A Change of Heart
Reversing a reversal or eternal return.
In my twenties, I thought if a man responded to me sexually it meant he liked me, and if he liked me he knew me in some way. We were naked and felt pleasure. This was a kind of knowing, a kind of sympathy. Even if I knew little about the man and little about myself, and even if we didn’t understand the sentences we exchanged after sex. Even if things soon went, oh dear, goodbye.
I’m in my thirties or forties when I reverse this understanding or wishful fantasy. In the new understanding, I’m more in touch with reality, I think. By this time, I’ve been with a number of men, and some of them, it crosses my mind, were attracted to me not because they liked me. They were attracted to me because they didn’t like me. Or they had no idea how my mind worked, even though I talked to them. They had no idea how my mind worked because they were floating around in their own private fantasy, the way I floated around in my own private fantasy. In this case, how could they feel sympathy for me or I for them, for that matter?
This may have been true for only some of the people I had sex with, but I came to feel that sexual attraction didn’t necessarily include a component of sympathy or knowledge. These things are not built into it, so you can’t be surprised or maybe even disappointed when the stranger beside you in bed—or the person you’ve lived with for five years—comes to look like a pod replicant.
More time passed, and the other day, I found something I’d written about the first reversal, the one where I’ve come to consider sympathy and knowledge an illusion in attraction. I was looking for something to post on social media, as a way to attract readers to my Substack. I was interested in the way time and experience can change your understanding, but as I read the reflection now, it felt like dumping cold water on the reader rather than saying look at this field of irises blooming in the sun. Maybe there was a hard-won finding in the thinking, but I didn’t like it.
As an experiment, I decided to reverse the reversal. Reversing the reversal felt narratively right. I don’t have to be sure I believe something when I try it out in a piece of writing. I only need to seduce the reader to the next sentence. People like when you change direction. They like surprise. They like when you aren’t so certain of yourself. I wrote, “As time has passed, I’m more confused than ever about what it’s possible to know. But I think I was right in the first place. There is a kind of knowing and sympathy in attraction, and it was in those early beds, no matter what happened after we left the beds.”
As I looked at the sentences, I began to think well maybe it’s true, and maybe I really do believe it. Maybe I believe it not the way the twenty-year-old believed it, because she wanted life to work a certain way, but the way a person my age, in her seventies, can see life as an accordion with pleats that expand and contract. Yes, I believe it! The first reversal now looked stern and gave off a medicine-y smell. Maybe in the past I’d swallowed it because I’d thought I had to. Or, in its time, it had felt narratively right.
Anyway, what do I know these days about sudden attraction? The last time I had sex with a new person I was sixty. It was when I met Richard and we jumped into bed after knowing each other a few weeks. We were at an artist colony, and weeks at an artist colony are like dried apricots, where the flavor is concentrated because you see the other person every day. Really, though, we were strangers. I’m mentioning this to say that was more than seventeen years ago, and without the refreshment of recent disappointment—and there were plenty of disappointments and beds that turned doleful before I met Richard—in the long gap between the last disappointment and now it seems I want to believe there’s a tender and knowing component in attraction.
As a further experiment, I tried to pick out a guy from the past to test this on. Between the time Gardner died, when I was forty-four, and I met Richard, I was with a number of men with whom things went bad so fast and dramatically my life had a horror-show aspect, like Linda Blair, with her head spinning, in The Exorcist. I had to conclude the constant in these relationships was me. I was the horror show. No doubt, I was.
I’m traveling back to a relationship I couldn’t get out of my head for years. The thing itself was like a minute, but it had an atomic half-life in my thoughts you would need to bury like plutonium in the core of the earth. The guy’s name was John. I’ll call him John. It’s the first name that swam up. John and I meet. But how? I have no idea. I can’t remember. Honestly, I can’t remember. He’s a writer, so it’s not hard to think how it could have happened. Do I read something he wrote? It doesn’t matter, but I’m just now realizing I can’t remember, although I remember a key turning in my mind. I could hear it, a gear cranking or a projector with sprockets going, click, click, click.
The gear turning is in me. Suddenly—it seems sudden in memory—I’m thinking you, John, I want to have sex with you. It wasn’t my first thought about John, but once the thought has formed it’s as if it’s always been there. It’s implacable and inevitable like any change of heart.
We have sex, and it’s great. I’m gone. What is going on with John and me? John has more experience than I do with people falling down a rabbit hole of fantasy or whatever the hell is happening between us. I think he tries to warn me that what we’re doing is an intake of breath. That’s all it can be. We’re not really suited. Cutting to the chase, he ends it, and I stand there. I’m unable to move for a long time. Why? I don’t care. I honestly have no interest in why I do anything.
So now, in the thought experiment, can I see, or taste, or smell knowledge of me and sympathy for me in John? Was it ever there? Did he like me? The answer to all these questions is yes! Did I like him, or was he more or less an erotic fantasy I plugged his head on? The answer to this question is no! I did like John. I did feel sympathy for John. I was hurt, and he was hurtful. Also, I am easily hurt. Probably everyone is at the level of sexual rejection, even if we express it in a million different ways.
In an experiment like this, you think you’re remembering something in the past. You aren’t. You can’t be. I think it’s that I’ve arrived at a stage where I want life to look sweeter than it sometimes looked in the past. In my case, I don’t think this is a function of being a certain age or of time passing. I think it’s a function of being with someone who makes me happy, and this happiness has the power of retrospective revision. You can call it the return of the wishful blur if you like. I’m not going to call it that.
I just read this piece to Richard. He was in his studio under a blanket, although it’s warm out. Who is he? He said, “Memory ceases to become storage and becomes story.” I’m glad he said this. I’m not a fan of word play.
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Not to contradict anything (this is wonderful in its tracing of the shifts of retrospection) but just to add some random data:
- a biological theory of attraction is that it’s about how people smell, which in turn is a signal of immune system compatibility.
- When I was in my twenties (I’m about your age) I had the impression some men were relating directly to my body and bypassing me. It seemed like a kind of reflex.
- Reading about Emma Goldman’s midlife passion, and others, matched my own experience of having the most intense erotic attraction of my life (which didn’t become an actual affair but was an obsession for several years) around age 40. (The timing might be about knowing oneself better and losing youthful inhibitions, and/or it might be a kind of biological last chance to get pregnant, or a last hurrah of youthful sexuality in a more capacious container of maturity.) The object of my lust was not conventionally attractive but if he just put his hand on the back of my denim jacket I felt it as hot bare skin on skin. Musing on this long after I wondered if maybe he wasn't just hyperthyroid,
This post shows how writing about sex can be without any prurience whatsoever and yet still be so evocative to a reader. More writers should write about sex. It's a fundamental human activity, and of keen interest to most people.
My thirty nine year relationship with my wife started when I was 22, and before then I was a shy adolescent. So I really have only one self-fulfilling data point about the concordance between sexual attraction and sympathetic feelings, at least for me as an adult.