Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Celibacy becomes an invitation to be a better father, a better citizen of the world, and, yes, even a better husband.
Apr 16, 2003 | The last time I had sex with my wife was Dec. 17, 1998. We were in a hotel in New York; our room was like something out of a Burroughs novel (William S., not Edgar Rice), but the city below was still in the midst of the dot-com boom, the streets were nearly paralyzed with Christmas shoppers and I had never seen Manhattan so festive. We made love atop the bedspread, wanting that extra layer between us and the no doubt rancid mattress, but otherwise enjoying the erotic frisson that sex in bad lodgings always seems to have.
I am glad now that I'm able to remember the occasion so well and so happily, because when I tell you it was the last time we made love, I mean it was the last time. We have not had sex since. I have been a celibate married man since that December night in New York.
I am 45 -- a bit early, some would say, to go into conjugal retirement. In fact, in the current sexual culture abstinence anytime before, oh, say, 110, has come to be seen as a pathetic failure of will. (I await the first self-help column advising us that death needn't get in the way of a healthy sex life.) Celibacy has also been given a bad name by the scandals in the Catholic Church; surely all those sad, desperate altar-boy diddlers would quit acting out in the rectory if they were only allowed to marry. Or so goes one line of reasoning.
But anyone who thinks wedding vows are a cure for pedophilia has misplaced his copy of Krafft-Ebbing. And I'm here to tell you that celibacy is an underrated option, especially for men, and that it functions pretty much exactly as the Catholic Church has always claimed it does: By repurposing the male to something other than getting laid every 72 hours, it allows the poor sap to put his mind to more than just himself and his johnson. For some of us at least, celibacy becomes an invitation to be a better father, a better citizen of the world, and, yes, even a better husband.
Not that I was drawn willingly into my life of chastity. At one time the notion would have appalled me as it would any normal tumescent lad. My wife, Sharon, and I had enjoyed a vigorous connubial life through our 20s and well into our 30s, including those nearly de rigueur patches, beloved of sitcom writers, when we grabbed every possible moment to put sperm to egg in an effort to conceive. The results of those efforts -- now 17, 15 and 13 years of age -- had the sedative effect upon our erotic lives that children usually do, but we continued to struggle gamely and for the most part successfully for our rutting rights as animals.
In her late 30s, Sharon developed endometriosis, a condition in which tissue like that lining the uterus grows elsewhere in the body, for reasons nobody really understands. The resulting lesions can, and did, sometimes make intercourse painful for her, but we learned to be careful -- no deep penetration -- and carried on pretty much as before. Then Sharon proposed having a hysterectomy.
"You want to have a hysterectomy?" I asked her. My impression was that hysterectomies were to women as castration was to men. But yes, she did.
"It might relieve the endometriosis," she said. "And we don't want any more children, do we?"
"No. God, no."
"Well then. And it'll reduce my risk of cancer." Sharon's mother had died of ovarian cancer at the age of 42.
Naturally, I was glad to think that she might finally be rid of those two huge bugbears, or at least have her vulnerability to them significantly reduced. Secretly and stupidly, I also anticipated decade upon decade of unfettered sex ahead. No more condoms to unroll! No more periods to wait out! Free love was making a comeback!
Free love, of course, was actually slipping out the back door. Sharon went on estrogen for six months after the operation, but a prescient doctor, who wasn't about to wait around for the results of all the studies on hormone replacement therapy, told her he didn't think she should continue on it long-term. So now, at age 40, Sharon was post-menopausal. Sex only became more hazard-strewn for both of us, and, with her libido evaporated, she increasingly had little reason to want to negotiate those hazards.
She tried. But I, of course, knew she was trying, and swung between anger that our intimate life had turned into a series of mercy fucks, and abhorrence at the idea that it was also now basically coercive: If it weren't for the fact that Sharon felt she had to make love with me -- like some downtrodden peasant woman yoked to a brutish husband -- she would almost certainly forgo it entirely. The low point came when I glanced down from my own orgasmic reverie one night and saw Sharon's face twisted in pain.
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