Seven Stages of Lesbian Desire
(What's Truth Got to Do With It?)
Renate Stendhal
As a young lesbian, I was notoriously afraid of bed death and skeptical about ever being able to escape it. Monogamy to me was a sure - fire condemnation to sexual boredom. My experience with serial monogamy taught me that desire was doomed to die a slow death. My intuition, however, told me otherwise. The notion that passion and intimacy can´t coexist had the suspicious ring of a man-made myth. I went on to question this famous incompatibility. There had to be a way to reconcile lasting love and hot sex.
Of course, there are periods in human life when monogamy seems too hard a struggle against our hormones, or seems in flagrant contradiction with the mood of a time. Such a time for me was the period of the second wave of feminism. In Paris, where I lived, the political and consciousness-raising groups, action committees and assemblies saw a daily stream of new women pouring in – every one of them a potential seductress or object of desire. Entire countries were swept by a woman-identified, woman-loving, lesbian euphoria. The erotic capacities of women seemed limitless: woman with woman, with two, three, a whole collective, a roomful of women. Obviously, in this high tide of sexual celebration, monogamy didn't stand a chance.
During my promiscuous years, I rarely admitted to myself that something was amiss. My adventures, affairs and experiments were a great sexual education, but they often turned out to be emotionally or intellectually frustrating and bogged down in jealous complications. The sexual excitement was short-lived. Was I still searching for “the right woman” – another myth? I ended up convinced that the forever sexually attractive, interesting and engaging woman of my dreams did not exist.
When I seriously fell in love again, I was – in spite of my delight – still suspicious. I moved to Berkeley, California, to be with this woman, who was also a writer and feminist, who loved French culture and German poetry. But I was determined not to stay a day longer than my sexual passion would last.
Today, twenty years later, I can say that my early intuition has been confirmed: passion and intimacy do not have to exclude each other. A lot is possible in a relationship if lovers are compatible, share important interests, like each other in a way best friends can like each other, remain attracted to and curious about each other, and, most importantly, are able to risk honesty with each other. I was surprised to realize that truthfulness about feelings and body sensations might be the key to lasting desire. Nobody had ever mentioned this to me, as far as I remember. There is a lot of talk about the value of honesty in any ethical, moral, loving relationship. But who ever thought that honesty could be erotic? That truth could be an aphrodisiac?
When I first fell in love with my American in Paris, Kim, one of our special erotic treats was eating fruit together. I remember the morning after our first love night in Paris. My apartment was composed of three tiny chambres de bonnes, maids’ rooms, on top of an old building. It overlooked a courtyard with a chestnut tree, then miles of gray slate roofs and brick-colored chimney-pots until the eye bumped against the Eiffel Tower at the horizon. I snuck out early, while Kim was still asleep, and got fresh croissants and strawberries down the street. When she woke up, I kissed and fed and fed and kissed her. I offered her a strawberry I was holding between my teeth and lips, and teased her by not letting it go when she went after it. The game of feeding, fighting, giving in piece by piece, bit by bit, and even chasing after the berry that had already disappeared in her mouth was a particular turn-on to me. It played with the best elements of seduction: offering and withholding, pursuit and evasion, aggression and surrender. The juicy sweetness of ripe fruit and tongue all mixed together was an erotic appetizer promising a feast like no other.
We repeated this game many times afterwards, with cherries, chocolates, and other morsels of food. Every time we played it, we were transported straight back to my little abode with its potted palm tree and a mattress on the floor, light streaming through an almost floor-to-ceiling window, and desire streaming through our surprised, elated bodies.
But some time down the road, the game disappeared from our menu. We quite forgot about it – at least I did – only to notice one day that it had gone missing. Now, when I tried to bring it back, together with its fond memories of our early desire, I got nowhere. Kim was not in the mood to play it any more. Something had changed. At first I was troubled, I felt rejected, dismayed. It dawned on me that there were other favorite erotic ways of communication that we had abandoned, or perhaps, that had abandoned us over time. I had to admit that my own sexual preferences were not exactly the same as they had been before: I, too, was depriving Kim of erotic treats that she had once particularly cherished and that I wasn't in the mood for any longer. Were we losing our sexual appetite? Were we getting bored with each other? Was the specter of bed death raising its scary head, once again?
I suppose all couples who have survived the stage of falling in love recognize the situation. It struck me that both of us had experienced similar “ climate changes” in our previous relationships. As a counselor, I also heard a lot from my clients about these changing erotic moods. I wrote about it in my book True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships. This is how I would describe the pattern of desire that typically shows up in a relationship:
Stage One: Falling in Love.
This stage is our major cultural reference point. We have been primed for it from the very beginning with fairytales, princes and princesses falling in love at first sight and, mysteriously, living happily ever after. Innumerable movies show us people falling in love. We see it so often that we automatically assume that love is – or should look like – falling in love. We do not fully realize that falling in love is not a normal condition. It is like a drug trip, an extreme high. We are in a “state.” The verb falling gives it away: we are swept off our feet, falling out of our usual balance. We can fall all over ourselves (fall to pieces) in this state, make a fool of ourselves, and even fall from grace. We can become obsessed with the object of our desire. Everything we do and everything our adored does is measured anxiously on the scale of: am I getting closer? Is she as attracted to me as I am to her? Or is this going to be just another friendship? We made a date: are we going to get sexual? Who will take the first step? What if the sex is disappointing? Will it ruin the whole thing? In this excited stage of uncertainty, heightened desire and anxiety, we don´t eat, we don´t sleep, we forget to water our plants, we skip school, quit our job. One could call it a benign state of insanity.
Stage Two: Honeymoon
The benign state of insanity continues. The sexual force of this stage tears open all our boundaries. Overnight, ecstasy, angst, and desire turn us into adventurers, discoverers of unknown continents of body and soul. We make love. We break out of our usual inhibitions. We suddenly like the look of our body in the mirror and are able to dance naked. We are suddenly not afraid to eat as much as we like of any food we crave. We discover we lust for oral sex. We take surprising risks, engaging in sexual games we have always only fantasized about. We soar. We are young again. We go to all-night raves, buy a tent, get our first tattoo, exchange our old VW for a jeep. We know the meaning of life – we are finally living fully, and we will never ever stop living and loving in this way, with passion.
Stage Three: Getting Familiar
We do not want to separate. We've found out about each other with the fervor of explorers and anthropologists. We find we are compatible enough to build a couple. But we still don´t know each other well. We continue to make discoveries which keep alive a feeling of sexual adventure and emotional expansion. We make life plans. We cross oceans and continents to be together. We develop shared habits, patterns, routines. We bump up against our differences, but are often willing to overlook them, sweep them under the rug, and glory in our ability to be so generous with our bodies and selves. We are in love, busily building our nest.
In this humming post-honeymoon stage of intimacy, Kim and I were not aware that we were doing much more than “playing house,” that we were building the foundation for the house-with-many-rooms that would be our relationship. Many couples, I think, take for granted what they accomplish at this early stage in terms of team-building, partnership, loving kindness to each other. They are not aware they are gathering resources that may last a lifetime if they continue to be developed. A lot of deep relational work consciously and unconsciously goes on as lovers try to integrate their sexual discoveries and the new risks they have taken. For Kim and me, the sense of closeness led to a certain degree of closing off toward the world, which is what many couples experience. There is a need for protective cocooning or merging where we give up individual space and agency for the sake of our couple-togetherness. The adventure of growing intimacy can obscure the difficulties: the fact that any newly formed couple has to contend with a radical life change, with often scary compromises, and a lot of unknowns and unanswered questions about each other.
When I look back today, I can say that I didn't realize at this stage that Kim and I were padding ourselves up against great uncertainties with a high-flying, determined vision of our future together.
Stage Four: Differentiation
The “honeymoon phase” is definitely over. We are proud of our achievement of comfort, of couple unity, especially in the company of our friends. But there are moments when we are shocked to discover that we disagree in front of our friends. The image we presented to the world – and to ourselves – shows cracks. It is suddenly apparent that we are not cut from exactly the same cloth. It also dawns on us that we are different from the way we were when we were freshly in love. We don´t feel generous any more the way we used to and, instead, struggle with competition, envy, jealousy, drawing anxious lines around what we see as “our turf,” around our boundaries and individual needs. Kim and I, for example, fell into furious fights over feminist ideals we thought we had agreed on. And underneath those ideological rifts we discovered vastly opposing views on the presence of ex-lovers in our life. This is just one typical example of what couples generally face at this stage. Our idealization of each other drops away, reminding us of the old proverb, “Familiarity breeds contempt.” Getting intimate seems to have opened a Pandora´s box. We suddenly stand there, naked, shocked at what we see. We fight the realization, and we fight each other. We fight over the gap between the promise of our honeymoon and our new disenchantment, between our expectations and our present reality. For moments, we seem to have fallen out of love completely, and our chances of staying together seem dim. We question the very nature of the relationship and wonder why we ever engaged with this person who doesn't resemble any more the one we fell in love with, the woman who seemed to be our ideal lover, “the only one.” A great and sometimes hopeless nostalgia sets in for the ways we were.
Some couples split up over the frequent discord and disenchantment of this phase. They do not realize what has happened to them, and they do not recognize its potential. Other couples outlast the turmoil because their sex life seems magically heightened by those hot-cold energies of fighting and making up. The distance that a serious fight typically creates in a couple opens up space for desire to return. I remember from these troubled times how moments of sexual bliss brought back the consolation and memory of our beginnings and reminded us of our relationship vision. But our moments of passionate anger at first seemed overwhelming to me. Coming from a family that hardly ever expressed loud sentiments, I believed anger was intolerable and would doom our relationship – until the day my therapist asked me, in an earnestly curious voice: “What´s wrong with yelling?”
Stage Five: Accommodation and Resignation.
Many couples progress from the pivotal stage four to a sneaking sense of caving in to “reality” and making do with less than they had hoped for. This is usually the time when we notice that sexuality has begun to fade away. We are tired of conflict by now, afraid to challenge each other any further, and scared to lose the relationship if we ask for “too much.” Too much typically entails the notion of “too much sex” – and sex of course is the deepest, most intimate, risqué part of our lovers’ commitment. To use my example, I could have quietly renounced the strawberries... and kept a long-lasting, secret grudge. As women in our culture are raised in numerous ways to be ambivalent about sex, it is often also the most conflicted part of our relationships. We are raised to think that if we enjoy physical tenderness, sensuous body contact, hugging and cuddling comfort, we may do quite well without all that troublesome sex.
I have known couples who seemed content with this conclusion. Their partnership had enough solid elements to carry on without sex, especially around the advent of menopause. But more typically, the compromise of keeping peace at the expense of sex leads to more turmoil.
Stage Six: Rebellion and Temptation.
At this stage, at least one partner starts to rattle the foundations of this hard-won peace. One partner usually expresses the sexual frustration of the couple and starts asking for change. In my past relationships, this used to be my inevitable role. If change – more frequent sex, better sex, more romantic sex, etc. – cannot be worked out or is too slow in coming, one partner tends to push the issue – and push the big relationship buttons. In my case, that meant giving my partner a few serious warnings and then having an affair. Everyone knows how the atmosphere around a couple heats up under this kind of tension. Nagging criticism, pulling more serious fights, turning more or less openly provocative, flirting with strangers, trying to make one´s partner jealous, secretly or openly acting out by starting an affair are classical ways of breaking out of the cage of a sex-starved relationship.
If a couple doesn't get help at this latest stage of conflict, the most common solution is to call it quits.
Stage Seven: Separation.
One partner has newly fallen in love or both partners are exhausted and heart-broken. They split up so that each of them can set out to begin the whole cycle all over again with someone else.
When I looked back at my earlier unsatisfying relationships, it struck me that each time, some essential truths had not been spoken or had not been heard. These truths always had to do with shame – shame of feeling, shame of needing, shame of telling. Even if we could still be best pals, with the absence of truth some secret resentment would remain and spread under the covers. The feeling of distance, vague loneliness and boredom would eat away at my desire... until there was no sexual appetite left. My relationship would slide from stage four to the unavoidable stage seven of “Good-bye, baby.”
By now I felt like the Sherlock Holmes of bed death. If truth was the culprit and if this sort of truth had such an impact, wouldn't we get the opposite result if we let that shameful truth out of the closet?
This is exactly what I found to be the case. Telling the truth to a lover who knows what we are risking and is taking the same risk herself can reverse the course of events. This doesn't necessarily mean that strawberries reappear on your menu like a charm. They didn't for Kim and me. But why get hung up on strawberries when new apples of knowledge beckon in your garden?
Early in our relationship, truth-telling showed up as spontaneous play. We were on our first trip together, cruising the little country roads from Paris to the Dordogne and the south of France. I remember lolling in the shade of a chestnut tree at our hotel when I responded to one of Kim’s cocky suppositions about me: “You’re a real know-it-all, aren't you? A real Alleswisser. Hello, Miss Alice Wisser!” The German-English word play was the trigger: on the spot, we started inviting onto our stage all the dangerous traits we already knew or suspected in each other. A whole cast of characters appeared under the chestnut tree, each with a name we fine-tuned together to hit the mark and make us laugh. There was, for example, Countess Haut-le-nez with her high-nosed superiority, and her match, Redereiter (speech-rider/writer), the diatribing feminist on her white horse. Madame Hyper-Hopper would appear after a morning espresso and need to visit at least five villages the same morning. And there was Fräulein Tadelheit – a hybrid of the old-fashioned first name Adelheit (literally “nobledom”) and the word Tadel (reprimand): she who found fault with anything new and modern in her idealized Europe. Later discoveries about our temperamental differences would lead to the introduction of new members for our troupe. Once Kim heard a voice during her meditation saying, “Mr. More is eating mana.” Mr. More was warmly welcomed as a part of Kim that often exasperated his counterpart in me, “Enough Already”.
Over the years, we kept happy company with these louche, endearing characters. It made a difference to say, instead of “Can’t you stop your diatribe for a minute?”, “I can hear the gallop – I bet it’s Redereiter taking over...” Or, instead of “Do you always have to be the party-pooper?”, “Is Enough Already scared of getting overwhelmed?”
At some point, child characters made their appearance, a boy and a girl whom I later developed into the heroes of my novel The Grasshopper’s Secret. Whenever the truth coming out of our adult mouths seemed too strong, too aggressive, too frightening, the kids would stand in, having a much easier time admitting to mistakes and wrong-doings, or voicing shameful needs. Kids know there is some unconditional sympathy toward little ones who are vulnerable and cute; they can create an atmosphere of good weather... whereas adults are easily caught in the harsh climate of criticism.
A typical debate at stage four of our relationship was how much room our ex’s could take in our new life together. Kim’s inclination was (in my eyes) more like a man’s: when it’s over, it’s over. Mine had the stamp of noble feminist loyalty: once together, always together. I had a hard time recognizing how much I was merged with some of my past lovers. I realized that I needed to do the hard work of “unmerging” with the help of my therapist. To the degree that I was able to accomplish an inner separation from my past and set better limits to its claims on me, Kim was able to trust that I accorded our couple the same priority she did. When this trust was felt by her, the ex-lovers were no danger any more for either of us. But no matter what we needed to clarify, facing our differences honestly seemed to unblock some creative energy that allowed us to figure out what to do and how to solve the problem. Every negotiation and achievement of a fair agreement and balance delighted us and fired us up, sexually speaking.
In spite of our delights, however, we encountered certain sexual incompatibilities that at first we didn't know how to address. One of my preferred ways of getting turned on is particularly tender touches. My skin seems to be a primary erotic zone with many “Open, Sesame!” doors. Kim is just the opposite. She likes stormy initiations and take-my-breath-away embraces. As women, we usually assume that what our own body loves will also be a real treat for our lover – a tricky assumption to say the least. Kim and I were lucky to share sufficient compatible desires to keep us happy – and disregard that awkward little truth about our mismatched starter energies. But we finally summoned the courage to spell it out to each other: initiating sex with light touches irritated Kim (or, at best, put her to sleep), and instant love attacks scared me and shut me down. Once it was out in the open and clear to us, we found ways to adjust and forgive each other for our frustrating limitations. We managed to get around the erotic “discord” by once again naming the unwelcome approaches and play-acting the new characters in teasing, erotic games.
Obviously any big or small disappointment between lovers can bring back the old challenge: “I’d rather die than tell her...” When Kim and I encountered the typical difficulties of communication that define stage four (but are not limited to that stage), we discovered another tool that helped us save the day: rituals. We set up anger rituals, wishing rituals and appreciation rituals. Every weekend, we would simply light a candle, gather a few pebbles or petals from the garden, and sit down with a bowl of water. Each in turn would take a pebble, voice an injury received (or perceived) from the other, then hand the pebble over to the water while the listener said, “I hear you.” If it was a wishing ritual, the listener would simply respond, “may it be so.” In the appreciation ritual, we would take turns voicing our gratitude to each other for the loving remains of the day, the week, the year..., and set our flower petals afloat. We were always astonished by the powerful transformation of energy that would result from these moments. Our talks would be tender and accepting, without accusation or blame. The ceremonial spelling-out of feelings that would have been hard to voice otherwise cast a spell over our hearts. And you know how women are: once the heart opens, the body follows.
Nowadays, we have abandoned our rituals (or have the rituals abandoned us?). We do what I describe in True Secrets of Lesbian Desire as “murmuring” or “speaking below the voice,” “saying what can’t be said, or should not be said, but can be whispered into the lover’s ear.” When one of us expresses the need for murmuring we know that something weighs on her soul and wants to come out. We often see it in each other’s face; we notice it in a silently depressed or anxious mood, and one of us tends to suggest it might be time... When we are both ready, we usually lie down in a cozy place together, in a hug, and start our confessional.
The emotion of this kind of closeness – the relief, the release of telling and receiving an intimate communication – is always experienced in the body, whether love turns into lovemaking or not.
Lies, secrets and silences between lovers, I argue in my book, create a distance that is emotional as well as physical. “We dance around in a ring and suppose,” wrote the poet Robert Frost, “but the secret sits in the middle and knows.” It takes conscious, tender work to build bridges across the gaps, the empty spaces between us where we can feel disconnected, left out, unknown, misunderstood, unacknowledged, unloved. The slippage that occurs from stage four to final resignation most often results from the alienation we feel when we haven’t found ways to reconnect. It isn't easy to tell the truth in a way that doesn't further alienate us; like any art, it demands patience, practice, inspiration. And, perhaps most of all, courage.
Let me repeat: telling the truth to a lover who knows what we are risking and is taking the same risk herself reverses the erosion of passion. “Telling the truth is an adventure, a loosening of control in order to do something daring,” I say in the book. “This is the first element truth has in common with good sex.” But sex and truth have a lot in common. Instead of holding back and biting our tongue, with every truth well told and well received we can turn stage four into a new version of stage one: falling in love again, or, if you prefer, ripening in love. In fact, there is the same potential at every stage of a relationship. Truth holds a continuous promise: the rebirth of love and desire... possibly until death do us part.
about the author
Renate Stendhal is a German-born, Paris-educated writer, writing coach and counselor for individuals and couples, based in Pt. Reyes Station and San Francisco. Among her publications are Sex and Other Sacred Games (co-authored with Kim Chernin), the Lambda Award-winning photobiography Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures, and most recently, True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationship. She is working on a Paris memoir. For more information: www.renatestendhal.com.
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