One way to measure the passage of time is to count the number of days since you last had sex.
I’ve lost count. I only know it’s been more than three years for me and my husband—at least with each other. I know this because sunflowers droop in our yard. Tomato vines sag. Windfall apples rot in the grass.
After the three-year mark, the exact math seems irrelevant—or maybe too dismal a sum to confront. Numbers are such an impersonal metric, anyhow.
Friends attempt to normalize my dilemma, pointing out the length of my relationship, as if its 16-year duration accounts for the fossilization of desire. I am 36 years old, though—unwilling, just yet, to surrender this relic from our relationship to the living room mantel, our home’s unofficial residence for old, brittle things: bleached skulls, weathered antlers, flaking horns. I picture our sex life there, wedged between a triceratops jawbone and a chunk of petrified driftwood, collecting dust.
***
It’s spring. My husband is not yet my husband. We’re two college kids who have only just begun dating and we’re sitting next to each other watching an evening of cowboy poetry. I am so aware of his hand, which rests on his leg, inches away from my hand. Over the course of the night, the space between our hands closes, until our fingers clasp. The hammering in my heart leads me to believe this is the most erotic act I’ve yet experienced.
***
It’s spring in 2020. The camelia bush bursts with pink blossoms, big as breasts. The shaded daffodils, not yet blooming, crane their slender necks toward sunlight. My husband and I sit on our deck facing each other, masks on, six feet apart. This week, he’s staying at another woman’s apartment, coming home to work in the backyard studio he built after he was laid off early in the pandemic. Because of the woman’s health condition, my husband and I must social distance from each other for the duration of his stay with her.
I form a visor with my hand to shield my face from the sun. “Did you sleep with her?”
He nods. My chest constricts. I tell him I’m happy for him. I tell myself I’m happy for him.
At this point, it’s been a year since we last had sex with each other.
I pull at the pills on my sweater, chew on the inside of my cheek. I want to close the space between us, to reach out to him. I want him to hold me, to comfort me. I want to smell the sun on his skin. I know he wants these things, too. But we stay six feet apart, masks on.
I am still getting used to this.
***
Sometimes it helps to imagine I’m the protagonist in a novel, a tragic wife in one of those static plots where life moves around her but not through her. Like she’s frozen in time while the rest of the world whirls by.
I am making myself sound more tragic than I am, though. At least, I was not so tragic prior to the pandemic.
The year before we married, my husband and I opened our relationship. It was 2019, and, unaware the world would soon shrink from global isolation, we expanded our sex lives. There was the hiker I met in Scotland, and we slept together while a storm pummeled my rental cabin by the edge of the sea. There was the woman with freckles fanning the bridge of her nose, her kisses soft and searching. There was the bartender who gave me butterflies, the night he stayed over a haze of cigarettes and mezcal, our skin tacky from summer.
For my husband, there was the woman with the Subaru who invited him into the back of it for a one-night stand. There was the woman who looked like a brunette Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones, a fact that snapped my ego at its breaking point. Then there was the woman with whom my husband fell in love, for whom he waited three years until she was ready to sleep with a man who was already partnered.
***
It’s spring again. Both virgins, my not-yet husband and I have been dating for one year. He’s 23 and I’m 21 and we’ve waited until now to have sex, because I’d wanted to wait, because I wasn’t ready until now. But the waiting has felt eternal.
Over the course of our first year together, I fell in love with him, a country boy. Maybe it was the stories, how he won a greased pig contest at a local fair. How he took care of an injured wild duck, nicknamed “Roadkill,” until her broken wing had healed. How he fixed up an old Volkswagen Beetle, using a doorbell to fire up the ignition. Maybe it was the way he’d played the banjo that first time, or the way he’d looked with his shirt off, a blade of grass dangling from his mouth, an ocean of prairie stretched out behind him.
Now, it’s the night we’ve decided to have sex, and it’s possible he will scatter rose petals over his ivory-white bedspread for the occasion, though our future selves won’t remember whether this detail is accurate or not. What is true is that he will place two chocolate truffles on a pillow, and the sex will be sweet and slow and familiar and new, and afterward, I will not feel altered, but our sex life will change. Before long, we will be having sex as much as possible, as if we already know that such frequency is finite.
***
At a park overlooking the city, I sit beside the woman with freckles fanning the bridge of her nose. It’s summer 2021. Our masks are off. She’s awash in sun, wearing a black tank top and jeans, sweat beading on her skin. It’s been months since I had sex with that one guy from Tinder, because COVID-19 has complicated my sex life—made it thin, full of waiting.
The woman tells me she’s fallen in love with someone, and when she tells me this, I feel something in me drop, but I smile and say I’m happy for her. She confesses she’s been keeping her distance from me because she wouldn’t have been able to fall in love with me the way she likes to fall in love. She says she told her boyfriend about me, and he was uneasy about the two of us continuing to see each other in a romantic way, but he joked about how he might be more comfortable by the time we’re 65. I try to imagine waiting that long.
On my drive home, I burst into tears.
My husband finds me sobbing in the bathroom and he holds me and rocks me, and I tell him I don’t want my sex life to look like this, so threadbare.
“Why don’t you desire me?” I say in a small, defeated voice.
“We’ll figure this out,” he says.
Anger flares. I want him to figure this out. I’m the one who’s been reading the books, listening to the podcasts, responding to the journal prompts.
In this moment, though, my husband continues to hold me, doesn’t let go. For tonight, this is enough.
***
When my husband was nine years old, hunting for fossils with his dad, he discovered a triceratops jawbone on the side of the road in Wyoming, except the bone was in pieces, so they had to recover each fragment, fit them back together, and trust the glue would hold.
***
My husband and I sit on the couch drinking cocktails, me sitting sideways, my legs draped over his, and I feel tender toward him, but also confused—so delighted by our love that I have trouble reconciling this delight with the sexual deprivation that I blame him for, because by this point, we have not had sex for two years. Intellectually, though, I’m trying to understand. I study dozens of books. I read psychologist Esther Perel’s books twice. Too much intimacy can lead to loss of mystery, I remind myself. “When there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek,” Perel writes in Mating in Captivity. To sustain desire, one must exercise persistent curiosity in the inherent otherness of one’s partner.
I consider how dinosaurs and outer space have long held the curiosity of humans, their colossal otherness a seduction. I, however, have never been all that interested in dinosaurs or space, unable (unwilling?) to see them as anything but abstractions.
When my husband shows me an image of a galaxy cluster taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, I nod, study the photo, and utter something about beauty or magnificence, because I fear saying anything less will reveal a lack of reverence for something that, judging by my husband’s clear excitement, is supposed to incite awe. Privately, though, my reaction aligns with Reddit user pizzafourlife’s response: That’s it?
A couple of days later, the woman with freckles sends me a link to Audubon’s photography awards, and I scroll. A ruby-throated hummingbird sucks nectar from a purple sage blossom. A northern flicker hovers in flight, yellow feathers stretching toward sky like flames. A bufflehead dips its beak in placid water, tilts its head back, and droplets fall, suspended in time. The behind-the-shot descriptions explain how the photographers held still for hours, bellies on wet sand and mud. One of them even stood in minus 10-degree Fahrenheit weather while snow fell, numb fingers steadying the camera. Each photographer snapped thousands of shots to capture a bird in a single perfect moment. Before I know it, tears stream down my cheeks. I am overcome.
Though my husband is awed by a galaxy cluster and I am struck by the wonder of these small winged creatures, maybe he and I see beauty in the same thing—though I’m not sure if I could name the thing. A reverence for inexplicable otherness? The perseverance of human curiosity? The simple, awful act of patience?
Now, on the couch, sipping cocktails with my husband, I pull a maraschino cherry from its stem with my teeth. As I chew, I tell my husband I have never cared much about the history of dinosaurs. He already knows this about me, but he still cannot believe it, and he laughs. I wave a hand vaguely in the air and say that it is the faraway-ness of it, that the immense distance between the existence of humans and the extinction of dinosaurs is too intangible for me to bother trying to fathom. Because he is patient, my husband tries again. This time, he offers numbers, walking me through all of creation, from the point at which earth began, approximately 4.6 billion years ago—and I want to stop him there, already struggling to comprehend (numbers are so impersonal, after all), but something to do with the alcohol relaxes my mind and I tell him to continue, and I try to imagine earth 4,567,000,000 years ago as a clump of dust that spun into a molten orb. I picture the planet, one billion years later, when the first single-celled organism squirmed onto its surface. Then, another two billion years, when the lusty conditions for sexual reproduction commenced.
I am interested now. Which is sometimes how excitement works—an arousal ignited by someone else’s.
My husband explains how, after dinosaurs clomped into existence, they milled about, doing dinosaur things, for 165 million years. Then, 200 million years ago—snap, blink—half of all life went extinct.
“Two-hundred million years ago?” I ask. “I can’t even comprehend how long ago that was.”
“That’s because it’s way beyond a human understanding of time.”
I sip my cocktail, swallow. “Whoa.”
I am trying to understand how something once so real, so tangible, can go extinct. Can be gone in a blink.
But no, I think, it’s not gone. It’s gathering dust nearby.
I walk to the mantel and lift the triceratops jawbone. It’s dense, heavy as stone. I run my fingers over it, and it feels so real to me, not abstract at all, this broken thing that was pieced back together with such care.
***
We have a five-hour layover in Barcelona. We’re on our way to Mallorca for our honeymoon, and while we wait, I browse lingerie shops at the airport. I had ordered a skimpy black onesie with a plunging neckline for our vacation in Spain, but the order didn’t arrive in time, so now I’m wandering the airport in search of new lingerie, and in this moment, jet-lagged and smelling travel-ripe, I’m certain that the entire fate of our honeymoon hinges on finding the perfect shape of fabric. We’ve been married three weeks and have only had sex once. Three days after our wedding, my husband began spending even more time with the other woman.
I tell myself we’ve been together more than 12 years now, so it makes sense we don’t have sex as much as we used to, but I’m worried that if my husband starts having sex with this other woman, she will eclipse me.
My task feels urgent, and even though I have hours to browse, I rush from store to store, searching for the right lingerie, the very thing that might make my husband see me anew, to see my inherent otherness. But in the end, it is too much to ask of one piece of fabric, and I return to my husband emptyhanded.
***
I know friends feel sorry for me. I know this because they tell me exactly that. They describe how their husbands are the ones who want sex, who initiate, who cannot be sated. I sense the fear in their eyes when they ask what I’ve tried, as if my condition is contagious. Maybe, if they do things differently, they won’t catch what I have.
“Have you tried sexy lingerie?” they ask. “Have you tried not being so forward?”
As if my husband’s desire is within my control. As if I am what needs to change.
***
In Sex and the City: The Movie, Miranda confesses she and her husband have not had sex for six months, and her friends are aghast.
***
I jog along the beach in winter. The salted wind is silvery cold and whips my hair into a tangle. The sea and sky are both metal-gray. I run until I reach a whale that has washed ashore.
The whale is a mass of flesh and blubber splayed across the sand, a gelatinous quality to it, like an enormous jellyfish. Sorrow sweeps over me, and I’m overcome by the loneliness of its decay.
Kneeling, I examine torn flesh, ribbons of insides in tatters. Gravely, gently, I press the tips of my fingers against it, and it has more give than I’d imagined, leathery yet still soft somehow.
To be touched.
I think how sad it is this creature no longer feels the press of water all around it. Now, only the cold grit of sand underneath. Wind licking over its exposed body.
My thoughts are interrupted when a dog, dragging its leash, trots up from behind me, squats next to the whale, and pees.
***
In her essay “Oceans,” Sarah Manguso writes: “Damage, growth, and time are all the same thing to a body.”
***
It’s the summer of 2020 and the woman with freckles is seated six feet away from me. We’re at the edge of a river, and we can’t move closer to kiss because we’re in a pandemic and she’s in nursing school.
She tells me what it’s been like living in a Black body in Portland, Oregon, this summer, attending protests every week. I’ve been attending them, too, but I know it’s different for me, a white woman. She begins to cry, and an impulse to hold her seizes me. Instead, we wade into the water so we can feel the press of it against our bodies. It’s a substitute, but it’s something.
It’s dark by the time we bike back to my house. We stand under a streetlight and she asks if she can kiss me and I cannot say no. As we kiss, I feel guilt and longing—guilt because of virus risk, and longing because we haven’t yet been naked with each other, because we waited too long, because while we were waiting, a pandemic settled in. This will be our last kiss before she meets someone and falls in love in the way she wants to fall in love.
***
When a pandemic engulfs the globe, death feels so much closer. Three months into the world’s new reality, my husband and I stop having sex. Then he begins having sex with the other woman he loves.
He and I spend more time letting conversations unwind over long, relaxed meals. We go on strolls through our neighborhood. During the workday, he walks into my office just to kiss me, to tell me how much he loves me. Even though he’s in love with two women, and only having sex with one of them, most of our time together feels unbearably sweet, like we’re characters repeating the same heartbreaking scene in a movie day after day, embracing each other, the music swelling, just before one of us walks out the door to meet an untimely death.
More than two years into the pandemic, a pap smear and subsequent tests show that I have a large, precancerous mass in my cervix. When I get the phone call from the nurse, I’m out of town and I still have many hours to drive until I can get home, and during those long hours, I cry and wonder whether the precancer will turn into cancer before I can get the mass of cells out of my body, and death feels so much closer than it ever has.
When I get home and tell my husband, I want him to throw his arms around me, to pick me up and carry me to our bed and make love to me because time feels more finite now. But he only holds me as I weep.
***
I read Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which time unrolls cyclically, looping back, wrapping around and around the characters in such a way that a century passes as if circling a spool.
Nearing the book’s end, I find myself envious of the passion between Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula, “succumbed to the delirium of lovers who were making up for lost time.”
In their fervor, they disembowel mattresses, roll naked in mud, tear the hammock to shreds, and nearly drown while making love in the cistern. They lose their “sense of reality, their notion of time, the rhythm of daily habits.” They keep the doors and windows closed, “so as to not waste time getting undressed. . .”
Then I realize I don’t envy their passion—and not just because they are aunt and nephew. After sixteen years together, my husband and I are well past the initial lusty stage of love, when we were having sex all the time and everywhere. Now, we’re seeing a sex therapist. She’s helping us look ahead to something more suitable to this stage of our story—a slowness, a deepening, like the moments when Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula, exhausted by their exertions, discover “that the rest periods in love had unexplored possibilities, much richer than those of desire.”
***
I awake from anesthesia and my husband is there, waiting to take me home. While I was under, the doctor excised a part of my cervix, and in a few days, I will learn that the precancerous mass was successfully removed and that the cells didn’t bloom into cancer.
My husband puts his arm around me and walks me gingerly to our car. He helps me get into the passenger seat, places a heat pad over my lower abdomen, kisses my forehead.
Most days in my marriage, I feel lucky. I still can’t believe that after 16 years, my husband and I love each other as much as we do. As time passes, I think we can’t possibly love each other more. Then, we do.
Reclining in the passenger seat, I try to imagine the expansiveness of our love five years from now. Twenty. Forty.
Till death do us part.
At our wedding, we didn’t vow to stay together until death—it seemed too dramatic, too old fashioned—though most of the time, I can’t imagine a force besides death that would be strong enough to separate us.
However, I also can’t imagine staying with my husband in a sexless marriage. There are times when my feelings for him are so large I don’t know where to put them—words fall short—and I imagine that sex would feel like a physical translation of my love, a language that would do some of the work of carrying the weight of this terrible, exquisite ache.
On the way home from my procedure, my husband drives through an intersection at the same moment a semitruck runs a red light—snap, blink—and my husband swerves to avoid the collision within inches.
Moments later, we both look at each other, exhale.
***
In ancient Greece, two words were used for time. The first, “chronos,” refers to clock time. The second, “kairos,” is time measured in moments, referring specifically to the perfect, opportune point at which the world inhales. In this pause, just before the world breathes out, the tides of life can change.
***
There’s a candid photo of me and my husband sitting on a driftwood log at the beach, the first photo ever taken of the two of us.
In the photo, we’re seated six feet apart, and we look so young in the photo, me at 20, him at 22, our smiles huge and hopeful. A moment, frozen in time, when our desire was enormous, too big for us to hold, too unwieldy to carry from year to year without letting some of it spill out.
I study the photo now and imagine time looping back. I picture myself tying a note to the tail of a ghost whale so that it can swim back to these two young people and fling the note through the air with one spraying swoosh of its tail so that it lands on the log between them. I imagine my younger self unrolling the wet paper, seeing my own handwriting:
Had we but world enough and time.
The part of me that longs to have sex with my husband would want my younger self to read this note and interpret it as a directive to not waste a second. To understand that pleasure is precious. That everything ends. That death is certain. Wait long enough and the fruit rots. The sex stops.
The part of me that desperately wants to have sex with my husband would want my younger self to embrace pleasure as much as possible while she can still wrap her arms around it. However, there’s another part of me that wants my younger self to go about her life exactly as she will. I want her to experience the fist-clenched yearning that comes from abstaining from sex until she’s ready. I want her first time to be exactly what it was: tender, a little clunky. I want the next eleven years of her sex life to be exactly what they were: adventurous, generous, impulsive. I want her to experience the disorienting effects of opening her relationship to new sexual partners so she can reacquaint herself with her own desire. I want her to wade through the grief of learning that the person she desires most no longer desires her, so that she must seek corporeal pleasure from places besides her husband’s body—to sink her teeth into a ripe fig, to brush pollen onto the tip of a finger, to swim in the river on a hot day and watch droplets roll down her skin. If she learns how to pay attention, these things, too, can be her release.
This moment on the log—two people spaced six feet apart, leaning toward each other smiling, the space between them filled with so much longing—this moment is kairos. It’s the point at which the world inhales. It’s the pause before something happens. It’s the moment when the tides of life can change.
Now, here, staring at this photo, I realize my husband and I are suspended in another kairos. We’re holding our breath. There’s energy in the pause, the waiting; I can sense it between us—the way my husband looks at me sometimes, his eyes filled not so much with desire but with longing, which is something like desire mixed with grief, and I wonder if this longing feels too big now. Perhaps we’re intimidated by the distance between us because we don’t yet know how to close the gap without resorting to old, stale patterns that are much too small to fill the space.
***
My husband and I play the three-minute game, homework assigned by our sex therapist. With my eyes closed, I run the tip of my index finger over the curve of the top of his left ear, then pinch the peach softness of the lobe. I feel heat, like sun-warmed fruit. For three minutes, I meander across the landscape of his ear, tracing every ridge and valley. And yet, when the timer goes off, I feel strongly that there is more to explore, millimeters of skin that I did not have time to probe, and it’s then that I understand the vastness of an entire human body.
Over the course of months, our homework progresses, until we are naked and exploring each other’s bodies simultaneously—with no set timer—simply letting our hands wander for as long as we like. Each time we finish one of these “sessions,” we hold each other in a flushed, relaxed state that feels equivalent to afterglow, and I have no sense of how many minutes have passed. I notice how, the more we explore, the more curious we both become, and the idea of what sex can be continues to expand and expand.
***
According to the law of conservation of energy, energy is neither created nor destroyed; it’s simply transformed from one form to another.
Desire has not been removed from my marriage; it’s just there in a different form now. I wonder if it’s simply a matter of energy finding a new way to transmit itself. Like fingers mapping unexplored pathways. Breath as a source of heat rather than auditory affirmation. Time as a mechanism of expansion rather than scarcity.
Each day that passes, I am one step closer to death, one step farther away from the last time we had “sex” in the traditional sense. The gap is shrinking and expanding at once, and in this liminal space, I’ve never felt more alive, never more certain of what I want, which is to experience as much as I can, while I still can. I bite into the meat of a ripe tomato, let the tang hit my tongue. I peer into the tops of the drooping sunflowers, marvel at their geometry. I scoop the rotting apples that tremble with worms, and I smile at the size of certain appetites.
Time folds onto itself, layering, fattening, compressing. Sometimes, my impatience swells—a displaced, restless energy—as I wait for something in our sex life to change, for my husband to spring into motion, for him to see each passing second as a missed opportunity. Then, sometimes I blink, and I notice that I am the thing that has changed.
***
When I return from a weekend away, the house is empty. My husband is on a date with a new woman, because things have ended with the other woman.
I wander outside to lift the last plump tomatoes from the vine. I deadhead the sunflowers. I retrieve apples lying on the ground and plunk them into a plastic garden pot. The tomatoes will be minced into salsa. The sunflower stalks will pop out a few final blooms. The apples will be baked into a tart pie.
When my husband gets home, he calls out my name. I’m in another room but I can hear the excitement in his voice, and I move toward him, and he moves toward me, and then, as if we are in unspoken agreement about what should happen next, he places his hands on my waist and I place my hands on his shoulders and we begin to bounce, around and around, until we are belly laughing at the absurdity of our excitement over our reunion, over our unrestrained joy, since it has only been three days since we last saw each other, and even though it has been more than three years since we last had sex, it doesn’t matter, because here we are, and I don’t know it yet, but we will have sex three days from now, and it won’t be momentous and I won’t feel altered, but it will be sweet and slow and familiar and new, and I still won’t know what lies ahead, but that doesn’t matter yet, because we’re here, in this moment, going around and around.
Devon Fredericksen is an independent journalist and the author of several books, including How to Camp in the Woods and 50 Classic Day Hikes of the Eastern Sierra. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, Hakai, High Country News, bioGraphic, Yes!, Guernica, and Indian Country Today, among other publications. She lives in Portland, Oregon.