It was a Sunday afternoon when he told me. I was making sandwiches; slathering spicy mustard onto thick slices of crusty French bread. My sexy husband, who had just pressed his body suggestively against my back and nibbled my neck, was looking at his phone with a little smile on his face. “Whatcha doin’?” I asked, inviting conversation as I popped a juicy slice of tomato into my mouth. He heaved a sigh and looked at me. My neck prickled. “I have something I need to tell you,” he said. I stopped moving the knife. The acrid smell of our neighbor’s burning trash suddenly smelled very strong.
He had started the blog a couple of weeks ago. It was a throwaway project… meditative… cool sexy photographs… nothing really. It was sort of like collecting baseball cards, but creative, with network effects. He hadn’t said anything because it was nothing, really. He had gone from just collecting photos to curating and blogging them. My mouth went dry. But he needed me to know now because overnight it had gone viral, which was cool and fun. His voice sounded proud and defiant and pleading at the same time. I carefully lined up salami slices and made some supportive listening noises. He hadn’t told me right away because he didn’t want me to feel insecure. A spikey wave of cold spread across my back and my tailbone felt weak. But he didn’t want to have any secrets from me. It was classy, really—comparatively speaking, nothing violent or lewd or disrespectful. And besides it was anonymous. I felt my mind float out beyond my emotions, kick back in an easy chair, and wait for the show to start.
“Can I see it?” He illuminated the screen.
FOR THE RECORD
Before we go any further, for the record, I see myself as a seriously sex-positive woman. I remember having sexual feelings about as long as I can remember having feelings: I was the kid who wanted to play doctor in the little plastic playhouse. My Barbie was a naughty minx who did unmentionable things with GI-Joe (Dream House, indeed). I knew where all Those Books were in the house, and my first lover was a vibrating toothbrush that I ravished myself with on a regular basis (I found a way around the bristles). I’m the friend who everybody calls to ask those questions, the one who can be counted on to be nonjudgmental, knowledgeable, and a little edgy. I enjoy reading erotica, watching some porn, and checking out the Warwick Rowers—and I don’t believe that any of those things is equivalent to infidelity, or even a step down that path. So, it goes without saying that I’m okay with my man blogging some pictures of naked women… Right?
So imagine my surprise to find myself taking a good long look at every photograph on his blog (which is, objectively speaking, tasteful, if over photoshopped) and proceeding to… FREAK THE FUCK OUT.
It was a multi-hour, full-body meltdown. My rational self, watching from the easy chair, watched my emotional self become unhinged. Geysers of emotion gushed to the surface, horrifying both my husband and me. I was appalled by the wrenching ugliness of my insecurity, and yet completely unable to rein it in. I felt like I was drowning in shame—and then I felt doubly ashamed for being a middle-aged cliché, and triply ashamed for my inability to find my way back to the easygoing, adventurous sexual person I know myself to be. I was tempted to lash out. Things I could have said fired across my mind—mean, smart things that would have cut as deeply as I was hurting.
Thankfully, I had enough control to not throw those daggers. My husband had made himself vulnerable by telling me. He had been honest, even though he was afraid of hurting me. My reaction, confusing as it was to both of us, was everything he feared, and he felt ashamed for making me feel so bad. He was very upset, and ready to delete his entire (viral) corner of the Internet. He said he loved me and our marriage more than network effects, and he meant it. Persecution was clearly the wrong answer.
I stopped him from pressing “delete” and tried to articulate what was going on… struggling to find constructive, blame-free words that were about me and my feelings. Feelings which boiled down to: “I’m so afraid that this is what you really think is sexy, and when I was younger I could probably deal with this because I could look like that on a good day, but now that I am getting older and my body is changing I can’t find myself among those twenty-something photoshopped models with implants, and so, clearly, I am going to lose you to someone like that, or at least you are going to stop wanting me. And I want to get implants so that I can have my perky boobs back, but I’m ashamed of wanting to get them because it probably means that I am insecure and everybody knows insecurity is the most unsexy thing ever. I don’t even recognize myself right now, and I know that you will never be able to love me the same way again having seen me like this about some stupid soft porn.”
After about five hours, we were down to moist hiccups. In the jagged aftermath of the storm we were both left with a big collection of pin-up girls and an even bigger question about how to navigate this next part of our identity, lives, and marriage, given the centrality of sexuality to all of those things. The blog had drilled right into that nerve.
LIFE IN THE BARBIE DREAM HOUSE
When I first met my husband, I was thirty-two, he was thirty-nine, and I swear, a sexual nuclear bomb went off. I have never been so animally attracted to someone and our high libidos were a perfect match. On top of his baseline physical hotness, my husband is an exceptional lover: generous, open, and totally committed to my pleasure. I swear I have twice as many orgasms as he does. When we got together, it was hands down the best sex either of us had ever experienced, and I felt the years of baggage I had built up around body image and my latent eating disorder melt away under the adoring attention of his strong hands. I surrendered completely to him, to desire, and to the deep pleasure of being fully seen and loved. My wedding gift to him was a little black book of boudoir portraits of me—I loved it as much as he did.
I can truthfully say that over the eight years we have been together the sex has gone from best to better. We have a bedside bureau overflowing with wispy, silky things, toys, and lube. We have pretended to be strangers meeting in a bar. We have rented hotel rooms in our city—just for fun. We have made sweet, wild, messy, slow, dirty, silly, crazy, playful, soulful, weepy, funny, rough, tender, lovely love across three continents.
Through all of it, my faith in his love, and trust in his profound attraction to me, has grown ever more solid. And in that solidity I have felt safe enough to explore my boundaries. In the last year or so, the Barbie Dream house has gotten interesting indeed—and I have found that vulnerability intensifies excitement. We had an amazing sex-soaked weekend in Amsterdam. The way my husband treated me as we wandered the red light district, uncomfortable and aroused and a little high, made me love him more… and in loving him more I wanted to open new parts of myself to him… express myself with him in ways that felt deeper and more raw… give myself over. We joined the mile high club on our way home. And since this is an APW piece about marriage, and not a letter to Penthouse Forum, I will leave the rest of the year to your imagination.
INTIMATE ARCHEOLOGY
I would not have thought that The Freak Out was even possible in the marriage I just described. And yet… there it was. So, being the curious nerd that I am, I have launched an investigation. I have read and reread Brene Brown’s work on the dynamics of vulnerability and shame. I am doing art journal entries exploring my beliefs about what sexy is and why it is important. I am following my husband’s blog and trying to tune in to my inner monologue as I look at those photographs. I have sought out blogs I find sexy, and am listening to what my mind is saying as I look at them. I am talking with my husband about sexual excitement and vulnerability and adventure and trust, and the relationship among those things. We are revisiting what we want and need, and what we simply cannnot bear. We are being completely honest with each other—and ourselves—about vanity and how hard it is for us to watch our bodies aging in a culture where youth is the main ingredient in sexiness. We are consciously reprogramming our beliefs about what comprises sexy. Eight years into our relationship, this intimate archeology is unearthing some complicated stuff.
I think the biggest surprise has been learning that logical opposites don’t necessarily cancel each other out. I can feel gorgeous and sexually confident and hung up about my changing body all at the same time. Fear and faith, courage and vulnerability can make a potent potion. Sometimes it is hot, and other times… I want to weep. I can be progressive and prudish, daring and demure, around the same issue. I can feel wise and graceful and powerful and so glad to no longer be in my twenties, and lost and awkward and funky about turning forty—all in the same breath. I can feel completely assured in my husband’s commitment to me, and yet exquisitely afraid of losing him. I am who I always have been, and yet I change—the way a landscape stays the same and yet becomes something else as the sun sets over its curves and the moon rises over its clefts.
And so we go on together, my sexy husband and I—as intimate as two people can be, and yet strangers to each other in the fresh landscape that materializes each time we invite each other deeper into our most vulnerable selves. It’s so scary that it’s sexy… and so sexy that it’s scary.
