Potent quotables
When you do the work of cultivating your individual garden and your shared garden, you’re not just doing good for yourself and your erotic relationship, you’re doing good for the world. Every time you pull the invasive weeds of body self-criticism or sexual shame, you weaken the social vine, making it that much easier for your sister to pull it from her garden, or your daughter or your niece, your clients and patients, your romantic and sexual partners.
Everyone is a little freer to explore pleasure in a context of safety and autonomy.
Imagine a world where all of us only ever have sex we enjoy. And anything we don’t enjoy, we just don’t do! We don’t do it, and—get this—we don’t worry about not doing it! When we put pleasure at the center of our definition of sexual well-being, sex we don’t like is never even on the table.
We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment.
You are probably not aroused as you do those dishes. You probably don’t feel horny as you scrub the ring of soap scum from the tub. You are not “in the mood.” But you don’t have to be in the mood for your best friend’s birthday party while you plan it, you don’t have to feel like going to your kid’s martial arts competition to order an ice cream cake for the day. You don’t need a mood. You need to care. It needs to matter to you.