Many Love

by Sophie Lucido Johnson

  Regardless of my fury, I failed to recognize my own patterns (sending follow-up text messages; choosing meaningful dates like going to amusement parks or for long rural bike rides; learning the names of all my hookups’ friends and family members), and so I was doomed to repeat them. After things fizzled romantically with the jazz musician, the special educator, and the punk guy, I started afresh with a vegan baker, a teacher who worked in the school garden, and a former contestant on The Biggest Loser. We had some good hookups, and then I got to know these people, too, and eventually the friendship was better than the sex and everything fizzled all over again.

  The paradoxical trouble was this: a hookup with someone you don’t really know or like that much is not, at least in my experience, terribly fulfilling. This was proved by three separate one-night stands I had with people I met while traveling across the country on a comedy tour. Two of these were with women I hooked up with at bars. The most interesting affair, though, was with a man I saw at a taco stand and followed home. (He invited me; I didn’t stalk him or anything.) He had six pianos. The sex lasted nine very boring minutes. Not knowing someone makes it difficult to articulate exactly how you want to hook up. You don’t trust the person, and you don’t think they trust you. It’s sort of exciting to see a stranger’s genitals, but after the novelty fades, there’s not much pleasure to be had.

  On the other hand, hooking up with someone you genuinely like, with whom you have shared weird jokes and sidelong public glances, is often very fulfilling. Holding out for a few dates before going all the way (whatever that may mean for you) is not necessarily conservative; it can be really hot. There’s so much to explore on the human body, and a lot of incredible pleasure to be had without any body part physically entering any other body part. Herein lay my conundrum: meaningless sex yielded very little pleasure, but meaningful sex yielded the kinds of substantial relationships I thought I wanted to avoid.

  I wanted to avoid them for all the same reasons that anyone who has just been dumped avoids them: the idea of getting hurt again is both terrifying and exhausting. Unfortunately, for many of us, there isn’t a proverbial wall we can construct to keep intimate emotions out. But I wanted to have orgasms, and one-night stands weren’t getting me there. I’m not saying they can’t work for anyone, but I do think there are other people like me who need time and practice with a partner to have truly incredible sex. So what was I supposed to do? Should I sacrifice my heart in exchange for good sex, or abandon all hope of orgasm to maintain emotional apathy?

  It struck me that maybe the trouble with love was not that it was inherently heartbreaking but that we see it inside a strict binary: either you’re in love or you aren’t. What if love was on more of a sliding scale?

  For example, when Ben and I broke up, I didn’t feel like I loved him any less, but I also no longer felt the kind of chemistry that made me want to have sex with him. Somehow I found a way to communicate that and Ben found a way to believe it, and we’ve been able to hold the word “love” between us for more than a decade. On the other hand, when Sam broke up with me, he told me he didn’t love me anymore. Years later, I wonder if that was really true. Was it that he didn’t love me anymore, or that he needed our relationship to change and he couldn’t see any way down that didn’t involve jumping off a cliff?

  Of course, this idea isn’t revolutionary, and it’s far too broad to be universal. The “casual” relationship I had with the garden teacher is a good example. We dated for almost six months. We would spend the night together and then walk to the bayou and sit on cement blocks and eat baguettes with garlic hummus and cups of fruit and talk about everything from education justice to Dave Matthews Band. (He was pro DMB, I was anti, and yet we still had good make-outs.) I loved the garden teacher but was wary of being in love with him. I worried that being in love required the kind of monogamy I wasn’t ready for. One day, we took a walk to see the irises bloom in the sculpture garden by the museum. We took turns naming the different varieties and sat on a bench under a shady tree to talk about our families. The weather was cinematic, and the garden was just empty enough to be peaceful. After the walk, he told me he was in love with me. I hugged him and kissed him like the character in the movie who’s scared of love. After the L-word had been dropped, I freaked out. We kept taking long walks, but our conversations started to focus squarely on the nature of our relationship.

  Again: I loved the garden teacher. I loved spending time with him, and I loved hooking up with him. But I started to worry that he wanted to hold hands in public. I got paranoid when I went out on dates with other people because it seemed like I might end up hurting him. The more I worried, the more I distanced myself; the more I distanced myself, the more I worried the distance would be hurtful. I didn’t want to break up with the garden teacher, because my reason would be that I thought I was going to hurt him, and that’s not a good reason to stop seeing someone—it sounds like a cop-out. But I felt that he should break up with me because he wanted a monogamous, in-love kind of relationship, something I couldn’t give him.

  Relationships get messy when two people want different things. A dangerous power dynamic can emerge if one person is more invested than the other, and ultimately, someone—or, more likely, both people—get wounded in the fray. This is definitely a flaw in my love-on-a-continuum relationship model. On the other hand, it’s a flaw in any relationship model.

  The other major flaw, of course, is time-related. I was never able to balance more than three romantic relationships at a time, and to be honest, maintaining even the three felt like I was pushing myself a little too hard. To get to know the jazz musician, the punk musician, and the special-education teacher intimately, I had to spend hours with them independently. If all I did in my life was date musicians and teachers, this would be almost manageable. However, I (like many people) had a full-time job and a separate catalog of platonic friends I wanted to prioritize. I had cats to play with and a mom to call at least once a week and chores to do. There weren’t enough hours in the day, and frequently time management was the underlying cause of a romantic relationship fizzling into a casual friendship.

  This period of casual dating, though, acted as the set of training wheels I needed to learn to ride the polyamory bicycle. While I dated around, I didn’t use the word “polyamorous,” but as I started to hear my friends use it more and more, I kept it in my lexicon as a tool I might use if I ever found myself accidentally falling head-over-heels in love again. Let me clarify: head-over-heels in love, and wanting to have sex. We really can’t talk about polyamory without talking about sex, can we?

  PART 4

  Let’s Talk about Sex

  To some, polyamory seems to be entirely about sex. You might blame (or credit) The Ethical Slut for that. Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy’s book (in its second edition) became a sort of Bible for the new polyamorists I hung out with in New Orleans. It’s a great book. Per the authors’ definition: “a slut is a person of any gender who celebrates sexuality according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you.”1 The Ethical Slut is written in the style of a guidebook—it’s meant to delve into everything you need to know when navigating the brave new world of open relationships. But this is a book that is, at its heart, almost entirely about sex. It’s about sexual adventure and the battling of sex negativity, which are important things. Polyamory isn’t necessarily all about sex—but there’s certainly a sexual element that should be discussed. Even if a polyamorous relationship is made up solely of asexual people, the absence of sex should be discussed.

  Don’t get me wrong: I loved The Ethical Slut. It fundamentally changed my life. One of the things that moved me so much when I read it was that it was written by women. I was woefully unused to seeing women write about, discuss, or even talk in passing about sex. I read The Ethical Slut almost ten years ago, and at that time, women writing about sex was a refreshing novelty. But now the happiness and intrigue has worn off, and
I feel something else entirely: I’m angry.

  That girls are taught not to talk about sex bothers me. It’s more than that: girls are taught not to enjoy sex. We learn sex as a task or a job. When Peggy Orenstein wrote Girls & Sex, she wanted to know what sex was like for girls today; what she found disturbed her: “Even in consensual encounters, much of what the girls described was painful to hear.”2 To learn a little more about her research, see the box below. Personally, I remember the first time I checked out my vagina with a hand mirror. I was seven, and I thought my vagina was totally amazing. It looked like soft, lovely fabric; I was so glad I didn’t have a horrible penis, which I knew was a fleshy extension that boys had to carry around. It wasn’t until fifth grade that I learned everyone else thought vaginas were inferior to penises. Kent Jackson said he heard they were like dead fish. It seems most girls truly believe that everyone thinks vaginas are gross—especially their boyfriends.

  More Horrifying Facts about Young Women and Sex

  • The vast majority of the girls Orenstein interviewed did not have orgasms during intimate encounters.

  • Women overwhelmingly think of fellatio as a “skill to master” and almost never as something reciprocal.

  • Girls told interviewers that they didn’t want to “subject” boys to their vaginas.

  • Girls don’t learn where their clitorises are (or, in many cases, that they even exist).

  Pleasure, as a general rule, is not something people who are growing up are supposed to know much about. Girls and boys would be equally disadvantaged here if it weren’t for the exponentially growing porn industry. Porn poses a deep quandary for me. First, I really enjoy watching porn, and (as I watch it on a near-daily basis) I’m glad it’s readily available to me anywhere there’s an Internet connection. On the other hand, pretty much every hormonal kid in the country learns what sex is supposed to look like (and more than that, what pleasure is supposed to look like) from watching porn; and porn is as comparable to actual sex as The Venetian casino in Las Vegas is to Venice, Italy. This is especially true for women and girls.

  When I was in the seventh grade and the Internet was shiny and new, someone sent a spam email to my first email address titled, “You Have to C This.” I had no knowledge of spam, or of how strangers could potentially access your email address to send you nasty computer viruses and suck money out of your bank account, or take your identity and live out a version of your life thousands of miles away from your physical being. I opened “You Have to C This” and found that it contained an attachment of a photograph, which loaded more slowly than today’s youth could possibly conceptualize. The photograph materialized in horizontal strips: the first minute you got the top of a girl’s head; five minutes later you could see to her neck; five minutes after that it became clear that she was wearing a schoolgirl’s uniform. It took a full fifteen minutes before I finally saw what I was supposed to “C”: the girl had lifted up her plaid skirt, and she was not wearing underpants. There was a thin strip of brown hair down the middle of her nether regions, in the shape of a piece of chewing gum.

  I thought the picture of the partially nude schoolgirl was, to put it simply, wonderful. I printed it out on my parents’ printer and stored it in an empty Valentine’s Day chocolate box. It didn’t take long for me to learn that you could search the Internet for all kinds of naughty pictures and stories; the schoolgirl picture was soon joined by a sixty-four-page piece of—surprise, surprise—literary erotica about Boy Meets World. The story had to do with Topanga’s being salaciously curious to the point of having sex with every other character on the show—Corey’s mom and Mr. Feeney included. I loved it so much that I felt disturbed by myself; it was as though I’d found out I had committed a grisly murder in my sleep; no one suspected me, but how could I live with myself?

  But honestly, I’d known that I had an apparently unnatural interest in sexuality before the pornographic email. When I was four years old, I pressed my palms up between my legs and rocked back and forth, fantasizing about getting spanked on the bottom by a man with a mustache. I didn’t think it was wrong until my mother told me it was—but looking back, I think she probably grappled with how to deal with this whole child-masturbation thing with a substantial amount of care. I get the sense that my mother didn’t masturbate a whole lot as a young woman, and she might not have known exactly what she was supposed to do. She told me later that she thought I was having “rocking-horse dreams,” until she got wise and told me to never do, um, “whatever it was [I was] doing” in public.

  When I developed a crush on a boy whose name I’ll protect (let’s call him Rory), my fantasies got significantly stranger, but at least I knew how to hide them. I was six. (That might sound like a very similar age to four, but when you’re six, four is ages ago.) I imagined Rory and I had both gotten arrested for some reason (we were being wrongfully convicted, but no one would listen to us). We were thought to be very dangerous, so we were handcuffed (naked) to a brick wall in a dungeon and made to stand on wooden boxes. And there, side by side, sure we were going to die, we had sex. Because I was six, I didn’t know what sex was. All I knew was that it had to do with bathing-suit parts. I didn’t imagine the sex because I couldn’t imagine it; I just thought about standing next to naked Rory, sentenced to death in a dungeon. I liked thinking about it, and I liked rocking back and forth on my palms while thinking about it, and I knew that all of it was very, very bad.

  I had orgasms. I didn’t know they were called that; there just always came a time when I was done rocking back and forth. In that moment, which came in a sudden dizzy rush, I was immediately ashamed of myself. I couldn’t believe I had just rocked back and forth on my palms and thought about dirty images. I never wanted to do it again; in fact, I almost always promised myself I wouldn’t.

  It took me until the age of twenty-two to understand that plenty of self-respecting girls masturbated. I was twenty-six before I realized that I knew how to orgasm. I read a lot of Cosmopolitan magazine, and it made such a big deal out of having an orgasm. (The most recent feature I could find in Cosmo about female orgasms quotes a woman as saying, “It was like a volcanic eruption . . . but down there”; another woman says, “It feels like melting and exploding at the same time.”3 That may be true for many women, but I was waiting for lava to come out of my vagina, and that never happened.) I assumed that I was not having “an orgasm” when I had sex because I was not having sex right. By the time I was in college, I had unlimited access to free porn videos (the Internet grew fast), and I watched them sometimes with a pencil and paper, trying to figure out how to have one of these coveted feminine explosions.

  Then one afternoon, while I was masturbating to a fine selection of literary erotica (still my favorite format, even with said access to all the videos and high-definition photos I could ever want), I read the line, “I came to completion.” It wasn’t a very poetic (or even technically correct) sentence, but when I read the word “completion,” something clicked for me. “Oh,” I thought. “Maybe an orgasm is just when I feel like I’m satisfied. Maybe it’s just when I’m done.” To have an orgasm while I was having sex, I had to move slowly and push my body against my partner’s body the way I pushed my palms against my body. It wasn’t really that hard, actually; but it was very different from the way the girls in porn videos seemed to do it.

  Considering how early to the masturbation game I had been, it’s surprising that I discovered feminist sex so late in life. It came to me in slow stages. The first time I decided that I wanted to prioritize my own orgasm during sex with a man was with Sam. I was twenty-five years old, and I had never done that before. It felt like eating an entire birthday cake on someone else’s birthday, but I went for it anyway. It wasn’t until we had been dating for two years that I felt comfortable telling him I wanted to try to have an orgasm. He was into that idea, because he was not a monster. It took an hour. There was a part in the middle when I sat on the edge of my bed and cried because I di
dn’t think I would be able to get there. But it was Saturday morning and we had nowhere to go, so we kept trying and kept trying until, finally, I went over the edge.

  And it was fucking awesome.

  That sentence—“And it was fucking awesome”—is its own paragraph because I cannot believe how long I waited to really enjoy having sex, and I’m sad about it. I’m sad that no one ever told me girls had just as much right to sexuality as boys. I wish someone had grabbed me by the shoulders and shaken me and told me sex could be amazing, but that the secret to it was not in porn or in books or in conversations with therapists. The secret to sex was to try as hard as you could to enjoy it. You should spend a lot of time with your own sex parts figuring out which buttons you like pushed and how you like them pushed. I saw sexy women having a very specific kind of sexy sex in movies and on HBO shows, but I never saw women bending awkwardly over their partners’ bodies to get a certain angle or moving slowly in the dark with closed eyes. (No, not even on Girls.)

  If I ever have a daughter and I could teach her one thing (besides “be kind” and “even if gluten allergies are real, bread is too good to not eat”), it would be this: You have just as much say over your sex life as your partner has. If you want to be done with sex, then sex is over. If you want to keep going, then you should be allowed to keep going. That the duration of a sexual experience is so often determined by the hardness of a penis is small-minded and, frankly, boring.

  Now, if only having good sex forever and ever was that easy. My first orgasm didn’t necessarily beget a whole bunch of other orgasms as I had more sex. I dated some men I found easy to talk to about sex, and with those men I had orgasms more often. I dated some men who had no interest in talking with me about sex, and they were the ones who went at the whole thing hard and fast, with gritted teeth and tensed muscles. (Sometimes, looking up at men who had sex with me like that, I found it very difficult not to laugh. They looked so silly and false, like boys pretending to be sheriffs.) I dated a few women who helped me better understand how to talk openly and honestly about sex. I was so lucky to meet women who had done this sexual legwork already; they probably didn’t realize it, but they were modeling conversations I would practice for the rest of my life.