“Are you still sexually active?” the doctor asks an older woman. Or the therapist does. Or the pharmacist. It’s rather like asking someone in her 60s, “So, do you still enjoy food?” The question, barring some disease of the taste buds, makes no sense.
It always feels to me that the person asking the question hasn’t a clue about the nature of sexuality. Like Mark Sanford, who like a teenager insists that infidelity isn’t infidelity unless there’s Penetration, these people believe that the range of emotional and physical intimacy that aren’t “acts” of sex but acts of tenderness are irrelevant to sexuality.
They’re wrong. What we call “emotional affairs” are as powerful as any that involve penetration. When I wrote my first book on this subject, I discovered that these affairs–filled with closeness and friendship and warmth (but, no, Mr. Sanford, nothing “more”)-were the most intimate of all interactions and, surprisingly, as compelling as any that had crossed the Sanford line. Conducted without the shame, guilt and even secrecy that’s attached to “cheating” on a spouse, they have a way of becoming deeply intimate…..whether or not “sex” even happens.
Observing this some time ago, my definition of “infidelity” changed. Because there, in the land of control, and of tenderness, was a discussion not of extramarital sex, but of a sexuality that defies description. So when I read today that Nancy Price Freedman, age 70, writing in the Modern Love section of The New York Times, was asked by a doctor whether she’s still “sexually active”) with her husband, I couldn’t wait to hear her reply.
“Does ‘sexually active’ necessarily suggest wild passion?” she asks. “Or does rolling over in bed and kissing my husband goodnight count?” She admits that she knows it doesn’t count, not in today’s world,where erections can last four hours and there seems to be no excuse for not enjoying endless penetration.
I say rolling over in bed and kissing her husband counts. Passion is heavenly. Sexual heat is divine. But what the women I speak with miss, when relationships end, is the warmth of that goodnight kiss. “Sexual activity” goes far beyond sex–as therapists know when they tell troubled couples to “pleasure’ each other but to refrain from actual intercourse until the comfort, the rthythm, the sense of tenderness that true sexuality provides, comes back.
We miss sex when we don’t have it, but we miss the breakfasts we cooked together and the weekend trips that we plan and the family gatherings that backfire or don’t. We miss life with a dear, kind, warm friend, a friend we’re sexually active in our own way, not necessarily the Sanford way.
