For many, sex is an addiction. And as Susan Cheever found out, giving in to the urge is like falling into an hypnotic trance. An excerpt from her new book, Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction.
Adultery is the drunk driving of sex addiction. It is possible that someone who is not an alcoholic might get behind the wheel of a car after having had a few drinks, but it is improbable. Similarly, it is possible that someone who is not a sex addict or someone who does not have addictive propensities when it comes to sex might find themselves repeatedly committing adultery, but it is quite unlikely. By committing adultery we often break more than one promise.
At a Fourth of July party I sit next to another writer in a garden on the terrace of a building on Park Avenue where mutual friends have an apartment. She’s a pretty, slender woman named Amy who I have known for a long time and who has written prize-winning books about politics and the economy. Since I am afraid to ask what she is working on, and I have a limited understanding of the federal banking system, I talk to her about what I am working on—a book about desire and addiction. I described the addictive trance, and as I do, I can see her responding. The food is served buffet style, and we have both helped ourselves to salads and are eating propped against a huge ceramic planter seated on green-and-white-striped cushions.
It felt like laughing gas or dopamine had been pumped into the car. I couldn’t keep myself from leaning over to touch him as we chatted. I imagined us in a motel room bed off the Long Island Expressway so vividly that it almost seemed to have happened.
As we eat, she tells me a story—all the while saying she can’t believe she is telling me—about sleeping with a man who was married to a close friend while the close friend was at tennis camp. She remembers that it was as if she were in a trance. She had dinner with the man and told herself that of course that was okay just to have dinner with him. He took her to a romantic, expensive restaurant and she told herself that was because they both cared about food. She wore strappy high-heeled shoes because, she told herself, she wanted her friend’s husband to feel that she wasn’t having dinner with only because of her closeness to her friend. She knew that she wouldn’t sleep with him; he was the husband of her friend, after all.
She remembers the experience vividly and she especially remembers the way it seemed to be happening to someone else. As he took her home and went upstairs to her bedroom, she felt that she was in some kind of parallel universe where the normal rules didn’t apply, some kind of dreamworld that only happened to have people in it from the real world. She remembers slipping her feet out of the shoes and then a few images. The next morning she almost thought it hadn’t happened because it was so impossible. For three weeks afterward she couldn’t stop thinking about him, but she kept herself from communicating with him in any way and the obsession passed.
Good marriages are based on a series of sexual promises being kept; adultery threatens marriage in more than one way. “The major causes of marital dissolution worldwide are those that historically caused damage to the reproductive success of one spouse by imposing reproductive costs and interfering with preferred mating strategies,” writes David Buss in The Evolution of Desire. “The most damaging events and changes are infidelity, which can reduce a husband’s confidence in paternity and can deprive a wife of some or all of a husband’s resources; infertility, which renders a couple childless; sexual withdrawal, which deprives a husband of access to a wife’s reproductive value or signals to a wife that he is channeling his resources elsewhere; a man’s failure to provide economic support, which deprives a woman of the reproductively relevant resources inherent in her initial choice of a mate; a man’s acquisition of additional wives, which diverts resources from a particular spouse; and unkindness, which signals abuse, defection, affairs, and an unwillingness or inability to engage in the formation of a cooperative alliance.”
About twenty years ago I decided to write a book about adultery. I thought I knew a lot about it from personal experience. I advertised in the New York Review of Books and New York Magazine for people who were committing adultery. I expected letters from people who felt guilty about their cheating but were sometimes powerless to stop it. I saw us as a potential band of sisters and brothers: sexual infidels who were at once ashamed and proud of their behavior and who would be joined together by their secrets. Instead I got letters from angry men and women whose spouses had cheated on them.
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Alexandra Penney is an artist, best-selling author, former editor-in-chief of Self magazine, and originator, with Evelyn Lauder, of the Pink Ribbon for breast cancer awareness. She had a one-person show at Galerie in Berlin in April and her work was shown at Miami’s Art Basel. She lives in New York, has one treasured son in Los Angeles and more amazing friends than could ever be imagined.
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Susan Cheever is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including American Bloomsbury, My Name is Bill, Note Found in a Bottle, As Good as I Could Be, Home Before Dark, and Treetops. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a director of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author’s Guild. Cheever teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the New School.
Susan Cheever is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including American Bloomsbury, My Name is Bill, Note Found in a Bottle, As Good as I Could Be, Home Before Dark, and Treetops. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a director of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author’s Guild. Cheever teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the New School.
Susan Cheever is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including American Bloomsbury, My Name is Bill, Note Found in a Bottle, As Good as I Could Be, Home Before Dark, and Treetops. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a director of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author’s Guild. Cheever teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the New School.
Susan Cheever is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including American Bloomsbury, My Name is Bill, Note Found in a Bottle, As Good as I Could Be, Home Before Dark, and Treetops. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a director of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author’s Guild. Cheever teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the New School.
Susan Cheever is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including American Bloomsbury, My Name is Bill, Note Found in a Bottle, As Good as I Could Be, Home Before Dark, and Treetops. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a director of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author’s Guild. Cheever teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the New School.
I am struck by the author's selfishness...adultery is a choice made by adults. It is a choice that says, I am more important than you, satisfaction of my desires are more important than my honor or the promises I have made to others.
It is surprising that anyone would be able to live with much less marry such a person.
This excerpt is simply unreadable. It's boring, ponderous and so self-indulgent, leaving nothing for the reader to walk away with. Is this what "Sensibility, Darling," is all about.
The ego set-up is , of course, the rhyme : "Women give sex for love,
Men give love for sex".
Nature is very good at these things.
But after so many nights with the same person, the love or the sex dims. We get tired of each other. Sex and love enter other arenas of our lives. We want more sex or love.
So we look around. Affection, Conquest, Thrill.
Addicts are the same, but they need one, or , the other, all the time. And you'll drive drunk to get it.
It's easy to judge, methinks. Harder to make an effort to understand. It's an interesting struggle and this book excerpt is a reflection of reality. Adultery is widespread and one can trace the impulse in each of us to a place and time - a sense of loss - a desire for change - a weakness - a need. We can re-balance our lives after the trough of a betrayal. All is choice.
It may sound selfish, and I wonder if the author wouldn't agree. Addicts are selfish, especially when it comes to feeding their addiction.
Still, the honesty and truth are compelling. She may be selfish, but at least she's telling it to us straight.