Seven Stages of Lesbian Desire ( What’s Truth Got to Do With It?)
by 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-loved. 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.
Therefore, when I seriously fell in love again, I was still suspicious – in spite of my delight. 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 grey slate roofs and brick-colored chimney-pots until the eye bumped against the Eiffel Tower at the horizon. I sneaked 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 lips and teeth, 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 discovering each other.
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 first 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, I was 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 “changes of climate” in our previous relationships. As a counseler, I also heard a lot from my clients about these changing erotic moods. 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 any 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, don´t sleep, forget to water our plants, 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. Over night, 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 dance naked in front of the mirror. 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 an SUV. We know the meaning of life – we finally live, 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 move 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 in terms of team-building, partnership, loving kindness to each other at this early stage. They are not aware that they are gathering resources that might 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 picture 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. We draw anxious lines around what is “our turf,” around our boundaries and individual needs. Kim and I, for example, fell into furious fights over feminist ideals that 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 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 about 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. Why did we ever engage 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 the nature of 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 oubeginnings and reminded us of our relationship vision. But the moments of passionate anger between us 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. Sex is often also the most conflicted part of the relationship as in our culture, women are raised in numerous ways to be ambivalent about sex. 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 sacrifice 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 usuall 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 the 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 down from stage 4 to the unavoidable stage 7 of “Good-bye, baby.”
By now I felt like the “Sherlock Holmes of the lesbian bed death.” If dishonesty was the culprit and if honesty had such an impact, wouldn´t we get the opposite result if we let that embarrassing truth out of the closet?
This is exactly what I found. Telling the truth to a lover who knows what we are risking, and who is taking the same risk herself, reverses the course of events. Being honest in a way that respects both our own and our partner’s feelings, is a skill that lovers can learn in the same the way we can learn (and teach each other) how to touch each other’s bodies. “Telling the truth is an adventure, a loosening of control in order to do something daring,” I say in True Secrets of Lesbian Desire. “This is the first element truth has in common with good sex.”
Sex and truth have a lot in common. Instead of holding back and biting our tongue, with every truth well told and well received, the relief can be refreshing like a great orgasm. Our heart opens, our body opens. We fall in love again. The ominous Stage 4 of our relationship can evolve into a new version of Stage 1 – a version we might call “ripening in love.” In fact, at every stage of our relationship, truth holds a continuous promise … until death ( not bed death) do us part.