‘What’s the best sex you’ve ever had? I mean, what is good sex anyway?’ She furrows her brow. Silence. Silence. I try to fill the silence, uncertainly.
‘Sure, we can Esther Perel this: connection, connection, connection – good sex is always all about connection, right?’
‘Connecting what though?’
It’s a valid, and disarming question. I know what Perel would say: it’s connecting the individuals participating in the whirligig-dance of the archetypal postmodern romance. [Obligatory Parisian accent]:
We need to be able to connect without the terror of obliteration, and we need to be able to experience our separateness without the terror of abandonment […] when two become one—connection can no longer happen. There is no one to connect with. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex.
Hers is a pithy and persuasive logic. Except, on closer inspection, it’s a logic that’s relational and curiously tentative, one that only gets you halfway. There’s a tacit assumption that individuated, autonomous, self-determining identity is worth preserving – but why, and to what end?
Part of the answer is shamelessly pragmatic: personal security and risk management. If you start a relationship and it doesn’t work out, that separateness, advocated for here, allows you to walk away, dust yourself off, no (lasting) harm done. Clearly, that wasn’t the case in the living memory of our grandmothers or even mothers, but it’s a non-negotiable in the present day. In a healthy, contemporary relationship, there’s no question that a woman keeps her friends, interests, and work. Should any dynamic fail, it’s absolutely right that her life remains intact—her social circle, privacy and sense of self unaffected—allowing her to seamlessly resume her usual duties without consequence.
But, Perel’s paradox-conundrum is, essentially, just the modern condition in freefall. Beneath the individuals lurks something else that dare not speak its name. There’s also that serendipitous spark to consider, chemistry, fireworks. And the quintessence of that chemistry is a dependency that has become deeply unfashionable: for, when connection occurs, two do become one, the partners in the dance complete one another, bringing something to the relationship that the other does not have. Flame and oxygen: both are required for fire; both rely on one another to make something greater than themselves. With reckless abandon, the Modernist novelist, E. M. Forster, described it like this:
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer!
Great sex? What is it? It’s almost too cliché, too trite a crucible to press these ideas into the service of, but, for sure, great sex holds both ideas at once. It maintains separateness, eschewing petty demands upon privacy or an insistence upon control. And it maintains not just separateness, but the security of separateness, indicated in everything from small acts of kindness, the luscious almond croissant that just shows up before you even realise you’re hungry; to long-range promises that are made sacrosanct and assiduously kept. A gentleman’s promise is one that must always be honoured, for it is the measure of his integrity. Regardless of the circumstances, compromise should never be part of the equation.
The security or safety net of separateness gives rise to not just the connection but the reckless fusion of prose and passion, oxygen and flame. Great sex is the loin-fire of the body, the poetry of the fervid soul.
‘However, let’s not complicate sex, it’s just sex’.
‘I think I understand’, she said.
‘Yes, I think you do’.