After the crab crawled, or 'doormat-no-more'

‘She needs to grow up. She’s a dissatisfied middle-aged woman who sees herself growing old in an unhappy relationship, with kids taking away her life and she’s jealous of your freedom, although she wouldn’t have had the balls to make the choices you made, but wished she had. Hence the sourness… Rhonda can feel free to pinch my argument if she agrees with it.’ -- a friend about a typical 'crab'.

It seems I have inadvertently managed to put my crab-crawling theory into practice... with spectacular effect.

Having spent the first 30+ years of my life filling a particular niche in the lives of my friends and family, I have reached the point where I not only realise it’s a place I don’t want to be, but I have actively tried to re-define my position, or rather, affirm my identity and establish boundaries around it -- something I failed to do before.

Part of this process has involved looking at the way I have chosen to live my life, and asking if this is what I want for my present and future.

For example, I established my current career not so much by choice as by accident. I grasped at the first grown-up job that came along, and then worked my way up to something I actually liked. But I haven’t explored beyond that, so I’m taking some time to look at where to head next. So far on this front I’ve flown under the radar, but I’m bracing myself for some kick-back when I finally do make the move.

I’ve also decided to relocate. Leave Boganburbia to the nuclear-family-oriented and position myself nearer to the things I value and with more like-minded people. When I first raised this in front of my family, the response was, ‘What would you want to live in that area for? It’s full of hippies and weirdoes.’

Over the years I have thought about having children but have come to the conclusion it’s not for me. This decision has been attacked from more directions than I care to count. The response has ranged from the use of assumptive language, ‘When you have children’ rather than ‘If you have children’, to ‘What if you regret it one day?’ (to which my standard reply became, ‘What if I regret having children? You can’t take them back.’

More recently the approach was to tell me if I didn’t have children I would lose my then partner. ‘You’ll need to have children if you want to keep him,’ they said. I remember thinking, Wow. That’s a healthy basis for a relationship, and an even healthier basis for raising a child. And they didn’t stop there. ‘You only have to have one. You can manage that. It won’t interfere with your life too much.’ Imagine the therapy that kid would eventually need. In the end I was tempted to pretend to be barren, just to get them off my back.

Another choice that has come under fire is my decision to not remarry or even have a quasi-married relationship. I’ve tried the whole miserable-marrieds-with-weekends-at-Bunnings thing, and failed. It just isn’t for me. This decision was affirmed during a subsequent relationship where every time things veered towards domestic-bliss-101 I found my insides screaming. I was miserable. I was lonely. I was trapped. And eventually I left. Crawled out of the basket amid screams of protest. How could I be choosing not to stay with someone who was kind, considerate, loving? My response: ‘If you want all those things, why don’t you marry him?’

I have since moved into a new relationship and ‘failed’ to integrate that relationship into the mould. No going-through-the-motions ‘family’ dinners, no weekends at Bunnings. And an endless barrage of criticism.

All this is before looking at the hostile response I’ve encountered to reforming my slobbing-on-the-couch-eating-takeaway lifestyle. Apparently prioritising diet and exercise and maintaining a healthier weight is cause for all kinds of snide remarks. I finally got one sister to stop by pointing out that I'm not so rude as to tell her she is overweight and should really do something about it, so I don't see why she feels it is okay to discuss my weight.

I can only imagine their hositility is because as crabs who share my mould they are more comfortable with dumpy, tubby me. I have redefined the mould's shape, both physically and metaphorically.

The remoulding process has been slow, and is still underway, but as I make progress the attacks become more intense. Criticism, lectures, guilt trips, the works.

Because I don’t hang out with my sister’s kids at the weekend, my other sister tells my nieces and nephew that she loves them more than me, that she is the better aunty, and they openly discuss my being outside the fold in front of the kids.

Because I’ve changed the way that I use social networking, and part of this involved removing my family, I’ve received hostile messages, vicious phone calls, text messages and emails. ‘Total cow! what the hell???? You just don't do that!’ and, ‘What the hell is wrong with you. Why are you trying so hard to not be part of our family?’

I even received a similarly parroted message from my twelve-year-old niece, who has been dragged into the whole saga by her mother.

I want to stress that I’m not writing this to vilify my family, but to illustrate the consequences of leaving the crawl too long. If I had been comfortable enough in myself to assert my boundaries as a teenager, or even when I first left home, I wouldn’t now be suffering because those who shared my mould are feeling the shift so acutely. Previously my position in the mould was beneath theirs and effectively propped theirs up, which means my shifting makes them feel less secure, less in control.

And in this case it is about control.

Ideally I’d like to have a loving, respectful relationship with my family, where I accept them for who they are and they respect me for who I am, but right now that choice isn’t open to me: ‘When you feel like joining us again as [the person we expect you to be] then I am here with open arms’, was my sister's last text.

Now that I’ve peered over the edge of the basket and seen the possibilities waiting for me on the other side, I have a chance at freedom, but unless me and my fellow crabs can establish a new, flexible mould, it looks like it will mean cutting ties with the crabs trying to claw me back, and leaving the basket for good.

'Happily Ever... Before and After'

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Married Sex – A fairytale in three parts

***Warning – this post may ruin your best friend threesome fantasy***

Once upon a time, long term couples were encouraged to ‘share everything’, from a strand of spaghetti to the grizzly details of the monthly cycle. The idea was that this constant sharing, this living in each others’ pockets, was supposed to bring you closer together. And it does. You’ll be best-friend close.

The problem is, you don’t tend to want to shag your best mate.

Worse, your living arrangement most closely resembles that of a sibling. Again, not someone you want to shag.

Enter the world of Married Sex.

Not only does sexing your partner start to seem about as appealing as humping a manky dish cloth, you may find you’re not into sex at all.

This is what happened to me.

At the time I blamed the pill, not realising I was living with a constant libido suppressant called a husband. All I knew was that over time sex had stopped being something I couldn’t get enough of, and started becoming a chore - something I did out of a vague sense of obligation that would have to wait until after I’d finished the ironing and scrubbing the floor.

To be fair, my husband had also stopped beating down the door to rip my knickers off. So I decided (with some relief) that he didn’t really want it either.

During this time (which I consider some freakish aberration), not only did I rarely crave sex, not even to DIY, the thought of shagging my partner was a turn-off. In fact I used to dread it.

The most satisfying sex we had during the long drought was on the rare occasions when my sleeping brain decided it had been long enough, thank you very much, and I would wake from a raunchy dream, desperate for a shag. In the dark, still half-asleep, I could jump my husband and not notice I was shagging him.

Experts now realise that the previously advocated ‘closeness’ and total entanglement of each others’ lives is the worst possible thing you can do if you want to avoid this deadening drought I call Married Sex. They concede that by the time your husband has seen you in your pink fluffy slippers with mascara blubbing down your face and once you’ve experienced his regular AGBs (1), when you have no privacy left, no un-mutual friends, and no me-only time, your desire for one another doesn’t just start to wane, it plummets.

Add to this the scientific theory that evolution is working against us, playing out its war on our libidos using the very chemicals that make us want to shag in the first place. Scientists argue that the cycle of romance, sex and love, by its very nature, is geared to lead every long term couple toward parenthood and virtual abstinence.

The cycle goes something like this:

• Romance produces the chemicals that lead to sex
• Sex produces the chemicals that lead to love
• Love suppresses the chemicals that lead to romance

which traps us into a life of monogamy through ritual emasculation (testosterone being the chemical suppressed by ‘love’). With the desire for sex depleted, we are much less likely to stray, and much more likely to feel the ‘love’ bonds that will encourage us to stay and raise offspring (2). The problem is that over time this has an inevitable impact on a couples’ desire for each other.

And this is just one of the ‘chemical’ theories of sex and love involving libido enhancers and suppressants.
For me, the contraceptive pill turned my body into one giant sex no-go zone. Like many women my age, I live with the ongoing pain of endometriosis, and so had been prescribed a high-dose pill. The hormones stopped my periods and so stopped the pain, but then stopped me feeling altogether. Without hormonal drivers, I had almost no drive at all. Not just for sex, but for anything. It was like wearing a pair of giant granny pants, the kind that suck in your gut only to have the excess ooze out everywhere else. All the while you’re there struggling to breathe. In the end I decided I could live with the pain in order to feel again, and stopped taking it.

BAM!

Like a teenage boy hitting puberty my hormones went into overdrive. I had energy to burn, and as the first full moon approached, I was climbing the walls. Just about every man who walked past was a potential shag. I lost count of the poor unsuspecting guys I imagined dragging into the loo for some unbridled bouncing-off-the-walls passion. The cruel irony was that my husband was away at the time, and so for the first time in years I locked myself indoors and masturbated like crazy.

Eventually my husband arrived home. But then the weirdest thing happened. I didn’t want to shag him. It was like I’d been given a dose of instant libido suppressant.

It scared the shit out of me.

It was a while before I had a hormonal peak as extreme as the first, but I did notice the ups and downs of my cycle after that, and I was never quite sure who I might be tempted to crack on to. At one point I felt I ought to wear a public safety waning: CAUTION: FULL MOON APPROACHING, just to prevent any embarrassing misadventures while ‘on heat’.

Having rediscovered the joys of DIY, for the next little while, it was all that kept me sane. I certainly got no pleasure from my unshaven, unwashed, bad-breathed husband sprawling himself on the marital bed in his ‘come get it’ pose. And when we did do it, it was a far cry from the lets-do-it-in-every-room passion of the early days.

‘He’d moved into the wrong part of my brain,’ she said.

I could understand this sort of change occurring in couples who have children, who end up taking on the asexual role of parents, but that wasn’t true for either of us. The moment she said it, though, I knew she was right. My husband had slipped into the ‘brother’ part of my brain.

Not twelve months later, we separated. With hindsight I’m not the least bit surprised.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if our relationship had come with a warning: DON'T TAKE YOUR MUTUAL ATTRACTION FOR GRANTED. What steps could we have taken to focus less on the ‘smoochie poochie’ part and more on the 'red hot rampant sex' part? The idea that you might need to work at keeping on wanting sex seemed absurd at the time.

Since then I’ve read theory after theory on the pitfalls of long term relationships and how to counter hormonal inhibitors such as illness and the pill. Advice ranges from the basics of maintaining separate lives, to forcing yourself to shag, even when you’d rather spend the evening repeatedly sticking a fork in your eye. Others advocate watching porn (3) or even having an affair. These theories all come with warnings, of course (4).

After my divorce I managed to sustain a relationship for two years. In that time we maintained very separate lives and shagged ourselves silly. We also weren't particularly close, and never quite made it to the point where our lives became entangled.

Who's to say the two are related? I was in a difficult place, and we were two very different people. As for my husband, we probably just outgrew each other and ultimately liked different things in bed.

What I can be sure of is that I'll never have Married Sex again. I’ll do whatever it takes. Read endless volumes of self-help books, research sex-partiesparties, anything. Because good sex is part of what makes you feel alive. And I’m a long, long way from dead.

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(1) After grog bog
(2) I suspect this is why some people run a mile after sex, as though they know in the moments after orgasm they are most vulnerable to a 'bonding attack'
(3) Or True Blood, if that works better for you
(4) Apparently affairs can also lead to a relationship’s demise...