Today I was at the dentist. There’s nothing sexually stimulating about laying back in a chair with a metal prod banging against my teeth. Although in my current state, I’m half-surprised I wasn’t able to spin that situation all hot and heavy.
The hygienist asked about tension and grinding. It took me a moment to identify that question as one relating to my dental health.
Things are pretty intense right now. My back is locked up and I’ve had a headache for the last week. I’m in the process of getting divorced and I’m just now allowing myself the chance to feel the stress. (Because I can without having it vaporize me.)
Try to focus on relaxing your jaw and neck during the day. It’ll be okay. You’ll find someone.
For what, I wondered.
Bite down.
This isn’t a slam dunk, but it’s pretty safe to say that 90% of the people that find out that I am divorcing assure me that I will not be alone forever. That there is a man out there for me. When I first spun out of my marriage and into the world of the uncoupled, shell-shocked, I definitely wanted to know that there was someone walking the trails looking for me. That I would love and be loved by a man. That before I checked out of this planet I would have the opportunity to create a lasting bond with one man, leaving behind memories for those I love of a woman who enjoyed a fulfilling, committed and loyal relationship, among other life successes.
I was loved.
When I first spun out I expected that to happen straight away. I was healthy enough in my spirit, in my heart to embark on a love affair. I wasn’t in a rush, but I felt that I had dealt with enough in my marriage to be rewarded with a stable and exciting relationship. Didn’t have to happen in the third month, but there was no reason to wait until the third year.
Then I came to.
I was able to see how I possessed no desire to invest in someone emotionally in any way other than as friends. My priority was to fall in love with me, not with someone else. Mr. Jackpot and the trip to Yachats was crucial in driving home that lesson.
So here I am, a year and a half removed from co-habitating with the guy I thought was my husband, and moments away from being officially divorced, and I am less inclined than ever to engage in a relationship.
What I crave are friends and sex. (Sorry, Mom. It has to be said.)
The thought of finally being divorced is like eating an oyster doused in dark chocolate with a side of spanish fly.
This is my puberty. I’m not embarrassed to admit it.
Based on the above, I would never be accepted into the clinical trials for Lybrido, the new treatment for women dissatisfied with their sex life with Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder.
Yep. Never.
First, you have to be in a committed, long term relationship – one long enough for you to become disinterested in having a physical relationship with your partner. Apparently the ten year mark is around the time your libido goes on holiday, and not in a good way. You must lack desire. Lust. Your primal urges are more about changing diapers, or replanting the garden then wrecking the sheets. Getting horizontal is a solo endeavor. Hopefully.
Welcome to the world of disorders. Thankfully there’s a pill coming soon that will fire you back up.
But first they have to tone it down.
See, it works too well. And the scientists behind the research are afraid.
“You want your effects to be good but not too good,” Andrew Goldstein, who is conducting one such research study in Washington, tells Journalist Daniel Bergner, who wrote this killer cover story for the New York Times Magazine.
His peers are also afraid of turning lose on society a herd of female nymphomaniacs. Infidelity will skyrocket. (That didn’t stop Viagra.) Men everywhere will be on edge, feeling like prey as they are cornered by a newly cured gaggle of ‘sexually agressive women’.
His peers must share cubbies with the animators at Disney who threw Merida under the knife, oblivious to the messages sent in their moves. Viagra, good. Lybrido, bad.
What does ‘too good’ mean? Draw some comparison for me, please. If an erection of up to four hours is ‘just right’, what the hell happens to these women when they pop this pill that makes it ‘too good’?
And for God’s sake, keep it away from me. It would be like a Molotov cocktail. You might as well put the male population of Marin on lockdown.
Better extend that to the South Bay. I do drive a diesel these days.
After I steadied my breathing, dried the tears of laughter from my eyes and called out to my mates here on The Calmmune, ‘I’m okay!’, an image exploded in front of me of an intriguing little creature playing hide and seek in plain site in a frenzied world wearing a t-shirt that said:
You People Are Nuts. All you have to do is…
(This is the kind of stuff that happens to me when I’m alone for far too long at a stretch.)
The psychological disorder that afflicts enough women to make the pharmaceutical industry salivate centers on the idea that after some time women lose interest in sexual intimacy with their long term partner. Men seemingly do not suffer from this malady. Viagra is just a crane to help combat gravity. A trainer for the one part of the male body that really shouldn’t hit the free weights at the gym.
Us ladies, our issue is all upstairs.
It might be easy to be offended by that assertion, but revel in it. You’ve got a complex brain that has barely been unleashed. Be floored by all it can achieve. Spend time engaged with it. Give it pep talks, and hugs and high fives. Let it play and chill and relax. Let it be best friends with your heart.
Then, all you have to do is love yourself, be physically healthy and find your emotional and intellectual equal and make sure all of that stays that way. Or pray that the FDA approves this chemical concoction.
The drug’s inventor, Dutch psychopharmacologist Adriaan Tuiten, says he was inspired by his own heartbreak:
“Tuiten was in his mid-20s when his girlfriend, a woman he’d been in love with since he was 13, abruptly decided to leave him. “I was — flabbergasted. You can say that?” he asked me, making sure, in his choppy English, that he was using the right word. “I was shocked. I was suffering.” He was an older university student at the time; before that, he’d been a furniture maker. The breakup inspired a lifelong quest to comprehend female emotion through biochemistry and led to his career as a psychopharmacologist.”
A lifelong quest to comprehend female emotion through biochemistry. Now, I don’t fully know what biochemistry means, by choice, but wouldn’t it have been more logical to consider that she left not because she had a psych disorder but because she had emotionally and intellectually parted ways with the future psychopharmacologist? And according to studies the doctor must be privy to, we women are lust-less without a heart/mind connection. Uh-huh.
She loved him at 13. They were likely emotionally and intellectually compatible at that time. Then they grew apart. It tends to happen. A lot. Nothing to be flabbergasted about…unless one has a disorder along the lines of, say, narcissism.
While I question ‘studies’ and the absolutes they produce, it’s safe to say that we experience a high when freshly entwined with another being. When that passion cools it gives us the space (and nudge) to challenge ourselves intellectually and emotionally. For the relationship to remain healthy, the desire to expand our emotional and intellectual horizons must be shared.
And then there’s the body. I speak from deep experience when I say that if the body is not healthy it’s not going to feel like partying. If I don’t feel sexy, I don’t feel like having sex, regardless of the mental and emotional connection with my partner. Mental and emotional foreplay leads to three, two, one, booster ignition and liftoff when my body is strong enough to handle the launch.
See you in the outer atmosphere.
Popping Lybrido will only help to melt the ice, opening up the crevasse that naturally exists between men and women because we are different species. Our best bet to help our emotional and mental evolution along is to seek our psychic equals, not psychopharmacologicals. And if we aspire to move beyond sex for procreation purposes only, we’ll need to pay attention to the body.
The first question on the application to be included in the clinical trials for Librido should be, Do you love yourself?
And the last one should be, How much to enjoy throwing up?
Every little pill comes with its long list of side effects.
I’m not in a rush to find the man that makes me say, Mom, I’m going to have non-marital sex, because there is no ticking clock on having sex. We can be fit – mentally, emotionally and physically – at any age.
Fit to be…
All you have to do…
Love yourself,
Cleo
Really witty, insightful and apt article!