just leave him

A few weeks ago I received an email from a reader looking for advice. Newly involved with a man, she found herself to be somewhat underwhelmed by him sexually. Her problem seemed to be two-part: she felt both unable to relax and enjoy her carnal beastess self, and she felt as if her new partner wasn’t super eager/willing/able to give her pleasure.

I read this reader’s letter, and after a couple of days, I responded that my visceral reaction was to tell her to exit the relationship quickly but with as much grace as she could muster. I told her that in my view, a man’s—or woman’s—palpable disinterest in giving me the good naughty shivers was my sign to show him—or her—the door. I wrote, as gently as I could, that I felt that a dearth of physical generosity was pretty emblematic of other lacunae, and in any case, I’ve lived long enough to know that I need a highly sexual partner who is highly interested in sex with me. Sex for me is the tipping point.

Then I followed those thoughts by saying that if she really liked him, she owed it to herself not to just summarily kick his sexually disinterested ass to the curb (though I said this in somewhat less Crayola language). I suggested that she owed it to herself, and I suppose to him, to have a frank and honest conversation about her concerns and her desires, and to tell him her thoughts about how to address the concerns and the desires.

Finally, I told her that she also needed to spend some time figuring out what she herself liked physically, and I pointed her in the general direction of my how-to posts and the specific direction of this one, which seems to address this reader’s most pressing erotic anxieties.

And then I wished her luck and asked her to keep in touch.

She did. I wish I could say that this reader did as I suggested,  and thereby experienced a bright shiny sexual epiphany with her boyfriend and that they are now regularly enjoying pyrotechnic orgasms of such breadth and variety that their neighbors have banged shoes on the door and called the cops.

This is not the case.

This woman, who seems really very nice and generous and honest and lovely—and not merely because she lauds my writing as the best thing since sliced Nin—wrote to say that she talked with her boyfriend and that he remains sexually “clueless.” He has not, she has written me, come over all white-knighted to the charge of her sexual discontent. He has not tucked into helpful tomes, not rented how-to DVDs, not signed up for a seminar at the local sex-positive emporium.

Mostly, he has continued on all ho-hum blasé-blah, as if what my reader has expressed to him lacks validity. That is the case as far as I know, for I have not been made privy to transcripts of their conversations.

And here’s the thing, she’s staying with him. The reader, who is a single mother living in a remote corner of this wet blue planet, who has not had a sexual and/or love relationship in a very long time, who seems like a lovely young woman, has decided that this man is “a good catch,” and because they get along so well together in every other way, she wrote me to say that she is going to stick it out.

Oh sweet Aphrodite on a pita, why?

Dear Reader, you know who you are, let me address you directly: Leave him.

Let me say it again: Leave him. Leave him. Leave him.

I know in my last letter to you that I’d only say that once. I lied. Leave him.

I recognize that I am not in the same position as you. I realize that I have no children and that I live in arguably the greatest city in the world with arguably the greatest baseball team in the world (that would be the Yankees). I realize that my life has been very different from yours in the choices I’ve made. I realize all this.

Leave him.

I have here on my pretty dumb things detailed my relationship with a man I’ve here called “Ernie.” Ernie, I’ve said was a lovely person. We had a lot in common. We were studying the same area of literature. We liked the same movies. We enjoyed making fun of the same cultural institutions, like the Republican party and Monster Trucks. We both enjoyed snow peas and soup.

We were very good friends, Ernie and I. What we were not was sexually suited for each other at all. In the slightest. At all. Zero. Zip. And I knew from kiss #1 that Ernie and I were as mismatched as any two people with so much in common could be. I knew from the first nanosecond that his inordinately soft lips touched mine that I was not now, not ever, not really, not without a tremendous of self-deception, not without a Shibari-like suspension of disbelief, ever going to be sexually wowed by this man.

And yet I pursued him. (You, Dear Reader, leave your Ernie.)

I spent two and half years with Ernie. I realize now that I did it because I had spent six years of my life holding my erotic self hostage to the terrorist that was stripping, and I think in choosing Ernie I was picking not merely a man who was different from the other men I’d dated because he was all substance and no flash, but also I was picking a man who was not picking me because I myself was a sexy beast. After all, if I wasn’t attracted to him sexually, my warped subconscious logic must have tallied, he couldn’t be to me either.

I spent two-and-a-half semi-miserable to flat-out frantically door-scratching, quietly keening years with Ernie. My friend’s mother told me that he was “a good catch’; I believed her. I told my mother about my lack of passion/interest in sex with Ernie.

“Well,” she said, “passion fades.” And counseled me to stay with him.

You don’t have to, Gentle Reader. You can leave your Ernie. You can learn from my mistakes and recognize that to deny your sexual self is to lead to extreme badness.

I spent the last year of my time with Ernie fantasizing about cheating on him. I imagined long and lustrous love affairs. I lovingly planned never carried-out infidelities like I have warmly planned suicide attempts at my darkest points. I put my sexual self in a little cozy and chintzed cave, and it busted out of the housey hoosegow and nipped me in the tits.

You, Lovely Reader, don’t have to offer up your sexual self. You can realize that there’s something happening in you right now that would counsel you to compromise that which you should not, and you can take the time to figure out why you’re willing to do it. You can take the harder, but more meaningful decision, and you can just say No to your Ernie.

You can find a therapist, maybe. After some time, and it won’t be easy, but it will be worth it, you can find your own best self. You can make it such that when a man stands before you ready to offer you everything you want, deserve and need, you will be able to recognize him.

Janis Joplin said, “Don’t compromise yourself. You’re all you’ve got.” She was right, at least when it comes to sex. Unless you share a checking account, sex is the one thing you’ll do with this man that you’ll never do with anyone else (I’m assuming monogamy here). You may unbosom yourself to friends or family. You may spend a night sleeping in the same bed as your child. But sex, you’re doing it with your Ernie. Why would you willingly choose to give yourself to a person who doesn’t tenderly blow on your erotic flame?

Leave him.

I won’t say it again.

I lied.

Leave him.

Comments

[alwaysarousedgirl]

I have a feeling that if I'd asked you the same sort of question, you'd have given me the same answer.

Sex is something that simply refuses to yield to compromise.

[Alanzo]

I am a male who, as a young man, decided carnal knowledge of my "motherlike" spouse was sinful. I downplayed it. Time went by, we parted of course. There are many out there, as I was then. Somehow this point of view was from a warped religious perspective. No more...never again for me. Alanzo

[Viviane]

Everything CG said, so eloquently.

You meet a man and so many things mesh, except that. And you make a life together and you love the daily-ness, nearness and all the togetherness stuff.

Except that.

Alas, I speak from many years experience with this.

So much brainwashing and propaganda that we swallow. All lies.

Leave him.

[efg]

CG,

Well said!

I would suspect, nay pray, that you would say the same to one of the other gender faced with the same dilemma.

I would edit AAG said above to say -
Sex is something that *should never* yield to compromise.

[Bn'B]

This is why I love me some CG.

I married my Ernie. I had a child with my Ernie. I divroced my Ernie.

Now I have to spend a lifetime looking at the face of my Ernie.

[Jefferson]

I did everything right by my wife and accepted that my days of carnality were past. Forget being bisexual; I was monogamous and accepted that meant no balls-on-balls hijinks. I mean, I gave up any expectation of a normal sex life.

I dialed down my libido to her speed. I waited months between opportunities for sex, and accepted that once I got her off (in short order), we were done. There would be no more sex until the trees changed with the next season.

After all those years of disinterest in my sexual pleasure, she dumped me. So it was for naught.

If I had a time machine, I would 1) travel back to 1938 and punch Hitler in the nose, and 2) travel back to 1988 and tell my future wife that, actually, come to think of it, I do mind her refusal to suck my cock because that was "gross."

He won't change if he refuses to try. Leave him.

[hungryheart22]

i too married my ernie. i knew it from the very first time we kissed...but it was too late. i already loved him for all the right reasons. AND he was cute too! lucky me.

so i plowed on. i even had a sex toy party. i needed something to get my motor running...and his too. it worked for a while. we had some fun...

the thing is, its my hungry heart. the biggest question i face on a daily basis, is whether or not my brain tumor (yes, you read right) will do me in before my hungry heart gets filled. its a delicate balance i face...

i am looking for *inspiration*. i will take it wherever i can find it. out here, in cyberland, is where i seem to have found my *passion*. i can fantasize about whomever i choose, then pretend that hubby is him/her. it was working for a while, but lately i am left sorely disappointed. tears fill my eyes with the bitter sting of reality...

with any luck, i will fill my oh-so-hungry-heart, before i can't.

for some of us, its not so easy leaving the

[BDGurl]

Leave him.

Leave him before you begin to believe that you are not attractive.

Leave him before you begin to doubt that you are a sexual being.

Leave him before your self-concept starts to do weird things to your head.

Leave him before you start to think that he's the best you can do.

Leave him before life seems so drab that it's an effort to make it from day to day.

Just leave.

bdg

[seraph]

This post, when I read it the first time, made me sniffle. I also had an Ernie, and I married him believing that the magic power of a wedding ring would somehow make our sexual desires mesh. It didn't work; we were married five years and then I asked for a divorce. I knew after only a year that it wouldn't work, but I held on because in all other respects he was a good husband-- and I knew that my leaving would hurt him deeply. But in the end, I realized that I had to hurt him in order to save myself.

Thank you.

[S.P.]

Ditto, ditto, ditto... been there, done that, gave away the t-shirt in the divorce...

Dear Reader has got to take a deep breath, do a head shake, and find the self-assurance that she can either find somebody better or that she will be fine on her own.

Granted, it ain't EASY finding someone you mesh with sexually as well as otherwise, but the "high (read; normal?) libido / low libido match is never a good thing in the long run... If monogamy is your intent.

Be strong, Dear Reader! Dump him...

S.P.

[J Morgan]

Youve described a condition of common suffering, rampant in Western mono
theistic, immediate self gratification seeking, consumptive culture.

Once you are in a relationship like that it is never easy to leave,
one must have a support system in place to ease the transition. But alas, when one is feeling melancholic about the historical trash heap of ones former emotional life, the pain seems a distant memory.

JM

[figleaf]

Pretty interesting post, CG. I had my real "Ernie" moment years ago when, sort of reeling from a few whirlwind years totally destitute debauchery, I decided I needed to dry out and do a little penance. I took a job with a chain pizza parlor I'll call Ernie's, at an exurban southern crossroads, and somehow decided the path to virtue lay in climbing the corporate ladder.

Several years into that, on my first paid vacation, I chose to go to one last annual Thanksgiving Extravaganza put on by my sprawling network of erstwhile debauchees near the campus of an alternative college way the hell out in the Pacific Northwest. At one point we were sitting with a circle of friends up on the roof of a 10-story dorm, the tallest building for miles around, watching the sun set in a Maxfield Parrish sky, surrounded by Alps-high mountain ranges that were in turn dwarfed by a scattering of snow-capped volcanos all camp-fire lit with the alpenglow. Most of us were high as kites from the little brown mushrooms that grew wild in the grass pretty much everywhere you looked. The guy worked in the dorm and he'd let us up on the roof during his break. At one point he laughed and said "I can't believe Housing is paying me to do this." And I my big epiphany: "Ernie's Pizza is paying me to do this. Fuck Ernie's Pizza!"

I've never looked back. Can't imagine where I'd have wound up if I hadn't gone out to say goodbye.

---

I'm a bit more sanguine about sticking with a relationship that's not sexually fulfilling so long as everything else works well.

I *don't* think it's going to work if, like you with your Ernie or me with my Ernie's Pizza, you enter the relationship because you think it's safe, or comforting, or penance. It's not going to work if you think it's worth the sacrifice. It's not going to work if you think you can settle for less just because you're lonely or hungry.

It sounds as if your correspondent is in that boat, hungry for one thing and willing to sacrifice something else.

I agree she should leave him. I say it reluctantly, with sympathy for each of them, but you're right. She should leave him.

In particular she should leave him now because it will be harder for all concerned when, years from now, she leaves him anyway -- either physically or emotionally.

Good post, Chelsea Girl.

figleaf

[Edgy Mama]

Yes, CG and Fig.

Leaving someone emotionally can be as devastating as leaving them physically.

But, as always, the kidlings complicate.

[S.P.]

CG -- Any further communications from Dear Reader???

[chelsea girl]

EM, she just barely got involved with this guy. Hence my urging her to leave now, before the going gets tough. Her child is from her previous relationship, not this one. But, yeah, you're right. Once you've created a family, it gets very hard to go.

Or so I've heard.

SP, no, nothing. Not a peep. Alas.

kissykiss,
chelsea girl

[Avalon]

The situation of the reader is indeed concerning. You are right Chelsea Girl. She should probably jump ship right now! However, since she finds him attractive on other counts she could try again to solve the problem/s.

I contend the reader has two problems (1) communication with partner and (2) unmatched libido/interest. Both these will cause her incredible heartache in the future. I suggest the reader exhaustively research the topics online and then speak to her intended with the aim of finding out why he is not interested.

It may be that he is overworked or on medication. It may be possible to solve the problem. If he is really not interested and not able to communicate effectively she should seek a new partner that matches her needs. There are many people out there that have low libido/low interest. He will be happier in the long run with one of those ladies. It might help her to think on that as well.