I have never turned heads
September 15, 2015 10:50 AM Subscribe

My husband is honest enough to say he's never found my body sexually attractive. And yet, we have a happy marriage.
posted by roolya_boolya (187 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite

I'm not sure I want to read the link, after yesterday's "the problem with first person essays" piece
posted by k5.user at 10:52 AM on September 15, 2015 [17 favorites]

Wow how brave. Get this guy a medal.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 10:53 AM on September 15, 2015 [11 favorites]

My husband is honest enough to say that he has never found my body particularly desirable, but still he asked me out on our first date three years ago because he found my way of being in the world, my sense of humor and my intelligence, sexy.

Or maybe the guy was old enough to know that however hot or not hot someone is, once you've seen them naked 1000 times it all tends to even out.
posted by three blind mice at 10:55 AM on September 15, 2015 [18 favorites]

This still seems kinda rough for her.

"I find you sexy for other reasons besides your body" doesn't seem like it necessarily ought to imply "I never initiate sex."
posted by edheil at 11:02 AM on September 15, 2015 [37 favorites]

People have some funny ideas about what is and isn't acceptable for themselves. If I had a girlfriend that looked at me and said, I've never found your body sexually attractive, I'd be like, "Well, let me just grab my coat and I'll be on my way."

And yet, there's an anecdote I always remember. After Abraham Lincoln's mother died, his father, Thomas Lincoln, packed the family up and moved to another city, and in very short order, he married a widow he had known in the past, with this proposal: "I have no wife and you no husband. I came a-purpose to marry you. I knowed you from a gal and you knowed me from a boy. I’ve no time to lose: and if you’re willin’ let it be done straight off." They remained married for more than 30 years, until Thomas Lincoln's death.

So, the heart wants what ... it ... wants? I guess?
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 11:03 AM on September 15, 2015 [37 favorites]

People have some funny ideas about what is and isn't acceptable for themselves.

Well, whose ideas about what is and isn't acceptable for them are good enough?
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 11:06 AM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

So while I was reading the article it made me think of this previous MeFi post on Radical Honesty, and Starlee Kine's piece on The Moth about RH.

I feel like telling that author's husband, "You know, just because you have a thought doesn't mean you need to share it. Sometimes sharing thoughts like that ("I don't find your body attractive and never did") doesn't make you admirably honest; it makes you an asshole with no regard for your spouse's feelings."

And I feel like telling the author, "You don't need to be with someone who feels no compunction about telling you he has never found your body attractive. There are people who will never say that to you, and will treat you as well if not better than your current husband does."

I feel sad for her. She seems to have Stockholm Syndrome. I read the article twice and I still feel the same way.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 11:09 AM on September 15, 2015 [116 favorites]

People have some funny ideas about what is and isn't acceptable for themselves.

At some point, though, many of us have to come to terms with the fact that, even if it isn't completely acceptable, it's the best that we can hope for, and better than the available alternatives. Middle age is cold, hard reality time.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:10 AM on September 15, 2015 [16 favorites]

The thousandth article I've read recently where I've said to myself "hey, at least she found someone who wanted to marry her."
posted by Melismata at 11:10 AM on September 15, 2015 [12 favorites]

At pushing 50, we're all lucky if we're getting any action at all. No big deal.
posted by colie at 11:14 AM on September 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

Yeah, I can still feel a certain pain in the text of the article. The inclusion of the third party, friend of a friend scene, where he is making a pass at her had the feel of external validation. The text teeters between subtle pain, moments of validation and rationalization and, to a certain extent, defiance on wearing that weight of years.

I don't know, I feel kind of weird about this article. I feel a certain pain in this article of the author coming to terms about a situation and proceeding from it.
posted by jadepearl at 11:14 AM on September 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

My husband is honest enough to say that he has never found my body particularly desirable

Oh yeah I had a guy in my life who was that "honest." He honestly made me want to kill myself after awhile. He made my life a living hell.

Sometimes "I'm honest" is just code for "I am a total asshole." This seems to be one of those times.

What was that my grandmother taught me? "If you don't have anything nice to say..."
posted by sockermom at 11:16 AM on September 15, 2015 [70 favorites]

This was a sad read. I mean, yay your husband loves you for more than your looks, I guess? But boo for the fact it seems like he's frequently reminding you of that?
posted by Kitteh at 11:17 AM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

This article resonated a lot with me, as someone who has had partners that were not even 1% attracted to me for my body. It sounds like he's not constantly reminding her out of nowhere - it reads to me like she asked him and after a while he became comfortable giving an honest answer. I don't think he's an asshole for answering honestly if she asks.

At the same time, it's okay for her (and for me) to be sad about the reality we are in.
posted by joan_holloway at 11:21 AM on September 15, 2015 [29 favorites]

"I find you sexy for other reasons besides your body" doesn't seem like it necessarily ought to imply "I never initiate sex."

This was the part that grabbed me, too, especially since she asks him to initiate more, and he does -- once, and then they fall back into their usual pattern. Beyond the subject of his honesty, I'm sad that he didn't make more effort to show his wife that he desired her. He ought to love his wife's body because she lives in it.
posted by Gelatin at 11:21 AM on September 15, 2015 [32 favorites]

Holy fuck. I'd rather be alone than be stuck with someone who's like, "well, you have lots of great qualities, but you lack the fundamental thing that makes me want to bone you, but I'll stay with you anyway." I have plenty of people in my life who love me for my abundant good qualities but don't want to bone me. Those people are called friends. I want a higher level of interest from someone who's supposed to be my life partner.
posted by palomar at 11:21 AM on September 15, 2015 [96 favorites]

I'm not sure I want to read the link, after yesterday's "the problem with first person essays" piece

So honestly my reaction is more this than what the essay is actually about. Writers gonna write. She teaches college-level creative writing. Which is not necessarily fiction writing.

While the essay certainly seems true and genuine, I find myself wondering why she'd write this and I come to the conclusion that the answer is that she needs to write something and not necessarily because the topic is actually really important, even to her.

I feel like there's this massive glut of confessional essays and that we're nowhere near the peak.

I'm normally a pretty open person more due to guilelessness and a lack of anything better to talk about but I feel like I need to stop ever talking about myself just because it's overdone. But god, here I am, doing it, even as I decry it. See how inescapable it is?
posted by GuyZero at 11:24 AM on September 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

Christ, what an asshole.
posted by lkc at 11:25 AM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

This was a sad read. I mean, yay your husband loves you for more than your looks, I guess? But boo for the fact it seems like he's frequently reminding you of that?

I'm not sure from the essay how much it is him reminding her versus her picking at it. At some point in any honest relationship, I think, you have to start honoring the other person's requests even if they're ill considered. What's the alternative? You consent to lie to make them feel better?

Obviously there's a line of overly specific in the honesty of an answer that is unnecessary, and I think nitpicking about the precise landscape of desire may be on the other side of that line, but I think mature relationships between equals demand that when you're pushed for something you make an effort to accommodate.

As with everyone else, I think the greater problem in this isn't the way her husband desires her at all but whether that desire is fairly applied. When your spouse clearly has some personal issues with feeling attractive for you maybe put some effort into helping them feel better about it. Or if you're losing interest in sex overall or just not motivated by it, maybe be rigorously honest with her about that too, huh?
posted by phearlez at 11:28 AM on September 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

Honestly as a cudgel -- yeah, that's not a quality I want in a casual friend, much less a spouse.
posted by holborne at 11:29 AM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm struck by the description of the women she loved, the beautiful one, seemingly able to skate through life. It resonates with me.

My very good friend is, by all accounts, gorgeous.
This does not make her a happier person, necessarily, or apt to find better partners, nor does it guarantee her high self esteem. I get all that.

But it does get frustrating, as a relatively plain person, who, like the author, doesn't always turn heads, that this friend does not realize her life is pretty fucking different to experience in some ways. That she has privilege.

And I feel like a petty, jealous friend sometimes, feeling plain.

I don't really know what my thesis is, but I do know that she'd never end up in a marriage like this, and it is really nice to feel desired, and really frustrating when I feel like I'm doing all the desiring.
posted by Grandysaur at 11:29 AM on September 15, 2015 [18 favorites]

This is an interesting essay for me to read, particularly at this point in my life.

The men I am attracted to are not at all my own body type. And as a subculture (gay bears), the men I am attracted to are not attracted to my body type. And I've spent decades really hating my own body because it isn't what I'm attracted to. And I've spent decades dancing away from involvement with men who aren't the type of body I idealize. And I've spent decades sort of waiting for crumbs of attention to be dropped from the table of the bears.

Although, really, I have not been waiting for that attention at all. In my 20s, I could drive to a city that I'd never been to before without any plans for lodging or even knowledge of what to do, and within 2 hours at the local leather/bear bar, I'd not only have a place to *ahem* sleep for the night but also someone who would at least give me tips about what to do while I was there if not have them be a my tour guide for the day.

I look back at pictures of myself now from then and realize, holy crap, I was a hot young man. I just wasn't MY "type".

During my 30s I started to get involved in a lot of relationship tangles (disclosure: pretty polyamorous as well as just sort of a slut), some of which continue to this day. These were all with bear guys who were obviously way more interested in (and interesting to) other bear guys than I am, but yet the tangle happened, and it was good and it was fun. Some of those tangles continue to this day, many don't. And that's okay.

In my 40s... well, I had this moment. It was actually a deep epiphany, a realization that... you know... I actually look pretty fucking good. I'm not someone I would personally chase, but I'm a type plenty of others would chase. It was like a door opened or a sluice gate or something, and I was suddenly able to view all my past through this new lens, or maybe without a lens at all but with just clarity, and realize... I've spend most of my life really hating my basic physical form (lean and lanky) because my idea of hawt was different, totally ignoring the messaging coming back at me about my own physical self and whether it was attractive or not.

Along with this realization, and this is where all this ties in to the FPP, although I think stuff about body image and who initiates with whom and stuff all ties in... Along with this realization came this sudden revelation of beauty in the world around me. Not even necessarily "beauty" like take a photograph sort of beauty... but this sudden new sight that realized that there are a lot of people in the world who lie entirely outside my bear fixation who are really truly beautiful, attractive people. And that beauty and attraction, that's not always something physical, and sometimes it is something physical but that is me projecting outside of my base triggers...

I guess what I'm saying is... This article is interesting to me because, well, I've spent most of my life feeling like I'm really not attractive. And once I passed through some doorway to realize that I am attractive in certain ways, it opened my eyes to seeing a lot of beauty I was otherwise missing. And that beauty is not always the magazine cover type.

I love that the author's husband learned this so much earlier than I did.

And yeah, I've spent most of my life being the initiator... And it does feel wonderful when it's coming my direction instead. But feeling loved (which I do) is pretty wonderful no matter what.
posted by hippybear at 11:29 AM on September 15, 2015 [41 favorites]

Having married my wife because I loved the whole package, I can't admit to understanding how her husband feels or why he'd even say that to her. Perhaps their "happy marriage" is based more on a mutual unwillingness to deal with the effort of ending it rather than love.
posted by tommasz at 11:30 AM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

I guess in a way I would find it liberating to think that people can have sexual relationships that are based on odd permutations of desire, but this piece made me really sad. I feel like she thinks she's ugly and worries about it a lot, and that's really different from "I think I'm attractive, you don't but you want to have sex with me anyway, go team!"

Also, what the fuck is wrong in bohemia these days? I feel like everywhere I turn online and in my personal life, there's nothing but artsy types creating cruel relationship dynamics under some kind of rubric of honesty and complete sharing. It's making me much more confident in the stern, repressed, proper upbringing that I had.
posted by Frowner at 11:30 AM on September 15, 2015 [94 favorites]

Picking a life partner is like picking a kidney. I don't see why it has to involve sex. Where does that leave asexual people?
posted by I-Write-Essays at 11:33 AM on September 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

I guess the way I feel about this sort of article is "Of course most of us couldn't understand living like that. If hers was a common set of experiences, why would we want to read about it?" The genre selects for outliers (or else truly brilliant writers who can capture something universal in a way that's makes you see it afresh; but that's much rarer).

Not trying to pass judgment one way or the other on whether she's really happy or really living a good life. But I do think there's almost always more diversity of experience in the world than anyone expects.
posted by nebulawindphone at 11:36 AM on September 15, 2015 [10 favorites]

I can't imagine a life where my husband didn't look at me like I am the most beautiful creature he's ever seen. Constantly touching me, constantly letting me know how he desires me. To each their own...but. I just couldn't.

I feel like that's why the article is striking so many of us as sad: it doesn't seem like the author can quite imagine it either, but it's every day of her life.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:39 AM on September 15, 2015 [22 favorites]

Ugh, I was really hoping this would be more "I let go of some cultural expectations about desire and lust, and the world didn't end!" and less "my relationship lacks something that I desperately need but I guess it's fine, I guess."

So I think you're trying to make that reaction sound sad or in some way negative, but personally I don't see it that way.

If other people don't meet your expectations you can try to change them or you can change your expectations. It's not necessarily a sad or bad thing to stop wanting something if doing that makes you happier.

If she stopped basing her happiness on owning things people would congratulate her.
posted by GuyZero at 11:40 AM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

But she doesn't SOUND happy; that's not happy writing. It's full of wistfulness, and sadness and dull acceptance. I think a couple can definitely have a relationship without sexual attraction, but she obviously desires it, so there's an imbalance of power.

And, this is completely beside the point, but I googled her and she is a quite pretty woman, and her husband is not, shall we say, Tom Hardy. Based on her writing I was expecting something very different, to the point I can only describe it as relationship dysmorphia.
posted by Windigo at 11:41 AM on September 15, 2015 [76 favorites]

>Picking a life partner is like picking a kidney. I don't see why it has to involve sex. Where does that leave asexual people?

I think it depends on the context. It was never disclosed where her husband fell on the sexuality spectrum, or if he identified as asexual at all.
posted by Ashen at 11:42 AM on September 15, 2015

If other people don't meet your expectations you can try to change them or you can change your expectations. It's not necessarily a sad or bad thing to stop wanting something if doing that makes you happier.

No, definitely not! And if the author gave any sense of "hey, it turns out I don't want this thing or need it to be happy," that would be exactly the article I was hoping for. Instead she doesn't even imply, she literally says, "I wish he would [do completely different thing] but he doesn't."

Maybe she's just still in the middle of a journey and at the end she will be in a great place but, either the article is not written the way she meant to write it, or she is definitely not actually in the great place she claims to be.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:43 AM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

To each their own...but. I just couldn't.

Not "to each their own", but rather "some of us are attractive enough to merit being constantly desired by someone else, and many of us ... just aren't."

A lot of happiness involves a role of the dice of genetics and privilege - if the roll doesn't come up in your favor, you just have to scrape by as best you can, knowing that there are certain kinds of comfort, pleasure, and emotional security that are unavailable to you. You just have to wring as much happiness as you can out of the ones that are.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:43 AM on September 15, 2015 [36 favorites]

Holy crap, people. Human nature is complex. Check it:

My husband is honest enough to say that he has never found my body particularly desirable, but still he asked me out on our first date three years ago because he found my way of being in the world, my sense of humor and my intelligence, sexy. “That matters more,” he says, “and makes you beautiful to me.” Sometimes that to me breaks my heart a little bit; sometimes it makes me feel loved.

It took us a while to arrive at this understanding. It was only once I thought to ask, “Do you not find my body sexy?” instead of simply, “Don’t you find me sexy?” that he could articulate the difference. These weren’t conversations we wanted to have, but they were necessary. And I know that it’s our ability to talk about the hard things that is really the strength of our marriage, that this matters far more than who reaches for whom in the night.

This is a little sad and a little great. Sometimes that to me breaks my heart a little bit; sometimes it makes me feel loved. Because it's a difficult, muddled thing. What does it mean to love someone? There's a complex honesty at work here that shouldn't be written off as simply "the guy is an asshole." Take this passage: It was only once I thought to ask, “Do you not find my body sexy?” instead of simply, “Don’t you find me sexy?” that he could articulate the difference. That means that when she asked in the past "Don't you find me sexy," he had said yes. Only when she split apart her personality from her body did he state that he did not. That means something.

Internet dating advice, which a lot of this thread offers, can be summed up as "dump the motherfucker already" or silence. Rendered into the abstraction of an article, it's easy to simplify a relationship still further and give the DTMFA advice/outrage. This piece suggests a relationship more complicated than "he's just not into you." A non-perfect relationship is not necessarily a crippled or evil one.

The strange, angry reaction people are showing here reminds me of the shock and anger that came up with the "males seldom feel desired" comment thread from a few weeks ago. Perhaps it's just me, but it feels as though a gender flip on this would not be considered notable. "A younger wife loves her older husband but finds his body less than hot" probably wouldn't roil, but the reverse clearly does. Is that worth considering? Perhaps I am off-base. Dunno.
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 11:45 AM on September 15, 2015 [66 favorites]

It's always seemed to me that there's something both oppressive and false about our cultural notion that being happy and in love with your partner requires that you find each other mutually sexually attractive. It implies all sorts of hurtful and unrealistic stuff:

1) It's okay to leave your partner when for some reason they transform (by age, illness, injury, whatever) out of your boundaries of what you find sexually attractive.

2) If you love someone then you necessarily will find them sexualy attractive regardless, and so a loved one becoming less sexually attractive really just means you don't love them anymore.

3) The only people you could fall in love with and who you should consider being with long-term are those with whom you feel a strong sexual attraction.

...and some other things. And this is extremely gendered in ways that are deeply oppressive to women. These expectations are less restrictive with regard to men being sexually attractive and they are much more restrictive with regard to women being sexually attractive. So people's desirability and sense of self-worth with regard to their most important intimate relationship is heavily mediated by our culture's standards of physical beauty which are also very unequal and biased against women.

So there's a lot of bad shit involved in this stuff.

However, it's totally okay for any individual person to make decisions about what's important to them in their romantic relationship and that includes feeling sexual attraction to their partner. If someone prioritizes that above other considerations, I think that's a valid choice given that sexual intimacy is pretty widely considered to be an important part of romantic relationships (but, dammit, don't go normalizing this for all people, everywhere and invalidate the experiences and preferences of those for whom this isn't such an important thing).

And, more importantly, we live in this culture with these expectations and influences -- it absolutely may be deeply unfair and distorting that everyone's and especially women's self-esteem is so closely tied to sexual attractiveness but that this is true doesn't in any respect excuse one from being empathetic and kind and avoiding exacerbating this in the name of "honesty".

I can imagine that someone is so immune to this cultural pressure that their self-esteem is utterly unaffected by even their partner's sense of finding them sexually attractive. But those people are surely relatively rare and I'm not sure how much I would have to be certain of my partner's secret inner-life before I'd be confident that they were one of those people. And, even if I were nearly certain, I'd ask myself what the relative benefits of being honest in this way are relative to the possible harm. Why tell someone this?

One of the things that a certain personality type -- a type that includes me -- has a lot of difficulty learning is that there's a great deal of social and psychological value in being less than truthful. It's facile and immature to think that love means absolute and complete honesty. In truth, love requires a great deal of discretion.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:47 AM on September 15, 2015 [58 favorites]

It's facile and immature to think that love means absolute and complete honesty. In truth, love requires a great deal of discretion.

And that is a whole lot of unlearnedness.
posted by GuyZero at 11:48 AM on September 15, 2015

I can't imagine a life where my husband didn't look at me like I am the most beautiful creature he's ever seen. Constantly touching me, constantly letting me know how he desires me. To each their own...but. I just couldn't.

This is horrifying to me. I can't imagine being a relationship that would constantly be at risk from the possibility of a more attractive person shattering it.
posted by srboisvert at 11:48 AM on September 15, 2015 [17 favorites]

My thing is that if I want you to be attractive (I like you enough and connect with you strongly enough) then you are attractive to me. I have been in physical relationships with people in the past that had other people ask me why I was involved with them, and I said (basically) that it was because I dug them.

It's enough for me.
posted by Samizdata at 11:50 AM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm surprised that so few here think about the gender-dimension in the article. As Harvey Jerkwater (eponysterical?) says, read this with reversed genders and it is still sad, but a lot less controversial. These days, a lot more older women are dating/marrying younger men, and a lot of formerly fixed patterns of relationships are being reversed. And it is confusing and interesting. But not simple.
posted by mumimor at 11:51 AM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

This article is so sad to me. And also it has only been 3 years since their first date? That doesn't give me a lot of confidence that this is a sustainable situation, given how this reads.
posted by likeatoaster at 11:52 AM on September 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

I've been friends with and dated physically attractive people. The one thing I've noticed is that, as you get to know a person, they cease to be the objectively attractive person and become an individual. For me it's tough to separate the component parts, but the personality is what you have to deal with. Sure, every component plays a part to a certain extent. I think it's important to note that typically one ends up liking or disliking someone because of their personality rather than their physicality. I know and despise very physically attractive people. On the other hand, I could never hate someone simply for being unattractive. The sexiest people I know are funny and intelligent. They know their strengths and weaknesses and play to them.
posted by jimmythefish at 11:53 AM on September 15, 2015 [10 favorites]

I think some of us are taken aback by the piece not because of her marriage situation, but because it reads as a woman who is hurting but is trying to convince us - and through us, herself - that she's OK with how things are.

Yup. It's not that I don't understand that a long-term relationship means that sometimes you deal with hard truths and people age and sexual attraction isn't the end-all-be-all. If she had written basically the same article about any other element of the relationship, it would have struck me the same way: like she has a deep need that her relationship cannot fulfill and instead of working to get it fulfilled, either in the relationship or otherwise, she is trying to tell herself she doesn't have this need. For her sake I hope it works but she just sounds like she is in a lot of hurt.

I mean if it was "I want kids and my husband doesn't, and we have a happy marriage" but most of the article was about her silently hoping her husband would decide to have kids, but sometimes feeling okay about it...I think a lot of people on MeFi would be like, man, that sounds hard and kind of sad.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:54 AM on September 15, 2015 [22 favorites]

This is horrifying to me. I can't imagine being a relationship that would constantly be at risk from the possibility of a more attractive person shattering it.

Wow, holy projection, batman. I laughed out loud.

My husband loves my body and finds me very physically attractive, yes. As I do him. We're neither of us outstanding examples of the human form. We're objectively average and not the sort to light up a room. But yet, we find each other incredibly sexy. Because for us, at least, the inner connection reflects upon how we feel about the outer. That's how, when I'm in sweats and grubby and have a zit on my chin, eating cheetos on the couch, and we've been laughing and having a great talk, he can look over at me and say "you are so beautiful" and desire me.
posted by Windigo at 11:54 AM on September 15, 2015 [23 favorites]

A lot of happiness involves a role of the dice of genetics and privilege - if the roll doesn't come up in your favor, you just have to scrape by as best you can, knowing that there are certain kinds of comfort, pleasure, and emotional security that are unavailable to you.

But it simply isn't true that only the physically beautiful lead lives of comfort, pleasure, and emotional security. In the past I've had lovers who were not conventionally beautiful, but either I found something about their personality intensely desirable -- in a way that did translate to physical passion, yes! -- or that I found them intensely physically attractive despite not being conventionally attractive.

My wife is beautiful, but we're both in the neighborhood of 50 and age has taken its toll on each of us. But we still regularly affirm the things we find attractive about each other, physically and otherwise. And pursuant to my point above, we try to be sensitive to each other's needs. It's the lack of sensitivity I perceive from her husband I find sad about the situation she describes.
posted by Gelatin at 11:55 AM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

People "settle" for all sorts of conditions throughout their lives, but this is...not one that I could swallow. It is clear that she wants a sexual as well as romantic partnership that includes desirability, and that her husband is unwilling or unable to offer it (having never found her physically attractive). The essay reads as if she's settling for being "interesting" to him, even though she yearns for more than that. And that's the sad part. Not the fact that she initiates, or the fact that he isn't sexually attracted to her, but the resignation to a dissatisfying and painful incompatibility. It's like having an umbrella with holes in it, and convincing yourself that you're fine with getting wet.
posted by Ashen at 11:58 AM on September 15, 2015 [11 favorites]

But it simply isn't true that only the physically beautiful lead lives of comfort, pleasure, and emotional security. In the past I've had lovers who were not conventionally beautiful, but either I found something about their personality intensely desirable -- in a way that did translate to physical passion, yes! -- or that I found them intensely physically attractive despite not being conventionally attractive.

Sorry - I should have said more explicitly that I mean personality / emotional beauty as well as physical. For people dealing with anxiety, depression, etc., that can obviously be an impossible struggle as well (whether or not they're physically attractive).
posted by ryanshepard at 11:59 AM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Transgressive relationship sub-par; turns out there's a reason for the way things usually are."
posted by MattD at 12:02 PM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

I can't imagine a life where my husband didn't look at me like I am the most beautiful creature he's ever seen.

i like this because i am imagining two monstrous murderous cannibal windigos in love

holding hands in the moonlight over a mangled corpse

doing the lady & the tramp spaghetti scene with entrails
posted by poffin boffin at 12:02 PM on September 15, 2015 [69 favorites]

i like this because i am imagining two monstrous murderous cannibal windigos in love

Yeah, I'd like to think we're foine foine examples of cryptids. So sexy! So murderous! He's so handsome with the moonlight shining off the blood in his teeth.
posted by Windigo at 12:05 PM on September 15, 2015 [10 favorites]

I've seen this essay pop up in several places, but it wasn't until I saw it HERE that I bothered to click through -- only to discover that the author, while not a friend exactly, is someone who has been on the periphery of my circle of friends since the late 1980s because of a shared connection to a now-essentially-defunct honors program at the U of Alabama.

I don't know that I've ever had a conversation with her, but I knew who she was back then. It was a nerdy crowd; there absolutely were people there who were outside the prevailing norms of attractiveness. I just never thought of her as one of them. She seemed plenty confident to me, at least from my position 4 or 5 years behind her.

Of course she feels the way she feels, and wouldn't have written this is she didn't feel that way. I guess my point is that most of us probably feel that way some or a lot of the time, unless we look like her friend with the "patron" and get constant reinforcement of our physical beauty. Her writing *about* that feeling here seems clear and true, so I'm glad I finally clicked through to read it.
posted by uberchet at 12:09 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

“Do you not find my body sexy?”, though? Seriously?

Thats the worst fucking loaded passive-aggressive relationship drama question I've ever heard.
posted by lkc at 12:14 PM on September 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

As a happily married person for 17 years, I find the premise of this essay utterly ridiculous (if you like to have sex).
posted by Nevin at 12:15 PM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

How much of the writer's apparent sadness is a result of living in a society that teaches women that their value as humans is primarily driven by their desirability, and by extension, her value to her husband must be similarly measured by her desirability? Same goes for all of us commenting...we're all products of that same society. Are our reactions just a result of the same life-long programming?

Absolutely. For that matter, my alternate version re: wanting kids is also rooted in a bogus narrative about who wants kids and how women's value is wrapped up in reproduction.

And yet...there is no strong cultural narrative that women's value as humans is driven by their intelligence, but if this woman wrote an article titled "My husband is honest enough to admit he thinks I'm stupid, but we have a happy marriage" I do not think we would be inclined to take her statement at face value either.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:24 PM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

How much of the writer's apparent sadness is a result of living in a society that teaches women that their value as humans is primarily driven by their desirability, and by extension, her value to her husband must be similarly measured by her desirability?

Well, from what I read, quite a bit, because though her husband claims to find her attractive in many ways, he can't seem to show her the physical affection she craves, though she's asked him to. I don't know if it's because he doesn't perceive her as physically attractive, but the thing that makes me sad is her husband does not seem to demonstrate that he values her, because he doesn't seem to be accommodating of the needs she expressed to him.
posted by Gelatin at 12:24 PM on September 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

In my mid-twenties, I had an affair with a man who had just turned sixty. He was not a handsome man, but he was kind and funny. When we were in bed together, he would marvel at the smoothness of my skin, the tautness of my muscles, the rise of my breasts, and the tiny swell of my belly. He could lie beside me for hours at a time, just tracing the length of my spine with his fingers and whispering, you are spring come to sweeten my old age. And although I didn’t find his body sexy, I craved his touch and the way he looked at me, amazed, as if my body were a gift I brought to him each time we lay together. It was a good love, and for many years we were happy until life took me to places where he couldn’t follow.

Perhaps she got to feel really crazy gorgeous in her youth and understands that is not what a committed relationship is about. It was nice, but it didn't keep them together. She goes on to say at the end:

I love you, he says, and I trust this.

There was enough of a collage of experience, I don't see any reason to be reductionist about it. She has had a variety of experiences. She has come to love this person.

Extreme honesty can be painful. But trust is not based on being lied to in order to protect your fragile ego. Perhaps at her age she has found that trusting someone matters more to her than re-experiencing the adoration for her looks she had long ago, at length, which apparently did not result in marriage.
posted by Michele in California at 12:29 PM on September 15, 2015 [14 favorites]

Dear Sockermom
you nailed it. Shakespeare's Iago is called "honest Iago" because he tells it like it is...but as the audience knew back then, the honesty was merely a way to say things better left unsaid.
As for the article itself, I find I am no more interested in how two people feel about each other in erotic manners than I am in their toilet procedures. If a woman is content with the guy, for whatever reasons, and vice versa, so be it.
Even aqnimla seeks the Other every so often as same old same old does get boring.
posted by Postroad at 12:32 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

"tact is just not saying true stuff, i'll pass"
posted by poffin boffin at 12:35 PM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

I really feel that sort of ‘honesty’ is a red flag; who would say to their beloved that, “No, actually, your physical being is not attractive to me?” Even if true? Hell, especially if true? There are things we do not say to each other, as part of being kind and loving.

Also, based on her first description of him:

In the moonlight, his long blond hair looks almost white, his skin glows.

I am fairly certain she is married to Edgar Winter. So.
posted by Ink-stained wretch at 12:36 PM on September 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

It's always seemed to me that there's something both oppressive and false about our cultural notion that being happy and in love with your partner requires that you find each other mutually sexually attractive. It implies all sorts of hurtful and unrealistic stuff:...

Oh so true. I spent about 45 minutes convincing a therapist last month that having sex was less important to me on my hierarchy of needs than having a fully supportive partner and home life.

Especially when dating as a nonbinary and bisexual person was a case study in russian roulette with half the chambers loaded.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 12:39 PM on September 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

you are spring come to sweeten my old age

May I just say: Ew.
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:40 PM on September 15, 2015 [19 favorites]

As a single lady - I do understand her dilemma. To love someone with all your heart- and have them love you back, but not exactly they way you love them- it's a bitch. I have been on both sides of that internal debate. She decided that half a loaf in the status/lonely abatement/shared bills contract was sufficient, and now she has to live with half a loaf, while wanting the entire peanut butter , banana and jelly sandwich.

I respect that she took the rational approach- but it seems to me that even though it's rational, you cannot legislate your feelings.

I am single by choice- until I find the whole PBBJ- I will continue on that way.
posted by LuckyMonkey21 at 12:40 PM on September 15, 2015 [21 favorites]

You know what? Subtracting the ideas about physical attractiveness and sexual desire from the equation....

If you have repeatedly asked your partner to show you physical affection, yet they just can't seem to ever give it to you without you having to ask for it ....well, that's messed up.
posted by Windigo at 12:44 PM on September 15, 2015 [47 favorites]

At pushing 50, we're all lucky if we're getting any action at all. No big deal.

Yikes. You might be very surprised.

I'm 58, he is 47. I've had a hip replacement and I'm heading toward a knee replacement. There are days when I stump around and I feel quite elderly. Yet my husband tells me all the time how beautiful I am, how sexy, how much he enjoys going to bed with me. He told me a few days ago that I should paint my own thigh! because it was worthy of being captured on canvas. I don't think of myself as sexy but I am damn glad he finds me so. It is a miracle, really.

I was married first to a man I found unattractive-- cute face but unlovely body. He had short hairy legs and a big, doughy chest. Yet I loved him and have many happy memories of being in bed with him. I just never lusted after him. Now I am married to a man I find immensely sexy. So hot that even after 15 years I lust after him in clothes and out of clothes. I like just looking at him and it makes me feel so happy to be in this place and time that I can so enjoy watch my husband climb on a ladder and can get aroused.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 12:49 PM on September 15, 2015 [18 favorites]

CBrachyrhynchos: "It's always seemed to me that there's something both oppressive and false about our cultural notion that being happy and in love with your partner requires that you find each other mutually sexually attractive. It implies all sorts of hurtful and unrealistic stuff:...

Oh so true. I spent about 45 minutes convincing a therapist last month that having sex was less important to me on my hierarchy of needs than having a fully supportive partner and home life.

Especially when dating as a nonbinary and bisexual person was a case study in russian roulette with half the chambers loaded."

My therapist can't seem to grok the fact I am not pushing harder to date. I keep telling her "When I try, it doesn't happen." and that when it is meant to be, it will happen. (Binary, but I prefer to identify as "nonjudgemental" as per my earlier comment about if you dig someone, they are attractive.)
posted by Samizdata at 12:50 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh so true. I spent about 45 minutes convincing a therapist last month that having sex was less important to me on my hierarchy of needs than having a fully supportive partner and home life.

Was s/he 22 or something? I find it really shocking that warrants any more than a nod.
posted by phearlez at 12:52 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think the key here is that sexy inside a relationship is a bit of a mystery to those on the outside. Who and what people find attractive in the physical sense can no more be determined by the external presentation than learning philosophy by sticking plato under your pillow at night. Finding the person who adores all of you is a haystack needle- maybe she got tired of looking.
posted by LuckyMonkey21 at 12:55 PM on September 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

"i like this because i am imagining two monstrous murderous cannibal windigos in love

holding hands in the moonlight over a mangled corpse

doing the lady & the tramp spaghetti scene with entrails"

Please marry me. And not in the praying mantis you keep talking about. More like a spider, pls.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:56 PM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

i too find this sad and i'm further saddened for people who can only find beauty in conventional beauty, whatever that is. i'm sort of a brute of a woman with a kind of odd face, and yet my husband, who i have known for going on 17 years, is utterly convinced of my beauty....

Exactly! I don't see why this is too much to ask for? Or, as someone helpfully pointed out to me above, if your partner finds your body and face sexy and beautiful, you must certainly be on guard because they are shallow and will leave you for a "more attractive" model (I'm still WTF about that comment).

Like I already said, a marriage or partnership can be whatever you want it to be. But when one partner is feeling bereft of affection, and obviously desires to be desired as a sexual being, should they settle? I suppose that is the gist of it. I don't think it's a zero sum game, where if you want to be desired physically you could care less about the inner beauty of people. In an ideal relationship, it should be a combination of both with each feeding into the other. And if the relationship - for all its good aspects - leaves you feeling lonely and unfulfilled, I think its place in your life needs to be revisited. Is it not human nature to want to be found attractive sexually by your partner (barring being on the asexual spectrum, of course)? Some people need that aspect in their relationships more than other people, but I don't think it can be dismissed as placing importance in things that are ultimately shallow.
posted by Windigo at 12:58 PM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

It sounds like she asked for a very honest answer to this question, rather than him offering this (which would be a very unfair move), and that's okay. But I think if he does love her and find her mind sexy, he can show that by giving her the physical affection she clearly wants.

My boyfriend is definitely into me for my personality and is very clear that he loves my intelligence and wit and all that. Which is what I'd much rather get compliments on (and he delivers on that). But pretty much anytime we're together, he will offhandly but sincerely say that he likes something about my appearance. Sometimes it's the cute dress I'm wearing or the color of my eyes, but just as often it's my super baggy sweatpants or unshaven legs. And he's equally sincere about both of them, and it's a really surprisingly good feeling to know that he is attracted to all of me.

Feeling wanted and desired is a really good feeling, and I think it's an important part of a relationship, and not a part that you can just decide you don't want. I think it's possible that the husband is closer to asexual on the continuum, which can be totally fine if you know that going in but harder to deal when neither is thinking about it that way.
posted by raeka at 12:59 PM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

It's hard for me to square her perception of the relative attractiveness levels in her marriage with the photos of her and her husband on her blog. That adds to my overall feeling that this article is a bummer. I agree that she doesn't sound happy. Obviously, I'm not inside her head or inside her relationship. All I know is that I'm left feeling sad for her.
posted by prefpara at 1:04 PM on September 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

I'm of the ( perhaps naive) belief that everybody's the object of desire, to someone. My experiences and observations have not dissuaded me of this.
posted by jonmc at 1:05 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

i was in my youth with a dude who was radically honest in this way - that he only ever found me attractive in very specific fleeting moments - and i used to be all "well, it's good that we're so strong that he can be that honest, and i asked, sooooo." i'm so glad i learned that i deserved to be with someone who could honestly answer that they found me beautiful.
posted by nadawi at 1:06 PM on September 15, 2015 [15 favorites]

I enjoyed a lot of things about this essay, which struck me as nuanced and thoughtful and not secretly actually sad. A lot of the comments about how awful her situation is seem to ignore the essay itself in order to draw those conclusions - it makes me wonder to what extent such readings are knee-jerk leaps to the defense of various gendered and sexual cultural assumptions that this article picks at, starts to unravel?

One of the things I most liked about it was the judo-flip of gendered expectation in a heterosexual pairing. The male as younger, the object of desire, sexually passive.

As someone who has been in happy, mutually supportive, deeply intimate and loving relationships that were not primarily based on physical attraction, I think it's quite nice to see one depicted so thoughtfully.
posted by erlking at 1:07 PM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

She obviously does not read Ask Metafilter at all. If she did, then she would know how Mefites would answer her question and therefore she would not need to write this article. "My husband has told me repeatedly that I'm not attractive. But I still love him. Should I stay or go?" "DTMFA!"
posted by Melismata at 1:08 PM on September 15, 2015 [12 favorites]

"It's hard for me to square her perception of the relative attractiveness levels in her marriage with the photos of her and her husband on her blog."

I was going to say this, but because I only saw the pictures via mutual friends on FB I did not. I didn't realize there were public examples.

I think they're both adorable middle-aged nerds, and (in this crowd at least) we should all be so lucky.
posted by uberchet at 1:10 PM on September 15, 2015

This article saddened me and left me with the thought that as women in relationships with men, we are sometimes put in the terrible double bind of only being loved either a) for our looks, and not known on a deep level, or b) in spite of them, and settled for with a bit of regret on the guys part. It may be more nuanced than that, but that is how it can appear to women, and I'm not going to downplay how traumatizing it is to be constantly bombarded with it. In fact, that mindset is why I am no longer a redditor and maybe I ought not to have read this article, either.

I Googled pictures of Sarah Einstein and her husband. To me, they look like a normal geek couple, the kind of people I'd game with or join for movie nights. Their age difference was not noticeable in the photos, nor did he look "out of her league." It seems like, in the article, she puts him on a bit of a pedestal. She described him as a Nordic god, and I laughed in startlement when I saw his photos. I mean, he's certainly presentable, but I was expecting him to look like Sting or Julian Sands and he looks kind of like my nerdy guy friends from high school. And I was expecting Sarah to look much older and frumpier than she actually does, based on the article. I think her perceptions of both herself and him are distorted and that is to his advantage, which may be why he continues to allow her to think that.

The husband does not come off well in this piece, not because of his honesty (it does sound a bit like she badgered him into admitting that, technically, her body isn't sexy on its own, but he finds her entire Gestalt sexy) but because he doesn't initiate sexytimes. His whole meh stance on fucking her or proactively complimenting her attractiveness even has a name in the marital and family counseling field -- "withholding." Some therapists would even go so far as to say that withholding is a form of abuse. (There's a reason we call sex "conjugal duties!" And they are still newlyweds!) In any case, the whole article belies the stated happiness of her marriage. It was ethical of her not to flirt back with the coffee shop guy, but I wouldn't have judged her if she had, or even gone further, dealing with the daily grind of spousal rejection. It's like she's trying to publicly talk herself into feeling better about it. I really kind of want to smack her husband. Or maybe this is her way of doing just that, in a strangely passive-aggressive intellectual display. In any case, if she's really "beautiful to him," he ought to step up and show it, especially now that she's made him look like a jerk in public.

I've known several couples in which the man was objectively more attractive than the woman, much more so than in the case of Sarah Einstein and her husband. The men in these relationships were crazy about their wives/girlfriends, and still are as far as I know. It doesn't have to be the way it is for Sarah Einstein. She doesn't have to resign herself to begging for scraps because "that's just what happens when you're not young and pretty anymore."
posted by Beethoven's Sith at 1:11 PM on September 15, 2015 [36 favorites]

She obviously does not read Ask Metafilter at all. If she did, then she would know how Mefites would answer her question and therefore she would not need to write this article. "My husband has told me repeatedly that I'm not attractive. But I still love him. Should I stay or go?" "DTMFA!"

Also therapy. And not to eat anything she may have left lying around the kitchen overnight.
posted by ryanshepard at 1:12 PM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

i am also finding the reality of how they look hard to square with this. he either links attractiveness with youth, is hiding his own dysfunction through his brave honesty, or needs something very specific. i'm one of those "find beauty in everyone" type of people, but you don't even have to step out of conventional attractiveness to find her immediately pretty - unless, again, there's some switch in there about youth=beauty, age=unattractive.
posted by nadawi at 1:12 PM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

mumimor: "I'm beginnning to feel this whole thread is not nice (even as I commented on it myself) I haven't flagged it now, but beg all to think how it would be to read this if you were the author of this piece."

Dunno. The article and how it is written strikes me as designed to trigger a dialogue, either with oneself or a partner or even beyond that.
posted by Samizdata at 1:13 PM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

I haven't seen pictures of both, but I'd like to add to my former comment that she is an intriguing, complex writer whom I will follow in the future.
posted by mumimor at 1:13 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

ryanshepard: "She obviously does not read Ask Metafilter at all. If she did, then she would know how Mefites would answer her question and therefore she would not need to write this article. "My husband has told me repeatedly that I'm not attractive. But I still love him. Should I stay or go?" "DTMFA!"

Also therapy. And not to eat anything she may have left lying around the kitchen overnight."

Or not to sex up anyone left around the kitchen overnight.
posted by Samizdata at 1:14 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm beginnning to feel this whole thread is not nice (even as I commented on it myself) I haven't flagged it now, but beg all to think how it would be to read this if you were the author of this piece.

I cannot but imagine that essay-writing-for-pay involves a lot of "here's some feelings or a conflict I had, crank it up to 11, beef it up thematically by weaving in some related elements like my hot friend oh and that guy who hit on me recently" and not so much "now I will confess my secret pain to Salon dot com" and as someone who probably wants to continue to sell her nonfiction she'd probably be stoked that people are gabbing about it. JMHO
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:14 PM on September 15, 2015 [9 favorites]

phearlez: Was s/he 22 or something? I find it really shocking that warrants any more than a nod.

Yeah, this is straying a bit off topic, but the last two therapists I had (the first one moved away for family reasons) required a fairly conscious shift in focus from, "I'm coming out because I want a boyfriend" to "I'm coming out because I need to talk about experiences with biphobia." To be honest, the two go together more often than not.

Windigo: Is it not human nature to want to be found attractive sexually by your partner?

Sure, that's human nature. It's also human nature to be cussedly different. It's also human nature to become different over time. Your dealbreakers are not my dealbreakers, but there's a lot of cultural propaganda saying that they should be my dealbreakers, even when breaking the deal would cause a great deal of harm to everyone involved.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:18 PM on September 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

Wow, holy projection, batman. I laughed out loud.

Thanks for diagnosis and derision!
posted by srboisvert at 1:22 PM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

What frustrates me about this discussion is that, mostly, we're conflating the normative aspects of this with the particular interpersonal aspects of this. Which works well for those who don't see this as a conflation, but rather an equation: love requires sexual attraction, therefore she's lying to herself and this is an unhealthy relationship.

But some of us don't accept this equation -- we really do think that there's variation in how much sexual attraction corresponds to the possibility/presence of romantic love and that, furthemore, our culture asserts a standard that is both at odds with that natural variation and which is patriarchal.

For those of us with this view, our analysis and reaction to this piece is complex. If she were fully armored against the cultural messaging and we could read this and believe that she was fully secure and happy in her relationship, then I think we'd accept her story as she wants us to accept it -- as empowering and a statement against an oppressive cultural norm. (Assuming that that this insecurity about physical attractiveness is the only problem, which I don't.) But I don't think she is fully armored and I don't think any of us are convinced that she is fully secure and happy in her relationship.

So I'm left feeling the need to agree that this relationship doesn't seem as healthy as she wants us to believe that it is, but I don't want that agreement to validate the notion that it's because it's not possible for such a relationship to be healthy. I absolutely do not endorse the view that the only healthy relationship is one in which both partners necessarily find each other sexually attractive. That people promulgate this makes me angry because, more generally, it's an example of how people universalize and make normative statements on the basis of their own experience and limited ability to imagine that other people have different sensibilities, and, more specifically, it denies that a great many people are having or could have fulfilling romantic relationships.

I'm reminded of a related argument I had here where someone asserted that it was obviously and necessarily true that not regularly having sex was pathological and psychologically damaging -- it was as if that person wasn't aware of, for example, all the people who cannot have sex and they weren't aware that they were arguing that every one of those people were psychologically damaged as a result. It was ignorant, presumptuous, and profoundly insensitive.

What I'm trying to say is that there's a way in which talking about this doesn't reinforce the very toxic and false ideas that drive (what seems to me to be) her insecurity and are partly involved in her unhappiness in this relationship. For example, in regard to my previous paragraph, there's a way in which we could talk about someone's unhappiness in not having sex that doesn't imply that everyone else who is not having sex is necessarily unhappy and damaged. Part of why an individual might be unhappy lacking sex is because they really want to have sex, but another part of why they might be unhappy is because they've internalized the damaging cultural notion that this is a measurement of self-worth. We can talk about this unhappiness without adding to this cultural weight.

I agree with others that the biggest concern in their relationship is that she wants and needs a level of sexual intimacy (and as a validation of commitment) that he is not providing, even though she has made her needs clear to him. That doesn't make him a villain, necessarily, but it does imply that there's a disconnect between their expectations that must be addressed one way or another for the relationship to be healthy.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:29 PM on September 15, 2015 [34 favorites]

Some people want sex.
Some people don't.

And some people want sex but struggle with the additional needs, triggers, and fears that come along with the ride because human beings are complicated that way.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:29 PM on September 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

And of course, some people wrote about this complex diversity 2,000 years ago, and some people build comedy routines about it today.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:32 PM on September 15, 2015

Thanks for diagnosis and derision!

This is the last I will comment on this, as I don't want to derail, but your comment was so out of left field that it read as projection, yes. Maybe it wasn't worded clearly, or I am misreading something. And knowing myself, and my husband, the idea that I have a horrifying "relationship that would constantly be at risk from the possibility of a more attractive person shattering it"....it did make me laugh. It came off as really weird? Like, how did you reach that conclusion? Because....he finds me to be gorgeous? Because I can't imagine a life with a partner who didn't feel that way about me and me for him, after having had it for the past ten years?
posted by Windigo at 1:33 PM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'm really torn about how relevant their "actual" attractiveness on some generally accepted spectrum is. On the one hand, the essay is sort of about her internal life within their marriage, and their behavior within their marriage. On the other hand, they actually exist in the world, and I did look at the pictures and thought jeez, lady, you're telling yourself a really unhelpful story.

And I tell myself the same story. In reality I know I'm a reasonably attractive person with relatively low body fat and carefully groomed eyebrows, pushing 40 - but for any number of reasons I've been both less conventionally attractive at various times, and also felt less conventionally attractive most of the time, or at least less how I'd expected conventionally attractive to feel. (I feel compelled to observe that I am fine looking but not some kind of GOLDEN GODDESSBEAST WITH LEGS FOR DAYS AND AN ASS THAT WON'T QUIT, unless you mean "for days spent walking around" and "won't quit sitting on seats.") I married someone who's not big on the "you're so hot" stuff, and learning that a pretty attractive colleague had had a longstanding crush suddenly shook my fundamental belief that I look like a potato.

All this to say that we've kind of renegotiated this in my marriage. I've learned to say "hey, I need to hear you think I have a hot ass." And he's learned to say it. It's possible. I want to tell Sarah Einstein about it.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 1:33 PM on September 15, 2015 [18 favorites]

"I find you sexy for other reasons besides your body" doesn't seem like it necessarily ought to imply "I never initiate sex."

I found myself wondering if he had a lower libido than she did. It's often eluded because of the false myth that men always desire sex but libidos are pretty variable between individuals, and it's not uncommon for a man to have a lower libido than his spouse.
posted by Deoridhe at 1:36 PM on September 15, 2015 [21 favorites]

The mostly happy couple, from the comments section of the piece.

On the one hand, dude needs to work a little harder at contradicting his wife when she says "you are beautiful, I am plain, and lo, it will be ever thus."

Then again, if he knows he's going to crop up as a character in her non-fiction essays where she muses on feeling un-beautiful, well, maybe his reticence is understandable. I remember there was an AskMe once where the asker wanted to know why some people were willing to INSULT YOU TO YOUR FACE BY CALLING YOU UGLY. And when people asked for a for-instance, it turned out that she meant "hey, you really look like [actress many consider very beautiful]" was what she meant by an insult. Some people are determined to find themselves unlovely, no matter what other people say. Some people can be called beautiful over and over, and will remain convinced that every such statement is a fond lie.

(mostly though, he needs to honor her wishes without needing to be reminded every other time, LBR)
posted by a fiendish thingy at 1:36 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Metafilter: A GOLDEN GODDESSBEAST WITH LEGS FOR DAYS AND AN ASS THAT WON'T QUIT
posted by Windigo at 1:37 PM on September 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

...gendered expectation in a heterosexual pairing.

Presumably.
posted by Mental Wimp at 1:38 PM on September 15, 2015

I'm really torn about how relevant their "actual" attractiveness on some generally accepted spectrum is.

Yeah, this occurred to me, too. I remember being extremely sexually attracted to a woman in college and when I'd rave to some of my friends about her looks, I'd get these strange sort of hesitant looks, like, "Dude, you think she's all that?" Love is blind and all that.
posted by Mental Wimp at 1:41 PM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Ivan Fyodorovich: "But some of us don't accept this equation -- we really do think that there's variation in how much sexual attraction corresponds to the possibility/presence of romantic love and that, furthemore, our culture asserts a standard that is both at odds with that natural variation and which is patriarchal."

Orrrr some of us are saying if you love someone, then you find them attractive as an element of said love.
posted by Samizdata at 1:42 PM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

We're one sliver of a relationship, told from one side. While interesting and unconventional, I'd hate to proclaim I know the width and breadth of their relationship. Especially by comparing it to my own.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:42 PM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

Less flattering photo from her own blog.

A single photo rarely does anyone justice, in any sense of the word at all. You can get super gorgeous pics of big stars and then you can go read articles all about Stars Without Makeup to see how much less hot they appear in day to day life.

I don't have any problem with the idea that her daily subjective experience is that, no, she is not quite as attractive as he is. Tossing a single photo of each out there does not invalidate her lived experience 24/7. (She may well be deluded. But a single photo of each of them is insufficient evidence of her delusional state.)
posted by Michele in California at 1:43 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Is there really such a thing as being fully armoured against cultural messaging? Maybe it's possible but I feel like the default principle, when talking to a person that you love, should be to assume that they don't have such a complete set of armour and therefore to be cautious about saying things that would normally be perceived as acutely painful (rejecting, unloving, whatever) in your shared culture. I can certainly imagine a situation where a woman is genuinely immune to being hurt this way - though I agree that the author of this piece doesn't sound like she's immune - but I feel like you would need to have really rock-solid grounds for believing that she was immune before telling her repeatedly that it doesn't matter that her body isn't sexy. "You shouldn't be hurt by that because it's only hurtful because of the patriarchy" doesn't seem like a good excuse when dealing with people actually living in the patriarchy.
posted by Aravis76 at 1:44 PM on September 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

I cannot but imagine that essay-writing-for-pay involves a lot of "here's some feelings or a conflict I had, crank it up to 11, beef it up thematically by weaving in some related elements like my hot friend oh and that guy who hit on me recently" and not so much "now I will confess my secret pain to Salon dot com" and as someone who probably wants to continue to sell her nonfiction she'd probably be stoked that people are gabbing about it

bumbum, I once wrote for a living, and it is truly a really bad underpaid job, where some resort to desperate measures because you are being paid by the line and you don't have enough ideas to pay the rent.. Which is probably why my reaction at this point is WHOA. Writers have all sorts of issues just like everyone else, and sometimes they feel the need to publish these issues, because they know their worries will be mirrored in thousands, if not tens of thousands of readers' reflections upon life. And they know human interest stories - or private life porn - is endlessly marketable. This is where the editor comes in: she needs to both get those fascinating stories and protect her writers from their own desperation. And that is not only a moral task, but also a business decision: Salon is always balancing on the thin line between serious media and tabloid. But their readers are all clearly on the serious side. They just love them some gossip now and then.

At Salon, if the tabloid goes too far, they will loose all their readers. However, if they have no gossip, they will loose the click-bait. In my view, this article is on the edge. It is well-written and interesting, and obviously fascinates and draws readers. But at the same time, the broader issues it points at are un-adressed, and thus it becomes very private and invites to private and personal comments. Which I am certain have a place: we need to talk about Bill Cosby's crimes, and about pro-lifers getting abortions. But during this thread I came to think about whether this woman's feelings are a public issue, and whether her editors are being responsible when they are publishing this article in this version (it might have great possibilities in an edited version).
posted by mumimor at 1:45 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Samizdata : Orrrr some of us are saying if you love someone, then you find them attractive as an element of said love.

And implicitly removing the author's right to choose the right relationship for herself by insisting that all "good" relationships should adhere to your relationship standards.

Seriously, people are trying so hard to read a bad relationship into an article that simply takes an honest look into one difficult aspect of a relationship, and are undermining the author's lived experiences by insisting she's not as happy as she says she is. I have to wonder if we are falling into the modern American obsession with insisting that everything must be awesome at all times - if you aren't deliriously happy with your relationship, DTMFA.
posted by Tehhund at 1:51 PM on September 15, 2015 [15 favorites]

Less flattering photo from her own blog.

fwiw, i don't find that photo of her less flattering at all. i have seen 10 or so pictures of her now and i really do feel like there's some dysmorphia (which is being encouraged by her husband) going on. i get it - i'm dysmorphic about my face/body/appearance too. i just can't imagine being with someone who encouraged that in me. i hope she really is happy or finds a way to be happy. even taking the attractiveness completely out of it - she seems to desire a relationship where she's touched and desired without prompting. she deserves to have that. i wish she believed it.
posted by nadawi at 1:54 PM on September 15, 2015 [32 favorites]

Sometimes, love is wiping their ass as they lay on their deathbed. Just pointing that out.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:55 PM on September 15, 2015 [9 favorites]

I don't think anyone is saying Everything Must Be Awesome at all times. As many people have pointed out, every marriage/relationship is different and YRMV and all that. But she is talking, explicitly, how she's not receiving affection/sex without asking, and that aspect of her relationship is difficult for her so I don't know if people are really needing to read that deeply into her words to decide she's not very happy?
posted by Windigo at 1:57 PM on September 15, 2015 [12 favorites]

one hopes that there is a strong foundation of affection and mutual needs being met along with the "in sickness" stuff of marriage.
posted by nadawi at 1:59 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Well, happiness in an adult relationship and ebb and flow (if that's the right metaphor) over time, but generally speaking the equilibrium has to be a feeling of well-being. This may not may you're happy all the time, but it means you're definitely *not* unhappy all of the time.

The writer of the piece sounds to me like she is deeply unhappy. Being unhappy in a marriage may be a "normal" state of affairs (according to some people), but it's definitely unhealthy.

Is she unattractive, or simply unattractive to her partner. I mean, a quick search of any tube site will prove that almost any body type is considered attractive to someone, so...
posted by Nevin at 1:59 PM on September 15, 2015

if you aren't deliriously happy with your relationship, DTMFA.

There's probably way more people stuck in miserable relationships out of fear and inertia than there are people getting persuaded to leave functional relationships because things aren't awesome enough.
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:59 PM on September 15, 2015 [20 favorites]

"'You shouldn't be hurt by that because it's only hurtful because of the patriarchy' doesn't seem like a good excuse when dealing with people actually living in the patriarchy."

That's what I was trying to get at in my first comment. I'm frustrated because what I see is a false dilemma. Either these are false patriarchal messages and it's okay to tell your partner that you don't find her sexually attractive, or, as Samizdata put it "if you love someone, then you find them attractive as an element of said love" and she's deluding herself and he doesn't really love her. Both of those are damaging, toxic messages, though in different ways.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:00 PM on September 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

She's... not plain. I struggle a lot lately to find myself attractive. I'm not the willowy 22 year old I was when I married. My husband no longer looks like Jon Stewart. But he's mine, and I'm his, and we're beautiful to each other. Anyway. I just want to hug her and tell her that's she's beautiful, too.
posted by Ruki at 2:02 PM on September 15, 2015 [16 favorites]

Seriously, people are trying so hard to read a bad relationship into an article that simply takes an honest look into one difficult aspect of a relationship, and are undermining the author's lived experiences by insisting she's not as happy as she says she is.

A person can absolutely be happy in a relationship whose terms many people would find boggling. There is also such a thing as protesting too much. I didn't have to try hard at all to read the author's unhappiness in this article. Is it perfectly reflective of her actual inmost feelings? Maybe not. Maybe the editors, boggled by the terms of the relationship, inadvertently slanted her writing through their edits. Or maybe, like the Corset Lady from a few days ago, the false notes just ring too clear to be ignored.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:10 PM on September 15, 2015

I understand the impetus to determine how pretty she really, objectively is in comparison to him in hopes of determining how valuable her insights are for other people. But I can't understand why a bunch of people think their opinions of her relationship, based on one article and a few pictures, is more valid than her own.

I mean, up to a point - but her whole article is about how she's just not good-looking, unlike her marble wildebeast of a husband, and we do live in a culture where women relentlessly run themselves down and get run down....in my life, many people have given me some useful reality checks (not about appearance, but about My Deeply Held Beliefs About Myself) because frankly, your Deeply Held Belief About Yourself can be just plain wrong, especially when it's obediently self-hating as women are supposed to do.

How many questions have there been here on metafilter where someone has been all "oh, how can I accept that I am just a giant ugly trollface foreveralone and get on with my life"? Lots, that's how many. And no one ever says "yes, you really are a giant ugly trollface, try to find someone who will be honest with you about how ugly you are but who will love you anyway", because that's shitty advice.
posted by Frowner at 2:11 PM on September 15, 2015 [25 favorites]

But I can't understand why a bunch of people think their opinions of her relationship, based on one article and a few pictures, is more valid than her own.

well, you yourself engaged in that conversation by posting a picture you said was less flattering. you're also inserting your opinion on the objectiveness of the claim.

and one of the reasons to attack it on that axis is how aging women are told we can't be beautiful or pretty or physically desired once we get stretch marks, and our boobs start to sag, and we stop having the (ugh) intoxicating skin of a 22 year old. we are made to feel like we're worthless for a whole bunch of reasons once we get older, and one of the huge ways is by convincing us that men get more attractive as they age and women get down right disgusting.
posted by nadawi at 2:11 PM on September 15, 2015 [23 favorites]

Even the AskMe thread I'm remembering in which the OP told the respondents to assume she were actually, objectively ugly, I don't think anyone advised her that because of her plainness she would have to settle for a relationship in which her partner rarely initiated sex or acted as though he really desired her. I don't think that mismatch is necessarily an insurmountable obstacle in a relationship, either, but I am also having trouble buying that it is unavoidable.
posted by en forme de poire at 2:17 PM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

And no one ever says "yes, you really are a giant ugly trollface, try to find someone who will be honest with you about how ugly you are but who will love you anyway", because that's shitty advice

Shitty advice, but an excellent sock-puppet name.
posted by The Bellman at 2:21 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I understand where y'all are coming from, that women are taught to hate their looks and their bodies and that this is probably informing her assessment of her appearance, but I also feel like if she wanted people to analyze her wrinkles rather than her words, she would have just put up a big photo of herself and not written this essay.
posted by thetortoise at 2:24 PM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

He reviewed this essay, according to her, but how is their marriage going to survive the fallout of, "hey, world, this guy here only tolerates me as a wife"? The smiles across the table at neighborhood gatherings are going to become a lot more crinkled and distant.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:26 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think I've mentioned this on MeFi before, but two of the guys I've dated in the past have said that I wasn't "as good looking as the girls [they] typically date, but that [my] personality makes up for it."
That hurt. I'm not conventionally good looking; my ears stick out and I have crooked teeth and circles and bags under my eyes and only within the past year have developed a more serious skin care regimen and I have a bit of a potbelly that comes with drinking too much beer and not sleeping enough. And I'm short. And I was heavy heavy on depo-provera when I was in college, so I have weird weight issues even though I've been between 125-135 for over 10 years at this point.
I remember when I told my partner-thing of over 5 years what my exes had said, and he said I should have punched them both in the dick.
Now, I find my partner amazingly gorgeous. Like, want to drop my pants every time I see him or hear his voice, and he's funny and kind when he wants to be, and reasonably intelligent and a deep thinker, and I love having conversations with him, whether they're about sports or life or food or sex; I don't care - he could talk about paint drying and I'd be enamored.
We've seen each other at our best and our worst, physically and emotionally, and it doesn't seem to matter; we find each other sexy.
He thinks he's ugly. I have no idea where he got that from. Granted, he's overweight, but I like big boys and his physical always comes back great so he's in good health. But he tells me he's fat and graying and getting older (he's 48; I'm 32), and I try to reassure him that I think he's perfect for me just the way he is, but I'll support anything he wants to do to better himself. I love his salt-and-pepper hair, his strong calves and big shoulders that hold me, his soft hands and his sparkling eyes, giving his belly rubs, and that smile that just makes me melt. He's the total package, and I don't understand why he can't see that; I tell him whenever he lets me that I'm so fortunate to have him in my life, but it's hard for him to hear and he likes to think he is very macho, but has on occasion mentioned that it means quite a bit to him. I have complained to him in the past that he doesn't say I'm "whatever" enough, only because of my own insecurities about my past. and sometimes he says "that's just the way I am!" and sometimes he replies with "you're sexy/beautiful/intelligent/insert really awesome compliment here," but I've learned with him that it's best to just let him talk and it will come out eventually.
Sometimes I struggle because I feel like he is way out of my league, but I try to count my blessings and appreciate.
posted by sara is disenchanted at 2:26 PM on September 15, 2015 [9 favorites]

I'm reminded of the great scene in Seinfeld where George is horrified to discover than a rather attractive woman he is dating confessed to Elaine that "looks aren't that important to (her)". To which George reacts, "I'd rather she hate me and thought I was good looking".

I too found this article kind of sad because it read to me like an ode to settling. Being desired physically is obviously important to this woman. Her husband can't provide that, so she's had to adapt to a marriage where she will never have this need fulfilled. This isn't to argue that this type of relationship, where physical attraction and sexual desire are given much lower priority than other aspects, can never work for anyone. It simply appears rather evident from this article that it isn't working for her.

I totally get the different people place different value on different things, but for me, I can think of few things more depressing than knowing that the woman I have devoted to spend the rest of my life with married me in spite of my looks and not, at least in part, because of them.
posted by The Gooch at 2:37 PM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

Couple comments deleted. MiC and nadawi, please drop it. And maybe folks can sort of steer away from the "is she good looking or bad looking objectively" and picture-posting thing? I understand the curiosity but as an extended conversation that specific line of inquiry isn't gonna go anywhere good.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:47 PM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

Jesus i think i'm even harsher on this than some people here. This reads as straight up manipulative and even abusive. Like, he's actively trying to destroy her self esteem so she wont leave kind of thing.

I sort of have the opposite take of some people saying have a relationship that isn't about attraction is some punk rock radical act. He's playing in to exactly that to put her down, and she's trying to play along either out of not wanting to admit that or by trying to be all progressive lefty cool. It totally reads cool girl.

I'm not on team "love requires sexual attraction", i'm on team "making these kinds of comments is unacceptable no matter what in the context of reality and society in 2015". Even if you don't agree with the first premise, there's a lot of other people here describing how and why these comments are harmful.
posted by emptythought at 2:54 PM on September 15, 2015 [24 favorites]

He reviewed this essay, according to her, but how is their marriage going to survive the fallout of, "hey, world, this guy here only tolerates me as a wife"? The smiles across the table at neighborhood gatherings are going to become a lot more crinkled and distant.

The same thing occurred to me, too, Countess Elena. How awkward. I do think it's brave to be so open and vulnerable publicly, I just couldn't do it myself.
posted by JenMarie at 3:05 PM on September 15, 2015

Six years ago the ever-enlightening OKTrends blog showed that women rated a full 80% of men as unattractive (i.e. below average). Here is just one example of the vast majority of men that women rated as ugly. Yet chix also still be dating the benighted scrub masses, so the take-away message for the link author is "welcome to the club". Take it glass half-empty (not desired), or glass half-full (attraction mental and not superficial).

Personally I think the natural state of humanity is a brief reproductive bloom during adolescence followed by a relentless physical decay on the way to death. Most sexual attractiveness is lost between 30 and 40. So it would seem that most relationships have very little to do with sexual attraction. Since we spend most of our lives as old people--as grotesque, degenerating forms--it plays a minor role for both men and women across most of the years they are mated. And it plays a minor role for women across their entire lifespan.
posted by dgaicun at 3:16 PM on September 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

Since we spend most of our lives as old people--as grotesque, degenerating forms--[sexual attraction] plays a minor role for both men and women across most of the years they are mated. And it plays a minor role for women across their entire lifespan.

Since this is apparently being left to stand I'll just say, LOL .
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 3:57 PM on September 15, 2015 [43 favorites]

I thought it was only the very end of our lives that we spend as old people, hence the term "old."

Anyway, I hope that comment was satire.
posted by Beethoven's Sith at 4:01 PM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

i'm honestly saddened by people who think attractiveness and youth are intrinsically linked. it seems so unnecessarily limiting. you don't have to believe the mass media. it's totally possible for us to be hot to our partners and others well past our teens or 30s or whatever arbitrary line we're looking at.
posted by nadawi at 4:11 PM on September 15, 2015 [12 favorites]

No, didn't you know, Beethoven's Sith, 30 is the new 85.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 4:11 PM on September 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

That OKC dataset is a pretty non-random sample with some serious confounds -- plus it's talking about initial attraction (based on abbreviated profile text plus pictures), not attraction within the context of a relationship. That data is fun to think about, but it can't support the type of sweeping, general claim you're making.

Since we spend most of our lives as old people--as grotesque, degenerating forms

Is that you, H. P. Lovecraft?
posted by en forme de poire at 4:27 PM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'm curious why it's damaging to think that someone who is saying they love you romantically should find you sexually desirable if they have sexual desire? I feel like there's a huge difference between someone who's an ace and someone who has sexual desire, but just not for their wife. And the latter is hugely fucking problematic.
posted by corb at 4:42 PM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Six years ago the ever-enlightening OKTrends blog showed that women rated a full 80% of men as unattractive (i.e. below average). Here is just one example of the vast majority of men that women rated as ugly. Yet chix also still be dating the benighted scrub masses, so the take-away message for the link author is "welcome to the club". Take it glass half-empty (not desired), or glass half-full (attraction mental and not superficial).

An alternate (and more likely, in my opinion) interpretation of these data is that women are less likely than men to agree on whom they find attractive, in part because there isn't really a culturally-defined standard of physical attractiveness that men are expected to live up to, unlike there is for women. Except for being tall, but you can't reliably tell that in a man from photos, obviously.
posted by un petit cadeau at 4:44 PM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

Hilariously the ad showing for me at the end is a guide to escaping abusive relationships.

In a few years, she will write about leaving him and rebuilding the tatters of her self esteem and confidence. It's fine to have different levels of sexual interest, to be companions rather than passion-driven, but she's starving and trying to convince herself that she isn't hungry while he holds the keys to the pantry. If he respected her, they'd have struggled through this and either gotten divorced or changed their marriage, but it works for him to have a wife bound to him by love.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 4:51 PM on September 15, 2015 [13 favorites]

At pushing 50, we're all lucky if we're getting any action at all. No big deal.

Excuse me?
posted by notreally at 4:52 PM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

An alternate (and more likely, in my opinion) interpretation of these data is that women are less likely than men to agree on whom they find attractive

But the data from OK Cupid doesn't support that thesis; it really did show that women on OKC rated most men as unattractive. Whether OKC is representative or there are other confounding factors or any number of other objections are quite fair but that women may not agree on attractiveness is not one of the objections supported by their data.

Except for being tall, but you can't reliably tell that in a man from photos, obviously.

Ugh. Yes. Tall is the big one for men.
posted by Justinian at 5:16 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

The power play in telling a partner that you have never found their body sexy is just gross. A therapist friend once asked: whenever you are going to tell someone something and you are unsure of if it is the right move, ask yourself why you are going to say it. What purpose does it serve for you? And does saying it actually achieve that purpose?

I cannot stand in someone else's shoes, but I cannot come up with a kind, loving, partner-affirming reason to tell a partner that their body does not turn me on (even if other things do).

And what patriarchal essentializing BS to lay on a female-identified partner - "your body sucks, but don't worry, I still find you hot." In the context of a world that tells women that their body is never sexy enough, thin enough, perfect enough, this was just a cruel move.

I could never settle for someone who made my life smaller - and a partner telling me this would make me feel small.
posted by anya32 at 6:16 PM on September 15, 2015 [14 favorites]

notreally: "At pushing 50, we're all lucky if we're getting any action at all. No big deal.

Excuse me?"

I am 48, and you edge cases can just shut up and stop making me jealous.
posted by Samizdata at 6:35 PM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

"The power play in telling a partner that you have never found their body sexy is just gross. A therapist friend once asked: whenever you are going to tell someone something and you are unsure of if it is the right move, ask yourself why you are going to say it. What purpose does it serve for you? And does saying it actually achieve that purpose? "

From the article:

"It took us a while to arrive at this understanding. It was only once I thought to ask, “Do you not find my body sexy?” instead of simply, “Don’t you find me sexy?” that he could articulate the difference. These weren’t conversations we wanted to have, but they were necessary. And I know that it’s our ability to talk about the hard things that is really the strength of our marriage, that this matters far more than who reaches for whom in the night."

It sounds like she was specifically asking him a question. It sounds like they were trying to address a low amount of sexual activity between them.

"
And what patriarchal essentializing BS to lay on a female-identified partner - "your body sucks, but don't worry, I still find you hot." In the context of a world that tells women that their body is never sexy enough, thin enough, perfect enough, this was just a cruel move."

This sounds like you're attacking the husband for some reason. The author herself said ""your body sucks, but don't worry, I still find you hot" in a previous relationship. It's not BS. People aren't just attracted to looks.

"In my mid-twenties, I had an affair with a man who had just turned sixty. He was not a handsome man, but he was kind and funny. When we were in bed together, he would marvel at the smoothness of my skin, the tautness of my muscles, the rise of my breasts, and the tiny swell of my belly. He could lie beside me for hours at a time, just tracing the length of my spine with his fingers and whispering, you are spring come to sweeten my old age. And although I didn’t find his body sexy, I craved his touch and the way he looked at me, amazed, as if my body were a gift I brought to him each time we lay together. "

The husband is being truthful to her. This wasn't the case at first and caused them relationship problems. When he figured out how to articulate his feelings their relationship improved. She says so here:

"In our early days, before my husband could articulate the ways in which he both did, and did not, feel desire for me, we sometimes fought about our sex life."
posted by I-baLL at 6:37 PM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

This piece and this thread are making me feel so emotional. I just... I know that there is that whole trope about how people become less physically attractive when they are in functional relationships (let themselves go, or whatever), but my experience has been the opposite.

I was raised to believe "don't let anyone ever tell you that you are anything less than beautiful" but that is a really hard thing to take to heart sometimes. And there have been times in my life when I actually think I got objectively uglier than other times, like believing that I wasn't pretty enough triggered some kind of unconscious self-sabotage in me, like it was obvious to people who saw me that I kindof hated myself. And those times were when I was in relationships that were bad, relationships where I was being told every day that I was rather plain, or compared unfavorably to some female acquaintance, or it was implied that I didn't try hard enough on my appearance, or I was not really my partner's type, or maybe they were slightly out of my league or whatever. And I really feel like being in a healthy relationship, with someone who cherishes me and whose positive comments about my body I truly believe, has actually made me more physically attractive. Like, noticeably, to both myself and to others.

There are times in my life where I feel like I could have written this article, because there are times in my life where I truly believed that not being attractive enough was just a Fact that I needed to accept--and could accept with time and grace--rather than an opinion, or a distortion, or a manifestation of being treated poorly. And I thank goodness that those times when I didn't understand just how much I was being influenced by the idea that I was physically less-than were not memorialized on the internet for everyone to see whenever they google my name.

Basically, my heart just really goes out to Ms. Einstein. I hope things get easier for her.
posted by likeatoaster at 6:52 PM on September 15, 2015 [20 favorites]

When he figured out how to articulate his feelings their relationship improved. She says so here...

Noooo, she says before that they used to fight about their sex life, and then they stopped. Not clear whether that's an improvement, per se.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 7:02 PM on September 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

I think she looks attractive! And while her husband seems all right, I'm really snickering at that lederhosen outfit.*

* I used to have antique leather lederhosen, I shouldn't judge, but that picture makes me go hee hee hee a lot.

Anyway, I certainly get the urge to settle for what you can get, as someone who's not considered all that attractive most of the time either I've heard it a lot. (As in, I should settle for the few dubious dudes who do find me attractive.) But as Lyle Lovett pointed out once upon a time, even a blind chicken can find a grain of corn now and then, and I think we've all met people who are dog ugly, or fat, or have no limbs, or whatever, and they can still find love. I think it's kind of sad to make their relationship a marital one if it doesn't sound suited to it, or more specifically if he's not into sex with her. (Or possibly in general, don't know for sure there.) That's the requirement of marital relationships: you have to have the entire everything going on, and if he doesn't have all of that for her, it sucks for both of them. Especially in monogamous sexual relationships.

"I don't see why it has to involve sex. Where does that leave asexual people?"

Hopefully dating other asexual people. It's fine to be asexual as long as both of you aren't wanting more than the other can give.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:08 PM on September 15, 2015

It is possible to both, 1) recognize that your beloved does not have centerfold-worthy looks based on society's beauty standards, and 2) find her personally very physically attractive and sexy regardless because you love and care about her. The thing that is bothersome about the husband is that he seems to unable to make this leap, which is why people are questioning how much he really cares about her. Lusting after a specific body type-- a body type of a hypothetical person you're not in a relationship with-- is fine, but he should also be able to muster some genuine desire for his living, breathing wife.
posted by scantee at 7:10 PM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

My issue is not with the husband's personal sentiments. It's with his decision to tell her this. People get to make their own decisions about whom they love, sleep with, stay with - and I would never tell someone else what to do. But it was the decision to share this information that does not sit well with me.
posted by anya32 at 7:11 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

But the data from OK Cupid doesn't support that thesis; it really did show that women on OKC rated most men as unattractive.

This is kind of a derail at this point, but it doesn't contradict that thesis either: even if, out of all ratings given by women, most are below a 2.5, that doesn't mean that the women in that sample rated the same men as unattractive. (Their graphs are not very well labeled, but I am pretty sure those are the total number of ratings across all men in each bin, not the distributions of averages per man being rated.) If it is true that women's ratings are more heterogeneous, though, it might help to explain their messaging results: overall men sent overwhelmingly more messages to high-scoring women, but that trend is far less pronounced for the women, and you wouldn't expect people to send messages to people they personally found unattractive. (And of course that's taking all their data at face value.)
posted by en forme de poire at 7:14 PM on September 15, 2015

"My issue is not with the husband's personal sentiments. It's with his decision to tell her this. People get to make their own decisions about whom they love, sleep with, stay with - and I would never tell someone else what to do. But it was the decision to share this information that does not sit well with me."

So the husband should lie all the time to her no matter how many times she asks? I don't understand your point. It's not that the husband dropped this information out of the blue. I already addressed this in my previous comment.
posted by I-baLL at 7:17 PM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Besides, I am not exactly a bronzed Grecian god (actually, the light from bronzed Grecian god will prolly not hit me for a long time. OTOH, woman and children don't run and scream when I go out, so there's that), so it strikes me as awfully damn arrogant to expect the same from a partner.
posted by Samizdata at 7:20 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

(Ummm, cross out woman and replace with women, please, in the above comment.)
posted by Samizdata at 7:26 PM on September 15, 2015

Oh, man. I poked around a little bit at some of her other writing. It's really lovely, and also this, in combination with the essay we're discussing, really smarts, mostly because I totally get it, and it's a really interesting and...honestly a bummer of a backdrop for the OP. Her description of a vague lifelong feeling that you have to turn out really cool and interesting since after all you're never going to be beautiful -- it rings true to me.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 7:28 PM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

So the husband should lie all the time to her no matter how many times she asks?

There's a saying that came from the Darwin Awards: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

If you ask a question you don't actually want the answer to, well, congratulations you played a stupid game and you won a stupid prize.
posted by Justinian at 7:29 PM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

If the situation is simple and straightforward, that he doesn't think she is hot but likes her personality, that is kind of sad but people find happiness in all kinds of weird situations. But then when people posted the photographs, their physical reality was so wildly different from her descriptions that I wonder what is really going on, whether it is some kind of dismorphia or something more manipulative on his part?
posted by Dip Flash at 7:45 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

corb: I'm curious why it's damaging to think that someone who is saying they love you romantically should find you sexually desirable if they have sexual desire? I feel like there's a huge difference between someone who's an ace and someone who has sexual desire, but just not for their wife. And the latter is hugely fucking problematic.

Um, pardon, when did the complexity of other people's relationships become any of your business?

But I'll indulge your question. My partner and I are mature adults very capable of negotiating sexual needs and boundaries in spite of having evolved different complex sexualities. The damage is that some therapists tend to chase a magical number of three fucks a week a bit like a dog chasing a squirrel.

At best, this is a waste of time and money. At worst, it's crazy making.

We're all adults here. If someone says it's a problem, it's a problem. If someone says it isn't, your job is to keep your pearl-clutching to yourself.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:07 PM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

I can't speak for him, but almost all women think we're ugly on some level, thanks to our lovely woman-hating culture. If we're anything less than anorexic supermodel perfect, we're ugly, period.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:09 PM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

The damage is that some therapists tend to chase a magical number of three fucks a week a bit like a dog chasing a squirrel.

Which might be relevant if the problem were that "our therapist thinks we should be having sex more than we are". But it's not. The problem is that she has explicitly asked him for what she needs to be happy and he's either unable or unwilling to give it to her.

If somebody has "need to feel desired by my partner" as one of their needs in a relationship, that's one of their needs.
posted by Lexica at 8:19 PM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

people act like the only options are a) she never asks and just ignores that her husband never compliments her physicality or touches her on his own accord or b) she asks and gets the super honest bold truth (and still doesn't get appreciated on a physical level or touched). but there is a shiny answer c) find someone who desires her and wants to honestly tell her how beautiful he finds her and touches her without reservation or prompting. it's not an impossible, crazy, selfish ask. she's allowed to want that. and she seems, through her writing, to want that - but she wants this guy to be that, and that's never going to happen for her. she's convinced herself it's because she's objectively ugly beyond measure and too old to be desired, but that's just not true.
posted by nadawi at 8:34 PM on September 15, 2015 [19 favorites]

Which might be relevant if the problem were that "our therapist thinks we should be having sex more than we are".

It's relevant in that "I'm curious why it's damaging...?" was explicitly asked (and explicitly quoted) in my response. Ivan up-thread had a nice bit about how it's almost impossible to talk about this article without validating norms about sexuality in relationships that many of us find damaging.

Given the heavy level of authorial, editorial, and interpretational filtering going on with this article I'm not willing to speculate about what the author does and does not actually need. Perhaps she needs the Doctor/Luke/Kirk slash fic the infinite hypothetical monkies that fly out of my butt are busy writing.

I wouldn't claim to know, regardless of the editorial filter it's none of my fucking business, and none of your fucking business, so all we can talk about are the fucking cultural relationship norms surrounding this piece, ...

... about fucking.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:47 PM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Ivan up-thread had a nice bit about how it's almost impossible to talk about this article without validating norms about sexuality in relationships that many of us find damaging.

But we can talk about how its damaging in this and many other relationships without saying that it therefore must be a universal experience.
posted by Justinian at 8:54 PM on September 15, 2015

But we can talk about how its damaging in this and many other relationships without saying that it therefore must be a universal experience.

I responded to a post that said just that.

I'm unwilling to evaluate the complexity of an author's marriage based on this piece.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:00 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

a giant ugly troll face

I am this.

A GOLDEN GODDESSBEAST WITH LEGS FOR DAYS AND AN ASS THAT WON'T QUIT

I am also this. Depending upon who is looking and what they fucking want from me.

And settling for someone who will manipulate that? Nope. Better off waiting for someone who sees the beautiful side in part because they actually bring that side out.
posted by susiswimmer at 10:01 PM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

but there is a shiny answer c) find someone who desires her and wants to honestly tell her how beautiful he finds her and touches her without reservation or prompting.

There's also d), that her husband could choose to be that guy, because even if he isn't so attracted to her physically, her mind and personality attract him to her, and he loves her so much, that he makes the choice to show physical affection and emotional support for his wife, because that's a spouse's job. My takeaway from the article is that he isn't doing that, but at least he's being honest about not doing that, so she's okay with it somehow?

I don't think anyone, least of all the writer, is asking the husband to feel any differently about her. What's making her sad are specific actions, or lack of, which actions are absolutely under his control.
posted by Gelatin at 4:52 AM on September 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

This was really, really hard for me to read. I just went through something similar, and it almost killed me.

It has nothing to do with conventional beauty, but when you know someone does not find you attractive anymore, when they won't touch you, it's tempting to believe that is the reason. That you aren't young enough, thin enough, fit enough. That you are too much YOU and not this imaginary woman that you would need to change yourself into to be worthy of affection.

It's a terrible mindfuck. Starvation makes you think desperate thoughts.

And it's bullshit. You are beautiful and you deserve to be happy and you deserve to be loved.
posted by louche mustachio at 5:00 AM on September 16, 2015 [23 favorites]

Ctrl-F, romantic orientation Enter.

0 hits.

Okay, I really didn't expect that, this time.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:01 AM on September 16, 2015

i like this because i am imagining two monstrous murderous cannibal windigos in love

holding hands in the moonlight over a mangled corpse

doing the lady & the tramp spaghetti scene with entrails

I am totally stealing some variation of this for a future when-I-get-around-to-it dating profile.

It's a fairly accurate description of what I'm looking for.
posted by louche mustachio at 5:12 AM on September 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Marry me. And not in the praying mantis you keep talking about. More like a botfly!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:07 AM on September 16, 2015

Metafilter: a brief reproductive bloom during adolescence followed by a relentless physical decay on the way to death

Best of that meme ever in my opinion. It'll even make the "it was better years ago!" brigade happy.
posted by phearlez at 6:51 AM on September 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

Marry me. And not in the praying mantis you keep talking about. More like a botfly!

I should probably just marry poffin boffin, but she is married to the sea

alas
posted by louche mustachio at 6:59 AM on September 16, 2015 [5 favorites]

louche mustachio: "Marry me. And not in the praying mantis you keep talking about. More like a botfly!

I should probably just marry poffin boffin, but she is married to the sea

alas"

Maybe you can get lucky and she will admit to herself she doesn't find the sea attractive any more.
posted by Samizdata at 8:08 AM on September 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

As long as she doesn't cudgel the sea with it under the guise of "radical honesty" or some bullshit because saltwater don't play
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 8:55 AM on September 16, 2015

That beautiful man of hers is an idiot.
posted by allkindsoftime at 8:57 AM on September 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

I have friends who confide in me, regularly, guy-to-guy, that they find their SO sexy... even though they know I don't. Even though I'd guess most men wouldn't.

Hey, life, and love, are both about compromising the ideal for the reality, but... there's someone out there who does find her sexy, I absolutely guarantee it.
posted by IAmBroom at 11:05 AM on September 16, 2015

Even though I periodically find myself thinking, "Never thought I'd be sleeping with a 59-year-old," I still find her immensely sexually attractive, and, I swear I'm not making this up, our sex is more intense now than the hyperactive type we practiced 25 years ago. I don't know how it happened, but she just keeps getting better with age.
posted by Mental Wimp at 12:10 PM on September 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

As mere readers of this article, there is a kind of worst case scenario going on, but really, is there any reason to eliminate the possibility that
a) The husband just has a lower sex drive than her?
and
b) He DOES find her sexy (as stated in the article), but, if her body was on a stranger, he just wouldn't find it noticeable?

The latter especially - isn't that pretty common? That unless someone is a model, and not even then most of the time, sexiness is personality driven, not physical?

I'm not saying that is the case, but we can't know it isn't. On the otherhand, that might be a charitable reading on one side and not enough so for her, because it would imply that she might be depressed or dysmorphic, which is not great either, but I did have alarm bells ringing at why would you ask a partner, not, am I sexy, but about your body only, like your mind is separate, or you're trying to cut yourself into pieces.
Harm being done somewhere, at any rate.
posted by Elysum at 5:03 PM on September 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

Y'know, it's entirely possible that the guy has issues out the wazoo that account for his asexuality and etc. Perhaps he was abused. Without knowing a lot more, it's really shitty to be hypercritical of his behaviors. Maybe he's already pushing himself to the breaking point.

Nah. DTMFA! He's bullying man scum! Judge, convict, condemn him! Leap to conclusions after hearing one side of the story!
posted by five fresh fish at 12:20 AM on September 18, 2015

Or you know, maybe the focus is on the wife's experience of the marriage and not immediately on whether the husband is being unfairly pillorised by people being sympathetic to a woman's anguished account of living in a relationship that multiple people are saying reminds them of living in similar circumstances to her.

There should be a word for this kind of - it's not exactly a derailment because in some circumstances it is an interesting and useful approach to a conversation or a text, to look for the other voices or the other sides. And yet it's often used as a cudgel to silence rather than a lever to open more conversations.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 12:49 AM on September 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

I don't think that DTMFA is fair to her choices either.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 4:37 AM on September 18, 2015

"I don't think that DTMFA is fair to her choices either."

Well, I think that's usually the case when people here or elsewhere react so quickly and strongly with a DTMFA. I do think that, ultimately, that's what will end up happening and it will be for the best in these cases where people jump to that advice, but even so, what has always really bothered me about AskMe human relations threads and part of what's going on here is that people universalize from their own experience and lack imagination that other people have different context and different sensibilities ... and that in this universalizing, there's a lot of value judgments of other people going on. It always rubs me the wrong way.

But you really need to read the painful and heartfelt accounts of women in this thread. There's a lot going on in this that I think men, straight and gay, don't quite understand and can't quite understand. Even putting all the stuff aside that I think makes this whole thing so incredibly fraught and difficult to talk about -- the patriarchal emphasis on a woman's sexual desirability as the locus of her worth -- even putting all that stuff aside, there's also the problem of the gendered cultural expectations about libido and sexual interest. And that is operating on both sides in this (and most every other heterosexual relationships) -- there's the cultural expectation that a man will naturally, inevitably have a higher sexual interest and that a woman will have a lower sexual interest. For men, this creates unrealistic expectations about performance that's expected to validate the relationship. But for women this creates unrealistic expectations about women being happy when their partner isn't interested -- women aren't expected to care that much about having a lot of sex. That sounds really archaic and surely our culture isn't still like that, but while it's not as explicit about it as it once was, all the subterranean expectations run in that direction. What I'm trying to say is that it's very common for women to feel sexually frustrated in their long-term relationships because the whole cultural context is tilted away from validating the idea that they have a right to consider that an essential aspect of a long-term romantic relationship.

Mrs. Roper's lack of satisfaction was played as a joke on Three's Company, she was presented as being comically oversexed when, given what she was saying, she was deeply unhappy in her relationship. Like so many women are for the same reason. But it was a joke. And this is how our culture sees this and so women are placed in this position of being told that their sexual desirability is a measure of their worth, but they're also told that they don't much really have a right to expect sexual fulfillment. And so men in relationships just take this granted, they tend to think that if they don't have much interest, it's just not that important because, hey, women mostly just care if you love them, right? And women will tell their partners and tell their partners that they are unhappy and their partners won't take them seriously. And, very often, their partners will tell them that it's their fault, which is what society is telling women, anyway.

In my opinion, the biggest issue in this relationship is that she's sexually frustrated and he's not taking that seriously. As I wrote earlier, I don't think it's right and I think it's very problematic to accept this cultural message that strong, purely physical sexual desire is a necessary part of and function of romantic love. But partners have to be on the same page. There's a lot of gendered stuff about how people are expected to behave in relationships that is problematic but we have to live in a world where we're affected by these expectations and, more to the point, both partners need to agree on how to navigate this. I don't think this couple is actually working this disagreement out, I think he's mostly short-circuited it by convincing her that she's wrong to want what she wants. That's a problem.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:23 PM on September 18, 2015 [18 favorites]

Am I the only person in this thread to see this as a problem of monogamy?
posted by girl Mark at 7:23 AM on September 19, 2015

But you really need to read the painful and heartfelt accounts of women in this thread.

I have, thank you very much, and I'm still of the view that it's patronizing as heck and arguably misogynist to put her relationship choices under a microscope based on a single piece of writing published as click-bait. Which is also a gendered dynamic in our culture.

What I'm trying to say is that it's very common for women to feel sexually frustrated in their long-term relationships because the whole cultural context is tilted away from validating the idea that they have a right to consider that an essential aspect of a long-term romantic relationship.

I'd say that's a cultural double-bind because women (and to a lesser extent men) are told that they're doing it wrong no matter either way they choose. Most typically by well-intentioned but patronizing little busybodies like yourself who are jumping to conclusions based on minimal and possibly biased evidence.

In my opinion, the biggest issue in this relationship is that she's sexually frustrated and he's not taking that seriously.

So I'm someone who negotiates these issues as part of a 20+ year relationship. I know the gendered expectations, not as a theory, but as an experienced thing. I know that our relationship is a no-win situation in the contradictions of the larger culture.

Your willingness to express a opinion on the lives of complete strangers because $5 and a metafilter account gives you the privilege of playing relationship counselor at a digital distance is deeply unethical and part of the problem. If you don't have an emic understanding of the relationship, your opinion is little more than pinning Cosmopolitan to a dartboard and throwing blindly.

I'm approaching this from an issue of both faith and skepticism, I'm willing to extend a bit of faith that the author is an adult capable of negotiating these issues, and I'm deeply skeptical that the linked article is much more than a glimpse through a peep-hole.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm not. But I know the rush to judgement regarding private relationship choices is damaging to my relationships, so it's a form of egoism I try to restrain. If you want to support people who make these difficult decision, you need to support that they can make those decisions, and not play shrink on metafilter because you obviously know better.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:01 AM on September 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

For the tl;dr, the biggest problem I have with my mixed-orientation relationship is that everyone and their uncle has a solution. Most of these solutions are little better than, "have you tried homeopathy."

What I'm lacking is people capable of compassionate listening.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:29 AM on September 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

"Most typically by well-intentioned but patronizing little busybodies like yourself who are jumping to conclusions based on minimal and possibly biased evidence."

From your comments, it's pretty clear that you have every reason to be angry about this and to react this way. I don't think it's fair to me that you characterize my comment like that, or that you're accusing the others in this thread of doing that. But I understand why you are and why you're hurt and angry about it.

Look, I would never, ever say the things I wrote to her in person or if she were, for example, in this thread. You're perceiving what I wrote and what others have written as unsolicited advice to her, and strangers diagnosing and passing judgment on her private life as if they were saying these things directly to her. But that's not what is happening.

She didn't post this as an AskMe; she's not here.

Rather, she wrote publicly about her private life which is implicitly an invitation for her audience to consider what she wrote, how they feel about what she had to say, and whether they agree with her view of her situation. The whole context for this is that she's making a case, an argument, for something that isn't universally regarded as self-evident truth. And even more importantly, she clearly expresses a fair amount of ambivalence -- it's not self-evidently true even to her. We're the audience, we're discussing this with ourselves.

Note that no one has disputed your attested experience of your relationship here. However, it's true that what some people have done is to implicitly dispute it by making categorical assertions that contradict your attested experience. And you may have noticed that I have repeatedly argued against people doing that. I think you're right to be angry about this and this is why I led my comment with the point that there's a definite problem with people universalizing from their own experience and sensibilities and then making value judgments about other people's lives, especially their relationships, telling them that they're doing it wrong. At the moment, I don't personally have a stake in this, but I have in the past and as a general rule, I really fucking hate that people do this. I'm on your side on this. And for that reason I do understand why you're touchy about this given that you have actual people in your actual life telling you to your face that your understanding of yourself and your relationship is wrong. That's offensive. Fuck them.

But, honestly, you're doing almost the same thing that some of the people here you're most strongly disagreeing with. Some people here have been in exactly the situation that she describes, are women and have personal experience about the context that you and I don't have, and have been gaslighted about how they feel and have been deeply hurt over it. Just like you, they have personal experience that makes this an extremely sensitive issue for them. Their experience is valid, their judgment is valid. And they're not emailing this writer telling her that they better understand her relationship than she does. At least I hope they're not.

Rather, what they're doing is what you're doing -- this is a presentation of a personal story that deals with issues that many people experience in their relationships, that involves social conventions and pressures, and which strongly resonates with their own painful experience. They're reacting to it, they're arguing for an interpretation of her story, and they're expressing their anger and pain. They oughtn't invalidate your viewpoint and reaction, you oughtn't invalidate theirs.

At the risk of repeating myself, I want to be clear that I very strongly agree with the sentiment and principle that I think is the bedrock of your complaint -- people are the authorities on their own experiences and it's very damn presumptuous to condescend to question and invalidate them. But she's not here -- she's not you in your chair at your therapist's office and we're not your therapist. We're not telling her anything. And, sure, the principle applies more generally to some degree in this sort of context, when it's about public stuff and we're bystanders who are naturally thinking about it and talking about and forming judgements about it. I totally agree that we should be careful about blithely sweeping aside someone's own explanation of themselves in general, outside their involvement in the discussion. But we all do it to some degree and especially and obviously think we know best because we've been there and are older and wiser or whatever. I think you'd be doing it in this thread if this essay were arguing for the opposite conclusion. I suspect or hope that you'd be sensitive to the need to qualify your thoughts and judgments, knowing that only she is an expert on herself and her relationship.

I've tried to balance that it's okay for me to consider and form judgements about a published essay on the writer's personal life against the principle that I'm not her and I'm not an authority on her life -- she is. It can be difficult to balance these things, but I've made an effort to do so, I think everyone should. But it's a balance -- she invited us, as her audience, to consider these things and to agree or disagree with her. Not to her face, but as her audience. That's how this works. And it's okay.

It's much more important that we are sensitive and kind to those present in this discussion. That most certainly includes you, but it also includes the people with whom you are disagreeing.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:19 AM on September 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

We're not going to agree, so let's leave it at that.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 4:47 PM on September 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I thought about the critiques, well-intended but still given,of their appearances, and that for a woman to have sexual desire is still more densely woven to her own sexual desirability. An ugly man can have sexual desire independently, although it often becomes a frightening power then, but an ugly woman is sexually vacant of her own desire. She might cross genders by becoming handsome or mannish, or be recognised as striking and unusual, but in the conventional heterosexual narrative, a woman needs to be desired before she is visible in her own desire. And the narrative is that most women are attractive because they bother with basic hygiene and fashion and make-up, compared to men who have a far wider range before they become socially gross. It's that whole "you're pretty because I love you" line that is both spoken in heart shattering truth and manipulated by some people to make a partner, almost always a woman because of the peculiar social pressures here, to believe she is physically repulsive and her partner loves her but has sex with her out of a sort of loving pity for her unattractive body and that her level of sexual desire is wrong because it is from a woman who has proven herself undesirable.

I keep thinking of Beauty and the Beat, and how I can't quite imagine a gender flipped version because a woman as a ravaging beast,a man sold off by a frightened parent, the whole metaphorical ravishing - are there any stories where an ugly woman desires and wins?
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 6:10 PM on September 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

Sorry what I meant to write at the start is that simply my sympathy is with the wife because a woman writing about being ugly is much much harder and stacked against her than a man. Even here, metafilter went to look at her photographs and see if she was 'objectively' pretty enough. Sure she's writing in public about a deeply personal subject, but as a woman, she's taking a greater risk than her husband would for a similar essay.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 6:15 PM on September 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

are there any stories where an ugly woman desires and wins?

It's not an uncomplicated gender-flipped version of Beauty and the Beast-- which is the point, of course-- but Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil is a blisteringly incisive take on what it is to be an ugly woman who desires in a patriarchal culture. I wish that book were required reading for everyone who doesn't understand the tyranny that sexist norms hold over the female body and how the notion of the scarcity of feminine beauty is transmuted into competition between women. It's a brilliant, fantastically angry book. I'd like to imagine the author of this article reading it and waking up and realizing she's a valuable human being in a toxic culture.
posted by thetortoise at 6:28 PM on September 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

"Even here, metafilter went to look at her photographs and see if she was 'objectively' pretty enough."

Yeah! And that's really revealing! I mean, I think people did it from both kinds of motivations, the patriarchal ones and the anti-patriarchal ones. I'm struck by how the supportive, feminist response to a woman expressing these sorts of insecurities is an argument that she is objectively attractive by our culture's standards. And that the supportive (or combative) sexist response to a woman expressing these sorts of insecurities is an argument that she is (or isn't) objectively attractive by our culture's standards.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:54 PM on September 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

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