What We Don’t Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Sex

I have never discussed my married sex life with anyone other than a doctor and my wife Debbie, with whom discussion has always been beside the point (anticlimactic was the word I wanted to use, but I didn’t.)

I don’t think our practice is unusual––I’ve always been led to believe that sex in real life should be treated as a private matter. But maybe I’m wrong, maybe there’s a great deal of sex talk going on that Debbie and I are not privy to.

I understand why single people (meaning those not in an exclusive, long term relationship) would talk about sex more frequently. Not yet being committed to a permanent sexual partner, they want to compare with friends what’s available. As well, single people retain sole agency over what they can reveal.

Maybe married people younger than us talk about sex. Or maybe within our particular slice of the Manhattan ecosystem, a ubiquitous atmosphere of money and status drives out sex talk, a sort of Gresham’s Law where sterile conversational currency drives out the more potent conversational currency of the flesh. ¹

In any case, the question remains. Are other married couples having discussions about sex that we just don’t know about? (Unintended “voice” of Carrie Bradshaw/Sex in the City)

It does seem strange that sex, a crucial part of most marriages, is something I’ve never talked about with close friends or even with my brothers. Debbie doesn’t talk about sex with her close friends either.

Perhaps one reason is that a marriage is a partnership, making sexual disclosure a joint decision subject to an implicit confidentiality agreement, violation of which would merit severe discipline (unless, however, you’re sexually into that sort of thing).

(Debbie has misgivings about this post, but has let me post it anyway) ²

What if we were at dinner with another couple and without warning or prelude they blurted out how frequently they had sex, which techniques worked best for them, and even what their hit rates of orgasms were. (Nothing like this has ever happened, and I’m not inviting it.)

I wouldn’t be offended, but I’d be flummoxed. Probably embarrassed enough that I wouldn’t be able to look anyone in the face. As for reciprocating with our own “stats,” even if I wanted to answer, I know that Debbie would immediately shut down the conversation.

The dinner might never recover from the awkwardness.

But why?

Here’s a disconnect: we’re reticent to talk about sex, yet explicit pornography is everywhere, not just on the internet (I’m told) but on nearly every premium TV show. Take the sex scenes out of Game of Thrones, and it would be so much faster to watch. (They should create that version.)

Sex with your spouse is natural, common, varied so why can’t it be fertile ground for conversation? In addition to comparing favorite binge-worthy TV series with married friends, you’d think it would be just as interesting and useful to compare sex lives.

In the absence of that sharing, we have recourse to surveys about sex like this recent one from AARP (article with a click-through to the PDF.)

The AARP survey found that having sex at least once a week drops from 44% in your forties to 25% in your sixties to 17% in your seventies (all adults, not just marrieds.)

Or there’s this study (also, a click-through) on the orgasm gap between men and women; it exists, but narrows in committed relationships vs. casual hook-ups.

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To set the lower bound on our own sex life, it’s not a secret that Debbie and I, over our forty years together, have had sex at least three times. Exhibits A, B, and C are marked in evidence as our three children.

I’m pretty certain that we conceived our first child, our daughter Lauren, when my wife accompanied me on a business trip to Los Angeles in the spring of 1987. My firm had set a $150 limit on the cost of a hotel room, and I was delighted that the Beverly Hills Hotel was willing to accommodate that budget.

Our first floor room, we later learned, had been recently converted from an actual broom closet. The attic-like slope of the ceiling and the bed taking up nearly the entirety of the room were clues. To travel from the room’s entrance to the bathroom we had to climb over the bed.

About fourteen years later, when Lauren was a young teenager, she knocked on our bedroom door while we were having sex (Our lower bound is now four times, once a decade.) We called out that we were busy, come back later.

There must have been elements in our voices that gave us away because the next thing we heard was Lauren’s exclamation of  “Omigod, gross!” accompanied by her peals of laughter and her footsteps running away from the site of the parental crime.

(Long ago, Lauren insisted that I had lost the power to embarrass her. I am now testing that proposition.)

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I’m intrigued by sex in words, i.e., reading, writing, and talking about sex. Reading sex is always safe, writing fictional sex relatively safe, writing memoir sex can be risky, talking about sex I’ve covered.

Writing fictional sex scenes is pretty safe from a personal disclosure point of view. However, atrocious writing about sex is a meme. The Literary Review gives out an annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award. The last award I could find was from 2019. Here’s one of the winners, brilliant in its badness.

“Katsuro moaned as a bulge formed beneath the material of his kimono, a bulge that Miyuki seized, kneaded, massaged, squashed and crushed. With the fondling, Katsuro’s penis and testicles became one single mound that rolled around beneath the grip of her hand. Miyuki felt as though she was manipulating a small monkey that was curling up its paws.” [from The Office of Gardens and Ponds] ³

To be fair, writing about the sexual act is difficult. And to do it well requires writerly restraint. It’s very hard to give detailed kinetic and anatomical descriptions and at the same time prevent the writing from being smutty and a candidate for the Literary Review’s shortlist.

So I appreciate writing that handles sex skillfully.

a. natasha joukovsky

’s novel Portrait Of a Mirror has two very different but artful sex scenes, one ending with intercourse, the other one set off by a brushing of hands when the amorous but chaste couple both reach for a dropped quarter in front of a jukebox.  I very much wanted the touching of hands and the looks to lead to consummation. But Natasha wisely defers the vicarious satisfaction of her readers. ⁴

Writing about sex in memoir gets riskier. But when sex is an important part of a memoir, the greater risk is to leave it out.

<Mary L. Tabor>

is serializing a memoir about her life after her husband leaves her. Sex looms large, and Mary takes the risk of writing about how sex with her husband made her feel as well as how the withholding of sex made her feel. Mary’s writing about sex is lyrical, vulnerable, and authentic. The few details she provides are not gratuitous; they are there because they are essential to her story. ⁵

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I write personal essays that often edge up to the borders of memoir. But as for my own sex life I have only this to add.

My wife and I are in our early sixties and have a strong attraction to one another. We no longer have children at home, but we do have our Shih Tzu Sophie who we treat as an adorable but ridiculously spoiled child. Sophie does not like to be left out of any activity. So when we need to be alone she can be very intrusive. If she is not properly distracted she will bark at increasing volumes at our door. Our best tactic is a peanut butter infused bone that Sophie loves to hide, find, and eat. Mostly it works.

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Question for the comments: Do you have discussions about sex with people other than your doctors and your partner?

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1. Gresham’s Law is that bad money will drive out good money so that only the bad money is left in circulation. In the late 19th century, there was fierce debate about how much silver (‘bad”) vs. gold (“good”) to coin as legal money. This debate gave rise to William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 presidential campaign speech arguing for free silver with the memorable phrase “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."

2. Debbie says. “If I have to suffer social mortification for my husband’s writing, he’ll never hear the end of it.”

3. If that passage amused you, there’s a tumultuous torrent of laugh-at-loud, bad sex writing at The Literary Review’s Bad Sex Awards.

4. Link to Natasha’s “Portrait of a Mirror.” One of my favorite novels; highly recommended.

5. Link to Mary’s (Re) Making Love: A Memoir. You can start from the beginning. I await each new chapter eagerly.