It could, on the surface, be an argument about almost anything: what time to leave for the
airport, who forgot to post the tax form, where to send the children to school… But,
in reality, in disguise, unmentioned and unmentionable, it is typically the very same argument, the
no-sex argument, the single greatest argument that ever afflicts committed couples, the
argument which has powered more furious oblique exchanges among lovers than any other, the
argument that right now, explains why one person is angrily refusing to speak to another
over a bowl of Udon noodles in a restaurant in downtown Yokohama and another is screaming
in an apartment on an upper floor of a block in the suburbs of Belo Horizonte, why a child
has acquired a step-parent and a person is crying over a bottle or at their therapist’s
office. The real injury – you have ceased to want me and I can no longer bear myself
or you – can’t be mentioned because it cuts us too deep; it threatens too much of
our dignity, it is bigger than we are. In the darkness late at night, time after time,
our hand moved towards theirs, tried to coax them into a caress and was turned down. They
held our fingers limply for a moment and then, as if we were the monster we now take ourselves
to be, curled away from us and disappeared into the warren of sleep. We have stopped
trying now. It may happen once in a blue moon, a few times a year, but we understand the
score well enough: we are not wanted. We feel like outcasts, the only ones to be rejected
in this way, the victims of a rare disease; nursing an emotional injury far too shaming
to mention to others let alone ourselves, the only ones not be having sex in a happy
sex-filled world. Our anger aggravates our injury and traps us in cycles of hostility.
Perhaps they don’t want us in the night because we have been so vile in the day; but
so long as our hand goes unwanted, we can never muster the courage to be anything but
vindictive in their presence. It hurts more than being single, when at least the neglect
was to be expected. This is a sentence without end. We can neither complain, nor let the
issue go. We feel compelled to fight by proxy about anything we can lay our hands on: the
washing powder and the walk to the park, the money for the dentist and the course of the
nation’s politics, all because we so badly need to be held and to hold, to penetrate
or to be penetrated.
It is in a sense deeply strange, even silly that so much should hang on this issue, that
the future of families, the fate of children, the division of assets, the survival of a
friendship group, should depend on the right sort of frottage of a few centimetres of our
upper limbs. It’s the tiniest thing and at the same time the very largest. The absence
of sex matters so much because sex itself is the supreme conciliator and salve of all
conflict, ill-feeling, loneliness and disinterest. It is almost impossible to make love and be
sad, indifferent or bitter. Furious perhaps, in a passionate and ardent way. But not – almost
always – truly elsewhere or beset by major grievance. The act forces presence, vulnerability,
honesty, tenderness, release. It matters inordinately because it is the ultimate proof that everything
is, despite everything, still OK. As ever, so much would change if only we could be helped
to find the words, if we could fight our way past our shame, if we didn’t have to feel
so alone (this should be proof enough that we aren’t); if we could point to the problem
without fury, without humiliation, without defensiveness; if we could simply name our
desperation without becoming desperate, if the one who didn’t want it could explain
in terms that made sense and were bearable and the one who felt cast aside could explain
without surrendering to vindictiveness or despair. We would ideally, alongside physics
and geography, learn the basics of all this in our last year at high school, learn how
to spot and assuage the no-sex argument with an in-depth course and regular refreshments
throughout our lives. It is the paradigm of all arguments. Those who can get over it can
get over pretty much any dispute; those who cannot must squabble to the grave. Were our
species to learn how to do this, the world would be suddenly and decisively calmer: there
would be infinitely fewer fights, alcoholic outbursts, divorces, affairs, rages, denunciations,
recriminations, civil wars, armed conflicts and nuclear conflagrations. At the first signs
of no-sex arguments, couples would know how carefully to locate the words that could address
their sorrow. There would not always be an answer but there would always be the right
sort of conversation – and, on a good day, the endurance of love.
Our Pillow Talk cards help prompt us to share our intimate desires.
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