Waiting for the life you want

A lesson on trying to wish the world away

In the New York Times appears an essay that somehow earned the title The Joys of Frivolous Sex and the caption “The pandemic has brought out a nasty puritanism,” while saying nothing about joy, sex, or puritanism. No one should leave the final word on this to the NYT though, so let’s see if tearing down the essay can’t serve as a teaching moment.

The author opens with her sexual escapades within the pre-Covid era, which were stopped by the lockdowns. After deciding it’s bad to adapt to the situation because it might challenge her prior lifestyle’s assumptions, she looks to the ruling classes for an explanation:

In Holland, officials advised coming to an arrangement with a sex buddy. Denmark’s health chief said: “Sex is good, sex is healthy. As with any other human contact, there is a risk of infection. But of course one must be able to have sex.” Whether you agree or disagree, at least these countries were capable of addressing what was a serious concern for many of their citizens.

But these countries seem to be exceptional. Mostly, the government here in Britain — as in many other places — pretended that sex doesn’t take place except between cohabiting couples… News releases from sex toy companies began filling my email inbox, advertising remote-controlled vibrators, as though the loss of physical connection was purely about missing an orgasm.

There has been no serious effort to confront the particular challenges of what it is to be single — to be alone — in 2020. 

First principles — what does the author want to be true? “The representatives of the health bureaucracy speak for the government, and it’s the government’s responsibility to validate my sex life.” And if not the government, then the sex toy companies, who have the nerve to send her vibrator ads without checking if that’s really what she needed. It’s these shadowy deities to which she expects the “serious effort” from, but she certainly doesn’t expect it from herself.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought out a nasty puritanism in some people, who luxuriate in the ability to police the way others live... To even complain about what it feels like to live alone and not be able to date right now is regarded as unseemly, dismissed as trivial. After all, some haven’t been able to visit vulnerable elderly relatives all year. Couples have it hard too, with many working from home in cramped quarters — not to mention those living with small children.

The complaints of a single person don’t begrudge or contradict the pain of the harangued parent or the anguished daughter missing her sick father… We are also going through something painful, without even the socially approved validity of the nuclear unit to back us up.

Even as she makes an attempt to remind herself of others with even worse hardships, she can’t resist the framing that this is primarily about the “socially approved validity” of suffering.

And who are these puritans who are dismissing her? She mentions a negative reaction from some Facebook friends — is that and the silence of the World Health Organization all it takes to set her off? If you’re going to make a claim along the lines of “society be like,” at least bring something more than a personal anecdote.

I left [my earlier boyfriend] because I identified that my desires and needs were not being best served by monogamy. This would have been impossible in my earlier life, when I was crippled by need, leaking out of me onto every passing man who looked like he could fill a boyfriend-shaped gap in my life. Back then, I could no more have turned down the offer of companionship and love than I could water and air.

None of the men she has all these intimate relationships are given a sliver of detail in this essay. What exactly made sex with them so great or monogamy so stifling? Doesn’t matter — other people are just bit-players in this movie. There’s a word for what she calls her earlier life, and a word for what she’s describing now too.

Now, I need differently. I need very little from individuals, but I am greedy for the world. And why not? Why shouldn’t I be? It’s a reasonable and good-natured greed, one fueled not by desperation but by a tremendous love of the world and the people in it. How could I be ashamed of that? That this impulse was thwarted in 2020 does not make it a malign one.

Some single people are not living in constant wait for the relief of a marriage to put them out of their misery. The restrictions of this year happened to suit couples and families best, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us were getting life wrong.

Count the “I” statements. The point of this essay is not to argue for why casual sex is good, or describe how much isolation hurts, or to even suggest what it would look like for society to accommodate people like her. No need to get into specifics, because the point is her and her only.

Note also the instant forgetting about the suffering of others that was admitted to earlier. Now it’s “the restrictions of this year happened to suit couples and families best.”

The writer wishes her problem was a moralist society trying to hem her in. The actual problem we all have to contend with is the encounter with a reality that doesn’t conform to our expectations.

In closing:

As we move into 2021, I know now more than ever that I was right to do what was best for me. I won’t be pretending that I want things that I don’t for the sake of temporary comfort. I’ll be waiting until the life I do want — trashy, frivolous and shallow as it might seem to some — is possible again.

“I’ll do whatever I can to avoid being happy, because that would mean becoming a different person.”

Essays like these are dime a dozen, but the point of this criticism is to look within yourself. If you find yourself in a rut, waiting for the world to “get back to normal” or for the life you want to finally be available, understand what you are doing is making a choice — in this case, the choice of comfortable misery over the physical and mental work of change. Maybe normalcy eventually does return, but by that point it’s a new normal and you’re a different person. There’s no stepping in the same river twice.

In life, you only ever get two options — adapt to your environment, or change your environment. Ideally you slide back and forth between the two as necessary, until you hit enlightenment or death. Yet the narcissist dreads the closing of opportunities implied by the former option and so always tries to opt for the latter. Which is fine for certain scenarios, such as being a teenager. Exploring can sometimes be fun; self-indulgence can sometimes be useful.

Yet eventually you’ll notice your hair starting to gray, or your lifestyle no longer being possible, or other people starting to find you boring and insufferable. When the narcissist sees the world moving on from them, they deploy the failsafe — shout on the street corner, post on social media, publish in the New York Times — “Reader, I Demand That You Validate Me.”

Still it’s usually easy to make the choices of adapting vs. changing as long as you’re only thinking for yourself. The hard part is considering how much you are adapting to others or forcing others to adapt to you.

Choose carefully.