Hopefully Helpful Advice

Dear G-NPX

I have been in a relationship with this pretty cool guy for two and a half years now, and honestly, it’s great. It’s a great relationship — we can talk, do silence, laugh, fight, hang out with others, each other, ourselves etc. There’s nothing destructive about it as far as jealousy, possession, distrust and the rest. In fact, everyone is jealous of US! It really is a perfect relationship! And he, himself, is perfect!

But: I’m starting to have my doubts. I understand that people don’t stay ‘in love’ forever, and that the passionate flame thrower of ‘in love’ gives way to a different, more ‘bar heater, slowly filling the room to make your feet and soul feel nice and toasty’ love. But really, must it? And how soon is normal for this to happen? I’m starting to feel stifled in the bar heat, my feet are over toasted and are getting itchy. I want my flame-thrower hunk-o’-burning-love lover back. It’s gone beyond  ’10 sexy seductions that will make him fall in love again’ and ‘How to spice up your love life’. It’s at the point of should I stay or should I go.

Is it okay to leave an amazing relationship on these grounds or am I just being a princess? If I do, will it be the biggest mistake I’ve made in my life? 

Thanks,

The Young And The Restless

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Dear Young And The Restless,

Thank you for your letter. What a great band and terrible television show you were/are!

First, to your ‘stay or go’. This is tough to answer without knowing how old you are. Are you under 23? If so, then it’s pretty unlikely that you know yourself well enough to have met someone at twenty-and-a-half and be ready to commit to staying with this person. As a decrepit and infinitely ancient old person, all I want to tell you is: youth is for playing around! It’s exactly like this wonderful scene from Little Miss Sunshine:

Grandpa: Can I give you some advice?

Dwayne: [shakes head “no”]

Grandpa: Well, I’m going to give it to you, anyway. I don’t want you making the same mistakes I made when I was young. Dwayne, that’s your name, right? Dwayne? Listen to me, this is the voice of experience talking. Are you listening? Fuck a lot of women, Dwayne.

Richard: Dad!

Grandpa: I got no reason to lie to you kid, fuck a lotta women. Not just one, a lot. So are you gettin’ any? Is it going anywhere?

Dwayne: [shakes his head no]

Grandpa: No? Jesus! What are you? Fifteen? You should be gettin’ that young stuff! That young stuff is the best stuff in the world!

But if you’re older than 26 then you’re approaching the time where potentially, yes, you are deciding if the person you’re with is the person you’re going to commit to for the whole shebang of a life together. If that is the case: to leave because of waning desire would be a mistake. I can’t say the biggest of your life, as I’m not acquainted with your degree of insane decision-making. Perhaps you enjoy BASE jumping and being bitten by spiders for science, neither of which I recommend.

It sounds to me like you are onto something with this fellow. I am wary of anyone who attaches the word “perfect” to another person, BUT I think this might just be your way of telling me that you are in a good thing with this man? (Quick aside: I say steer clear of perfect, because nothing is perfect. NOT EVEN SPHERES. Not to mention, the person deemed to be perfect could very well suffocate under the weight of living up to that impossibility in someone else’s estimation. “Good enough” is what we want from ourselves and each other, ideally. It doesn’t mean settling, it means being realistic.)

You aren’t being a princess. Your letter is very timely, really, as the New York Times just published a lengthy piece on this exact subject. The piece explores the potentialities of a ‘female viagra’, and the research so far into women’s (and men’s) sex drives, and how they fade over time. There is a lot of conflicting evidence as to why this happens in long-term relationships, and whether it is innate biology or social conditioning — i.e., men are taught to be virile and highly sexed and to seek it often; woman are taught to be monogamous and motherly. So do we both follow these conditioned roles, or is there something to suggest a biological proof of this behaviour? The writer is sceptical of the latter and it’s really worth reading the whole thing for a balanced exploration.

The early stages of sexual attraction are overwhelming. If you think back to those times in your life (or if it’s happening to you right now – HUBBA HUBBA, and good luck concentrating long enough to read this, slutbags), you’ll probably have trouble remembering what else you were meant to be doing at the time. How did you even manage to do your job when all you could think about was this other person and their arousing new smell? Everything about them! Wanting to be with no one but this person for the rest of time, just like this. Only us! The whole world falls away. You become so enmeshed with this incredible other human being that all the barriers between you are obliterated. It can almost feel like you’ve become one entity. It’s probably one of the most powerful feelings we ever live to experience. This is heady stuff!

This cannot last forever, because it if it did the world would end. Can you imagine? Industry would grind to a halt. No one would care about the very large inconvenience of playing your part in the world when you could be in bed fucking, occasionally resting to eat, to half watch a movie, to read to each other from books, to sleep only so you can fuck again. But then, who would write the books? Who would make the food? The movies, no one would direct them! We’d all whither away, eventually, blissfully, in this orgiastic global bonkfest – which honestly is infinitely preferable to all these other ways – but still, this cannot be sustained.

As those psychiatrists say, they are bedeviled by this ancient question, so, SPOILER ALERT, we will not be answering it today — if we did, G-NPX would be very rich. But still, let’s try.

Think of a committed relationship as a slow burning and delicious stew that will sustain you together for your whole lives. You want to keep this stew cooking for roughly 60 (or 91) years. The stew cooks in a giant, wrought iron pot over a hearth in a dirt room under your house. If your hearth goes out, you’ve got no stew. If your stew gets burned, you’ve got no food. You can’t just chuck whatever you have around into that big pot and leave it on the fire forever and hope for the best! You have to pay attention all the time. First, agree on which soup you both want, then select the ingredients carefully. Your taste in stew will change over time. You will have to manage these transitions slowly. Sometimes, only one of you will be able to be there with the stew and you will have to take on more of the task to make sure everything stays cooking. Take turns in sharing who does more and when.

In the delicious, life-sustaining relationship stew of a shared life there are many ingredients. Sex is one of them, but it’s only one. Too much or too little of anything and that stew will taste awful; neither of you will want to eat it. There are all the other ingredients that are just as important — like you say, you can ‘talk, do silence, laugh, fight, hang out with others, each other, ourselves.’ They all go in the pot. Or else, no stew.

There is no agreement on why desire – especially for women – fades over time, only the evidence that it does happen. Perhaps pathologising it and making it into a problem that makes people feel constantly like there is something wrong with them is actually what’s wrong? Despite all the depictions in the media to the contrary, sex ain’t like how it is in the movies.

Now, this is where things get perhaps unromantic, but real. When you’re in it for the long haul with someone — who is, remember, the same someone you couldn’t bare to be disunited from in those throes of early insanity sex times; the exact same person! — you have to make time for things in a way you didn’t used to. You have to be mindful, you have to tend your stew! So you are still having great sex with this person, it’s just different. It’s just less often (the whole world-ending thing). There’s a lot to look forward to in really knowing someone this way, like being completely comfortable and safe and respected and understood – which are all things that are necessary for good sex. Real intimacy isn’t borne of just screwing until you pass out from exhaustion.

But be aware that the longer things go on with you together, the easier it is for life to just get in the way of you making the effort – a concerted effort – to do things that make it work for you together. Human beings seem to be really bad at living without novelty; we expect distraction and excitement and new things all the time. These things are the opposite of familiarity, but familiarity is what inevitably comes with spending every day with someone.

Then again, perhaps you’ll find that one day your desire will just come back to you all at once like a flood and you won’t be able to stop sexting like teenagers whenever you aren’t together. Which is the other thing: every single person’s relationship is different. Every one of our everyday lives and our physical and emotional and psychological makeups and family history and work-related stress situations and attitudes we were taught about sex are different, and all of these things, at different times, factor into the very complex equation of how we feel desire.

The pluses of having found someone that you even want to spend all your time with and mean it are many, many, many. You just have to remember that this thing, this fading of the initial burning we feel for someone else, is natural and inevitable and for all we know, has always happened. As time goes on, remain engaged with each other, acknowledge that balancing everything in the real world you now inhabit outside of your initial-meeting-bliss-bubble is hard work. But you love this person, you desire them. You just can’t spend every spare minute having sex because life must be lived! Remember to adapt as time goes by together, and listen, really listen to the other person, and always do your best to meet them halfway. These things are hard to live up to, but we have to always be trying. Trust yourself if you know you’re onto a good thing. Tend your stew.

Or, you know, book a night in a hotel, take as much ecstasy as you can still handle and just go fucking crazy now and then.

Every best (dirty) thought,

G-NPX

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Dear G-NPX,

My apartment is covered in mould. It’s a never-ending battle. I clean it off and then it comes right back. It gets into everything. We also get overrun by slugs, all over the damn place. We used to get heaps of cockroaches too, but since bombing the house with bug spray they have been gone only briefly, to be replaced by lots of tiny random bugs that the cockroaches were probably scaring away before. How do I get rid of all of this? It’s gross. Pls hlps.

Dirty But Not In A Good Way

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Dear Dirty BNIAGW,

Perhaps might I suggest moving from this disgusting pest-ridden place?

OK, no. Mould: get a bunch of these things and place them around the house. You also need to call your real estate agent – if you’ve got a more systemic problem of rising damp, they will need to address that, because as you can see it is complicated to fix, and likely structurally related to the building.

You have what sounds like a permanent pest problem that bombing has only made worse, so you need to get your estate agent on to that too, in the form of a pest control service that will come and go nuclear on your revolting, uninvited guests.

Sometimes it’s nice to be able to give a straightforward answer. Hope this helps!

Forever in cleanliness,

G-NPX

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