“I question everything
My focus, my figure, my sexuality
And how much it matters or why it would mean anything
…
I’ve been thinking about it every night” – Bully, “Trying”
When I moved to southwestern
Missouri, I knew that I was moving into a new cultural scene. I wasn’t worried
that it would be completely unfamiliar – I was born and raised in rural Iowa –
but I knew that I would have to reacquaint myself with some social expectations
and small talk questions that I had largely been able to sidestep during my
time in college and grad school on the east coast. I was warned that I would
get asked what church I attend, for instance, and I was ready to cheerfully out
myself as an atheist. But what I was not ready for was how often I would be
asked about my husband.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, I suppose, when someone at a party asked me what my husband did, even though I had not mentioned my husband and was not wearing a wedding ring. Nor should I have been surprised when a Walgreen’s clerk asked if I was watching the Super Bowl, and then, when I said no, followed up by asking if I’d have to put up with my husband watching it. I have, after all, been dealing with forms of this question for virtually my entire life (the “do you have a boyfriend yet”s of my teen years have seamlessly morphed into the “do you have a girlfriend yet”/“when will you get married”/“no really, why aren’t you married yet”s of my twenties and thirties).
I have known on a visceral level for as many years as strangers have been asking about my romantic life that marriage is not right for me. My sense has always been that it’s a raw deal for women, and that sense has only intensified as I get older. I remember being upset by the first weddings I went to when I was in elementary school – not only was I forced to wear girl clothes, but I hated watching fathers hand off their daughters at the altar. At the time it was the ceremonial severing of a familial connection that bothered me, but it didn’t take long for me to develop an even deeper discomfort with the affirmation of patriarchal order those ceremonies offered. Small surprise then that I have never been able to imagine my own wedding or my own children. As a kid, I would listen to my friends talk about what songs they would play when they walked down the aisle and what they wanted to name their daughters, and I would play MASH with them and dutifully try to imagine my own adult future, but I just couldn’t envision the wedding or the kids. And yet I still assumed that at some point I would want these things, and that they would naturally be part of my life.
It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that it struck me with real force, for the first time, that I could choose not to have kids. I was with someone at the time who I wanted to stay with, but I also started to realize that staying with someone didn’t have to mean marriage (these were not realizations my then partner had along with me). Feeling “no” as a possibility felt like breathing for the first time after being held underwater. The ticking clock stopped – I didn’t have to worry about convincing myself I wanted kids before my fertility diminished, and I didn’t have to get married to enter into adulthood.
The relief has never left me, but I still struggle to maintain my visceral feeling that no – to marriage, to children – is the right answer for me. Every seemingly friendly question about my husband is a reminder that my personal internal logic – the protest against organizing life around marriage that I live daily – isn’t legible to the rest of the world. The available figures people have to understand me are “unlucky in love,” “developmentally delayed,” and “closet case,” to name the least damning options. As I always do when I’m struggling, I’ve been reading to try to feel my way through the disconnect between how I identify internally and the identity I’m given by others. I re-read parts of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse this weekend and was struck by how concisely Barthes is able to pinpoint what makes the tangles of lived experience feel so knotty. A Lover’s Discourse is about many things, but mostly about a lover after love has ended. Who are they? Where do they fit? What is an adult who is not part of a couple? Barthes explains,
The world subjects every enterprise to an alternative; that of success or failure, of victory or defeat. I protest by another logic: I am simultaneously and contradictorily happy and wretched; ‘to succeed’ or ‘to fail’ have for me only contingent, provisional meanings (which doesn’t keep my sufferings and my desires from being violent); what inspires me, secretly and stubbornly, is not a tactic: I accept and I affirm, beyond truth and falsehood, beyond success and failure; I have withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance … Flouted in my enterprise (as it happens), I emerge from it neither victor nor vanquished: I am tragic.
(Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?)
I am a failure in the eyes of the world, tragic not in Barthes’ sense, but tragic as a cautionary tale of what happens when you don’t commit yourself to adult life as we insist it must be lived – with a monogamous partner, raising children. But I protest by another logic. I feel my other logic strongly and am committed to it the way most people are committed to the ideal of long-term monogamous coupledom. This doesn’t mean that commitment is easy to maintain in the face of a world that wants to know, “What does your husband do?”
***
I have a pattern of choosing to be with people who I know are, in some fundamental way, wrong for me, because I then always know that, whatever happens, marriage will not be a possibility we will have to confront. I do this fairly consciously most of the time. And I still find myself angry and hurt when those relationships end. This is partly just being human – knowing a relationship is going to end doesn’t preclude the development of real feelings and of real attachment. But these feelings of anger when relationships end also come from the unshakeable sense that you win or you lose, in love as in life, and that I have set myself up to lose in both. When such a relationship ended a few years back, I shocked myself (and my ex) by how mad I was at the other person, as if they had failed me by being exactly what I wanted them to be. The more I thought about where my anger was coming from, the more I realized that I was upset because I knew this person would get married pretty much immediately once we were over (they did), and I was angry about their ability to step into the role expected of them, without sacrifice or trouble or doubt. I was angry even though they were stepping into a role they truly wanted and that I truly didn’t.
This is the lure and the trap of coupledom Barthes so perfectly describes:
How is it that the sistemati around me can inspire me with envy? From what, seeing them, am I excluded? Certainly not from a ‘dream,’ an ‘idyll,’ a ‘union’: there are too many complaints from the ‘pigeonholed’ about their system, and the dream of union forms another figure. No, what I fantasize in the system is quite modest (a fantasy all the more paradoxical in that it has no particular vividness): I want, I desire, quite simply, a structure … Of course there is not a happiness of structure; but every structure is habitable, indeed that may be its best definition. I can perfectly well inhabit what does not make me happy; I can simultaneously complain and endure; I can reject the meaning of the structure I submit to and traverse without displeasure certain of its everyday portions (habits, minor satisfactions, little securities, endurable things, temporary tensions); and I can even have a perverse liking for this behavior of the system (which makes it, in fact, habitable): Daniel Stylites lived quite well on top of his pillar: he had made it (though a difficult thing) into a structure.
I don’t want the structures available to me, but I want to be legible within those structures. This is a larger and more impossible desire than it might appear.
***
A few years ago, after much too much scotch, a few friends and I found ourselves in an intense argument about sexuality and privilege, among other things. At some point, exasperated, one friend responded to another, who had been referring to himself as a straight man frequently throughout the night, “What does it mean to you to be straight? Why is that identity important to you?” I don’t think I’ve really stopped thinking about that question since that night. The world usually (not always) takes me to be a straight woman. In the coarsest sense, I suppose I am – my sexual desires usually involve male-bodied people. If I try to quantify my sexuality, I can calculate that 92.5% of the people I’ve had sexual encounters with have been male. If I try to think about it historically, it’s blurrier – at certain times the configurations of acts and bodies I have enjoyed have been illegal in parts of this country (anti-miscegenation laws, broad-ranging anti-sodomy laws…). Does that make these acts straight or queer? Is straightness always on the side of law and order? What is the difference between the way I was straight when I was 16 and 21 and 28, and the way I will or won’t be straight when I’m 50 or 68 or 73? Can my sex life be straight and my romantic life be queer, in the sense of opposed to heteronormative structures?
What does it mean if I claim to be straight, and what does it mean if I refuse to claim it?
Identity is of course always about power relations, and it matters that, if I could somehow force my erotic and domestic desires to coincide, if I could bring myself to want the state to be involved in my legal identity as it relates to who I have promised to sleep with (and to not sleep with), I have always been able to marry most of my former sexual partners. That’s important. But so is the fact that I am unable to want that, and that my sexual orientation means I am supposed to want that, according to all those nice folks asking me about my husband.
***
Barthes describes the person who isn’t pigeonholed, who is not taken up by the system, as the child who loses a game of musical chairs: “the clumsiest, the least brutal, or the unluckiest … remained standing, stupid, de trop: the lover.” De trop – too much, excessive, superfluous, without a place, unable to be contained. I want to be legible as de trop, not as femme manquée. This was one of many reasons why, when I stumbled upon a review of Emily Witt’s Future Sex, about a thirty-something single woman exploring the cultural obsession with organizing all aspects of life around marriage and potential alternatives to that model, I ordered a copy immediately.
Witt and I are roughly the same age and went through breakups while staring down the barrel of 30, when your failure to get married starts to become either suspect or tragic, and so I found myself identifying with many experiences in Witt’s account (giiirrrlll, the chapter on dating sites and apps…). But I was sad to find how sad Witt often recalls feeling about being de trop. Witt is essentially narrating a process of apostasy, of course, and so the sadness makes sense. As she explains,
When I turned thirty, in 2011, I still envisioned my sexual experience eventually reaching a terminus, like a monorail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center. I would disembark, find myself face-to-face with another human being, and there we would remain in our permanent station in life: the future. I had not chosen to be single but love is rare and it is frequently unreciprocated. Without love I saw no reason to form a permanent attachment to any particular place. Love determined how humans arrayed themselves in space. Because it affixed people into their long-term arrangements, those around me viewed it as an eschatological event, messianic in its totality. My friends expressed a religious belief that it would arrive for me one day, as if love were something the universe owed to each of us, which no human could escape.
Witt describes herself at this stage as “a person in the world, a person who had sexual relationships that I could not describe in language and that failed my moral ideals. Apprehensiveness set in: that this was my future.” I have felt this apprehensiveness and I understand it well, but I have also felt the possibility of that future as a non-tragic choice. The persistent reminders that single people are failures and the way so many of us internalize that message is what makes me sad – the way linear heteronormative expectations diminish, bury, and squander erotic opportunities. I prefer to live in the realm of the erotic rather than the domestic, but we don’t have a structural place for a woman who wants to sleep with men without ending the monorail ride with one of them. This is, in short, what Future Sex is about – the search for that structural place, which is quite possibly a structural impossibility.
Even if it is an impossibility, it’s a search that matters to me because I want a way to express the value of the non-teleological relationships that have made up my erotic and romantic life for the past six years – those relationships matter to me even though they don’t count as anything other than losses in our culture. The truly erotic (read: not future-oriented) encounter, which is about shared pleasure, is incredibly hard to come by in the “straight” dating world as its configured now, Tinder notwithstanding. On one side are the domestically inclined – the people who believe that starting from a place of eroticism dooms a relationship to failure – and on the other are those interested only in their own bodily pleasure, not a shared experience. It is profoundly meaningful to me when I find someone who enables me to stay in the realm of the erotic with them without expecting that it will lead us anywhere (if you have or are currently enabling this and are somehow encountering this piece of writing, I appreciate you).
What is the name for a present-oriented female sexuality? Is it straight?
***
Many of the individuals profiled in Future Sex are involved in diligent searches for the new rules and principles of sexuality that could give structure to their relationships without replicating patriarchal models; many of these individuals are also, not coincidentally, well-off Silicon Valley tech workers. I’ve spent a little time around the world of gentrified sexual exploration, and if anything, it’s less satisfying to me than the future-oriented straight world. (If I never listen to another polyamorous white man with a trust fund explain how liberated he is when he’s not working at a financial consulting business I will die happy.) It’s not just the hypocrisy of the well-to-do playing at liberation while working for oppressive institutions that turns me off; it’s the attempt to continue to codify and regulate desire, as if more or better rules could keep us from pain or disappointment or failure.
What I find myself trying to describe when I think about why the codified scenes Witt describes turn me off is nothing more nor less than the singularity of desire, which of course Barthes describes better than I ever could:
what is it in this loved body which has the vocation of a fetish for me? What perhaps incredibly tenuous portion – what accident? The way a nail is cut, a tooth broken slightly aslant, a lock of hair, a way of spreading the fingers while talking, while smoking? About all these folds of the body, I want to say that they are adorable. Adorable means: this is my desire, insofar as it is unique … Yet the more I experience the specialty of my desire, the less I can give it a name; to the precision of the target corresponds a wavering of the name; what is characteristic of desire, proper to desire, can produce only an impropriety of the utterance. Of this failure of language there remains only one trace: the word ‘adorable’ (the right translation of ‘adorable’ would be the Latin ipse: it is the self, himself, herself, in person.
There is something in a current object of desire that is located in the arms and hands but it’s not just that. I can’t describe it because it’s more like a feeling triggered by a visual cue, and neither feeling nor cue have precise names. It’s hardly even worth talking about except that it’s something I keep thinking about. It’s both banal and exceptional, universal and particular to a current configuration. But I don’t want anything aside from that feeling. What is the name for that desire?
***
I don’t want rules, but I do want representation.
There are representations of desiring women who are not destined for marriage – the party girl, the femme fatale, the Samantha. They are usually tragic figures (we all know the party girl parties to keep from crying, the femme fatale must be domesticated or die, the Samanthas of the world think they are liberated but are the most compliant subjects of capitalism). I don’t need a new language for desire; I am not, like Witt, bothered by being “a person in the world … who ha[s] sexual relationships that I [can’t always] describe in language,” probably because these relationships don’t “fai[l] my moral ideals.” But I do need a way to be read as an adult human woman who is not a failure because I’ve made and continue to make choices that aren’t based on the fantasy of a husband. Witt argues that “a straight woman who hooked up with people she met online in her search for a boyfriend was not different, in behavior, from the gay man who made a public declaration about looking for noncommittal sex,” except of course that we have names for the latter (cruising) that makes it legible as a practice, which makes the individuals engaging in the practice legible as adults making choices rather than as adults who are failing. I can count on one hand recent representations of women who have sex with people without expecting to marry one of them eventually. There is no straight cruising because we can’t escape the expectation that straight sex will eventually have a purpose.
My specific desires are singular, but I am not. Barthes:
Confronted with the other’s brilliant originality, I never feel myself to be atopos [“unclassifiable, of a ceaselessly unforeseen originality”], but rather classified (like an all-too-familiar dossier). Sometimes, though, I manage to suspend the action of the unequal images (‘If only I could be as original, as strong as the other!’); I divine that the true site of originality and strength is neither the other nor myself, but our relation itself. It is the originality of the relation which must be conquered. Most of my injuries come from the stereotype: I am obliged to make myself a lover, like everyone else: to be jealous, neglected, frustrated, like everyone else. But when the relation is original, then the stereotype is shaken, transcended, evacuated, and jealousy, for instance, has no more room in this relation without a site, without topos – without what in French we call, colloquially, ‘topo’ – without discourse.
I want to stay within the “true site of originality and strength,” the unique relation that isn’t of a type that has to have a predetermined outcome (success or failure). Can there be a structural place for the person who desires to live in that space? What does it mean to be able to represent a person whose most desired relations are without discourse?
***
Over Christmas break I was driving somewhere with a newly sober family member. We were catching up on our lives and they jokingly asked about my singledom, “My therapist says I shouldn’t date for another year. What’s your excuse?” It was a question from one de trop individual to another, borne of anxiety about where we fit and what we are if we’ve failed to become the type of adults we’re supposed to become. What I want for both of us is not to need an excuse.
At the end of Future Sex, Witt explains that her journey through various scenes of modern sexuality left her with “a heightened perception of the power the traditional story had over the sense of my standing in the world, especially when I traveled to places where the old social order was intact, where small talk began with ‘Are you married?’ or ‘Do you have children?’” I do not know that I believe in the possibility of structural change in places like these (my home), even as I fight for it. In his review of Future Sex, Dion Kagan points out that “[s]ingle women who want to encounter different models for sex and life remain a potent source of anxiety because of their tendentious relationship to the systems of labor and kinship that reproduce capitalism.” The 20th and 21st centuries have taught us nothing if not the power of capitalism, of patriarchy, of white supremacy, to force us into all the old structural relations every time we try to escape them.
For now, I would settle for a corner, to the side, where I am seen as myself – someone whose desires have exceeded rather than failed her, who exists outside of an imagined relationship with a husband who doesn’t exist.