A Difficult Topic... but Which Isn't?

A recent conversation with a dear friend of many, many years prompted this post. His frustration, helplessness, and confusion was touching and tragic to me; however, it is the topic itself that is far more frightening.

Dalma Heyn, in her book The Erotic Silence of the American Wife, wrote:

"Trying to account for why so many wives called their marriages 'happy' when they revealed signs of feeling deeply alientated in them, Bernard (sociologist Jessie Bernard, 1976) found that researchers tended to ignore what a woman said unless certain arbitrary criteria were met. They measured the success of a woman's marriage not according to her honest appraisal of it, but rather to their interpretation of her adjustment to it. ...Bernard concluded that if researchers measure a woman's happiness in marriage by her adjustment to it, it is understandable why a wife would do the same, since she then 'interprets reconciliation as happiness no matter how much she is paying for it in terms of psychological distress.'"

She continued,

"Married women in these (modern) studies report about 20 percent more depression than single women and three times the rate of severe neurosis. Married women have more nervous breakdowns, nervousness, heart palpitations, and inertia. Still other afflictions disproportionately plague married women: insomnia, trembling hands, dizzy spells, nightmares, hypochondria, passivity, agoraphobia and other phobias, unhappiness with their physical appearance, and overwhelming feelings of guilt and shame. A twenty-five year longitudinal study of college-educated women found that wives had the lowest self-esteem, felt the least attractive, reported the most loneliness, and considered themselves the least competent at any task - even child care."

And,

"Finally, when noted mental health researchers Gerald Klerman and Myrna Weissman reviewed all the depression literature on women and tested for factors ranging from genetics to PMS to birth control pills, they could find only two prime causes for female depression: low social status and marriage." (italics mine)

The book itself explores the subject of women with extramarital relationships, and how it is increasingly common for women to say that "their dilemma is not how to end either the adulterous relationship or the marriage, but how to maintain both."

I hear quite often from married women that approximate my age that sex has become so low on their list of priorities that it may as well not be on the list at all. We are tired... we are frazzled from working full-time, maintaining a household, raising children, managing a family calendar, organizing activities, and providing an endless supply of baked goods for the PTA/Booster Club/Book Fair Pot Luck/Bake Sale/etc. More than this, sex becomes just another duty; something else to add to the list of chores that must be accomplished before we can fall, exhausted, into bed for approximately 5 hours of sleep per night. And this is just the surface - underneath the emotional exhaustion of the business that is marriage and family is the dark and sinister knowledge that your children stole your figure, your youth, and your career competitiveness... and your husband sees that you are no longer the young girl with so much promise and sexual fire, a dessicated husk that can barely bring herself to go through the motions.

Heyn writes,

"As woman after woman voices her deepest feelings about marriage and sex, striking similarities emerge: Something had changed inside each of them during marriage; they had experienced a profound loss, an inexplicable silencing of their inner selves."

Does it seem logical to anyone else that the voice of that inner self might often be sexual desire?

My hypothesis: Married women seek extramarital relationships because they represent a sacred space no longer found in their lives of sacrifice. A purely sexual relationship is an equal relationship - one in which each party brings the same thing to the table and leaves with the same reward. Married women lose their sexual voice - and thus their manifested sexual desire - because sex becomes something that must happen to maintain the relationship rather than something that must happen to be whole.

Heyn wrote:

"I am saying that for all these women I interviewed, sexually exclusive marital relationships were made joyous only when they first killed off that Perfect Wife, and shattered this rigid institutional cage in which she flourished and which imprisoned their sexual selves. The conventional goodness the women entered when they married, and through which they found they still assumed status and approval, was precisely what was killing them - and their husbands, too - and they felt they must smash that framework in order to save them both."