A warm look back at cold comforts

Pretty interesting post from Chelsea girl of Pretty Dumb Things with advice to a correspondent.

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.

...

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?

...

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.

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.

...

Leave him.

I've omitted the rest of Chelsea Girl's story, including some deliciously salacious parts, so definitely follow this link to read the her whole post.

I had my own similar-but-different "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 volcanoes 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.

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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.