If you are a woman in her 40s or 50s, living in an arid marriage or partnership, and are not having an affair or contemplating one, you are behaving unnaturally.
More and more women are allowing themselves to behave like my friend “A”, who, as soon as her children finished high school last year, walked away from her battle-scarred marriage, moved into her own place, commenced no-fault divorce proceedings, and joined the RSVP online dating service.
I didn’t see her for months, and when I did she looked trim and buoyant. She had a new boyfriend. “I’m behaving like an 18-year-old,” she said. She did look as if she was getting a lot of exercise. She met the new man on RSVP. She also had war stories about RSVP. One of her friends, a 60-year-old architect, received about 100 responses from women on the site.
This, by the way, is not a clarion call to infidelity. The key qualifying word in the opening paragraph is “arid”. Rather, it is a consideration of the way society treats and portrays the sensuality of older women, and why so many allow themselves to disappear into a great compromise built on habit, stability, security and obligation rather than how they really feel.
Compare [url=http://tinyurl.com/2s626f]this[/url] from the NYTimes:
[blockquote]In graduate school, when my boyfriend then — a touchy-feely, anarchist performance artist type — announced he wanted to see other people because monogamy was “a bourgeois construct,†I reluctantly went along with him for about a year, thinking that dismantling the dominant paradigm was the right, countercultural thing to do.
Mostly what it did, however, was make me paranoid about getting a sexually transmitted disease, despite our practice of safe sex. I began to imagine every woman I encountered in his circle of friends as the one who might have had sex with him just hours before.
My respect for him dwindled as I viewed his need to see other women less as a political stance than simply his sexual overdrive combined with a lack of impulse control. We eventually split up, and I looked for someone who wanted to have an old-fashioned relationship. The emotional trafficking that being “poly[amorous]†required was just too exhausting, using up energy I needed for school and two jobs. I saw no benefit, anyway: the men I broached the idea with were just freaked out by it.[/blockquote]
http://tinyurl.com/2s626f
The juicy quote of the article is:
[blockquote]What she and all these women are saying is that desire, the need for intimacy, is the authentic emotion that lies buried beneath layers of routine, obligation, fear, guilt and the dogma of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious tradition whose one common purpose has always been to constrain the sexuality and sexual freedom of women.[/blockquote]
The author is most definitely disingenuous. His second example of infidelity, he writes:
[blockquote]”D”, who is 55, has been complaining to me for years about her husband’s addiction to the remote control, which he uses to watch sport, accompanied by beer, while turning his double chin into a triple chin. Last year she went out and had an affair with a Latin lover. [b](That turned out to be a disaster, but this column is about needs, not ends.)[/b][/blockquote]
But all the other examples are of women who attain sexual nirvana by dumping their couch potato husbands. Why not discuss one of the fastest growing segments of new HIV infection, that of older women who have been taken advantage of by erectile dysfunction drug enabled sexual marauders?
Father Handy discusses the need for a new reformation to transform the Church to exist in this post modern world (as opposed to capitulation to cultural whims). The present article as well as the one cited by William Sulik certainly bolsters Father Handy’s contention.
Sheehan’s comments and rationale are sophomoric tripe.
20 year old slut is pitiful, a 50 year old one is also pathetic. Thanks be to God that the risen Christ has given us new natures. It may be my husband’s “nature†to impregnate as many females as possible to ensure his gene pool lives on. It may be my “nature†to throttle said females, toss them into a lime filled pit and fling husband’s testicles in after them. But somehow I just can’t see a court or God for that matter buying “ its only natural†as defense. Yeah try getting by Saint Peter with that line.
Nature is not nice. It is not patient. It is not kind. It is not tolerant of the weak, the lame, the young and old. But we have traded nature for love. The love of our Savior which illuminates our lives and by which we see the world. I would not abandon that trade for anything.
Mr Sheehan’s tone will be different, if he comes home early tonight to Mrs Sheehan, and finds a strange car parked in his driveway.
I do not want to live and act according to my old nature. I want to live and act according to the new nature that was given in Baptism and confirmed at Confirmation and changed in Ordination. Articles like this just go to show that our “natural” state is sinful and will destroy us and society if we are not changed. This goes for hetersexual nature as well as homosexual nature.
By my “natural” self (unchanged by God’s grace), I want to dominate my environment. I want to have more than anyone else to eat. I want to have sex with as many women as possible. I want to rule my family, friends, co-workers. I want to be in charge. I want; I want; I want. It all comes from a sense of want.
In my new nature, given by God through Jesus Christ, I do not want. I am not empty. I am filled and overflow with love and God’s grace. I now want to eat what is right for me (well, sometimes). I want to have sex with only my wife. I want to live in community, not dominate it (well, in my better moments). I do not want. I have God, what else could I desire.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
For those of us who survived–just barely–the late ’60’s and the worse ’70’s, this article has a familiar ring to it.
Although we want fidelity, does this sort of fidelity condemn people to be a part of the living dead?
John,
No. The infidelity that derives from trying to feel fulfilled by another person is what causes people to be part of the living dead.
True happiness, true fulfillment, true joy can only come from God. If we try to get happiness, fulfillment, or joy from ourselves or others, then we will be unfulfilled, unhappy and unjoyful and go in constant search to find what we can find only with God.
I am re-reading Henri Nouwen’s [u]The Return of the Prodigal Son[/u]. Here is one of the my favorite passages:
[blockquote]I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found. Why do I keep ignroing the place of true love and persist in looking for it elsewhere? What do I keep leaving home where I am called a child of God, the Beloved of my Father?[/blockquote]
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
Let’s go deeper yet.
The take-home pay in this article is that Christians need to look at how their marriages have not been fulfilling in many cases because they have absorbed feminist values within the conventional structure. In most modern boomer Christian marriages I see, those struggles take place in the context of monogamy. In other words, conventional marriage structures with unconventional internal thinking lead to martial misery.