by
Roberta Tyler
undergone personally. since that now ancient time and they wouldn’t know where to begin. When I
think about it, I can hardly believe it. First I want to cry, then I have to laugh. Finally, I feel great
and want to celebrate all over again!
How about this for a start? I received one of those “Can you believe this?” e-mails making its rounds
through the e-universe and it speed-dialed me right back into the ‘forties (when I was a kid) and the
'50s when I took up wife-ing and motherhood and that decade’s image-making. It was a 1955
magazine article titled “The Good Wife’s Guide,” which listed several ways a woman might ease the
strain and stress of her husband’s long day at the office (“greet him warmly,” “quiet the kids,” “make
him a drink,” etc.). Above the article was a drawing of an attractive, thirty-ish, middle-class wife with
a couple of well-behaved youngsters playing together nearby. She is standing in front of a kitchen
stove wearing a dress—calf-length, full-skirted and starched, an apron, also starched, strings tied into
a large bow at her back, and high-heeled shoes. My mind’s eye instantly pictured what she wore
under the dress: bra and panties, silk hose snapped to a garter belt (or a girdle—she’s slim, though, so
probably not a girdle) and one or two starched, frilled and furbelowed petticoats, as was the style.
She was making dinner wearing high heels!! I knew what was in her head, too—because she was me
and many other women of that time whose highlight of the day was sitting down to dinner with her
clean starched kids and husband—suit jacket off, briefcase aside—around a picture-perfect table.
That’s when I cried, I laughed, and I couldn’t believe it.
Well, okay: so my father didn’t work in an office and my mother saw no point whatsoever in
starching her dresses. On the other hand, wishing a better future for her girls than the one she
envisioned for herself, she did starch and iron our dresses. One way and another I zig-zagged into the
decade of the '50s and immediately bought into its zeitgeist, especially its two foremost and
interchangeable conventions: “the perfect marriage” and “the perfect family.” Failing at perfection,
when the '50s became the '60s I threw in my lot with the women who were kicking off their heels
and wearing sneakers when they cooked—if they cooked. Sneakers were so much better for “coming
a long way” over so much steep and contentious terrain. We made so many personal and collective
changes during the next twenty years that it’s hard to overstate how much influence women had on
the whole of our society—beginning with sex.
One of my just-married '50s friends, an outspoken, intellectual whiz-kid who never once pulled a
punch as long as I knew her, called me right after her honeymoon and said: "If that’s all there is to sex,
what a bore." Other than her, none of the young married women I knew would have dreamed of
trading girl-talk about their sex lives—good or bad—and without stories to compare and others to
talk to, who could guess on a scale of one-to-ten how close she was to being perfect in bed? You
probably noticed that even my one radical, truth-telling friend wasn’t extreme enough to bring
anything less than virginity to her wedding bed. That’s because virtually every woman close to my
age today was raised to believe that sex before marriage was absolutely out of the question—was one
of those really big, sins that could ruin your “reputation” for life. Wait, they said; wait. The reward
for waiting, as far as I could determine, was that the terrible taint on sex before marriage falls away
quite like magic once the wedding ring is on the finger. Imagine that!—even as the bride and groom
are pledging their troth, one of the seven deadliest sins of all will have become God-blessed and
guaranteed connubial bliss in time for tonight’s bedding-down. Who knew the psyche could spin on
a dime, when (I’m snapping my fingers now)—just like that!—sex is no longer unspeakably wicked?
In the '70s, when women were talking to each other quite a lot, I was surprised to learn that a
great many of us didn’t rate the sex in our marriages “way up there.” As one among the immaculate,
uninstructed novices of a time when religious and social conventions required virginity from its
women (though never its men) before her nuptials, I anticipated my “deflowering” about as eagerly
as I would an X-rated nightmare.
Conditioned since puberty to romanticize the wedding night all out of proportion to reality, I recalled
my “peak experience” the morning after the wedding feeling as though I had in some inexplicable
way just gone down for the count—had sacrificed just-yesterday’s venerated virginity for his pleasure,
though not necessarily mine. "Yeah," I said to my friend after my honeymoon, "I’m disillusioned, too."
And for the next fifteen years of our marriage, my husband and I never once talked about the first
time or any other time we were “together” in bed; never once asked each other “how was it for you?”
Our marriage ended before society had awakened to some of the cracks in its ideal matrimony
mythology. When everything began to change a decade later, I learned to enjoy sex—though never
as much or as often as our culture exploits it for gain. Yet, for a long, long time before then, I pretty
much thought of the marriage bed as a responsibility—as a commitment implicit in my wedding
vows as I perceived them—to satisfy his expectations for making love “on demand."
As if her super-idealized sexual “upbringing” wasn’t enough dysfunction in a marriage, for any
woman not trying to become pregnant, there was the palpable fear that she might do exactly that—
certainly the biggest deal-breaker of all for spontaneous and carefree lovemaking. “The pill” had not
yet arrived, you see, but when it did, in 1960, those marvelous little miracle tablets were instantly an
integral and enduring part of a couple’s intimacy, providing nearly total liberation from unplanned or
unwanted childbirths. “The pill” opened up a world of possibilities to women, giving them
immensely greater power over their own destiny almost overnight, and, while it was also the cause of
cultural upheaval for awhile, it lifted an anxious pall off the institution of marriage itself and changed
all of our lives forever. Before “the pill,” it was easier to imagine that for some of us women already
feeling not nearly enough in charge of our lives, much less our bodies, “making love” seemed more a
euphemism for “making rape.” A harsh truth, that one; it took me years to allow it into my
consciousness, to say the words aloud and reflect on their implications. I think it explains almost
everything about sex for a lot of married women in those years: so deeply connected to her body are a
woman’s emotions, so personally does she feel her body is hers to give or withhold, there is nothing
quite so conflicting or enraging for her than perceiving she doesn’t have the first and last say about it.
Needless to say, these had all been my perceptions, not those of the man I married. Nor had my
perceptions ever been his intentions.
He, too, was a product of the time in which we married, one among droves of middle-class, upwardly
mobile, ambitious and career-competitive men who went no deeper into the female psyche than men
have ever thought was important— which is to say minimally—since our species stood upright, is my
thought. So much did we misunderstand one another each time he made his gender’s long-privileged
assumptions about the rights to my body, that he was often truly perplexed by my responses. He
was caring and thoughtful in many ways, yet I couldn’t say he ever looked at “us” through my eyes
to find a perspective different from his own; this is not a judgment on him: men of that time didn’t
need to, so why would he? If we had only known how to talk . . . but we didn’t. It would take years—
more years than we were married—before I could articulate myself to myself, much less anyone else.
Though we both finally got into therapy, we never did discuss our sex life straight out, never got
beyond our equally inchoate discontents—all of which went so much deeper than our sex life. So we
blamed one another—civilly, of course, but always peripherally, or implicitly, or silently. Eventually,
for all the reasons born of the impossibly unenlightened customs of our day—and for the usual
“insurmountable differences and mutually unmet needs” that came to light in our separate
therapies—the marriage ended. It was one of thousands and thousands of '50s marriages that had
their demise in the '60s; we were the generation of couples who started a trend in divorce that
eventually ran away with itself.
So it was with great care that I extracted my particular points of view from the maelstrom of partisan
opinion swirling around the Women’s Movement at its peak in the '70s. I worked my mind a lot
in those days trying to clarify my feelings about the girl-woman I had been and the maturing,
“coming awake” woman I was becoming. The public “battle of the sexes” was daily polarizing the
gender issues I thought were probably best discriminated by me—personally and privately and for
my life only—because whatever conclusions I drew I knew were going to influence the rest of my life
and all of my relationships. Women were rewriting change for their gender famously and fast, and
while both their cause and much of the reaction against it were emotionally charged, progress was
also apace. Already women my age were feeling better about sex when I married again in 1974.
Feeling free, even teachable after all that therapy, I was eager to participate and experiment as a full
sexual partner in my second marriage, celebrating the sexual encounter, discovering the joy of
surrendering my body to love and finding the rapture in love returned. Yet, a passion pitched so high
would not sustain forever—only for as long as I was in love and in lust and blithely believing that all
the lessons I had learned in my first marriage would guarantee success in the second one. When my
ardor had cooled and taken its rightful place among some other of my passions, our differences
marched front and center.
It soon became clear how important it was to him that our physical relationship continue with the
ardor and frequency he desired. Just as important to me was that we seek out other ways of loving, as
well: less hot-body passion, more affectionate companionship; less physical prowess, more intellectual
exploration; far less time out in the world of people and more time in the quiet pursuit of our separate
interests. Too simply put, he complained, I balked and the marriage unraveled. Was his version of
“love” generic to his maleness, so primary in his gender that he could not accommodate our
differences? Or was it more his preference for a sexual lifestyle he was determined to keep? And if I
asked myself those same two questions, gender-reversed, would I find the lifestyle I favored equally
important to me? I believe today that he was, consciously or not, serving not a preference but a
psychological need to have me in bed at his pleasure. Certainly I was serving, consciously or not, a
need with a different objective: to cool down my life, to breathe and to be separately. When the
surface of our relationship finally cracked wide open to expose our different fundamental life
requirements—the thing more important to either of us than the marriage—his was the sex-life of his
imagining; mine was to live alone.
Both of my marriages ended not just because of my differences with their men, both of whom I had
loved the best I knew how before we parted. They ended because marriage is a complex emotional
arrangement; it has parameters and mutual responsibilities—and it is conditional, requiring two
separate souls to give and get from one another in a delicate balance of mutual desire, communicating
with an intent to learn, and a willingness to accommodate one another. I once believed that I had
needed from marriage—and was willing to give back in return—only what was “fair” to both of us:
acknowledgement of my value in the relationship and respect for my needs as a separate person.
Had I expected too much?
But wait, there is more to this story. Even as I struggled to make marriage work, I was itching to live
by my own lights—to break free, grow up, get sane, quest for the more of my destiny I felt certain
was waiting to be discovered. In my heart, but still “unknown” to me, I was chafing at partnership.
Like staying too long in the heat of the sun, I was burning out from the extraverted “togetherness” of
marriage; it pulled me out of my self, where I had unfinished business I was longing to complete. I
was not a brat with an attitude about marriage, not threatening “my way or the highway” for
eighteen years the first time and eleven the next. I had twice hoped—assumed—that marriage was
what I wanted—so why had mine been such a struggle? Or was I struggling against myself? Down
the road, way too late to save either marriage, I finally had an answer to my question: As far back as
memory will take me, I was always a little “dorky,” ever the serious-minded introvert: a reader, a
writer, a thinker, a walk-on-the-beach-and-never-cook-another-meal “loner” who does great with one
or two good friends at a time, yet is lost beyond recovery in a room full of people at a party. So, yes, I
had expected too much of marriage—and both husbands—and myself.
More change was in the offing and to my way of thinking what happened next to my “woman” was
so radical there can be no way—nor enough time left—to top it. The background: It is nearly twenty
years after my second and last marriage ended. I have been living alone and loving my life ever since
and am now working part-time-retired in brand new surroundings. I have just made a move that
would make almost any heart sing—four hours away from the hot, sprawling, over-populated, under-
infrastructured city down south, to a charming, unpretentious coastal community half-way up the
state. More a village than a proper town—one post office, one stoplight—it is friendly, cooler by far
than where I came from, and walkable end to end. My modest, smallish, three-level dwelling is a
cedar wood house planted in a small forest of tall trees, themselves “home” to sundry critters. When a
family of deer passes under my kitchen window on most mornings, I am never not astonished; I hold
my breath when all at once they stop to watch me observing them, and I wave goodbye when, again
all at once, they step out again on their artfully chiseled leg bones and disappear into the trees. The
considerable charm of my little sanctuary springs from the simplicity of its architecture and two west-
facing windows, one upstairs, the other down, through which I might, if I so choose, observe a
gigantic ball of fire-red sun: slipping . . . slipping . . . now slipped altogether into a darkening sea to
trade the day for yet another star-filled night. Life is very, very good in paradise. I am each day
amazed to be one of its occupants, grateful beyond knowing how to express it, and as certain as one
can be that I will be watching the deer right here in the trees all the way to check-out time. You can
see how it is that I want for nothing (remember those words).
Before long and against all odds in so small a town as this, I meet an interesting man and we are
immediately mutually attracted. We are close in age, he is nicely conversational, and I am soon
persuaded that he is very smart, maybe even “enlightened”—could this be? Old, familiar feelings
haul themselves out of a deep slumber and wander into my second chakra. A year later we become
intimate, and the first thing I notice about these special times together is how out of the ordinary they
are. Everything about them, especially my feelings, is new, for there is a certain rarified quality to
them I can’t seem to describe. But, never mind—because after a half-dozen of these now-and-then
times together, there comes the first uh-oh in our relationship, followed by a series of accelerating uh-
ohs that finally bring an end to our intimacy. What can I say?—things about us are not as we had
once imagined them to be. You know. Nonetheless, the rest of our relationship survives and we
become friends—which I am pleased to think confers a certain cachet of maturity to both of us.
Off and on for a year and a half following our last time of intimate togetherness, I wondered what it
was about those close encounters that had seemed so special. In a way I could not explain, they
symbolized something of great importance to me whose meaning I seriously needed to explore. So I
began to write about them. I wrote and re-wrote and wrote again about those curious times until I
had got as close as I could to the truth and to uncover the meaning of my part of our story. Our
stories were different, you see: I once asked him if he experienced our times together the same way I
did and he said, “No, that’s not how they are for me."
It was the love that was different—the kind and quality and its inexplicable totality; I had not
known this love before. It was not love as in the way we “made” love,” which was always tender,
respectful and for me, anyway, never about sex per se. It was not about being “in love,” which we
knew from the start didn’t describe our feelings; we were quite content to think our attraction was
more about lust, at least for the time being. Finally, it was not ego’s tendency to dramatize our
sexuality—we had no larky need to prove that we could still “get it on” even-at-our-age. So now I
will try to recapture in words this “love of another kind” that happened only to me, though it is
indescribable and I have no hope of doing it justice:
My observing “I” is barely present, recording only liminally, only for memory these feelings that
slowly overtake me—sexual and at the same time not; remotely familiar, yet in some way too rarefied
to recognize. My body, wrapped around and joined everywhere with his, becomes one body—and
merely a body: a “vehicle” for an experience unconscious of itself in a long “forever” moment outside
of time. Is it the one body who is so deeply silent, resting, feeling intensely gentled by the long chords
of a particular energy pulsing through it—or is it me who rides the current of this tremendous beauty
through a space so silent and so beautiful I dare not speak? The pulsing, barely there, unheard yet
unmistakable, emanates from and is integral with the same starry black and plangent silence that
floats the universe. The one body comes awake to an energy
pulsing love into the vastness of eternity. I am deeply moved by the stillness of this love that stills
even my breath, as though to breathe now is optional or irrelevant. I am fully present and involved in
the experience of love where time is not and I have always longed to be—yet, soon something in me
yearns to leave, to be free of this love because it is more than I can carry: tremendous, too beautiful to
bear. Though my eyes were never closed, they open now; in the distance, I hear a door close, softly,
and am returned to time.
I have said this “love” seemed to be the energy of existence itself: impersonal, all-inclusive, pulsing
and streaming through the one body and naming my self the same love as its self. Yet, in each of
these encounters there came a time when I felt my heart breaking apart from the weight of so much
“wisdom.” That a love such as this love was the sum and substance of every atom in the universe was
unfathomable; that it was everywhere at once—or, if not everywhere, then issuing from a stratum of
depth or breadth beyond the known universe; and if not that, it was love as the ground of all that
moves up and out of our apparently non-depletable unconscious: who can think like that? Was this
love I felt using the one body to demonstrate the fact of itself—or was it me in those moments who
was that very love as a fact? Gender and sexuality had in some sleight-of-hand “vanishing act”
transcended the dimension of my physical self to expose the universal love I was truly made of—
where I had come from and where I am to return. I was the literal anatomy of a love so huge I could
grasp its import only for minutes at a time. It’s not likely I will experience more of those minutes, and
I am pleased to think so: if a heart can break from feelings of love too powerful to prolong, and if
memory can conjure the beauty of that love from a tolerable distance, one is not apt to beg for more.
Wheresoever we intimate the presence of depth, in cosmos, in nature, in others or in self, we are in the
precincts of the soul. [i] —James Hollis
Why were my experiences mine alone and not in some degree approximated by my friend?
Apparently we were not in the same “psycho-spiritual” neighborhood, is all I can think, not nearly as
alike even then “as we had once imagined.” In time, it occurred to me that two bodies—one male
and one female—were required to create “the one body” necessary for those experiences, which made
it easier to sort out the meaning of our encounters. Each of them began with an expectation of sexual
union, which in itself can be a spiritual experience: sexuality by its very nature is transpersonal libido
[energy], according to Edward Edinger, and when sexuality engages the whole person, it plumbs
profound depths of the psyche.[ii] Yet the original expectation was each time quickly displaced and
subsumed by a ”larger” experience unbounded by sexual intent, therefore limitless and ultimately
much more profound. It was as if the “whole” of my psyche had been penetrated by a love that was
also whole—that is to say, by a love that was total and complete, all other forms of love being a part
of its wholeness. It was then I was able to confirm what “of great importance” those times had
symbolized for my life and to rest my case: during those times when I felt myself and the love I
described to be one and the same thing, I was experiencing the “wholeness” of myself. For no more
than minutes during each of those extraordinary half-dozen encounters I was able to experience the
unbearable beauty of being completely aligned with the unfathomable love that is also my very
being. One does not will, or choose, or even hope to have such minutes, but a single glimpse into the
Mystery that is me—is all of us and every thing—is worth the work of yet a dozen more difficult
lifetimes.
One of my favorite friends, who is both a clinical psychologist and a spiritual retreat master, puts this
question to his congregants: If you had planned your own life, could you have imagined it any better
than the way it is today? To answer his question, I ask myself one of my own: Would I change
anything about my life today? My life, especially my interior life, has not been easy, yet, over and
over again, I have answered both of our questions with a resounding No!—because the truth is, my
life is perfect today. I haven’t always said it was perfect, of course, yet there was never a day I would
have changed my life for another’s. When I look back to see how many ways I have changed over
time—the hundreds and hundreds of tiny ways and a few crucially important watershed ways—I am
dazzled by the artistry, imagination and skill that go into the creation of an always changing life.
Please believe me, I have none of those attributes in nearly enough supply to have made my life
become perfect today, and so the Mystery of the miracle of “me” remains unsolved.
Turn, turn, turn. The three important watershed changes in my sexual life occurred over a span of
decades. During all that time they were fusing with other changes occurring simultaneously on
different levels of my psyche to create a transformation impossible to describe all at once. My
conscious desire to become a whole person began historically in a time when many women like
myself were seriously discontented with the roles society had assigned them, perhaps especially their
role as sex object, dare I say centuries ago. Later, mid-life in my case, when women struck out to
change the accepted view of women’s sexuality for one with considerably more autonomy, things
changed for the better—and so did I, eventually to become the fully sexual woman I wished and
needed to be. Then, as I grew older and sex took a lesser place among my needs, I changed again,
this time moving beyond gender-opposite boundaries and more fully into my personhood. The
merger of my inner male and female characteristics now offer me a less boundaried, more
androgynous perspective on life and—in those few reassuring glimpses of my own personal
wholeness—a somewhat “proven” link to the spiritual “Ineffable.” Change is Psyche’s motor,
surreptitiously effecting, with our permission, the slow, quiet transformation of our lives, minute by
minute. The pages of this book have pulled on many separate threads to unwind the never-ending,
always altering story of change that began my life on its very first day. I have followed its trail, done
its bidding. That’s all I have done.
References
1. James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1996),
13.
2. Edward F. Edinger, Transformation of Libido: A Seminar on C.G. Jung’s Symbols of Transformation,
edited by Dianne D. Cordic (Los Angeles: The C.G. Jung Bookstore, 1994), 10.
memoir essays on the passages of a woman’s life. One of the essays was published in the New York C. G. Jung
Foundation’s Quadrant Journal in 2006; a second essay is a “finalist” in the San Francisco Writers Conference
Writers Contest. Ms. Tyler’s writing reflects a lifelong interest in psychology, literature and the world’s wisdom
traditions. Comments on "Turn, Turn, Turn." will be greatly appreciated, please contact Ms. Tyler through QME.
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