Toward Commitment

by Diane Rehm

  DIANE: It's a lifetime of learning.

  JOHN: As is marriage itself. But again, I don't want to make this sound like a grim enterprise that you embark upon. There's fun, there's pleasure, there's love.

  Making Love

  John

  The first time Diane and I made love was an ecstatic experience that is still fresh in my mind. On a warm fall afternoon, the whole world seemed to devolve into one union of one couple in one bed. All demands and responsibilities were suspended for several magical hours. That afternoon seemed to presage many more of an equally carefree and ardent mood.

  The mundane realities of marriage made it all too difficult to perpetuate that illusion. Those realities came to take many forms, to my surprise and chagrin. For example, making love competed for discretionary time with other activities. I found it difficult to plan the event in advance, since that would rob it of the desired spontaneity. Moreover, it seemed crass to attempt to prioritize making love against the demands of raising two children, preparing meals, maintaining a house, and the like. All too often, therefore, I let it go, nagged by my sense of Diane's disappointment.

  But setting aside the competition for time, making love often became a psychological weapon, wielded in marital skirmishes and even war. Withholding it was a form of retaliation for the infliction of real or imagined wounds. Restoring it after a period of destructive silence was an awkward means of expressing regret. Demanding it as a form of release disregarded Diane's feelings and wishes.

  In short, making love became problematic. At times its presence offered a means of reconciliation, when other avenues were cut off. At other times, its absence exacerbated the tensions between us. Yet throughout our marriage, making love has somehow retained its fire.

  Diane

  I feel very shy as I write this section. It is, I would think, to any couple the most private and intimate area of a relationship. Yet I do believe there are some aspects of the sexual interaction I can speak about, without going beyond what I would consider appropriate boundaries of expression.

  First, I felt exactly as John did the first time we made love. It was a perfectly gorgeous day, sun shining, breeze blowing through the windows of his apartment. It was a moment we both cherish and recall happily, signaling, for me, a new way to embrace the sexual encounter, for the first time realizing how beautiful it could be. I loved John's emotional gentleness as well as his physical strength, his understanding of my mood, and his caring words. It was a very promising beginning to a mutually satisfying relationship.

  The two of us are quite certain that I became pregnant on our wedding night, because David Bartram Rehm was born just seven days short of nine months after we celebrated our marriage. During the period of anticipation of a new arrival, we continued to enjoy our lovemaking, taking greater and greater care as the time of delivery approached. But our passion for each other, and our playfulness with each other during that first nine months, was joyous.

  After David Bartram Rehm arrived, a number of factors began to affect our desire and intensity. First, fatigue. It hits all parents. After the birth comes the recovery period, which in those days allowed me to remain in the hospital for five days, a luxury that young women do not enjoy today. Then, the shock of going home, just the two of you, with this beautiful baby boy. But relishing the joy doesn't last very long, because immediately the middle-of-the-night feedings begin. Quite frequently John would get up with me to sit and talk while I fed David. While I treasure the memory of those moments, they were followed by bleary-eyed mornings, each of us struggling to find the energy it takes to care for a new human being and to face another day. Then, with John at the office working from eight in the morning until at least seven or eight in the evening, I would try my best to live up to my own expectations of myself as a perfect, nurturing, caring new mother. I don't think I'm alone as I recall those early days. Many of my good friends have told me they experienced the same kind of utterly endless fatigue, trying to do it all.

  What was left in the way of energy in those early months of parenthood was minimal. I had little, if any, interest in lovemaking, and John seemed to feel the same way. He didn't approach me, and I didn't approach him. It was as if we had gotten out of the habit of pursuing our sexual relationship. We thought so much about how to deal with the everyday practicalities of life with a new baby that we had no time or inclination to think about ourselves, our wants, our desires, or why we weren't resuming the simple and loving but provocative gestures that newly married couples engage in.

  A number of therapists I have spoken with have indicated that the relationship between two people changes after the first child is born. It is as if the couple has entered an altered terrain, necessitating learning a new geography, and it takes time to sort through it.

  In our case, the arrival of the much beloved child coincided with the intensification of John's career, and is the important second factor that I believe affected our early sexual lives together. One can argue, of course, that John may have, consciously or otherwise, been comfortable with the fact that his work was so incredibly demanding. Perhaps this allowed him a reason to distance himself from the demands and responsibilities that a wife and new baby boy present.

  Finally, once the fatigue of the early months of child-rearing had passed, it took some time to readjust to even a minimal level of lovemaking. We had been changed by the experience of having a child.

  Dialogue on Making Love

  JOHN: For many years and into the present, I have carried with me what I call the romantic illusion with respect to making love. What do I mean by that? I mean the notion that making love occupies a special but separate area in a marriage, that it somehow transcends what's going on in the relationship, its problems and difficulties. It's like a little island. Not only does it remove you from the prevailing problems, but— and this is the key to the romantic illusion—it will do away with them. It will do away with them during intercourse itself, but also beyond. If you can get to that privileged, lovely little island, all will be made good.

  DIANE: I'm glad you started that way, because I have such a different feeling. As a woman, for me the sexual encounter is very much an extension of the emotional encounter. Time and time again, when we have been distant or isolated from each other, you have approached me sexually as a way to move beyond the problem. But I am still in the problem and therefore can't move that quickly from the emotional feelings I'm experiencing, turn them off, and move toward becoming a sexual partner.

  JOHN: I understand that very well. Therefore I've found myself needing to provide a realistic approach to making love, complemented, perhaps, by what I call the romantic illusion. In that realistic area, I know of instances where I tried to use making love as a way of seeking forgiveness, of trying to reconnect with you. At times when I have done so, you've made it clear by word or gesture that you weren't interested. However valid your excuse, I've typically been caught up in two related emotions. The first is the bitter feeling of rejection and, in turn, isolation. Emerging from this is the strong desire to retaliate by withholding my own sexual participation the next time you show interest. But by doing so I risk further sexual estrangement, in which case my strategy boomerangs.

  DIANE: Though sex probably is one of the first attractions that people feel toward each other, it's interesting how complicated it becomes, how enmeshed in all of the day-to-day problems —the fatigue of raising children, the intellectual attachment to what's happening at the office or outside the home. It becomes a much more complicated relationship than one can imagine after those first beautiful encounters, which often take place with the idea of producing a child. I agree with you about the romanticizing of making love. I, as a woman, have certainly romanticized the sexual act. Yet at the same time, I've felt too often that because it's been used as a weapon to separate or distance us, to try then to use it in the opposite way, to try to connect by it, is equally difficult. You and I have had long periods when we did not connec
t, because we weren't on the same emotional and sexual plane. We were working individually and separately, and it was hard to find a meeting place.

  JOHN: More recently I think I've tried to achieve a balance between the romantic illusion and the realistic understanding of the sexual act in the context of a relationship. But I don't want to make this sound bleak, because I think you'll agree that there have been instances where making love has at least assisted in restoring a degree of connection and intimacy. So the notion that it shouldn't be used for some other end beyond itself—I don't think that's correct. On the other hand, I also think that, at times, I've expected too much of making love, that it would in some curious way not only suppress but maybe eliminate the existing problems. So I quite agree with you—it becomes complex. And that complexity at times is daunting and can in itself reduce the urge to make love. I can remember a time when I went off to South Africa—and we were barely speaking. I wrote you a note, later, saying that I almost asked the taxicab to turn around as I was leaving the house for the airport, because I knew how emotionally distant you were from me at that time. I was afraid that you wouldn't be there when I came back. But on I went to South Africa. In that note I said that each time you and I talked on the phone from Johannesburg I became increasingly fearful that I had indeed “lost” you. I said the tone of your voice over the telephone was really frightening to me because it seemed so distant. We had suffered, before I left, a long period of noncommunication, part of our pattern through a lifetime of living together. When I did come home, I did so very tentatively. I came home emotionally, as well as physically, needy.

  DIANE: And it was that emotional aspect of you that I could see and respond to, and so when you approached me physically, I felt not only your physical need but your emotional hunger. That was what allowed me to respond to you.

  JOHN: Another aspect of this topic that I want to talk about briefly is what I call the “absolutist” approach, and this may in part be due to the difference in physiology between men and women. If I'm going to make love, it's got to be the “big bang,” if you will. I don't know where I got that notion, but it's still with me, and at times has inhibited my reaching out to you sexually, Diane, because I wasn't quite ready, for a variety of reasons—physical, psychological, what have you—for the “big bang.” Therefore better to put it off, build up the expectation, so that it would be more likely to be the “big bang,” as opposed to what I think is a more realistic and healthy approach, which is to recognize that there are degrees of making love, both in physical and emotional terms. It can be moderate, it doesn't always have to reach a stunning climax; there are ways of being together sexually that don't always involve the “big bang.” I've had to work hard at that, and I think it's something that you understand better than I.

  DIANE: There's another thing I want to say to you, and that is that, throughout our marriage, in many ways and not just in the sexual encounter, you do have this tendency to postpone pleasure.

  JOHN: So that it will be all the greater.

  DIANE: Perhaps.

  JOHN: That's my illusion.

  DIANE: That's your illusion. That's part of the romantic illusion, and it does seem to me that it takes away from the acting out of the natural urge. If you keep postponing, you don't act on the urge. Now, obviously, people have to restrain themselves from acting on the urge every single time it occurs.

  JOHN: But you see, in my view, there's a correlation between the two: that is to say, the longer the wait, the greater the pleasure.

  DIANE: Well, baloney. Of course, as a woman, I don't have that expectation that I must always achieve physically. Achieving is not what it's all about for me. You've often said women have it so much easier than men. I'm not sure I agree with that. But I do know that for me, the sexual encounter is as much about holding one another closely as it is about achieving what you call the “big bang.” That hugging, the smell, the touching of the flesh, the warmth of the breath, all of that is so powerful to me as a woman.

  JOHN: But I think I'm typical of most men in this regard. If I could wave a magic wand and relieve men of at least one burden that they carry through life, I would relieve them of this need that we feel in ourselves to achieve the “big bang” in the fullest sense of the word, with each act of making love, so that we could return to a more modulated approach and recognize, as you've just said, Diane, that hugging can be just as meaningful, indeed perhaps as powerful, as the full climax. Not easy for men to understand in our culture, which does, I think, in a kind of macho way, expect the big bang each time.

  DIANE: As we age—you've heard that expression, “Use it or lose it”—you're now seventy-one years old, I'm sixty-five, I would expect our sexual lives to go on forever, in some way, but not necessarily in the same way it occurred when I was twentythree and you were twenty-nine.

  JOHN: But are you suggesting that sexual intercourse will last forever? I somehow doubt that.

  DIANE: In some form, I do believe it will last forever. The adventure, in whatever form it may or may not take.

  JOHN: I would certainly expect and hope that the sexual encounter, in at least some sense, will endure and continue. But we'll have to confront certain physiological realities over time.

  DIANE: Well, we'll see. [Laughter from both John and Diane]

  Solitude

  John

  The little boy is absorbed in pushing the toy train across the kitchen's hilly cobblestones. Deep in his bed, the adolescent relishes the colors of his feverish dreams. The young man opens the door to his apartment, happily anticipating its emptiness. The older man sets off on a long walk owing no allegiance to anyone—however temporarily.

  These are vignettes of some of my happy experiences, and they all manifestly involve solitary pleasures. From time to time, the company of others brings on a deep thirst to be alone. Assuaging that thirst is like taking a long draft of cool spring water. From the time of my boyhood, I have been strongly drawn to the figure of Robinson Crusoe. Thrown back upon himself after a shipwreck, he achieves both security and pleasure in his solitude.

  As far as I can tell, this part of my character springs from both parental and environmental influences. My father and mother both favored being not lonely but alone. They had the intellectual resources to avoid being lonely, although my mother desired the companionship of others more than my father. Yet I remember how consistently each sought out his or her private pleasures. That was the model I was given and absorbed.

  The model was enhanced by the fact that I spent my first two or three years with few playmates. During that time, while my father worked for the Paris Herald Tribune, we rented a little apartment in Paris during the winter and a small farmhouse outside Paris in the summer. As a result, I can recall only one playmate, whose name was Michel, and even he was available only some of the time. Nor do I have any memory of my mother playing with me. Like Robinson Crusoe, therefore, I had to create my pleasures in solitude.

  If for me solitude is rich in happy connotations, for Diane the word evokes pain, in particular bringing to mind the many times she was punished by being confined to her room. Thus, what was a haven for me was a prison for her.

  That difference in our histories certainly led to difficulties and misunderstandings between us. I found myself using that very desire for solitude as yet another weapon against Diane, a way of distancing myself from her, even though I knew full well the anxiety I was thereby causing her.

  Over the years, however, two complementary things have happened. On the one hand, after long periods of struggle, I have come to realize the joys of sharing more openly with Diane, offering up not only my daily activities but the feelings I experienced. She and I have learned to be together in new ways, to listen more carefully to each other's words—the implications we make and the inferences we draw. At the same time, Diane has discovered her own joy in being by herself, in writing in her sewing room overlooking the garden, working among the flowers, or reading a book.
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br />   Diane

  Today has been a glorious day for me. I am alone. I have been by myself all day, in the privacy of our home, with all the windows wide open, feeling a soft breeze blow into my sewing room. I have worked in the garden. I have paused to breathe, closed my eyes to relax, and have not uttered a single word to anyone today. I am truly ecstatic.

  What an incredible difference this is from those early years of our marriage, when I was anxious and fearful each time John left the house, whether for work or on an errand. What has happened to change me and my outlook? Maybe it has been just the “growing up” that each of us has had to do, shedding the past and freeing ourselves from childhood images.

  When I was a young girl, I was very active in all kinds of sports, including tennis, basketball, kickball, and baseball. I was constantly playing with other people, enjoying the cheering, the laughter, the competitiveness, and the encouragement of teammates. All of this took place at our neighborhood playground in Washington, D.C., Twin Oaks, at Fourteenth and Taylor Streets, NW. As a youngster, I would run up to the playground as soon as school was over; this became my daily ritual. Freedom! Companionship! Playfulness! They all awaited me at Twin Oaks.

  Of course, my mother realized how much all of this meant to me. So to punish me for some infraction, I was forbidden to leave the house. I can remember looking out the window of the upstairs bedroom I shared with my sister, watching my friends play outside, knowing I couldn't be with them or share in their fun. There were times when that punishment would last for weeks, and along with the pain of being confined came the fear of my mother's wrath. She wouldn't talk with me during those periods, and I didn't dare try to cross her path. Late in the afternoon, when she'd call me downstairs for dinner, she would place the meal on the table and leave the kitchen before I entered. The whole experience of her punishment left me with a terror of being left alone.