happened to Us?
There is a litany of reasons why my marriage fell apart, both external and internal.
On the external side, my husband felt like our move from the DC area to New York City forced him into taking a high-stakes, high-pressure legal job while he was on the cusp of receiving an MBA in Maryland. He’d hoped to leave the law and go into business and the move to New York City disrupted his plans. He felt compelled to take a high pressure, high paying job to support the family, and this caused him a tremendous amount of anger and resentment. Ironically, it was the New York City move that ultimately helped him find and cultivate his true passion of being a writer.
Our family theater producing businesses put a tremendous amount of stress on the marriage and the family. Overnight my husband and teenage son’s work received a lot of attention in the theatrical community. As their talent became more recognized, what was once a fun sideline activity became serious; the stakes for each new musical were very high. It was excruciating for all of us to experience the ups and inevitable downs that go with the creation of new work.
But the worst part was the role that I played as a theater producer. It is immensely challenging to shepherd a new writer through the insular world of theater. There is a lot of frustration along the way. No matter how brilliant, a new work that doesn’t have an A level production team rarely finds its way to Broadway. The fact that the theater world was even taking their work seriously is a true testament to how talented they were. But as the producer, I was a figure of authority, which complicated my other role as a supportive wife and mother. It intensified the strain on my marriage, which was already veering out of control. It created a tremendous amount of tension and our conversations were fraught with anger and resentment.
We Were Doomed from the Start
In hindsight, I can now see all of the internal issues that doomed our marriage from the beginning. Like so many young lovers, we saw in each other a chance to correct mistakes from generations past, but actually just reinforced familiar, negative behavior patterns. For example, my widowed mother had taught me that love was about grief and pain. No surprise then that I chose to marry a man who was in deep grief over a recent tragic event in his life. I sought comfort in the familiar, and eventually, our marriage became a source of grief for both of us.
But I believe our issues could have been overcome. We might still be married today, but for the fact that our sex life was completely nonexistent. Without that physical connection, what was left of our marriage was a business arrangement. We were partners in the business of raising children, partners in the theater business, but we were not partners in life.
When I think about the trajectory of the demise of my sex life, I sometimes wonder: what came first, the loss of attraction between my husband and me or my lack of interest in sex? In all fairness to my husband, I was not an easy woman to have sex with. Sex was usually painful and uncomfortable for me. I rarely, if ever, experienced sex as pleasurable. No matter how hard my husband tried to please me, I rarely got turned on. Orgasms were not in my repertoire, except a rare weak clitoral orgasm. Everything having to do with sex was a problem, including getting pregnant and suffering from such severe morning sickness that I was under a mandate of bed rest from the third trimester until I gave birth. I don’t think it was humanly possible for me to feel sexually attracted to the person I associated with so much pain and discomfort.
So, we just stopped having sex.
Looking back, I understand why my body would have felt completely betrayed by anything and everything having to do with sex. Of course I shut down. Of course I was relieved to stop having sex. Yet I still felt somehow broken. And then there was the guilt about denying my husband his pleasure and feeling our relationship slip away. We rarely talked about any of this. When we did, the conversations always ended in anger and tears, which created even more distance in our relationship.
Finding a Home in Your Body
At the time, I believed my situation was an anomaly. Now I know otherwise; way too many people around the world are disconnected from their sexuality. The National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior conducted by Indiana University in 2009 reported that 36 percent of women in their thirties did not masturbate in the last year. That number jumps to almost 50 percent for women over age fifty. The good news is that there is more awareness of the role healthy sexuality plays in our lives and more resources are available to address sexual issues.
If you’re someone who finds sex challenging or feels uncomfortable with your sexuality, I’ve written this book for you. If you’re alienated from your erotic side due to sexual abuse or trauma, you will find a healing balm in these pages. If you can’t surrender to pleasure, can’t sustain intimacy, or want to reclaim and feel empowered in your sexuality, consider this book a love note to you.
Before we begin your healing journey, let’s look into what brought you to where you are and try to gain some understanding of why and how your challenging relationship with sex came to be.
Women are Programmed to Say “No” to Sex
The sexual revolution started over fifty years ago with the groundbreaking work of Alfred Kinsey in The Kinsey Reports.1 Only in the last few decades, however, have we really had open communication about sex in the popular culture. From the affable and outrageous Dr. Ruth, who hosted the first radio show on sex in the 1980s, to the current multitude of sexperts like Emily Morse, whose Sex with Emily podcast has millions of fans, we both love and hate to talk about sex. Getting sex education and information from the Internet is easy, but talking about problems in our sex life is challenging. When I started my business, The Power of Pleasure, five years ago, one of my objectives was to normalize the conversation around sex. But the discomfort and shame around sex is so deep and insidious that it’s even shameful to talk about our shame. No wonder clients so often comment on how valuable it was “just to have someone who I can talk to about this” after our very first session.
Sadly, most of us don’t have anyone we can talk to about our sex life, our sexual problems, our sexual desires, our fetishes, and our fantasies. Talking to your partner can be highly charged and not without repercussions. Many couples fear that even bringing up the subject will open up a Pandora’s box they will never be able to close. People often worry about bruising their partner’s ego, or fear the conversation will quickly revert to blame and shame. Better not to bring it up and just put up with a bad sex life. This was certainly my experience. Every single time my ex and I tried to talk about sex, I ended up feeling guiltier, and even more broken, angry, and disconnected from him.
Some women talk to their girlfriends about their sex life or lack of one, but rarely in great detail. Most OB/GYNs and urologists are ill-equipped to provide useful advice about how to make our sex lives pain-free, better, and more pleasurable. Even couples’ therapists are often extremely uncomfortable talking with clients about their sex life on any level of detail that could actually be useful. This came to me as quite a surprise initially, but in time I realized that most therapists haven’t dealt with their own shame around sex.
An Oversexed, Sex-Starved Culture
The irony is that sex is talked about frankly and broadcast blatantly in popular culture. We find it everywhere…in books, movies, TV, advertising. The maxim that “Sex Sells” is true! Just take one look at a magazine advertisement for practically any lifestyle product, from sexy, sleek new cars to deodorant and lipstick. Sex entices us and is also the forbidden fruit driving our desires and wallets.
You would think we’d be sexually open in a society that constantly throws sex in our face. In fact, the opposite is true. The United States is a sex-negative and sex-starved