Finding Lost Pleasures...Even in the Throes of Perimenopause
How I'm navigating - and finding - new patterns of desire and creativity
“You’re such a hedonist.”
I could tell he meant this as a criticism based on the tone of his voice and the expression on his face.
We were sitting across from one another at a restaurant and I’d made a comment about how much I valued pleasure in life - and all pleasures, not just those of a sexual nature.
“I don’t like hedonists,” he went on. “They’re goddamn lazy. Always looking to feel good and never willing to work for anything important.”
I was shocked by his comments. This was a college lover I’d spent several nights with, a man who had repeatedly pulled my hand into his pants or pushed my head into his lap and wouldn’t let me move until he was satisfied.
And a man who had never, ever returned the favor because he believed that a woman’s production of oxytocin during an orgasm would cause her to develop loving feelings toward the person who gave her the orgasm, which he felt was an irresponsible thing to do to a woman he didn’t want to be with long term.
In other words, if anyone was a goddamn lazy hedonist, it was him. I honestly couldn’t believe he’d had the balls to say such a thing to my face after all the pleasure he had taken from me with no intention of putting in the work to reciprocate it.
Nevertheless, I stood my ground. Because somehow, even back then at such a tender age, I knew I was right.
Pleasure, sexual and otherwise, is a critical ingredient of a good life.
As a middle aged woman in the height of perimenopause, I find that I think of pleasure a lot. For instance…where did it go?
These years have been a time of low-key physical suffering, as many women would agree. Little sleep, constant joint and back pain, breast tenderness, moodiness, brain fog… It’s an incredibly hard daily slog.
And there’s little respite - not even a fun evening with a lover, a circumstance that you can thank our nosediving libido for.
It’s one of the cruelest tricks nature plays on women. We hit our sexual peak right before we fall into our sexual wasteland.
I’ve never felt anything like what I felt in my early forties. Let’s just say I was ready to go almost all the time. It’s years - yes, years - of feeling like a cat in heat. (It’s no wonder that some of my best and most passionate writing flowed out of me during that time - and no wonder that most of it was about sex.)
And then I found myself in the mountaintops of perimenopause and suddenly things felt very different. Like a Swiss herdsman letting loose a yodel in the hopes of hearing her voice echo back to her, I’d yell out, “Hello?” to my suddenly absent libido hoping to locate it by its answering call. But that call never came. There was nothing but silence.
What the hell happened to that hedonistic woman I used to be?
What makes a person who they are? What makes a woman who she is?
There’s no easy way to answer that, but I think each one of us holds on to certain truths that we know about ourselves. For me, I have always known myself by my creativity and my sexuality - which both come from the same place, in my opinion.
But what happens when that changes?
