Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [56]
I stick to my intentions about ending that way because I wanted to emphasize that many loose girls marry like I did, and yet it doesn’t mean anything, not really, about how we change. In many ways, I married to simply take myself out of the market. It’s not that the man I’d met was magical, that he somehow knew how to love me in a way others couldn’t. He was a good man, but he was still human with all the imperfections and difficulties that come along with that. He did not save me from myself. He didn’t transform me into someone else. I was still me: the loose girl. The work of having intimacy had only just begun.
Being a loose girl is a lifelong process. I will always have to watch myself carefully, and I will surely always struggle. I will always make mistakes here and there. Whenever life gets hard, whenever something makes me feel insignificant or unloved, whenever I feel abandoned in any way, I tend toward my old behavior. I start thinking about a guy. I start considering how a man might save me. I start to slip. The main difference now is that those thoughts don’t have the same power over me. I don’t believe the fantasy. I’m too aware of its lie and how I’ve hurt myself with it.
But many women are not in the same place. They still struggle heavily with those feelings, still believe the pull, and still enjoy the high just a little too much.
Sandra has been having an affair for seven months now. She also sometimes sleeps with other men. Her husband probably knows, but he turns a blind eye. His anger comes out with passive aggression and occasional verbal abuse. He tells her that she does things wrong or that she’s too slow or too fast. He has pretty much stopped having sex with her, too. She knows her marriage needs to end, but she’s scared that when she’s on her own, her behavior will only get worse, that she’ll feel out of control and will harm herself further.
This out-of-control feeling is typical among adult loose girls. They are ashamed that, at this point in their lives, when they should be making mature choices, they still act in these ways. But it feels like they can’t stop. Often, as adults loose girls will fall into love and/or sex addiction. They tend toward unavailable men who will distance themselves as the women approach and pursue. Loose girls often demand too much too soon. They want to know if the men are going to commit to them pronto. They want to know how the men are going to make them feel loved. They expect men to fill their emptiness, and in adulthood, the loose girls feel angry that they don’t. They call or email or text men too much, no longer feeling they have the luxury to wait. The pressure from society to settle down and marry is so immense that if a woman is single she often feels she is undesirable.
Or they remove themselves from men altogether. Gerri, who has been divorced for many years, told me that she hadn’t been with a man in two years. She’s been with more than a hundred men, and she just wants it to stop. She assumes she can’t have a normal relationship with a man, so she won’t go near any. She’d rather be alone than feel that out-of-control feeling that comes with her engagement with men.
The shame for grown-up loose girls is as bad as it is for teenagers, but it happens for an entirely different reason. Women should be married and monogamous (and heterosexual, for that matter). They should be concerned with their children, not with their own needs. They can have sex, unlike teenage girls, but they can’t want it. And they certainly can’t want it as much as or more than their partners. The stereotype of the married woman is that she is always warding off her husband’s advances. There is that old caricature of the wife who says, “Not tonight, dear. I have a headache,” and the underlying assumption that this is just an excuse for not wanting sex at all. There is that stereotype, too, of women sitting around together, complaining