I know someone, who knows someone, who knows the Spitzers, and my source tells me that their source says the Spitzers have a sexy marriage. (Or had one). That they’re into one another, they both are sexual people.
This is an achievement. As anyone who’s been married 15, 20 years can tell you, or not tell you, it’s hard to keep the pilot light going. No one warned us about this when we got married, I assume because in the previous generation, people didn’t expect to have sex when they were in their 50s. But that was before the 1970s, the sexual revolution, my selfinvolved generation, which defines itself sexually. Sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll was a real credo. And there is a high expectation even as we get old that We Should Be Having Sex. Amazing sex, into our 50s. The culture is hypersexualized, as I observed in my last post on this issue.
Some of us fall by the wayside. There are a lot of sexless marriages out there.
I am someone who defines himself sexually. I have a handful of very close guy friends who I can talk about sex with, and my impression is that there are a good number of people like me out there: guys (and women too–though I don’t talk about this stuff with women, beside my wife) for whom sex is a core matter, guys who would feel lesser, or not whole, if they weren’t having sex regularly. The day may come when I don’t have regular sex and have to redefine myself, and I am frightened by the prospect. And this is true for other friends of mine.
Again I say, this is a difficult thing to achieve, a sexual life in your late 40s, early 50s. There are a lot of hazards. There’s parenthood (one guy I know said he didn’t feel the same about his wife after he’d seen a baby come out of there); there’s midlife depression; there’s menopause; there’s the general drift of domestic values (one friend once told me that foodies, people who put a lot of energy into cuisine, say buying the perfect pancetta to make the perfect sauce for their handmade pasta, weren’t having sex). There are marriages of convenience. Or marriages that were never that sexual to begin with, maybe on one person’s part, not the other.
I’m not a sex therapist (though god knows I talked about these issues in therapy when I was in it), but it’s my feeling that to maintain sex in a marriage you have to be a sexual person. You have to bank the fire and maintain it, don’t let it go out. Talk dirty, buy sexy lingerie, rough stuff, whatever. Look after your body. One thing I know is that you have to keep your fantasy life alive, which is to say, you have to maintain the belief that you are sexually attractive, which means not just sexually attractive to your wife, but to the world of women. This is dangerous. The hazards include divorce, sexual addiction, infidelity. Drawing the line here is a hard thing, but I would maintain that it is an essential task if you’re going to keep your marriage sexual.
Gay guys I know don’t seem to have a problem with jumping the fence now and then, and not informing their partner, of course. I think they say it’s worth it because the guy is staying sexual, and you need the partners to believe they’re players if you’re going to keep the home life going. Of course, they’re both guys, so they don’t have to go through the difficult translation of trying to explain their sexuality to the other. It’s harder between a man and a woman, who are from Mars and Venus.
There’s a point coming. If it is true that the Spitzers had a sexual marriage, one reason they did is that Eliot Spitzer continued to regard himself as sexy at age 48, with that lantern jaw and big bald head. And maybe one way he did so is in the way that is now so famous and shameful. Legalize it.
