Sex – Sage Telling Your Story

As a college freshman I heard a lecture in which the
professor pointed out how Americans love many things, everything from cars to
mashed potatoes. We celebrate the love of clothes, looks, hairdos, decorations,
and cities. We love our ball teams. But we don’t expect most of the things we
say we love to love us. Mostly we limit the hope of being loved to our relationships
with other humans except, of course, our pets, especially our dogs who we are
sure love us in return. In this story I’ve made an incomplete list of my
experiences of being loved by that one someone who figures centrally into our
American mythos of being loved, but obviously I’ve expanded my list to more
than that one and only—woman or man.

I was deeply loved by Myrna my wife. I felt loved. And
I loved her in so many ways in this most complicated relationship of my
life—one with a professional career, children, parents and siblings and in-laws
and many, many friends over a period of many years. I was happy about it
basking in such warm and complete love.

About two years into that marriage I was loved by a
gay friend. I loved him, but I had no experience and didn’t understand the
order of things. He loved my wife and didn’t want to hurt my marriage. I loved
him but not in the way I finally realized he wanted me to love him. I was very
young. I think I hurt him deeply. Still our friendship flourished for many years.

In the meantime I fell in love with a man who probably
loved me but whose life was too encumbered, whose imagination couldn’t deal
with what that might mean about himself and his life. As a result his love for
me became stunted. I loved what feeling I received from him although I hoped
he’d never want me to give up my married life for him. I also knew I’d never
ask him to give up his married life for me.

Then I loved a man who may have loved me but had built
a barrier around his feelings. Oh he wanted sex with me but he didn’t want to
give or receive the feelings of it all. So when we started the sex, I agreed to
his demand there be no emotions since I realized the advantage of his program
to my marriage. Still I wondered at his request but like a good soldier turned
off my emotions—at least some of them—but not so much as to miss experiencing
the thrills our play created.

Then I loved a man who really loved me. I warned him
that my love, while real and deep, was quite different than his. Now I was the
one defending the two of us from one another for quite complicated reasons. I
loved being loved by him although I could not imagine living with him.

I was loved by a man who had nothing to offer me
except his adoration. We lived in two greatly different worlds, his with Okie
twang, mine with educated artifice. I was nice and kind but never in love with
him. Still I appreciated his devotion even with its great impediments. I was
relieved when he no longer pursued me.

I liked a man who seemed to like me. Eventually I fell
in love with him and he with me. The experience was new to me since I was
recently separated from my wife and could actually go live with him. He loved
me. We lived together. I watched him die. I grieved.

I loved a man who really loved me. Our love had all
the markings of classic falling in love: the ancient lover and beloved, the
medieval romance, and the extremely baroque and renaissance drama of an opera
plot. Sadly this love affair was also a tragedy although a gentle one. I
grieved unlike ever before in my life when he died.

Again I love a man with whom I live. He loves me. We
don’t match very well but do live together successfully. Neither of us is
especially romantic, but I seem to have a much greater proclivity for romance
than he. We have a nice social life with mutual friends. His mother lives with
us. I know I am loved, but again it is a new experience with dynamics unlike
any of my other loves.

Perhaps the nice thing about my loves is that my wife
and the man I first fell in love with and the man I first allowed my love to
grow with all continue to be my good friends. My current love is also a good
friend. I have come to realize that I love any number of men for any number of
reasons. I will refrain from counting the ways in this story. Perhaps another
day there will be a poem describing that matter! Of course, these listed affairs
of the heart are only one category of being loved. But I have always realized
that I am loved by many different people for many different reasons and in many
different ways. I really feel loved. I guess it proper to say the one-and-only
aspect of my being loved is to be found in the individuality of each loving relationship.

© Denver, 2013

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle
lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In
general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two
years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now
focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE
program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

At times I am a thinker. So here is a summary of “I used to think…, but now I think…” although it really is “I used to do…, and then I thought…, and then I did a lot more, and then I thought some more, and now I think….”

As a child I was open to sex with my friends. I never had it with my siblings and was unaware of any of my friends having sex with their siblings. Nor was I aware that any friend or acquaintance was having sex with an adult. The play happened occasionally over several years, with a number of kids around my age.

When I was fourteen, an older man molested me as it is defined by law. I wasn’t upset. What he did felt good, but I was not interested to spend time with him and within a year my family moved to another town.

Then at age fifteen I had quite a lot of sex with a friend a year younger than I. With him, the sex came complete with all the pleasures afforded by increasing hormones—that double testosterone fix as it were—and some things the other guy had learned somewhere else. His family moved away the following summer, just before I turned sixteen. I didn’t have another boyfriend for years.

What did I think of all this? I wasn’t bothered by it and since I also had girlfriends, I reasoned it might be a sort of phase I was going through. I did not have sex with my girlfriends although we did dance and hug and kiss on occasion.

Upon graduation from high school I went to college and applied myself to my studies but found no girlfriend or boyfriend. As a sophomore I met and started dating the young woman who would become my wife. Unlike some other students in our church-related school, we were conventional in our expectation to wait until the wedding before having sex. At the same time I read books on the matter. I learned about hymens and pain and how men and women often have quite differing relationships with sex and differing expectations related to the interactions. I found helpful the ideas about how to have sex and how to sustain the loving relationship for years and years. I paid attention. I taught my wife what I had learned and we commenced our marriage with gently-approached, though vigorous, sex. We continued that exploration for twenty-eight years and the sex was an important feature of the way we communicated and loved one another.

At the same time during these years that were characterized in our nation by the sexual revolution, I evaluated ideas of sex and relationship. Not being very ceremonial, I came to think that if a man and woman get together sexually, they become married—at least in terms of the religious universe in which I lived and, of course, state statutes of common-law marriage. I was not at all concerned about premarital sex assuming it was just that. When one of my sisters and her boyfriend talked with me about their pregnancy, I was accepting and reassuring, a fact that surprised her ROTC boyfriend who was sure I’d beat him up. I laughed when he said it. He was the soldier and quite a bit bigger and stronger than I. I had no judgment against them for I was aware that I had been sexually active as a child and teen. In fact, co-habitation followed by marriage after pregnancy seemed to become the norm in American society around that time.

When at age thirty I fell in love with a man, I realized I had a few more things to consider. I had no idea of leaving my marriage and family. My only fear related to what the other man might think or desire. I would have loved having sex with him but he, too, was married, and I valued marriage. So that relationship didn’t go sexual for several years. By the time it did, I knew him well enough to hope he’d never want to leave his marriage. While I was somewhat crazy for him, I didn’t want his debt or his expectations regarding what he owed his offspring. By that time—in my mid-30s—I knew about men getting it on and sometimes living together in committed love relationships. (I had kept reading!) I knew about lesbian relationships also. I started wondering about even more complicated relationships.

The churches I worked in often had more conservative views than I. As clergy I conducted weddings—rituals with simple Hollywood-like vows—ones I found realistic given what I had learned over the years. Still I wasn’t interested in counseling couples and some years later felt relieved when I was out of the marriage business altogether. Perhaps that’s why I argue for the adequacy of civil union services for all kinds of marriage. For me it’s kind of like this: People who willingly make babies together must shoulder the responsibilities. But I know well that a union or marriage certificate has little correlation with folks’ behaviors or their ability to shoulder the burdens. I have become more European in my assumptions about marriage and extra marital affairs and have let go of all fairy tale assumptions about romance and royalty and marriage. No man’s house is his castle. No woman dolled up in a long dress adorned with flowers is Eve or a princes or a queen, and the man she is marrying is not prince charming however good looking. For me, the same sorts of things apply to all marital-type pairings, with or without children.

Oh—I remember—we live in a democracy. I’m happy to be here. I’m happy to see laws change toward more tolerance and equal rights for all citizens. I’m happy to define my own relationships. I’m happy to work out my relationships in ways that to me seem moral, helpful, and loving. That’s what I think now about sex and relationships.

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

Tag: Sex

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