Group Sex: An Excerpt from The Husband and Wives Club
Would you tell nine relative strangers the deepest secrets of your marriage? One weekend, these five couples did, and with truth came consequences
The theme of June’s two-day couples group is “Keeping the Erotic Pot Bubbling,” and Philadelphia psychotherapist Judith Coché is wearing red. It’s not racy red—she’s wearing a knee-length dress, scarlet with tiny sprigs of white flowers—but choosing a red dress and hot pink sandals to kick off the group’s sex weekend is the kind of thing she’d do. As the members, five couples, take seats in Coché’s “summer” office, in seaside New Jersey, everyone seems edgy, or at least curious. How far will crazy Judith take this titillating theme? For two years, I will observe these 10 people in monthly, daylong sessions of group marital therapy with Coché. I can tell they respect her, and most of them are pretty trusting of her, too, but they know she has a provocateur’s bent. You might be explaining how you barked at your boyhusband one afternoon, and before you know it, she’s taken it to incest in the dark of night.
“Who wants to start—how would you like to improve sexual enjoyment with your partner?” she asks. When Coché, who’s in her early sixties, ran the group with her late husband, Erich Coché, they had a good cop/bad cop routine going: Erich reassured, stroked; she pushed. “Causing the right amount of trouble is an art form,” Coché likes to say. She has had other coleaders since Erich died of cancer in 1991, and her sidekick for this session is sex therapist Julian Slowinski, a former Benedictine monk with a bearded, teddy bear face. He’s the designated nice guy to her troublemaker. This weekend, however, trouble will practically start itself, coming from way out in left field. Or to use Coché’s cliché, it will come from an empty erotic pot, one blackened and crusty with the remains of what had been cooking years before. Yet at the moment, nothing seems terribly dire.
“Should we begin?” Michael says, turning to his wife, Rachael, who at 34 is the youngest member of the group. The spouses range in age from their mid-thirties to their late fifties and have been married anywhere from a few months to nearly three decades. Rachael shrugs good-naturedly at her husband’s bid to start. She’s an Australian émigré with fair skin, pale blue eyes, and chin-length curls. Michael, four years her senior, has a slightly beaky nose and a floppy shock of brown hair that he is forever pushing out of his face. If how people act on a couch is any indication of what goes on in bed, these two are doing fine. “I’m a little blunt,” Michael says to the group. “I would want more oral foreplay.” He turns to his wife, who giggles. “Are you embarrassed?”
“In a funny way,” Rachael says.
“Do you want to give or receive, or both?” Coché asks.
“Receive,” Michael says. “I’ve given, but more receive. On the whole, I think our sex life is actually very robust. Um, it’s just that certain skills need to be improved.”
“Anybody?” Coché says, a little like a carnival barker. “Who else would enjoy more oral play?”
Thunderous silence.
“Who wants to admit it?” Michael deadpans.
“So nobody?” Coché repeats.
“Well, I’d like it to happen,” pipes up 57- year-old Leigh, who’s been married to Aaron, nearly 60, for seven years. “That’s one of the things I feel I’ve had to give up in this marriage.” Like Coché, Leigh was widowed in her late forties. Aaron is her second husband, and they’ve been in the group for a decade— longer than anyone in Coché’s 20-plus years of running couples sessions (the typical stay is two years). They joined before they married, to determine if they wanted to marry, in fact. The major problem: Aaron’s anxiety-based sexual dysfunction.
“So ‘more’ isn’t quite right,” Coché says.
“Just some would be wonderful,” Leigh says, “but it’s not going to happen.”
“You’re giving Aaron permission not to?” Slowinski says with shrinky spin.
“I’m just resigned,” Leigh says. “I don’t want to pressure him or make him feel he has to.” But, she says pointedly to Slowinski, “I’m not giving him permission not to.” She turns to Aaron, also on his second marriage, the first having ended in divorce: “Did you feel I was giving you permission not to?”
“No.” It’s the shortest answer Aaron will give all year.
“I think I’d like some too.” It’s Clem, joining the deprived contingent. His wife is Marie, and they’re both in their mid-forties, married 21 years. “But pressuring Marie isn’t going to help.” Clem is the essence of mild: fit and trim, with prematurely white hair that sets off his baby blue eyes.
“Very similar to how Leigh feels,” Coché says. “Do you think you’d like more oral sex, Clem, or are you fairly certain you would?”
“Yes, I’m—I’m certain,” Clem says. Then, addressing Michael: “So thank you for providing some leadership and being blunt.” Michael nods, smiling.
“How’s the erotic pot?” It’s Bella. She and her husband, Joe, were running late, and they’ve just arrived, blown in on a fresh wind. They’re attractive, well dressed: prom queen and king for the moment. They plop down in two chairs waiting for them. Bella crosses her legs. She’s wearing a clinging royal blue dress and strappy gold sandals.
Rachael, who’d just begun her sexual wish list when Bella and Joe came through the door (she’d like to try new sexual positions and dress more erotically, if she could shed a few pounds), smiles at the couple, who are close to her age.
“How does it feel to walk into this conversation?” Coché asks Bella and Joe.
“Actually, it feels good,” Joe says, like, no problem; he’s cool with this therapy thing, with graphic sex talk. To begin melding the reconfigured group, Coché says she wants to back up for a minute. “A group moves as quickly as its slowest member, and we were just joined by two people who didn’t have the benefit of being with us last time.” (Bella and Joe had to miss the first session because of a longscheduled Italian vacation.) Coché wants to go from person to person, to find out how many total years of marriage are in the room. The members oblige her matter-offactly, with the exception of Mark, who speaks proudly of his 27-year marriage. Mark and his wife, Sue Ellen, first visited Coché because of their teenage son’s drug problem, and she recommended that they join the group—if their marriage improved, she advised, they’d be better parents. This is their second year, and Coché told me they have made “huge progress.” I believe her. The couple’s long marriage seems like a soft cloak, rather than an itchy wool topcoat with rocks in the pockets.
“Of those years of marriage,” Coché continues, addressing the group again, “how many have felt satisfying, successful?”
“Two months,” Rachael says, which is how long she’s been married to Michael. They are the other pair of divorcées in the group, and apparently, Rachael’s first marriage, which lasted 10 years, was pretty much a bust.
“A year and a half,” says Michael, referring to his first, five-year marriage. “Then two months with Rachael.”
“I’d say zero,” Clem says. Zero years out of 21, that is.
“Three,” is Marie’s assessment.
“In this marriage,” Aaron says, “all seven.”
“I would say all 23 in my first marriage,” Leigh says, “and in this marriage—two.” The tick-tock-tick of the wall clock is deafening.
“So we begin to hear the disparity,” Coché murmurs.
“Twenty-seven for me,” Mark says.
“I’d say about 15,” Sue Ellen says, so softly I can barely hear her. Her hand was resting on top of her husband’s a few minutes earlier, but at some point, she took it back.
“I think there are, like, two days that haven’t been blissful,” Bella says of her yearlong marriage to Joe.
“That was actually my answer,” he says.
Bella and Joe notwithstanding, the mood is leaden. “People change, in my opinion,” Coché begins solemnly, “when there is nothing left to do.” The corollary to that for her is another one-liner from the existentialist canon: “Despair is a great motivator.”
Existentialist despair is founded in the belief in the ultimate meaninglessness of existence (there is no God to grant purpose), but Coché uses “despair” more broadly and tangibly. For existentialists, the answer to this universal tragedy isn’t for man to throw his hands in the air, but to take responsibility for making meaning (while not losing sight of the ultimate absurdity of the endeavor). Coché sees herself as a guide for that task. “The changes you’re able to do easily you’re not going to need our help for,” she tells the group now. “We’re here to work with what doesn’t feel okay…and I think now we can go back and keep talking.”
The question the couples were considering— how they’d like to increase their own sexual enjoyment—sounds trifling in the current context. Except that sex has the potential to be deeply meaningful. (Even a Hobbesian like Freud believed it: “[T]he union of mental and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of life’s culminating peaks. Apart from a few queer fanatics, all the world knows this and conducts its life accordingly.”)
“I feel like I’m enjoying things much more,” Aaron announces.
“So much better than you thought you ever would that you can’t imagine it could be better?” Coché asks.
“Absolutely, right, right,” he says. “As I like to say with a little humor, I’ve gone from kindergarten to college to graduate school.”
“That’s huge,” Coché compliments him.
“The first time we were in bed together,” Leigh has told me outside of the group, “Aaron just froze. He just became stiff, and he didn’t touch me. He lay like this.” She put her arms straight down at her sides, elbows locked. “He was petrified, absolute fear. The next day he broke out in shingles.” Leigh told him their relationship was over unless he got professional help for his extreme anxiety, and he did, first in individual and couples counseling with Slowinski, and then here.
“We were reminiscing last night about how he wouldn’t even stay in the room [after sex],” Leigh says now, in the group. But the night before, she continues to Aaron, “you were so loving and verbal.” It’s as if she’s willing him to look at her, to soak up the appreciation in her eyes. She is a person whose smile transforms her appearance; you notice her intelligent eyes and ready warmth, her stylishly cut and highlighted hair.
As for what she’d like sexually, Leigh doesn’t mention her earlier request. She is trying to ask for something she has a chance of getting. While the couple first had intercourse at about the same time they married, Aaron, as one might guess, still had a ways to go on sexual relations, and on close relations in general. “With his anxiety, it was like there was this wall,” she says in private. “He didn’t listen to what I was saying, didn’t hear me crying.” And their physical relationship had plateaued: Aaron never touched Leigh sexually; the couple always used a vibrator. For whatever reason, nine years of this was Leigh’s limit. So at the beginning of last year, Leigh told Aaron she’d divorce him if he didn’t touch her.
Aaron took her seriously; never before had she raised the prospect of divorce. With Slowinski, he reapplied himself to a desensitization program to lessen his near phobic reaction to the female anatomy; he agreed to take antianxiety medication; and he did what his wife required: He started to touch her every now and again.
So a year later, Leigh is here to keep their gains from evaporating, and she asks Aaron to continue to “notice her.” She wants to be admired, told she’s pretty—basically, she wants to be seduced a little.
“Anybody else in here feel like your enjoyment would increase if you were more noticed or your partner were more verbal?” Coché asks.
Clem sticks up his hand. “I wrote down ‘Wish my partner would show interest in me, wish Marie had more interest in sex and touching.’ It’s been hard for me, after 20 years. At one point I probably lost 25 pounds and got in really good shape, and even that didn’t make any difference.”
Clem is wearing dock shoes with no socks, and I find myself wanting him to cover his bare ankles, to stop making himself naked. This year, Clem continues, “it’s just, uh, it’s, uh, I’m trying to give Marie her space.” A watched pot never boils, so to speak.
“You can’t push it,” Coché agrees. “But you can do what Leigh did, which is require that your partner keep working on it… Marie?” she asks. Marie is the last person up before lunch—Bella and Joe are going to address the question after the break.
“Um, I don’t feel in the same place that any of y’all are,” Marie says. She grew up in a rural area, and she hasn’t entirely scrubbed the country from her speech. “Right now, I don’t have a sexual need, because while you all are almost at the technique level, I’m at the inside-dead level.”
“Sheesh,” Coché says. Marie’s bald insight into herself is impressive.
“So if I can’t nurture and expand the parts that make up myself,” Marie goes on, “it’s like asking somebody if they’re hungry while they’re choking.”
“Wow, you should write a novel,” Slowinski gushes.
Marie smiles, and I think I see a hint of pride (that she can outtalk the purveyors of the talking cure?) in her expression. Marie’s graying brown hair hangs to the middle of her back, and she wears it in a long side ponytail. Hair like that in a middle-aged woman could be either a girlish affectation or a sign of indifference about her appearance. With 44-year-old Marie, I’ll come to believe it’s both.
No comments:
Post a Comment