Archive for the 'Ex-lovers' Category

A note on Erfolgtraurigkeit, Schopenhauer, and exes (again)

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 19, 2009
in Ex-lovers and Relationships
. 15 Comments

A few months ago, I put up a long post about how we move on with and without the people from our past: The crowded “cloud of witnesses”: of ex-lovers, ex-wives, and the call to grow. This week, Amber, who introduced me to the marvelous (if somewhat cobbled together) term Erfolgtraurigkeit (sadness at another’ success) links to a New York Observer story about the frustrations of having an ex-boyfriend suddenly become a much better person after your relationship ends.

I was happy for him, but there was also a little teensy part of me that felt whatever the opposite of schadenfreude is—instead of feeling happy at someone’s misfortune, I felt resentful at someone’s good fortune. Why couldn’t he have gotten his proverbial shit together while we were dating? And, a more uncomfortable thought: Was it somehow my fault? Maybe, I realized, I had seen him as someone who had potential but just needed a little tweaking. But it was sort of annoying that he managed to do all the tweaking after we’d broken up.

It’s the Butterfly Effect: one day he’s a pot-addled caterpillar barely hanging on to his barista job, begging off brunch because he’s only got $37 in his checking account, spending his nights “playing music” (his band is going to start playing shows again really soon) and eating cheese fries, and then, six months after the breakup, he’s turned into a Monarch: lost 20 pounds, has a job as a graphic designer, his band is playing the Bowery Ballroom and he has a new girlfriend (tall, blond, wearing what appears to be the $282 Vanessa Bruno sweater you eyed longingly at Stuart & Wright) who, he casually mentions when you run into him at brunch, is the heiress to a paper clip fortune.

I like Erfolgtraurigkeit as the opposite of schadenfreude.

I wrote last November:

I don’t know if it’s always been entirely true, but I’ve always assumed that every woman with whom I shared a bed and a life liked me and wished me well. It’s not that I imagine that I am God’s gift to women; far from it. But for whatever reason, I’ve never been the sort of person who imagines that those closest to him secretly dislike him. All of my exes found flaws in me, of course, and most of the time, those infuriating flaws played a part in the end of the relationship. But though they might have been furious with me sometimes, and even said “I hate your guts” once in a while, I always figured that deep down, they wanted nothing but the best for me as I did for them. In most of these relationships, what ended up happening was that the gulf between the “real Hugo” and the “public Hugo” became obvious and eventually overwhelming. (Ask anyone who’s had the pleasure of dating and mating with someone who was habitually diagnosed with the standard “cluster b” personality disorder.) It may well be my my old character defect of narcissism rearing its ugly head, but I remain convinced that those whom I loved genuinely and deeply loved me as well, and that even after the relationships ended, their hope and their expectation that I could grow and change endured.

And so today, I do everything I can to pour all of my sexual and romantic energy towards my wife. At the same time, I know that my ability to do so is based on experience as well as grace. I am blessed to have been loved, and loved well, by many people in many ways. Whatever confidence and optimism and resilience seems apparent in my character is a consequence of having certainty that I am loved. Loved by God, first and foremost, and — increasingly — loved by myself. Loved by my wonderful family, of course, and loved too by a series of women who in one way or another tried to build a life with me. I learned from each and every one of them, or so I tend to think; the fact that most lessons had to be repeated several times doesn’t vitiate that truth. Of course, the role of these women was not to make me a better man — they had their own drives, their own motives, and their own equally important lessons to learn. But the byproduct of the love we made and the lives we shared is a series of lessons about how to live, and live well, in this brutal and beautiful world.

I haven’t asked if any of my exes experience Erfolgtraurigkeit, and I’m certainly not going to hunt them down to ask. Were one of them to inquire “Why are you sober and faithful and communicative in your marriage now, when you weren’t any of those things when you were with me?”, I would assure her that my bad behavior was never a response to anything that she did or didn’t do. Every one of my relationships taught me something new, even if the lessons learned did not result in any discernible change in my actions until long after those relationships had ended. And some of the lessons I needed to learn were repeated in a series of relationships until finally the stars aligned and I “got it”. I accept that it might be immensely frustrating to have been the very last one on the list before the “Eureka!” moment.

One of my exes whom I dated on and off for more than a year was a drug addict and an alcoholic. We alternately used together and tried to get sober together, were chronically unfaithful to each other, and couldn’t stay away each other. It was with this woman that I did drugs for the last time and took my last drink; it was with this woman that I tried to take my life — and hers — in a strange and thankfully unsuccessful suicide pact in June 1998. I haven’t seen this ex of mine since I looked over at her in the ER of a hospital where we were being treated for our overdoses. We spoke a few times in the weeks after this disastrous final evening together, but we have had no contact at all in well over a decade. I heard recently through mutual friends that this ex of mine is doing well, finally sober herself, in a relationship, living a good and interesting and productive life on the other side of the country. I was very happy to hear this, though I had and have no interest in resuming contact.

But if I am rigorously honest, there’s just a little bit of me that wants to know if our relationship, for all of its beauty and toxicity, played a role in prolonging her addiction or served (as it did in my case) as a catalyst for transformation. It’s ego, of course, that creates that hope that I was an important and ultimately positive figure in her life. But I know enough to know that not everyone has the same narrative. I tend towards a tenacious optimism as well as a fondness for the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc — and that means that I tend to have, as my linked post above makes clear, a generous slant to my memories of ex-wives and ex-lovers. It ought to be pointed out that that generosity is linked to an ease with forgiveness (ENFPs tend not to carry grudges) and, perhaps most importantly, a recognition that in relationships, I have always been a sinner (to reverse Lear) more often sinning than sinned against! The reality that others may want to blot out any recollection of “what we had” is one of which I am keenly aware. That awareness doesn’t entirely vitiate that childish and narcissistic longing to “know that I was important”.

But there is no Erfolgtraurigkeit. Rather, there is simply an acknowledgement that in the end, in the final analysis, we make sense of our past the best way we can, by making it all seem part of the plan. Many people know this famous excerpt from Joseph Campbell’s Power of Myth.

Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.

Bold emphasis mine. This is how I see my former lovers, and how — though I have no say in the matter — I would like them to see me. It’s how I see most people, really, who have come in and out of my life. And in that vision, there is surely no room for Erfolgtraurigkeit.

Of getting naked, and getting naked: of truth-telling, vulnerability, sex work, and the right to a past

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 15, 2009
in Ex-lovers, Relationships, Sex work and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 12 Comments

After yesterday’s post in the continuing series of posts on the subject of disclosing one’s sexual past to a partner, I got an email from a woman who is a regular reader and a Facebook friend. She writes:

My question comes from your “exclusivity” post. I’m wondering, if in a similar vein, how one should go about in terms of discussing such information such as having nude photographs taken, working as an exotic dancer, etc?

It’s a good question, and there are a couple of different queries buried within it. First of all, the issue of nude photos has changed enormously since the advent of the digital camera and the internet. Back in “my day”, it was difficult to get naked amateur pictures developed; many developers would simply throw away any film (including the negatives) that they judged obscene. I recall that a number of my friends, valuing their privacy, took Polaroids as a result of this longing for discretion and a permanent reminder of either nakedness or a specific sexual encounter. Today, with film more or less a thing of the past, it’s much easier to take — and more ominously, easier to send — naked photos of oneself. A couple of years ago, one of my youth group “kids”, then aged 16, took a topless photo of herself standing in front of her bathroom mirror, and e-mailed it to a boy she “thought” was her boyfriend. He shared the picture with friends, and the miracle of technology meant that half her school saw the photo. (At the time that one of my co-volunteers and I counseled her, we never realized that in some jurisdictions, this teen could have been charged with sending child pornography. She was, thankfully, never in legal trouble, but her humiliation endured.)

I don’t know what percentage of young people today take naked pictures of themselves and their friends with digital cameras. I imagine quite a few do, and that promises to delete the photos are as unreliable as similar promises about burning love letters were in the past. One waits for, oh, about 2025, when a Supreme Court nominee is forced to withdraw his or her name from consideration after nude pictures and a salacious college Myspace profile are uncovered by zealous journalists. And then, by 2045 or so, the ubiquity of these pictures and the cyber-indiscretions of the once-young will be so commonplace that this sort of thing will not be a disqualifier for high office. So, bottom line, I don’t think that the existence of amateur naked photos is going to remain a serious issue for years to come. What was once shocking will very quickly become banal, as is the way of most things.

That said, I don’t think my reader was writing about the topless photos one takes of oneself in the mirror with the trusty Canon SuperShot. She’s writing, I suspect, about whether to tell a new partner about one’s past experience of getting paid to pose nude, or to strip for money, or to do other things that would fall into the broad category of “sex work.” And that’s a much trickier question. Continue reading ‘Of getting naked, and getting naked: of truth-telling, vulnerability, sex work, and the right to a past’

Exclusivity, not rarity: further thoughts on the “number” and the richness bequeathed by a “past”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 14, 2009
in Ex-lovers, Faith, Marriage, Sexual ethics and transformation and Sexuality
. 41 Comments

In July 2005, I wrote a long post entitled “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the Right to a Private History”. I wrote about dealing with one’s own — and one’s partner’s — sexual past in a relationship, and the importance of not allowing one’s consciousness to obsess on what one’s current lover has or hasn’t done. I took an especially strong tack against the habit, common among the insecure and the young (particularly, but not exclusively males) of nagging to be told “the number” of previous partners. I wrote:

On the subject of one’s sexual past, I’ve become a great believer that no one should ever ask — or answer — the question “So, how many people have you slept with?” (Let me clarify: I don’t mean one shouldn’t tell one’s good friends — just not one’s partner.) Answering a request to reveal one’s number rarely turns out well, especially for women. For more conservative (and insecure) men, any number higher than “zero” will be too high; whether it’s five or fifty or five hundred, she may pay a high price for answering truthfully! To be fair, some women are also going to be unnerved by what they may regard as an “inappropriately high” number. The only rational response to such a query from a current or prospective partner is a gentle, loving “Tell me why you really want to know, and tell me what you’re going to do with this information once you have it.

I stand by those words today. I wrote in 2005 from the perspective of a man about to be married to his fourth wife, a man with a colorful history and a penchant for frankness who has (nota bene) never come close to disclosing his number on this blog, a site on which he discloses so much else. And I honestly have no idea where my wife’s number stands. And I thought again about that post, and about this topic, because of a comment Antigone made below Monday’s post on kissing:

There is nothing that I’ve done with my husband that I haven’t done with someone else. I don’t have anything that is “For One Person Only”; and yet, I don’t feel like my intimacy with him is lacking in any way.

I think we cross-over too many ideals from property, including rarity makes something more valuable.

That resonated with me yesterday, and got me thinking about the distinction between “rarity” and “exclusivity”. Like most feminists, I’m disgusted by the way in which the abstinence movement employs images of chewed gum or wilted roses to describe a woman with sexual experience. I’m infuriated by the tactic — employed by my fellow Christians who ought to know their New Testament better — of “slut-shaming” by suggesting that a girl or a woman (much less often a man) who has had pre-marital sex has lost her value. We are not cars; we don’t depreciate when driven off the lot. But these tactics work to create anxiety and shame in many young (and not-so-young) people. And these tactics are based on, as Antigone suggests, the misuse of the property model, a model that suggests that the less often something has been handled or used, the more “rarely” it has been seen or touched, the more valuable it is. We no longer treat women as legal property of their husbands, but we do employ property-based thinking when it comes to sex. Continue reading ‘Exclusivity, not rarity: further thoughts on the “number” and the richness bequeathed by a “past”’

The crowded “cloud of witnesses”: of ex-lovers, ex-wives, and the call to grow

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 10, 2008
in Divorce, Ex-lovers, Favorite Posts 2008, Marriage, Memories, Relationships and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 10 Comments

After ten days of “all election, all the time” posting, I’m ready for something different.

I’ve got a remarkable number of friends going through divorces or break-ups right now. And a week or so ago, one of those friends asked me a question I often get: “How did you survive three divorces?” The question is usually half-facetious, half-serious. I have the quick and facetious answer down pat: “I’m the King of Starting Over”, something I’ve blogged about in the past. I know better than most how to move out of a shared space and begin a new life with rented furniture! Three divorces before my 36th birthday (still, and one hopes always, a standing family record) have given me a great many interesting stories about “new beginnings”.

But last week, my friend asked me a question I get far more rarely: “How, Hugo, do you deal with having been in love with so many women? Where do they all ‘go’ in your head and your heart?” My friend is an evangelical cradle Christian; his soon-to-be-ex wife was his first love and his first lover. He can’t imagine ever being as intimate with anyone in the future as he was with her. He’s worried that memories of his first marriage, and his first romance, will haunt any future relationship. He repeated his question: “Where do all these past lovers ‘go’?”

There’s a great line in Jane Hamilton’s otherwise over-wrought A Map of the World (which was turned into an underrated Sigourney Weaver/David Strathairn film). I don’t have the book or the movie handy, so I’ll quote it as I remember. Near the end, the lead character (who has gone through unspeakable tragedy piled on unspeakable tragedy) says of her past loves: “They’re always with you, just not consciously. They’re right beneath the eyelids.” I may be misquoting the line, but the point is reasonably clear: the past is something you heal from, something you get over, but also something you carry with you. And the lovers and exes whose bodies you knew and whose lives you shared are gone — and in some sense, need to be gone — but their influence on your own life continues.

One of the Apostle’s loveliest images is of a “cloud of witnesses” urging us on. Whatever St. Paul meant, I’ve long cherished the idea that I am watched over, and perhaps in some sense even protected, by those who have gone before. I think of my father, my grandparents, and countless other friends and relatives who have “gone to join the great majority” on the other side. As a Christian, I believe not only in a life to come but also in the promise of being reunited with deceased loved ones. I also believe, based on Scripture and on hope, that I am watched over and cared for by these witnesses. I’m not practicing some sort of ancestor worship, never fear — but though my great hope is in Jesus, my quiet comfort is also in the presence of those who cheer me on. (I know this isn’t a comforting image for everyone. I had a friend who was raised with the belief that the dead could see you, and she grew up with a genuine phobia about going to the toilet, worried that dead people were going to watch her poop.)

In any case, I don’t just apply the “cloud of witnesses” image to the dead. Continue reading ‘The crowded “cloud of witnesses”: of ex-lovers, ex-wives, and the call to grow’

Revisiting the question of the “number”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 10, 2007
in Ex-lovers, Feminism, Marriage, Men and Masculinity and Sexuality
. 7 Comments

Have I been posting too much this week? I’ve been a bit on the prolific side. Perhaps quality is suffering as a result…

Jill and Jessica posted a little card with a graph (click on their names to see what I mean) that nicely illustrates the ancient double-standard about “studs”, “sluts” and the number of sexual partners it takes each sex to earn those very different labels.

In various ways, I’ve written about how we think about our sexual pasts. See here, for example, or here, or here. (Read them all, you might see a chronological evolution in my thinking.)

I’ve mentioned this before, but I have dear friends of both sexes whose sexual experience is enormously varied. I have two male buddies, both dear to me, who have each had but one partner: the woman to whom they are now married. I have two other buddies, also dear to me, whose “numbers” are reliably well into the triple digits. (One, who has finally settled down into happy monogamy, knows his exact number, and shares it so often I am tempted to greet him with “What’s up, Mr. 119?” The other friend has at least three times that many, and has long since lost count. He, unlike most of the rest of us who are committed these days, is still out there working his shtick. His number climbs inexorably higher.)

I have no intention of disclosing my number here. It’s obviously more than 1, and it’s less than my buddy’s 119, and I’m not going to so much as hint at where it stands. (I am happy to say it hasn’t moved in many years, and Lord willing, it never will.) I will say that I see no evidence that my straight, heterosexual friends who have an exhaustive catalogue of experience with different women have learned much about relationships or love as a result; I can say that my friends who have had rich and varied experiences with the same woman have taught me far more about how to be a loving husband. That doesn’t mean that an abundance of experience is automatically an impediment to intimacy, mind you! It just means that an abundance of experience doesn’t automatically lead to wisdom or sensitivity, either!

I only post today because I have a few folks in my life — of both sexes — who have told me recently that they wish that their number was higher. They daydream, from time to time, about what it would have been like to take more risks and more chances when they were younger and single. And I have other friends, again of both sexes, who still struggle with some shame around their number (dear Mr. 119 is not among them), wishing that it were lower, wishing that they could have some “do-overs” that would reduce the overall sum. I am happy to say that I am in neither camp.

Two categories of folks earn my rebuke. First those, like one of my friends above, who view their ever-growing number with pride. I don’t need my strong Christian faith to tell me that using other human beings to boost one’s ego is adolescent at best, pathetically narcissistic at worst.

Second, I have little patience with those who cling to the nasty, archaic slut/stud dichotomy, and use a woman’s “number” to try to shame her. One clear sign that a boy has failed to develop into a man: an obsessive focus on his girlfriend’s past lovers. Probing questions, pleas for reassurance, passive-aggressive displays of judgment and anxiety — these are indefensible. To quote myself:

A true lover can say, “Before there was an ‘us’, there was a ‘you’ and a ‘me’, and I will never use what you did in the past against you. I honor your right to have lived the life you chose to live before we were together, and I ask that you honor my right to my past as well.” True love focuses on the joy of the present and a shared commitment to the future; it seldom dwells on the past.

…from a spiritual standpoint, there’s a huge difference between holding oneself to a high standard and expecting that same standard from everyone else. A good Christian might well desire to be a virgin on his or her wedding night; it doesn’t follow that a good Christian has a right to demand that his or her spouse have an equally low level of sexual experience.

“I have no idea what she was thinking”: a long follow-up on wild oats and how we construct our narratives of the past

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 29, 2006
in Blogging, Ex-lovers, Marriage and Sexuality
. 8 Comments

There are many excellent comments below yesterday’s post about "wild oats".  I’ll respond to more of them in the days and weeks to come, time permitting, but want to focus this post on those commenters who were troubled by the lack of analysis I provided of one particular anecdote.  Alice wrote:

In discussing your post-30 wild oats days, you said that you’d told a woman you were with that you’d have to stop because you wanted to be a father. Describing her response, you said "[t]he gal took a step back as if I had slapped her. Her eyes welled up, and she stared into the distance. She shuddered once, and then looked back at me with a firm gaze …"

I know that this post (and this blog) are about your life and your thoughts, but I was expecting more exploration of her reaction - that’s a pretty evocative description, and the lack of any further discussion seems very abrupt and dismissive.

I know that my response to this is heavily influenced by my own experiences (female friends feeling that they don’t have a ‘right’ to be a parent because they don’t fit into the monogamous model, feeling that my parents’ marriage was threatened by my father’s possibly infidelity, etc.). I freely admit that her reaction intrigued me, and so there’s a bit of pure curiosity that’s driving my interest.

However, I really was (and am) surprised that you wouldn’t at least explore her reaction a bit more, or acknowledge that you weren’t exploring it. You recognize that she had a powerful response, but don’t seem to recognize her as a person here, just as someone/something that had an effect on you. It struck me as uncharacteristically dismissive, and I think that’s what’s been nagging at me.

I wasn’t expecting your discussion to center so exclusively on the male perspective, since you started out talking about the effect of the wild oats theory on women. I know that you can’t explore *every* aspect of a theory, but this exclusion felt wrong to me, because it evokes so many narratives where women are simply acted upon, and their responses ignored. That’s definitely not the norm here, which is what makes it so striking in this instance.

Alice has me thinking.  I write about my past frequently, usually in order to make a specific point about faith or personal transformation or grace or male feminism.  Three ex-wives get mentioned periodically, and when necessary for the post (as here), I make allusions to periods of promiscuity.  Of course, the voices and opinions of the figures from my past don’t appear on this blog.  I describe and lament my innumerable shortcomings and petty cruelties, but the perspective is mine alone.  This is part of blogging, of course, and really of writing of any kind: the narrator constructs the narrative as he or she sees fit, and the various players in one’s past get reduced to numbers, anecdotes, and ciphers.  It’s not fair, of course, but it’s inherent in the writing process.

I also am conscious of the feelings of my family, friends, and wife.  This is a very public eponymous blog.  Many of my students read it.  My mother reads it.  My siblings read it.  And my wife reads it.  My wife’s co-workers read it.  Our Pilates instructor reads it.  A large and growing readership is lovely, but it imposes a tremendous responsibility on me, particularly to balance the need to "tell the truth" and the need to honor my current commitments.  My wife knows my past; she trusts my transformation and my conversion.  She knows I am not who I once was.  And she understands that blogging about my past is part of making a larger point about grace and conversion.  But there are only so many details of that past which I am willing to make public, largely because I owe it to my loved ones to spare them the visual images that a more explicit and accurate narrative would conjure up. 

This is part of the reason why I rushed so quickly through the story about the young woman with whom I had that pre-dawn, post-oats-sowing conversation that Alice quoted.  Why provide more details than necessary about her?  But as Alice makes clear, by only considering the impact that this woman’s reaction had on me, I did something classically male: I recounted a narrative in which a woman functioned only as a prop.   Years later, I’ve never forgotten how her reaction made me feel, but I haven’t expended much energy on considering the reasons why she behaved the way she did.  It’s a kind of masculine narcissism to which I was — am — particularly prone.  I appreciate Alice calling me on it.

I know a couple of women whose life patterns were similar to my own.   I’ve got some female friends today who are adult converts, who prior to "comin’ to Jesus" went through multiple marriages or prolonged periods of promiscuity.   Like me, they aren’t filled with shame at their past, but they don’t gleefully relive it either.  Of course, as women, they’ve had years and years of being called "sluts" and "whores" — terms that were only occasionally applied to me, and then usually in (mildly reproachful, or envious) jest.  The "reformed sinner" narrative is an old and familiar one in Christianity, and it includes great figures of both sexes.  But culturally, turning from a life of promiscuity/wildness to a life of monogamy (and parenthood) may be perceived differently for men and women.  Some of my female friends, now well into their thirties or forties, still struggle with their own internal feelings of shame, feelings less rooted in their actual behavior than in cultural double-standards and our national penchant for "slut-shaming."

It makes me wonder — if I were a woman blogger who wrote about her past in the same way as I do here, would the reactions be the same?  No one calls me a "slut", after all.  The worst I get called is "self-congratulatory", which is hardly at the same level of insult!  My past, in whatever degree of detail I choose to relate it, becomes an asset for me.  It gives me a certain credibility on specific issues (like male transformation).  Would a woman benefit as equally?  If a female professor wrote about her past in the same way, would she not take greater professional and personal risks?  I wonder.

I still haven’t answered the question as to what the woman to whom I confessed that I would "have to stop doing this" was really thinking.  I know that she and I shared similar lifestyles at similar ages; like me, she was (at that time) no stranger to "oat-sowing."  I can’t tell her story, though, not through lack of interest or concern, but through lack of knowledge.   I don’t know where she is today, or whether her life has changed.  Late in the last century, she and I spent a few hours together, the actual details of which are blessedly all but forgotten.  (Part of living a radically monogamous life is being intentional about "erasing the mental videotapes" of all prior experiences.  That’s a future blogpost, actually.)

All that I recall, all that stays with me, is the intensity and passion of her reaction when we said goodbye at her car.  And it’s haunted and challenged me for many years.

Thoughts on closing a different kind of door

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 17, 2005
in Ex-lovers, Marriage, Sexual ethics and transformation and Youth ministry
. 16 Comments

Lynn Gazis-Sax has a terrific post up today: Where Do You Draw the Line? It begins:

There’s someone with whom you’re sure you should not be having sex. Maybe because you’re married to someone else. Maybe because he or she is. Maybe because you’re taken a lifelong vow of celibacy, or because that person is not quite legal, or maybe you’re waiting till marriage, or maybe you’re just waiting till the third date. Maybe the person is attractive to you, and you’re trying to manage your attraction. Maybe the person isn’t the least bit attractive to you, but others might suspect you if you do the wrong thing, and you’re trying to manage your reputation. Whatever the reason, if you seriously want to be clear that you’re not going to have sex, there are probably a bunch of things, short of sex, that you’re also not doing. Where do you draw the line?

Lynn then considers the various possible responses to the question, and considers the boundaries in her own marriage, as well as what the implications are for her, as an openly bisexual (though monogamous) woman.  Read her whole post.

I’ve become fairly rigid about my boundaries in recent years, largely because in my past I got into so much trouble for not being so.  In my youth, I had plenty of "platonic" friendships with women that sizzled with barely unexpressed sexual tension.  I figured that infidelity was an action, not a thought or a desire; I allowed myself to indulge in the narcissistic pleasure of these non-sexual (but tense) friendships for years.  Another thing I did to harm all three of my previous wives was to maintain strong, ultimately inappropriate friendships with exes and other women with whom I had a "past."  At the time,  I thought I was demonstrating my maturity and sophistication by continuing to have warm, friendly, non-sexual relationships with ex-girlfriends and lovers.  At one party my third wife and I threw many years ago, I calculated that she had two ex-boyfriends/lovers and I had four ex-girlfriends/lovers in attendance.  That gave me a bit of a puerile thrill at the time, I’m rather embarrassed to say.  It’s not something that I would ever let happen now.

I’m not uncivil to the women from my past, but in the last few years have realized the wisdom of "letting the past be the past." Unless there are children involved, I don’t think it’s a healthy idea to maintain close friendships with one’s exes.  Somehow, it actually seems to diminish what was shared.  To transition from passion to non-sexual friendship seems to dishonor the intense relationship that did exist in the past.  Furthermore, I’ve come to realize that it’s my job, as a boyfriend, fiancee (and soon, a husband) to make sure that my beloved feels honored and cherished both by my actions and by the appearance of my actions.   A few years ago, a friend suggested that when with a woman who wasn’t the one to whom I was committed, I ought to imagine that my gal could see and hear everything I said and did.  (This includes, he said, e-mail and instant messaging.)  If I could be honestly certain that she would be untroubled by my behavior, fine.  If I wouldn’t want her to witness what I — or another woman –was doing or saying, then that was a good signal to cool it.  At the time, that sounded terribly restrictive; in the last couple of years I’ve grown to accept that as a wise and helpful tool.  To this day, I periodically imagine my fiancee seeing and hearing  and reading everything I do and write and say; it helps me avoid inadvertently crossing a line I ought not cross.

Do I recommend internalizing an "omniscient partner" in order to set good boundaries?  Not for everyone.  Frankly, my caution is based on my own recklessness in the past.  Plenty of folks I know have been able to practice good healthy common sense around issues of fidelity and attraction for years and years.  Different folks will have different comfort levels, and some will be able to have a much less restrictive policy.

On a related topic:  at a professional level, I meet with my students of both sexes behind closed doors.  (My office opens on to a very noisy hallway; if I even have the door ajar, I can’t hear myself think).   I don’t meet with teenage girls in my youth group behind closed doors, except in those rare instances when they approach me for a private discussion.  At those times, I often go into our youth minister’s office.  It’s got glass walls, happily enough (every youth pastor needs ‘em); folks can see in and out but can’t hear what’s being said.  That enables me to strike a safe and helpful balance.  I wouldn’t mind glass doors on my office at school, either, as long as what was said could be kept private.  But given that we can’t even seismically retrofit my office building (erected in 1937 by the WPA), I’m not holding out hope for chic transparent doors!

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” and the right to a private history

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 26, 2005
in Ex-lovers, Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Sexuality and Teaching
. 61 Comments

Regarding the David Allen appointment, I’m quoted in this morning’s Scott Jaschik piece at InsideHigherEd.  I’ve got more thoughts about men teaching women’s studies (and, in my case, a straight man teaching lesbian and gay history), but that will have to wait.

Complete shift of topic:

I heard from a former student the other day wanting a bit of advice.   Her boyfriend recently left her, ending a two-year relationship.  The reason?  He couldn’t "handle" her sexual past.  When they started dating, he was a virgin, while she had had a modest number of sexual partners (she didn’t specify a number to me.)  Their relationship had been going along swimmingly until that fateful day when he chose to ask her "So, how many men have you slept with?"  She chose to answer truthfully, and things were never the same.  For the remaining months of their relationship, he alternated between pestering her for details of her past, and calling her a "slut".  (Why she put up with such demeaning and inappropriate behavior is another topic altogether.)  Finally, unable to cope with the truth of the disparity in their experiences, he dumped her.  She was devastated.

Over the years, I’ve thought quite a bit about the phenomenon of sexual jealousy.  I respect its power.  Without any verifiable evidence, however, I have my own theory on the subject of men’s obsession with women’s purity.  It’s hardly an original one, but here goes: men are terrified of two things, I think.  One (and this is probably a hold-over from our ancestors),  men are scared that if women are not virgins on their wedding night and faithful ever after, they will be unable to know with certainty if they are really the fathers of their own children.  In a world withoud DNA testing, fathers have precious little assurance that their children are really theirs.  (Of course, they could simply trust their wives, but that would involve making one’s emotional wellbeing dependent on a woman!)  The "double-standard" thus serves to protect men from the awful, nagging doubt that a child is not their own.

Male sexual anxiety seems to play a part as well.   I’ve heard from many, many women whose boyfriends or husbands seemed stunningly preoccupied with comparisons.   After all, the more lovers a woman has had, the greater the number of other men to which a current beau can feel himself compared.   As one man put it to me bluntly, years ago, "If you marry a virgin, Hugo, you’ll be guaranteed to be the best f@*k she’s ever had."    Charming, huh?  Nothing seems to threaten an insecure man like the possibility of being found "less than" compared to other males.  Female purity, therefore, seems to be an effective tool for safeguarding the male ego.

This latter theory plays well with what I’ve written about before, Michael Kimmel’s notion of homosociality.  (Homosociality is the idea that men are more concerned with winning the approval of other males than of women.  Men measure their worth according to standards set by other men, not by women).   Accordingly, many men who are in relationship with heterosexually experienced women may find themselves competing with all of her previous lovers.  Indeed, this sense of competition often seems to happen even when the woman involved is scrupulous about not making such comparisons herself.  But, if one buys into the notion of homosociality, it doesn’t matter much what the woman thinks; the man will be competing with her past lovers in his head, even if no such rivalry is taking place in hers.  After all, he isn’t really after her validation; his real goal is to prove himself "better than" those she’s been with previously.   And while some men might find that competition exhilarating (and many more women find it bewildering and exhausting), other men may find it terrifying.  And let’s face it: it’s a lot easier to call one’s girlfriend a "slut" than it is to acknowledge one’s own sexual anxieties.

On the subject of one’s sexual past, I’ve become a great believer that no one should ever ask — or answer — the question "So, how many people have you slept with?"  (Let me clarify: I don’t mean one shouldn’t tell one’s good friends — just not one’s partner.)   Answering a request to reveal one’s number rarely turns out well, especially for women.  For more conservative (and insecure) men, any number higher than "zero" will be too high; whether it’s five or fifty or five hundred, she may pay a high price for answering truthfully!  To be fair, some women are also going to be unnerved by what they may regard as an "inappropriately high" number.  The only rational response to such a query from a current or prospective partner is a gentle, loving "Tell me why you really want to know, and tell me what you’re going to do with this information once you have it." 

I recognize that we’re all curious people.  Folks like to talk about "the number"; I’ve posted on this before.  But I’m a very strong believer that we all have the right to have had a past, and to have that past without apology.  Mind you, this is not an argument against pre-marital chastity!  Those who, for spiritual reasons, choose to remain virgins until the wedding night do not deserve our scorn.  In certain instances, they may even merit our admiration.  But those who, for whatever reason, have not "waited" deserve not to be shamed by their current partners.

It is possible to have a loving, honest relationship without disclosing every detail of one’s sexual history to one’s current partner or spouse.  Indeed, I suspect it’s a sign of high maturity and self-confidence not to ask for details of one’s lover’s past!   A true lover can say, "Before there was an ‘us’, there was a ‘you’ and a ‘me’, and I will never use what you did in the past against you.  I honor your right to have lived the life you chose to live before we were together, and I ask that you honor my right to my past as well."  True love focuses on the joy of the present and a shared commitment to the future; it seldom dwells on the past.  There are times when a focus on the past matters; a history of abuse or molestation can have huge ramifications for one’s future sex life, as can certain sexually-transmitted infections.  But with those caveats, I think it’s safe to advise a policy of "Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue."

When we marry, we promise each other many things: fidelity, devotion, and a willingness to share all one has.  For many of my generation who come to the altar after years and years of "experience", we perhaps ought to give another kind of pledge: the promise to focus on the future together, not on the past.   Real love rejoices in all the things that have made one’s husband or wife who he or she is today, knowing that without those experiences he or she would be a fundamentally different person.  But despite the often overwhelming temptation to pry, I’m convinced the wisest course is to acknowledge that there are some things none of us need to know, and we can give our partners and spouses the gift of an uncondemned, unchallenged, unquestioned past.

Postscript:  I realize that I haven’t mentioned how this intersects with faith.  That’s probably another post in and of itself, but let me say this for now:  from a spiritual standpoint, there’s a huge difference between holding oneself to a high standard and expecting that same standard from everyone else.  A good Christian might well desire to be a virgin on his or her wedding night; it doesn’t follow that a good Christian has a right to demand that his or her spouse have an equally low level of sexual experience.   I know quite a few Christian couples where one partner was a virgin, and the other wasn’t.   This often happens when a "cradle Christian" marries an adult convert;  new Christian Lauren Winner writes quite honestly about this when she talks about the disparity in experience between herself and her lifelong believer husband.  Indeed, it’s a particularly Christian act of love to marry someone who has had a colorful and extensive past when one hasn’t had one oneself.  It’s even more Christian to never condemn that past, and to never allow the spectre of past lovers to haunt the marriage bed.