If I Got Any Pleasure at All
Our talk last night was particularly disheartening. Jean and I wanted to make love and we came upstairs about 7:30, but I couldn’t. My failure was disappointing, but I handled it in stride and I’m not feeling down about that. I know that it will take time to return to normal even with the progress that I’ve made. We stayed in bed—talked a bit, read some and then talked some more. Jean asked me what goes through my mind that causes my body to fail. I started to rattle off the usual list and then realized what I really wanted to know.

“Do you feel abused when we make love?”

“No, I don’t feel abused, but I don’t feel any pleasure either. If I got any pleasure out of making love at all, I might be able to do it more often.”

If I got any pleasure out of making love at all …

I knew that her words didn’t reflect her thoughts of me as a lover and I didn’t take them personally, but I told her that I was sad that she couldn’t feel any pleasure and that her feelings were partly the cause of my impotence. I asked her, “How can I make love with you knowing that it gives you no pleasure?” She told me that I could make love with her because she enjoys watching my eyes; she knows what making love means to me and that it’s sometimes okay if we make love just for me. I didn’t need to feel bad about it. She was sincere.

“Sam, you need to unlearn some things,” she said—and without missing a beat continued, “but don’t unlearn too much.”

Being a Husband
It’s distressing to feel like a friend when I want to feel like a husband. On one level, love makes that easy to do—I love Jean dearly and doing all that I can to help her is something that I must and can do without question. Turning off the physical part of life, however, has extinguished a fundamental spark to my existence. Platonic love contains no cure for the loneliness that fills me. Husbands are friends and lovers, and as only a friend, I feel like a brother or a father … I shudder at the thought that I’m just the father she should’ve had.

Jean met a woman at one of the pain clinics she visited after her wreck. The constant and severe pain this woman felt in her lower back had made having intercourse with her husband unbearable over the last several years. She told Jean how annoyed she was with her husband because he treated her more like a sister than as a wife. Even though I only heard her side of the story through Jean, I easily imagined what her husband was feeling. As a sign of his love, he had managed to turn off his sexual feelings, but that’s difficult because your wife is the person for whom you are supposed to have those feelings … it’s no surprise that the room cooled when the thermostat was turned back. Like me, he needed to think differently of his wife to keep his feelings in check, but while we do love our sisters, the sadness that permeates us thinking of them in this way takes away our smile and removes an essential part of the joy that we find in them as our wives.

My Conundrum
“We talked about you today,” Jean said. That is never quite the good news that I wish it would be, but I asked what it was about. Jean told me, once again, that I need to rethink why making love means as much to me as it does (with the subtext being that I need to think of it differently, of course) and once again that the look in my eyes while making love reminds her of her father. I told her that I have rethought it and started to say something more, but she interrupted me—“Don’t look at me like it’s my fault!” she yelled. “Any woman would find you to be too intense.”

After my initial frustration over her outburst subsided, I recalled what she means when she calls me intense—intensity doesn’t refer to my actions, but to the expressions on my face. I know the looks that she’s talking about, but I see them as loving—one look says that I care for her, another confirms that she is safe in my arms, a third look says that we are only for each other while another reflects the enjoyment that I find in her. These are looks that she hasn’t seen for almost two years, but she can’t clear them out of her mind let alone interpret them through my heart.

Now my conundrum is clear—if she ever asks me to make love with her, I’m not sure if I should … I will have a look on my face. My eyes will be full of the emotions forged by the union of her hell with my heaven and even if I shut them she will feel their expression in every muscle of my body and in every breath that I take. Most of all, I fear that it will be too soon for her and that the eyes she sees will be mine, but even that won’t make a difference and my selfishness will set her back forever and I will no longer be part of her life.