Guilt: The Gift That Kept On Giving
By: Danika Bloom
Tags: Relationships, Love, Life Lessons, Life, Self

Have you ever given a gift to someone you love and had it backfire on you?

Perhaps you bought something expensive and they were too concerned about how much you spent to appreciate how perfect the gift was. Or maybe you organized a romantic weekend away only to find yourselves arguing over something silly like whether the room was exactly as advertised.

On Labour Day weekend, 2005, I gave my husband of fourteen years a gift that I’d spent months planning. Well, planning may not be quite the right word…preparing for would be more accurate.

A picture perfect partnership

James and I had what everyone, including us, thought was a perfect marriage. We had one healthy child (though James wanted at least one more), and in all our years together we’d only had two arguments, both about incomplete truths he’d told about what he was doing while away on business trips.

We never argued about money or how we were raising our son or any of the domestic things so many couples find themselves battling over. We were each other’s best friend.

I’d say James and I talked about everything, but there was one conversation we’d managed to avoid for the entire second half of our marriage: the fact that with each passing year we’d had sex less and less often. In our fourteenth year, we’d made love fewer than five times. And the three years prior were barely any better — less than once every six weeks.

The reason I never raised it was because I liked our sexless relationship. I had zero interest in making love. I decided that it was because my pregnancy had been so emotionally difficult for me — a miscarriage was virtually guaranteed by doctors— that the fear of becoming pregnant again was the cause of my non-existent sex drive.

To help me alleviate that fear, my loving husband had a vasectomy. We were in our early thirties and on the day he had the procedure done I went to work — in my entirely female office — and announced the great news.

My boss, who had a daughter one year older than my son, had been trying to figure out how to have a second child since her husband had had a vasectomy shortly after their daughter was born.

She looked at me with so much pain in her eyes, “But, you’re only 33. What if you decide you want another child in a few years?”

“Then I can have one,” I blurted. “James is the one who can’t have more children.”

She called me a horrible person — it felt like only partially joking — and we all laughed.

But what followed did make me feel like a horrible person. A horrible, terrible, awful person.

James gave me the gift of sterilization

James had made the sacrifice to never be able to have the “more kids” he truly wanted. He did that for me.

In return, I was going to give him a functioning libido.

Unfortunately, I still had no interest in sex. I faked it for a few years, responding to his touch by silently taking off my pyjamas.

As easily as he and I shared our small kitchen space without getting in each other’s way in the morning, communicating our next move silently, the same did not translate to our communication in bed. The missionary position was the only position we’d ever had sex in. In all of our years together I’d not once had a vaginal orgasm. And the number of times he stimulated my clitoris to help me achieve climax before or after penetration was in the single digits.

In fairness, I hadn’t given him more than a few blow jobs or hand jobs…so, tit for tat, I suppose.

Sex, for me, was work with little reward. I’m not sure if he knew the extent of my lack of pleasure since I sighed and mmm’d and generally made the noises a polite young lady should make when in the throes of passion. And my Keigel muscles were in top form so I could easily create vaginal contractions to accompany my vocalizations.

It never occurred to me that I could or should ask for more, or different, or better from the man I loved and who loved me back. I had spoken to a couple of girlfriends about this, basically saying that if I never had to have sex again, I’d not be sad about it.

Neither of them offered ideas to help me increase my libido, rather they both empathized and agreed. We decided that if our husbands predeceased us, we’d buy land and live in an all-woman commune. It was a plan.

A virtual stranger gave me the gift of knowledge

Over the months preceding a traditional week-long, end-of-summer holiday with those two girlfriends, their husbands, and our collective six kids, I’d been meeting with a film producer who was working with me to find funding for a documentary film I’d written. We met at his home office so I’d gotten to know his wife of twenty-plus years.

One morning I arrived for our meeting and he wasn’t there, so I had coffee with his wife. She told me that he’s spent the night in a town about 90 minutes from our city and was stuck in traffic.

I asked if he’d been at a film event.

She said, “No. He was with his lover.”

We spent the next hour talking about polyamorous relationships — something I knew nothing about. She explained that they had rules and that although they were both allowed to have extramarital affairs, she’d only had one short fling. She was simply happy that the man she loved and wanted to grow old with was getting what she no longer felt compelled to provide for him — an active sex life.

Mind blown, I started to think about this as a solution for the guilt I’d been feeling about my husband and our sexless marriage.

In addition to the guilt, I’d also started to worry that he was going to have an affair and lie to me about it, since if I’d been in his boxers I’d probably have cheated on me years ago.

To me, being lied to felt much more disrespectful than having my husband poke a piece of his flesh into another woman.

I mentioned the film producer’s open relationship to my two girlfriends. They were appalled. They said that they would never accept their husbands having sex with another woman. So I doubted myself. And for months I played all the scenarios in my mind — well, all but one.

The one I never considered was where I figured out why I was so disinterested in sex that I’d rather send the man I loved to sleep with another woman than resolve my issues.

Eventually, I concluded that giving the love-of-my-life permission to have a non-secret affair was a gift that would ensure our marriage stayed strong.

I gave James the gift of another woman

Back at that cottage with our friends, James and I left my son with our friends so we could spend a day doing adult things together. We ate a quiet brunch, went for a romantic hot air balloon ride, and then had a lovely dinner in a restaurant that didn’t serve Pirate Packs or Happy Meals. It was a perfect day and on the hour-long drive back to our cabin, I offered my gift.

“I know that you want and need to have sex more than I make myself available for. And I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m just not interested. It’s not you, it’s me. I want you to be happy. I know that if you had a secret affair and lied to me and I found out, I’d never trust you again. It would ruin us. So, I was thinking that maybe we could try having a non-monogamous relationship.”

He was confused. I told him about the film producer and his wife’s arrangement. As we discussed what this might look like, he wept and thanked me.

That night, we made love at my initiative.

And two weeks later, as he packed for his first international work junket, I sat on the bed and we went over the rules we’d put in place to keep this experiment safe for both of us.

He’d wear a condom, naturally.

He’d not get involved with anyone who lived within two hours of our home. That was one thing I couldn’t wrap my head around — my husband choosing to spend nights with another woman while I was home with our son. So his affairs would be while he was travelling, which was typically at least one week a month.

And he’d tell me everything I wanted to know about his experiences. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

He agreed on all my parameters, packed a box of condoms, and when I dropped him off at the airport the next day, thanked me again for this gift.

Three weeks later he was home. He’d followed all of the rules and told me everything I wanted to know about the woman he’d slept with. And then he told me something I’d not considered possible: he’d fallen in love and was leaving me for her.

In hindsight, I guess I understand how and why that happened. Instead of working to fix what was wrong in our marriage — both my libido and our inability to talk about it — we chose avoidance and an “easier” route. What that approach highlighted what that our marriage wasn’t as perfect as we’d imagined it, pretended it, hoped it to be.

I gave myself the gift of myself

My current long-term relationship — thirteen years so far — is one in which sex is an incredibly pleasurable experience. In part, because I learned to ask for what I need to make love-making authentically moan-worthy. But also because the man I’m with now actually enjoys spending time learning about what makes my body respond — which, on some days, can be a challenge. Happily, it’s a challenge he’s always up for.

But to get to that place, I needed to heal some deep wounds around my sexuality. I experienced body memories and releases, grieved losses, and perhaps most importantly forgave myself for having committed an ‘unthinkable sin’ when I was twenty.

I sometimes wonder how different my life would be had I had the courage while I was in my thirties, to do the work I needed to do. I don’t wonder with longing for anything lost, though. I wouldn’t change a thing about my current life or the path I had to take to get here. It’s just a curiosity about what my ‘self’ is doing in an alternate universe, where I made different decisions and learned lessons at different times.

Would that Danika have had the ten kids that I wanted when I myself was a child? Would she be a writer who shares her soul’s secrets with strangers — some of whom become friends? Would she be happy?

I like to believe so. I like to imagine that every gift given and every gift received — even the ones that we don’t appreciate in the moment — are always exactly what is needed.