Simon & Schuster, October 2008
My teenage sexual awakening began when I lost my virginity at sixteen on the damp grass outside the New Hyde Park train station. Contrary to what I had heard, it didn’t hurt at all. Actually, it didn’t feel like anything. But the boy I was with thought it was pretty great. And that felt powerful. I developed a penchant for young virgins, addicted to the power of initiating them into sex. My promiscuity, I’d later realize, was a symptom of my own self-doubt. I needed attention from boys to feel good about myself.
“Few of us want to drink too much or become drug addicts or rack up credit card debt, but most of us want to fall in love,” writes Susan Cheever in her provocative Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction.
Cheever’s book explores the line “between the kind of love on which a life together can be built, and the passionate kind of love that is an addiction and that is described by Bronte, Flaubert, and many others.”
Cheever is intimately acquainted with addiction in the form of alcohol abuse, and has written about it extensively in numerous works including the biographical memoirs Home Before Darkand Treetops, the former concerning her father John Cheever, the literary giant plagued by too much drink, and the latter dealing with several generations of her mother’s family also soaked in alcohol. Her memoir Note Found in a Bottle explores Cheever’s own alcoholism and recovery, which led her to write the biography, My Name is Bill Wilson: His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous.
At age twenty-two, I stopped jumping from one bed to the next and settled down with one man, to whom I married and remained faithful for over twenty years, until my midlife crisis hit.
In retrospect, I confessed my one and only marital sin right away to try and put the brakes on the affair, thinking my husband would put up a fight, enclose me in a protective fortress, where I’d be forced to abandon my reckless desire and come to my senses. Instead he left and his absence just made it all the easier for me to see my lover, whom I would go to, trancelike, whenever I had the chance.
Susan Cheever describes this trance in relation to obsession. “When one is in the grip of an obsession, children, regular meals, sleep, work—is swept away. The entire being is one yearning, frothing bath of desire.”
She goes on, “Normal people have some experience with obsession. For an addict it is an almost constant state of mind—a state of mind that seems real, compelling, and which makes it important to do everything possible to grant the obsession’s requests.”
I am finally waking from this romantic trance Cheever describes. After two years, I am seeing clearly the wreckage of my broken marriage. Did I have an affair because I’m a sex addict? I don’t think so. Still Cheever’s words pierced to the core:
“We are [all] addicted to the feelings of new love, of being swept away, of being adored, of being obsessed.”
Yes. Oh God, yes.
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Stephanie Susnjara is a freelance writer and editor based in Katonah, New York. Her essays have appeared in the anthologies, Women Who Eat: A New Generation on the Glory of Food(Seal Press/2003) and Our Roots are Deep with Passion: Creative Nonfiction Collects Essaysby Italian American Writers (Other Press/2005), as well as other publications. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in 2000.