Sh*t To Help To Show You Up February 24, 2023
What are you into?
Way back in 1994 I moved to Seattle, WA. I had just graduated from college and was determined to make my way in the world totally independently from my family. Was I hopelessly naive? Yes, I was. Partly because I didn’t know enough yet to understand that adulthood is more a winding road than a straight, uphill ascension away. I also didn’t yet know that vulnerability, needing people, and having to ask for help didn’t make me a failure or a disappointment, or patently unsafe.
I’m still learning those lessons.
I also didn’t know much of anything at all about sex or how to have healthy intimate relationships, despite the fact that I’d been attempting both for years. I’m not alone in this. We are shockingly remiss in the sexual and emotional education that we offer to young people in this country, no matter their sexual orientation, gender, racial background, ability status, or class. We just set young people loose— clueless, hopeful, and sometimes traumatized— and tell them not to create an unwanted pregnancy and find The One.
To my rescue entered Savage Love. Savage Love was a column in the local free paper, The Stranger, back in those days, written by author Dan Savage. It started out as a snarky sex advice column for straight people written by a gay guy, and it was that in many respects. Explicit, intentionally provocative, and, quite honestly, hilarious. It was, in fact, so successful at being entertaining while simultaneously challenging long-unspoken heterosexual assumptions about sex and relationships that the column was eventually syndicated and picked up by dozens of papers across the country. In 2006 it also became a podcast, which recently recorded it’s 852nd episode.
Are people drawn to Savage’s writing because it’s explicit? Probably. I enjoy that part myself. But Dan’s work is also as much focused on self-examination, honesty, good communication, and ethical decision-making as the details of sexual activity. In a recent podcast interview with Savage, host Ezra Klein referred to Savage Love, now in its 32nd year of publication, as “the most important text in contemporary American sexual ethics.”
Our needs for physical and emotional intimacy, for sex and love, are essential aspects of our experience as whole human beings, which means they are also spaces where we can, and must, practice our integrity. Listening to that recent interview with Savage I realized that encountering his work in my early twenties planted seeds of that practice that are still growing and flowering today. Dan created an expectation within me that continual learning and growth in order to be more present, accountable, and integrated in my intimate life was the goal.
Expectation is actually a word I choose quite intentionally, because managing expectations is often a focus of Savage’s work. How do we get clear with ourselves about what we expect, and how do we take responsibility for those expectations? How do we co-create a space in which our partners feel safe to share their expectations with us, and how do we respond if, or when, our expectations don’t align with each other?
In his conversation with Klein, Savage illustrated the work of managing expectations beautifully, or what he calls being willing to pay the price of admission:
If people have unrealistic expectations, then they’re constantly disappointed. And this can get very, like, metaphysical, people’s expectations. I do not expect, when I go home, to find a clean kitchen, because the people I live with are not gonna do dishes, so I am never crushed when I get home and the first thing I have to do is dishes. I’m just like, price of admission that I pay to be in these relationships, and that’s fine. And the trick to paying the price of admission is you don’t bitch about it. You know, you pay the price, you ride the ride. If you don’t want to pay the price, don’t get on the roller coaster. But don’t buy a ticket to that roller coaster and then complain the whole time you’re on the ride about how much it costs. At a certain point, you just get off or you don’t get on that ride.
In his work Savage also spends a tremendous amount of time discussing relationship structures— talking openly about the mechanics, pros, and cons of making various choices, and normalizing polyamory and ethical non-monogamy. He is accused of being against monogamy and commitment, which seems to me a defensive reaction to his refusal to support monogamy as the default choice. It is simply “a” choice, and one that people should make openly and intentionally, rather than assuming it’s the only option.
Savage and his husband Terry have actually been together for nearly 30 years, going through periods of sexual exclusivity, open non-monogamy, and now polyamory. Commitment is clearly not a thing they misunderstand.
And Savage believes really strongly in love, even if he doesn’t believe in romantic notions of The One. Realistically, he insists, “There’s a .73 that you round up to the one, and that’s about the best you can do. And some people find that dispiriting. I think that’s kind of lovely, because not only are you rounding that person up, but you know that they’re rounding you up too, and I think that’s a gift, and you should take it.”
Yes, please, as my partner would say.
Finally, and this is really important to me as the mother of teenagers, Dan offers cogent analysis on the importance of comprehensive sex education, and what comprehensive actually means. It’s about teaching emotional intelligence and communication skills, not just biology. How else will we develop the skills to understand what we want and convey that to our partners, to practice integrity in this essential part of our lives?
How to put a condom on a banana, you can do that. Sexually transmitted infections, you can cover the ones people need to worry about in 10 extra minutes. Everything else is difficult and hard, because feelings come into play, insecurities come into play, expectations, realistic and unrealistic, come into play, and that’s where people get in trouble. And the people we often have the hardest time talking about sex with are our sex partners. How did we construct that, and how do we deconstruct that, that corner we’ve painted ourselves into, that the person we feel least free being ourselves with and opening up with about who we are sexually and what we want is somebody that we are about to have sex with for the first time, or somebody we’ve been having sex with for 20 years?
As Ezra Klein so beautifully states, “a big part of sex is how it changes or affirms or validates, or undermines our idea of ourselves.” No wonder it’s hard to talk about, and therefore, no surprise we need help figuring out how to do that.
Whether or not you are currently someone who has sex with other people, you love people who have sex with other people, so thinking about how we think and talk about sex and relationships is a worthwhile endeavor. I hope you’ll listen in on this freewheeling conversation about sex, relationships, desire, communication, family, policy, transgression, and ethics. (There’s also a transcript if you don’t have the time to listen to the whole thing.)
If you prefer video, here’s another wonderful interview with Dan and one of my other favorites for reflection on sex and intimacy, psychotherapist Esther Perel:
Great Friday post! And you inspired me to find my copy of Skipping Towards Gomorrah, which I bought at Powell's when I lived on the West Coast.