girl interrupted - future sex

To declare that I would organize my sexuality around the principle of free love seemed at times like a pointless statement. I was unsure a declaration of pursuit had any effect on lived experience. Just as wanting to fall in love did not manifest love, proclaiming myself “sexually free” would not liberate me from inhibition. A life lived with the goal of having a wide range of non-exclusive erotic friendships would still have long stretches of monogamy. I would still have to respect the preferences of my sexual partners. I could not override feelings with a claim to freedom. I knew, however, that naming sexual freedom as an ideal put the story I told myself about my life in greater alignment with the choices I had already made. It offered continuity between my past and the future. It gave value to experiences that I had viewed with frustration or regret. Without such a declaration of purpose we were living a double standard. We could talk about coregasms, but we believed in the nobility of abstinence. We wanted gender equality, but we wanted the man to pick up the check. We wanted babies, but we thought we needed to get married to have them. These contradictions resulted in a greater duplicity, where what was good or bad in sex was not about the sex at all, but rather where the sex would land us in the social order. I had disliked my freedom because I didn’t want to see myself landing on the outside of normal.

I had always preferred success through recognized channels: getting good grades, going to the right college. I experienced satisfaction in obeying rules, and I had greater affirmation from my family when we acted as if I hadn’t chosen to be alone, when we spoke as if I was simply waiting (maybe for decades) for the right person to come along. It was easier to see my circumstances as the result of unluckiness, rather than deliberate sabotage from a willful declaration not to pursue lifelong partnership. And then there was always the possibility that I was just an undesirable woman trying to cast a more flattering light on my circumstances, or that I was naive and would learn another lesson about the pursuit of sexual freedom being emotionally destructive. I began to ignore these arguments, or at least I had now absorbed a powerful lesson about resistance to change: that it manifests less by institutional imposition and more by the subtle suggestions of the people who love you.

Some people would remain committed to the institution of marriage, but I hoped that married partnership would cease to be seen as a totalizing end point and instead become something more modest, perhaps an institutional basis for shared endeavors such as raising children or making art. Open marriages had already lost stigma. Practice would make us better at the emotional management of multiple concurrent relationships. We would have more overt experience in free love, more evidence to work with. “Failed” marriages would no longer be interpreted as personal failure.

I found that I wanted all that, but mostly I wanted to live in a world with a wider range of sexual identities. I hoped the primacy and legitimacy of a single sexual model would continue to erode as it has, with increasing acceleration, in the past fifty years.