Desire is an enigma; but we all know that we don’t tame feral cats. Desire is thirsty and monogamy may not be the best way to quench it. Desire is not Valentine’s Day, it’s Valentin escaping us and catching up with us, a lascivious dance between the seaweed and the river. Desire is neither hot nor cold, it is consumed. I never danced with him so much as after leaving the convent at 55. Yann Moix can go get dressed.
This fire, this call, so intense, burns miles away from plan-plan security and Friday night Netflix (very pleasant too, huh?, but from a different bill).
Feminine desire is still a mystery for many men and many women. Around me, confidences multiply: candidates from 20 to 60 years old discover female ejaculation (squirting) assisted by a… man, meditate with jade eggs in the yoni for toning and ecstasy purposes, sign up for 15-minute orgasmic meditation sessions (in groups… no, I’m not curious) . The word “clitoris” has become as familiar as the word “bok choy”; we will eventually recognize him in the street.
But desire cannot be taught; we think we have him, he galloped off again. It is not under warranty for three years. In fact, in heterosexual conjugality, this libido declines twice as much after a year in women (34%) as in men (15%), according to an English study from 2010-2012. And time, stress or routine don’t help matters, quite the contrary.
It’s not just sex in life. But it’s not just sex in desire either.
Remember that conjugal duty has hung on the end of the feather duster since marriage existed and, even today, some feel authorized to say or to think: “I have needs, mowaaa! And that’s one of the mental loads that add to the rest: the sexual load.
I too have added this box to my diary in a few relationships, tax bills, checkwash the bathroom carpet, checkmake love, check. This compatibility of coitus is sometimes unconscious, but guarantees us a certain stability and marital peace when desire looks like a faded bok choy, life getting involved (illness, pregnancy, children, postpartum, breastfeeding, menopause, fatigue, trials, Netflix). We are aiming for the norm, in general, the good hygienic average.
Once a week is good?
The sex columnist Maïa Mazaurette (The world) reminds that above once a week, sexual satisfaction is not higher. In any case, the frequency does not compensate for the quality. What about desire, damn it? We come there.
The sexpert titled her January 8 column “Are we condemned to desire sexually what we cannot obtain? » (bit.ly/40G9Zhl). She quotes the German philosopher Leibniz, in 1704: “The anxiety that a man feels in himself by the absence of a thing which would give him pleasure if it were present, this is called desire. . »
The answer is hidden somewhere between human nature that gets tired quickly, a society that has instilled in us the obligation to satisfy our desires (fast), to achieve our dreams (no matter the cost) and the limits of Tinder’s algorithms. .
“Should we reinject the lack of “everything, immediately” into our society? adds Maïa Mazaurette.
You still love him — how can you no longer love who has animated you so marvelously, who has colored your days and set your body ablaze? — but he no longer has that mystery that intoxicated your senses, he’s too well known to you, he’s become a relative and no longer someone else, a familiar — and you don’t make love with your family.
The answer is also nestled in the very beautiful book by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette river woman carried by this feminine desire. I delight. “It seems to me that it is this lack that beautifully defines our species. It is he who motivates my impulse towards the one that I do not know, the one that I am not. The bursting of my borders is only possible in movement. If I don’t feel lack, I stay still and static. ” So.
Mazaurette suggests emancipating oneself from the framework of monogamy to revive desire — his leitmotif for a long time —, if only in fantasy: “when a couple emancipates itself from the narrowness of monogamy, lack is its greatest return (did she go to get the bread, or did she go to get the baker?). This is of course a risk taking. But this risk is, in my opinion, lower than that which consists in giving up desire. »
And it is this risk that the narrator of river woman, which leaves spouse and child temporarily on the bank to meet the river and wild desire. This book gives permission for women to be plural.
That of Brigitte Vaillancourt, straight to the sun (which comes out on February 14), does the same and decompartmentalizes the limits of the hetero-mono couple:
“It just can’t be that you’re the only man I’ll make love to for the rest of my life.”
I open the fridge door and take out the parsley.
“Even if it’s you I love.” »
desirous woman
In his excellent essay marital dutyFanny Anseaume addresses the sexual charge, consent in marriage, breakdowns of desire, the eroticization of men’s bodies, which is less common.
Sorry, I don’t like porn movies featuring a 64-year-old depressed man, AKA the writer Michel Houellebecq, who got himself filmed for the cause.
Fanny Anseaume’s essay goes around the “problem”, so to speak, mentioning the effort that women make to make themselves attractive and the lack of enthusiasm among men to do the same thing because sensuality would be opposed to virility.
“To make oneself remarkable or desirable seems to be an admission of weakness for many men. […] However, if men agreed to play the game, then the question of women who begin to no longer want to make love after a year as a couple would certainly arise in other terms”, notes Fanny Anseaume.
Maybe not.
“During the passage to the domestic, we enter, also as individuals, into the furniture – loved, but known, taken into account, but without constituting the point of focus”, wrote Maïa in “Faut-il maintain sa libido comme on court un marathon? », in 2016.
Why, for whom, do we fight against what is biologically programmed? she wonders.
In the desire is also hidden the word “wrinkles”. It may not be a coincidence.