How It Started 35

Dear Reader,

This is the story of my marriage. It is a very average American marriage. We are a very average American couple. You have probably seen us in line at the grocery store, or school pickup, or waiting for a table at brunch. And yet, our marriage has one little component that makes us stand out--one that you're probably already familiar with and here to read more about. This is the story of how I experienced--or am in the process of experiencing--an honest-to-God, old-fashioned sexual awakening in my mid-30s.

Maybe you see yourself in me. Maybe you'd like to. Either way, I will bring you along for the (anonymous) ride. Most of the details contained here are true. Some of the identifying details have been changed. But what is absolutely real are my feelings and perspective on how this journey has changed my marriage and changed my life.

So let's talk about it.

I have a suspicion that all of the personality traits that define me and the ones that hold me back are rooted in the one-two combo of a Bible Belt/Irish Catholic upbringing. Guilt is a second language; a permanent chip on my shoulder. Barely repressed feminine rage makes itself known at inopportune moments. I bear the weight of a fundamental mistrust of pleasure and a deep sense of shame.

I told myself in my twenties that I had moved past the fearmongering approach to sex that I had steeped in as a teenager subject to abstinence-only sex education at the inept hands of the public school system. I pretended it didn't bother me or impact my development--I had liberal parents! I knew where to find accurate information about birth control and safe relationships on the early 2000s internet! I had gone to college and survived the baptism-by-fire of hookup culture on Greek Row with my dignity and emotional well-being (mostly) intact! I was a sex-positive, adult feminist with a modest collection of vibrators who would rather die than yuck someone else's yum--even though I classed the majority of those yums as being exclusively for someone else, and definitely not for me.

I had never had much of a reason to question that lack of curiosity about sex; not the role that it played in my life, not what I was missing out on, and especially not what other people were getting up to behind closed doors. Long gone were the days of dishing with my college girlfriends about sexcapades from the previous evening with the frat boy du jour. Even when I was single and living in New York, raunchy Sex and the City-type brunches were a fiction for me--all my friends were married, in committed relationships, or too focused on serious, important things to compare notes about what went on in our lives between the sheets. It felt normal for me not to address that part of my life to anyone, including myself. I was living out a true "If a tree falls in the forest" question when it came to my sex life: if I never acknowledged its existence, was it even a part of me?

Here's what I would love to say here: "Then I met my now-husband, and everything changed for the better almost immediately." But it didn't quite happen that way.

We fell hard and fast for each other, in large part because we were both so comfortable opening up emotionally. I had been hurt badly by a previous relationship that culminated in me getting dumped on the couch of the couples therapist he had hired to "help us work things out." The turmoil of that experience and its aftermath had shaken me, but burning my life down to start over was liberating in its own way. I had that hardened kind of fearlessness that only comes from surviving what you thought would end you. At the time we met, I didn't feel like I could trust anyone--but I was somehow able to trust him.

Even with all that trust, though, he correctly intuited that I might not be ready to fully accept the side of him that was into kink. I like to believe that I'm open-minded and would have found a way to embrace it even back then, but it's impossible to know in retrospect. Had I known at the time that some of my favorite things about him (his compassion, his sense of boundaries and respect, his deference and chivalry) tied back to his specific sexual interests and the kink community, I probably would have gotten on board with a quickness. Even so, because we were long-distance at the beginning of the relationship, communication and creativity were the foundations on which we built a healthy, if somewhat vanilla, sex life. His first gift to me was a dimmer switch for my ancient Hitachi Magic Wand. I surprised him with a WeVibe for remote play and the occasional voice memo of an orgasm. We made it work knowing the distance had an end date; unfortunately, that end date also brought an end to the need for creativity, and we both slumped into a complacent (but happy) lull.

Fast-forward to some years later: we're married, parenting our toddler, and still reeling from the change and trauma of the COVID era. I've upped my anti-depressant prescription and I hate every single thing about my body except for the fact that it brought us our child. We both work from home and nothing feels magical. We're exhausted and lonely, desperately holding onto each other in the hope that things get better but unsure how to make it happen. I listen to the other women in my book club complain about their husbands: their weaponized incompetence, emotional cluelessness, and weekly golf games with the boys that leave their wives stranded and resentful. I nod along respectfully and pray to whatever god is listening that I don't become one of them.

Reader, that prayer was answered in a format I never saw coming: butt plugs and Pleaser heels.