Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life From Dear Sugar
Maybe it’s because I’m new to this whole nonmonogamous scene and it just doesn’t come naturally to me (yet?), but sometimes I find myself feeling completely overwhelmed by the prospect of juggling these different men. One week, I went out with “Bill” on Monday, saw “Jack” on Tuesday, then had a no-strings-attached encounter with a friendly ex on Wednesday. It was lovely getting laid three nights in a row, but getting laid by three different dudes sort of made my head spin.
I don’t want to have anonymous and/or completely meaningless sex, but neither do I want to home in on one guy and pursue a serious relationship right now. How can I navigate these new waters without giving myself a nervous breakdown? Am I obliged to tell the guys I’m seeing that they’re not the only dude I’m sleeping with?
Man Juggler
Dear Man Juggler,
I’ll answer the easy question first: Yes, you are obliged to tell the men you’re sleeping with regularly that you’re not sleeping with them exclusively. There are no exceptions to this rule. Ever. For anyone. Under any circumstances. People have the right to know if the people they are fucking are also fucking other people. This is the only way the people fucking people who are fucking other people can make emotionally healthy decisions about their lives. It’s clean. It’s right. It’s honest. And it’s a basic tenet of Sugar’s hard-earned, didn’t-do-it-the-right-way-the-first-time-around Ethical Code to Loving Others as Well as Loving Oneself.
Plus, it seems like breaking this news is going to be rather easy, Man Juggler. It sounds to me that the men on your current roster of lovers already know that you aren’t sleeping with them exclusively. (And yet, if they all knew this, why would you ask the question?) Best be sure to slip it in rather soon. You don’t have to be overly specific or get all heavy and doe-eyed and like, “Um … we really have to talk.” Just say, “Hey________(Bill/friendly ex/new romping partner I have acquired since I wrote that question to Sugar), this has been superfun and I want you to know that I’m seeing other people too.”
Then smile. Just a little. And perhaps run your hand very lightly up his dreamy hunk of hairy man arm.
Okay. Now. On to your question about how to navigate the “strange and magical world of casual, nonmonogamous dating.” I think it’s excellent that you’re having fun sleeping with people you like but don’t love, who stimulate you both sexually and intellectually. And it’s even better that this new (and likely temporary) era of your sex life is helping you discover a previously unexplored side of yourself. So all that’s peachy, right? What’s not so peachy is this business about how you feel “completely overwhelmed by the prospect of juggling these different men.”
The beauty of your situation, Man Juggler, is that you don’t have to juggle. Just because you can fuck a different man every night of the week doesn’t mean you should. One of the basic principles of every single art form has to do not with what’s there—the music, the words, the movement, the dialogue, the paint—but with what isn’t. In the visual arts it’s called the “negative space”—the blank parts around and between objects, which is, of course, every bit as crucial as the objects themselves. The negative space allows us to see the nonnegative space in all its glory and gloom, its color and mystery and light. What isn’t there gives what’s there meaning. Imagine that.
Sex with three different guys on three consecutive nights? It’s too much paint. Don’t do it again. Not because I told you so, but because you told me so when you used the phrases “head spin” and “nervous breakdown” in reference to that three-day run. Listen to yourself. And have fun.
Yours,
Sugar
TINY REVOLUTIONS
Dear Sugar,
I’m a woman in my mid-fifties. I read your column regularly and believe that my question is pedestrian but am humbly asking for your advice and support anyway as I sit in the pain of it all.
After a couple decades of marriage, my husband and I are separating. I’m at peace with it as I feel my marriage has essentially been dead for a while. My husband never was demonstrative emotionally or physically. I have spent many years feeling horribly lonely. No amount of trying to get from him what I needed brought change. It took a lot for me to finally believe that I was worthy of more and to make a step toward that possibility.
Of course the future terrifies me and excites me at the same time. I want to create more loving relationships in my life, both in friendship and romance. I want and need loving touches, loving words. And at the same time, I’m terrified that I’ll never feel the tender touch of a man. Yesterday, as a friend was telling me about a wonderful intimate moment with his partner, I was frightened that I would never have that in my life.
I worry about sex. I haven’t been with another man for a long time. The sex in my marriage was routine and uninspiring. At one point, I told my husband I wanted to have sex more often and he made a joke of it the next night. And I am afraid I am not very “good” at it. I would orgasm regularly with my husband so it isn’t that. We hid behind what worked until it got to be boring. For years I imagined robust, adventurous sex, and yet I would allow the routine to continue. I am afraid that I will meet a man that I connect with and we’ll have sex and I will not be any good in bed.
I need help. How does one go about changing that before it’s too late?
And, then there is the issue of my body. With clothes on, I am presentable. Without clothes, my body reveals the story of significant weight gain and significant weight loss. I feel good about losing weight, but naked my body is droopy and I’m embarrassed by it. I try to imagine how I will be present sexually with all my insecurities in that department. Surgery is expensive and out of my means. My doctor says without it, my skin won’t regain the same tightness. I imagine orchestrating ways to keep from being seen, but I know that probably won’t work and I am so afraid of how a potential lover will react. I don’t want to hide behind my fear, and yet I am so very frightened of exposing myself. I know you can’t do it for me, Sugar, and yet I feel so alone in this place of fear.
Are there men my age who date women my age who will be accepting of my body? I know you really don’t have the answer but I ask anyway. Emotionally, I am very brave. Sexually and being vulnerable with my body, I am not so much but want to be. And, of course, I am equally terrified that I won’t have the opportunity to express myself and challenge myself in that way. Please help.
Signed,
Wanting
Dear Wanting,
When my daughter was five she overheard me complaining to Mr. Sugar that I was a big fat ugly beast who looks terrible in everything and immediately she asked with surprise, “You’re a big fat ugly beast who looks terrible in everything?”
“No! I was only joking!” I exclaimed in a falsely cheerful tone. Then I proceeded to pretend, for the sake of my daughter’s future self-esteem, that I did not believe myself to be a big fat ugly beast who looks terrible in everything.
My impulse is to do the same for you, Wanting. In order to protect you from a more complicated reality, I want to pretend that droopy-fleshed women in deep middle age are lusted after by droves of men for their original and seasoned beauty. “Looks don’t matter!” I want to shout in a giddy, you-go-girl tone. It wouldn’t be a lie. Looks really don’t matter. You know they don’t. I know they don’t. All the sweet peas of Sugarland would rise and ratify that statement.
And yet. But still. We know it’s not entirely true.
Looks matter to most of us. And sadly, they matter to women to a rather depressing degree—regardless of age, weight, or place on the gorgeous-to-hideous beauty continuum. I don’t need to detail the emails in my inbox from women with fears such as your own as proof. I need only do a quick accounting of just about every woman I’ve ever known—an endless phalanx of mostly attractive females who were freaked out because they were fat or flat-chested or frizzy-haired or oddly shaped or lined with wrinkles or laced with stretch marks or in some other way imperfect when viewed through the dist
orted eyes of the all-knowing, woman-annihilating, ruthless beauty god who has ruled and sometimes doomed significant portions of our lives.
I say enough of that. Enough of that.
I’ve written often about how we have to reach hard in the direction of the lives we want, even if it’s difficult to do so. I’ve advised people to set healthy boundaries and communicate mindfully and take risks and work hard on what actually matters and confront contradictory truths and trust the inner voice that speaks with love and shut out the inner voice that speaks with hate. But the thing is—the thing so many of us forget—is that those values and principles don’t only apply to our emotional lives. We’ve got to live them out in our bodies too.
Yours. Mine. Droopy and ugly and fat and thin and marred and wretched as they are. We have to be as fearless about our bellies as we are with our hearts.
There isn’t a shortcut around this. The answer to your conundrum isn’t finding a way to make your future lover believe you look like Angelina Jolie. It’s coming to terms with the fact that you don’t and never will (a fact, I’d like to note, that Angelina Jolie herself will also have to come to terms with someday and probably already struggles with now).
Real change happens on the level of the gesture. It’s one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before. It’s the man who opts not to invite his abusive mother to his wedding; the woman who decides to spend her Saturday mornings in a drawing class instead of scrubbing the toilets at home; the writer who won’t allow himself to be devoured by his envy; the parent who takes a deep breath instead of throwing a plate. It’s you and me standing naked before our lovers, even if it makes us feel kind of squirmy in a bad way when we do. The work is there. It’s our task. Doing it will give us strength and clarity. It will bring us closer to who we hope to be.
You don’t have to be young. You don’t have to be thin. You don’t have to be “hot” in a way that some dumbfuckedly narrow mindset has construed that word. You don’t have to have taut flesh or a tight ass or an eternally upright set of tits.
You have to find a way to inhabit your body while enacting your deepest desires. You have to be brave enough to build the intimacy you deserve. You have to take off all of your clothes and say, “I’m right here.”
There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay. And perhaps the body is our final frontier. It’s the one place we can’t leave. We’re there till it goes. Most women and some men spend their lives trying to alter it, hide it, prettify it, make it what it isn’t, or conceal it for what it is. But what if we didn’t do that?
That’s the question you need to answer, Wanting. That’s what will bring your deepest desires into your life. Not: Will my old, droopy male contemporaries accept and love the old, droopy me? But rather: What’s on the other side of the tiny gigantic revolution in which I move from loathing to loving my own skin? What fruits would that particular liberation bear?
We don’t know—as a culture, as a gender, as individuals, you and I. The fact that we don’t know is feminism’s one true failure. We claimed the agency, we granted ourselves the authority, we gathered the accolades, but we never stopped worrying about how our asses looked in our jeans. There are a lot of reasons for this, a whole bunch of Big Sexist Things We Can Rightfully Blame. But ultimately, like anything, the change is up to us.
The culture isn’t going to give you permission to have “robust, adventurous sex” with your droopy and aging body, so you’re going to have to be brave enough to take it for yourself. This will require some courage, Wanting, but courage is a vital piece of any well-lived life. I understand why you’re afraid. I don’t mean to diminish the enormity of what’s recently ended and what now will begin, but I do intend to say to you very clearly that this is not the moment to wilt into the underbrush of your insecurities. You’ve earned the right to grow. You’re going to have to carry the water yourself.
So let’s talk about men. A whole bunch of them will overlook you as a lover because they want someone younger and firmer, but not all of them will. Some of them will be thrilled to meet a woman just exactly like you. The sexiest not-culturally-sanctioned-sexy people I know—the old, the fat, the differently abled, the freshly postpartum—have a wonderful way of being forthright about who they are and I suggest you take their approach. Instead of trying to conceal the aspects of your body that make you feel uncomfortable, how about just coming out with it at the outset—before you get into the bedroom and try to slip unnoticed beneath the sheets while having a panic attack? What would happen if you said to Mister Just-About-to-Do-Me: I feel terribly self-conscious about how droopy my body is and I’m not sure if I even really know how to have good sex anymore, since I was frozen in a boring pattern with my ex for years on end.
In my experience, those sorts of revelations help. They unclench the stronghold of one’s fears. They push the intimacy to a more vulnerable place. And they have a spectacular way of revealing precisely the sort of person one is about to sleep with. Does he laugh and say he thinks you’re lovely so just hush up, or does he clear his throat and offer you the contact information for his ex-wife’s plastic surgeon? Does he confess his own insecurities or lecture you appallingly about yours? Is he the fellow you really want to share your body with or had you better walk away while the getting’s good?
I know as women we’re constantly being scorched by the relentless porno/Hollywood beauty blowtorch, but in my real life I’ve found that the men worth fucking are far more good-natured about the female body in its varied forms than is generally acknowledged. “Naked and smiling” is one male friend’s only requirement for a lover. Perhaps it’s because men are people with bodies full of fears and insecurities and shortcomings of their own. Find one of them. One who makes you think and laugh and come. Invite him into the tiny revolution in your beautiful new world.
Yours,
Sugar
NOT ENOUGH
Dear Sugar,
Last year I met a guy who is wonderful, though I recognize he has a lot of growing up to do (he’s twenty-four). We get along well, have a similar sense of humor, and have great sex. After nine months, I still get a tingle in my gut when I see him. Our relationship started casually, but over time we got to know each other and became ourselves around each other. We can cook together and be silly and go on adventures and read to each other and have sex on the floor and then make a cake and eat it in bed. In the beginning, I was okay with us not being monogamous, but once our relationship became more than a fling, I wanted a commitment. We talked and he told me that sleeping with just one person could get boring, but that he clearly likes me or else he wouldn’t spend time with me. He said he was afraid I would change him somehow—turn him into someone he’s not.
I didn’t understand him then, and I still don’t. Am I just dense? He likes me, but not enough to say he likes only me? Maybe it’s that simple.
We still see each other pretty often, just now without the sex. I care for him, but I don’t know if I’m foolish to stick around to see where it goes. Am I torturing myself by keeping him a part of my life?
Best,
Needs Direction
Dear Needs Direction,
I receive a lot of letters like yours. Most go on at length, describing all sorts of maddening situations and communications in bewildered detail, but in each there is the same question at its core: Can I convince the person about whom I’m crazy to be crazy about me?
The short answer is no.
The long answer is no.
The sad but strong and true answer is the one you already told yourself: this man likes you, but not the way you like him. Which is to say, not enough.
So now you get to decide what you want to do about that. Are you able to be friends—or even occasional lovers—with this man who is less crazy about you than you are about him without feeling:
a) bad about yourself,
b) resentful
of him, or
c) like you’re always longing for more?
If the answer is not yes on all three counts, I suggest you give your friendship a rest, even if it’s just for the time it takes you to get over him. There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don’t let a man who doesn’t love you be one of them.
Yours,
Sugar
NO IS GOLDEN
Dearest Sugar,
I’m writing to you with half of the answer already in my heart. I felt I should say this up front, since conventional wisdom says that no matter what advice a mixed-up person gets, they always end up following their own. My question is about my upcoming wedding, which my fiancé and I are planning to have at his father’s house in Europe. Because I’m from the United States, my guests will be far fewer and I have to think a lot harder about who merits an invite.
At thirty, I feel like I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m doing all of the things necessary to move forward without forgetting my past. I’ve been in therapy for the past year, trying to come to terms with a childhood filled with all of the usual pitfalls that cause kids to grow up into bitter, emotionally damaged adults. Alcoholism, drug abuse, physical and emotional abuse—along with a mother who depended on me from the time I was five to assure her that my father wasn’t dead in an accident on some dark road somewhere—all caused me to live most of my twenties on a precarious ridge between responsible living and disastrous free fall.
But I got lucky. I got away from my family and lived in another country. I found the forgiveness within me to reestablish a relationship with my mother. I gathered the courage to achieve what I refer to as “normality.” People underestimate the importance of normality. Normality means no one is screaming, fighting, or insulting one another. Normality means I’m not sobbing in my room. Normality means Christmas and other family holidays are a joy. Normality means, for some people, getting married.