Ever heard the one about a self-described “good girl” in her early 40s moves out of her home, posts a personal ad “seeking single men age 35-50 to help her explore her sexuality,” sleeps with roughly a dozen friends and strangers, and joins a sex commune?Well it's true.
This Midwestern good girl and her stoic Midwestern husband, opted for something new. Well she did actually. This "good girl" had decided a baby would add purpose to their lives, but her husband did not. “I wanted a child, but only with him,” she explains. “He didn’t want a child but wanted to keep me.” When he opted for a vasectomy, I demanded an open marriage. "Sex was boring, our life was boring and he seemed bored with me. Sex was always average with him but it had become a two minute affair, my orgasms where my responsibility."
“I refuse to go to my grave with no children and two lovers,” she declares. “If I can’t have one, I must have the other.I wanted to tell him to f— me hard but I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth and fucking me hard or good never has been his thing."
We had agreed to three rules — “no serious involvements, no unsafe sex, no sleeping with mutual friends” — she takes her break, not really his idea but he says he felt backed into a corner. He finds a steady girlfriend, while she violates two rules right away. “In truth, I was sick of protecting things,” she writes about going condom-free with a colleague at a conference. “I wanted the joy of being overcome. I wanted to feel him!" She also ends up sleeping with a friend. She admits "I have always wanted him, I have heard he was good in bed and he was!"
Her body’s reactions along the way she describes as "discovering" and "amazing". At first she is upset that she can’t feel pleasure as quickly as other women, but she finally decides she’s glad that her “surrender didn’t happen easily, that it lay buried and tethered to the realities of each relationship.” Her clitoris, and G-Spot although “moody,” was also “an astute barometer. . . . It dealt solely in truth. You either where good at eating my pussy or fucking me and I got off, or you where not!"
Truth often comes in tacky dialogue also. “Your breasts are amazing,” one of her younger partners tells her. “You should have seen them in my twenties,” she says. His comeback: “You’re cocky. I dig that.” (Fade to dirty talk.)
When they do it again months later, he thanks her in the morning. Not one of her best lovers she admits but hung like a horse! He tells her one morning “Something happens when I’m with you,” he says. “I feel healed.” I’m sure that’s exactly what he feels she murmurs.
She an’t seem to decide why she’s doing all this. The project is her “rebellion.” Or “a search for fresh, viable sperm.” "Great sex", Or a “bargaining chip.” Or “an elaborate attempt to dismantle the chains of love.” Or just a “quasi-adolescent quest for god knows what.”
One of her oldest friends calls her out. “How is sleeping with a lot of guys going to make you feel better about not having kids?” she asks. Her nanswer: “Sleeping with a lot of guys is going to make me feel better on mydeathbed. I’m going to feel like I lived, like I didn’t spend my life in a box. If I had kids and grandkids around my deathbed, I wouldn’t need that. Kids are proof that you’ve lived.” It’s a bleak and disheartening rationale, as though women’s lives can achieve meaning only through motherhood or sex. She admits the sex is super fun and she maybe mad that she stuck with fucking her husband so many years orgasm-less.
When the year runs out, she returns to husband, even though she soon starts an affair with a project flame and a few other men. She’s no longer so upset about the vasectomy, regarding it as a sign that her husband can stand up for himself (though it may also mean she now cares less about him, period). No shock that post-project, their chemistry is off, and when she makes a casual reference to their time apart and how the sex was fantastic, he finally explodes. “Do you know how many nights I cried myself to sleep when you moved out!?” he asks. “Do you care about anyone’s feelings but your own!?” She was “too stunned to reply.” But the fate of this marriage, revealed in the final pages, is anything but stunning.
“These are the sins against my husband,” she recounts. “Abdicating responsibility, failing to empathize with him, cheating and lying.” After blaming him for so long, “in the end, I was the one who needed to ask forgiveness. I won't ever admit the sex was not worth it but the means might need to change. I had a lot of great sex he could not give me."
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