Vol. 1, Post #45 All I wanna do is make love to you

Last week's post on affairs went LARGE. Here's follow up. My sex tips for girls* (*girls who are holding on to mid-life by a thread). A dating odyssey for Young Olds, AKA, people with readers.

Merry, joyful, happy holidays, Young Olds! I’m publishing early this week since tomorrow is Xmas and you currently might be traveling, frazzled or bored to tears, and looking for something juicy into which you can delve — likewise, you can read me tomorrow as you pray to your patron saints to Calgon, Take Me Away.

If you were around last week, Dear Readers, you know that a handful (a generous handful) of women in my life are having relationships (sex-based or sex AND love-based) with people besides their spouses or primary partners. In writing about it, I hypothesized that many women — all Young Olds — are seeking out these relationships for a variety of reasons, but what’s rang clear is this: shame is playing nearly no role in it.

Some of these women are channeling “Mad Men” Roger and Don, and their stereotypical midlife crisis excuses for seeking out OPP but many are not. Regardless, I’m extremely interested in what I learned and to test out a theory I have, I followed up last week’s post with this on social media, offering it up in a private group to which I belong that is made up of only women, all feminists over the age of 40:

I’m wondering if there is anyone who would be so kind as to speak with me privately and completely confidentially, regarding having an extramarital affair. I’m writing about this topic now on my Substack and I have an idea for some follow up that needs a first-hand, anonymous source.

There is ZERO judgment on my part and believe me when I say you are not alone. But I do need some perspective outside of my own community in which I have already mined some valuable insight.

As an aside, I’m hoping that those who have condemnation regarding extramarital affairs will not offer that up here. I understand everyone has a wide variety of opinions on extramarital relationships, or relationships outside of a partnership, and it’s not my goal to stir the shit about that for anyone who feels triggered.

What I’m trying to do is get in touch with anyone who’s made a reasonable, or calculated, decision to have another relationship outside of their primary relationship, without being polyamorous. As in, “This is missing in my main relationship, and I am seeking it out with another person on the side.”

Please DM me and again, this would be a confidential conversation.

The group of just over 2,000 women, I felt, would be a perfect sample audience on which to test my theory, which is centered around some of these cultural touchstones.

• The rapid-fire growing popularity of Esther Perel and related “relational intelligence” therapy. Esther has been doing her important work for decades but has captured the public’s attention in a profound way in recent years.

• Miranda July’s runaway 2024 success with “All Fours” – the New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction. If you’re not familiar, the book is based on the story of a semi-famous artist who leaves her family and takes a cross-country road trip from Los Angeles to New York and embarks on a journey of self-discovery that includes a pivotal love affair.

• The ongoing discussion and societal acceptance of gender fluidity, polyamory and open marriage, not just for the “curious” 20somethings. Major media including New York Magazine have run cover articles on this sexual zeitgeist. And, related, what it means to revisit the classics on polyamory, like “The Ethical Slut,” written in 1997, and how today’s Young Olds are adapting some of these practices as they carve out what their mid- and later chapters should look like.

Ready to guess how many woman from that group I described above reached out to me to share their stories? In the first hour after I posted my request to talk, over 80. By the end of the first day, over 200. I’m still getting messages, reading, “I want to talk to you.”

Who are these women? They ranged from homemakers who were seeing lovers during the days when their kids were at school and their spouses were at work, to professionals who were navigating busy careers and finding time to travel with lovers out of area so that they could walk down the street holding hands. There were therapists and sexologists who were treating clients as well as dealing with their own desires. There was a dominatrix who fell in love with one of her customers, who, ironically, had sought her out precisely because his wife had given him permission to take his kink somewhere “safe” like a professional. There was a woman who left her now ex-husband even before she had sex with her now new husband, both of them gobsmacked in love as if struck by lightning, both of them ready to move mountains to be together as their entire town damned them. There was a woman who begged her husband for an open marriage and when the answer was “no,” took matters into her own hands, opting not to get divorced and instead embarking on what was now a decades-long affair with a man she calls “so desirable in every way but too temperamental for a day-to-day partnership.” That woman has chosen to stay married, live two lives and doesn’t want to negotiate any of it as she endeavors to make herself happy.

Now it’s time to open the invitation to chat to all of you.

I’m researching this topic for a book (remember Vicki Iovine and her 90s series, “The Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy”? Like that) and I’m looking for as many voices as possible. If you have a story about being in a committed relationship (not poly, not ENM) and how you’ve sought out love, companionship, sex, etc. from someone other than your main partner or spouse, I’d love to hear from you.

Please get in touch with me by emailing me at whatsshovegottodowithit@gmail.com

And since I’ve been on a metal schmaltzfest, here’s Heart doing a song from 1990 about fucking around that audiences still request, even though singer Ann Wilson says she dislikes the tune intensely and hasn’t performed it live since 2017. It was Heart’s last Top Ten Pop Chart hit in the US and was originally written for Don Henley(!)