The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen

by Taylor Marsh

  That doesn’t keep head-exploding headlines like “Childlessness ‘May Increase Likelihood of Early Death’” on websites as important as the BBC’s, even if the subheading is actually the story. Reading on, you learn it’s “involuntary childlessness” that may increase that likelihood. The information comes from a Danish study that focused solely on couples seeking in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment, with the women who were unsuccessful at conceiving “four times more likely to die prematurely than women who had been mothers.” Involuntary childlessness has to be heartbreaking. However, the numbers give the bottom line, with 316 people dying out of twenty-one thousand couples over the eleven-year study.

  Knowing our own uniqueness has always been the primary key to happiness, but also is the only way to catch the right man. As you live your life and slog through difficulties and grand experiences, finding who you are becomes the central adventure, along with being the key to what makes you happy along the way. Happiness is greatly underrated, as life quests go, but I’ve found nothing to replace it as a guide to not only following the bliss that manifests a life lived authentically, but also in leading you to attracting the right man.

  There’s something inside each of us that drives us, that sends our pulse racing, similar to the high when you meet a great guy. It is that something that draws you like a magnet to discover and eventually experience your own individuality. It manifests through the curiosity that naturally rises when you find something you want to do with your life.

  You can’t ignore the impulses being sent from your heart when you come upon your life’s work. Establishing a foundation for supporting yourself is a girl’s major priority today, no matter her age. Our extended life span — the real possibility for realizing great longevity — means additional stressors on married life. Where a twenty-five-year marriage might once have lasted “a lifetime,” it’s now a point at which some modern couples, especially those who spend extended periods of time apart and living separate lives, find nothing left.

  When former Vice President Al Gore and his wife Tipper announced their separation, there was a sort of shock wave that rippled through the political world. Washington, D.C. social diva Sally Quinn, who writes for the Washington Post, where her husband Ben Bradlee once ruled, wrote: “Watching the Gores is sort of looking at the possibilities of what a good marriage could be, and when it doesn’t work for them, you sort of think, ‘Oh my God, maybe it’s not possible.’” The Gores announced their separation to friends via email, calling it, “a mutual and mutually supportive decision that we have made together following a process of long and careful consideration.”

  Tipper Gore is an accomplished photographer and has been part of the political universe with Al Gore for forty years, with the former vice president now an international environmental force. Both individuals have their own professional universe beyond their marriage. But in what universe is forty years not a complete marriage? That’s a question we’ve never asked and answered, because it’s never been an issue. However, the twenty-first century brings with it so many advances that allow us fuller lives for longer periods, that the normal course of relationships cannot help but also be altered.

  It offers another reason to postpone marriage, to live a little of your own life before committing to someone else.

  There’s also the image you create of your spouse that over decades can make him or her into a caricature. That’s where stirring up the sex can be very helpful. Pedestals and personas can inhibit treating one another like sexual beings with appetites that include imaginative roles. When a woman becomes a mother, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t still have an inner sex kitten that needs tending. A judgmental male mate, who’s always pontificating on his moral soapbox, could use being handcuffed to the bed and shown where his inner animal still resides. Changing the game and the dynamics between you in the relationship every once in a while may be difficult, even risky after so much comfort, but it could save a marriage.

  According to a 2011 Pew Research poll on social trends, the median age for a woman to be married her first time is 26.5 years old; with men it’s 28.7. In 1960 the numbers were twenty and twenty-two, respectively. Delaying marriage has caused the divorce rate to drop as well.

  In 2007, USA Today reported that divorce had dropped to its lowest level since 1970. Some say it’s because cohabitation has “increased tenfold since 1960.” Others say there is a divide, with divorce rates falling for college-educated couples, “but not among less affluent, less educated couples.” This same article reported that people are waiting five years longer to marry than in 1970. Bill Chausee from the Child and Family Services of New Hampshire is cited, saying, “People don’t see marriage problems as some sort of stigma anymore. They’re really interested in learning how to stay married; a lot of them are realizing they need more skill.” USA Today also reports that experts believe the breakup rate of marriages is between 40-45%, not 50%.

  In May 2011, CNN reported that the U.S. Census Bureau found that “divorce rates for most age groups have been dropping since 1996 by an average of about five percentage points.”

  Studies from Pew Research to Knot Yet all reveal that people, including men, are happier in marriage, so even as rough as it is to make marriage work, there’s a reason we keep trying.

  A March 2013 Pew poll on modern parenthood also revealed that a significant majority of marriages are now two-income households: “Roughly 60% of two-parent households with children under age eighteen have two working parents,” the report states. “In those households, on average, fathers spend more time than mothers in paid work, while mothers spend more time on child care and household chores.” When children are included in the picture, this same poll reveals the real divide, but also a window on what change could make everyone happier:

  Overall, 33% of parents with children under age eighteen say they are not spending enough time with their children. Fathers are much more likely than mothers to feel this way. Some 46% of fathers say they are not spending enough time with their children, compared with 23% of mothers. Analysis of time-use data shows that fathers devote significantly less time than mothers to child care (an average of seven hours per week for fathers, compared with fourteen hours per week for mothers). Among mothers, 68% say they spend the right amount of time with their children. Only half of fathers say the same…. And when it comes to what they value most in a job, working fathers place more importance on having a high-paying job, while working mothers are more concerned with having a flexible schedule.

  What if both men and women had equal responsibilities at home, giving the man more time with his children? It seems to me that what a man values as important might be directly related to the opportunity he has to spend time with his kids, just as a woman’s valuing of a flexible schedule could revolve around the reality that she’s the one with the primary domestic duties, even with a full-time job.

  Unsurprisingly, American society still judges the woman as the best partner to be at home with children, but all that’s needed to change this is to see a great father in action. First, he has to be given more time to become one. This has as much to do with traditional standards as it does with who is a better parent. A man cannot breast-feed an infant, but he can bottle-feed and rock the baby as well as a woman. We’re just at the beginning of having a wider conversation about men being fifty percent of the domestic puzzle, and it’s a topic that should have been explored a long time ago, because it’s directly related to women still not having full equality.

  Each woman’s individual path now almost demands she find something beyond a relationship and children, and this can be excavated before finding a partner. This path is something that, when fully explored, can become a constant part of a growing consciousness that leads a woman toward fulfilling her dreams. Living longer demands this.

  What can be gained through following the bliss of her personal interests is hard to explain to a woman who has never considered any path beyond finding a
man to marry and building a beautiful marriage that blossoms into family. This can be the center of your universe in thought, which today encompasses everything from active dating and planning to visualizing the life you want, all depending on the way you think and create your life. It can also be part of a larger experience that first includes finding something else to accompany the joy of finding love. This makes you someone a man will be attracted to, because of the fascination your interests bring to you as a person, as an individual. It can also be a shelter in life’s hurricanes.

  When exploring the things you love to do, it’s not a coincidence that you may also be led either to someone who has similar interests or who finds the type of things you’re interested in fascinating because he or she can’t do them. The opposites-attract quotient is powerful in this regard, as is the possibility of you being good at one part of your mutual interest, while a potential mate may have another gift to bring to the table.

  Relationships require at their heart something the two of you will create together, beyond the relationship itself, even beyond children. This is the primal key to connecting at the deepest, most powerful level of all. Nothing rivals it or can compete with its grandeur.

  Of course, centering a relationship on creating doesn’t guarantee longevity either, but a relationship that isn’t creative at its core cannot survive, whether it’s ten years or forty, the latter certainly a long marriage by all accounts, especially when you consider “till death do us part” used to mean age fifty-something. According to the U.S. Social Security website, “Life expectancy at birth in 1930 was indeed only 58 for men and 62 for women.” By Jane Fonda’s sexual enjoyment standards, these statistics mean she’d never have reached her peak satisfaction. Tipper and Al Gore would never have lived to separate.

  What is often not understood or fully appreciated is that creation in a partnership doesn’t require children to make the relationship soar and have the potential to lock in the primal code to give it a real chance and hope of longevity. Older couples and those in second marriages have found this out.

  Shared interests can lead to creating something together. Two people can have investments in their own lives, with one person aiding the other in a venture that could benefit them both. For example, women once worked to send their men through law school or to become doctors, and there are just as many men who have shepherded women into business.

  But attracting and catching a man in the first place?

  The place to start is through your own life. Find something that is yours that you enjoy doing, something that fills your heart with happiness and deep satisfaction. It can enlarge your world and make you excited about your own life. What this does for you as a woman, individual and unique person will change how you look, what you transmit to others, and how a man sees you. You cannot help but be more interesting, even happier, and there’s nothing that acts more like an aphrodisiac on a man than a happy woman who is in love with her own life.

  You also might be surprised who you can meet along the way to living your own life and exploring who it is you are as an individual. There’s no down side to paying attention to yourself and what you want out of life. It starts with making yourself happy in your own skin, about what you’re doing with your life and the trajectory you’ve set for yourself.

  No man can make you happy.

  All alone, living your daily life, happiness must be the core of what your choices deliver. If you’re not happy in the life you’ve constructed, the first order of business is fixing that now, immediately. It might begin with something as simple as making a list of likes and dislikes about what’s going on in your life. Often, it’s about things that can be changed, but also can require work, which you’ve put off.

  If you’re in debt and that’s dragging you down, the answer is simple and has nothing to do with finding a man. You first have to extricate yourself from the financial hole you’ve dug for yourself. It doesn’t take fixing it before you look for a relationship, but your woes need to be manageable, and you must be taking responsibility for them, or any potential boyfriend could back off as soon as he starts connecting. The economic times require that both people in the relationship deal with their own realities before trying to create something together.

  The old twentieth-century notion of women catching a man was coined when that was exactly the attitude, not only of society in general but also of women.

  The modern era requires a woman to trust that she can attract a man worthy of her. It happens through the life she’s leading that will eventually bring someone across her path, whether it’s through online dating, friends and social networking, or through her career. It can even happen by chance. But today, women are leading their lives first, because having a man in our lives is a plus, not the means by which we have a life in the first place.

  There’s no guarantee, even if you’re doing everything right that it will all end as you imagine. Life doesn’t work that way. We’re all dealt terrible blows. The only real weapon to combat life’s surprises is the knowledge that you and no one else has chosen the path you’re on. To have no regrets because you’re living the life you want, even after disappointments force changes, is all anyone can expect of herself.

  For a woman, dreaming of a man rescuing you has morphed into being the heroine of your own life. Writing sentences like that makes me wince, but the simple fact is that without this fundamental belief in yourself and having the knowledge that you can live a good life alone, it’s very unlikely a relationship will be what you want it to be, even if you create it.

  Your choices make your life, and they begin when you’re alone.

  A man wants to believe in the woman he envisions being with, whether it’s a monogamous relationship or marriage, but he can’t believe in you if you don’t believe in yourself. There is also nothing on earth that can deter a man from pursuing a woman when lightning strikes, except the woman’s own insecurity.

  Stop listening to the tape playing in your head. You know the drill. It can either play continually or only in those moments of special vulnerability, when you begin to break out and take a risk. You think the words you’re hearing cannot be controlled, but they can. You have the remote, so just turn them off. Delete them from your brain-pan DVD. Every time a phantom of them pops up, hit delete. You don’t need them, because they likely came from someone else at another time when you didn’t have your own voice.

  It doesn’t matter what’s happened in your life. Absorb it, thrash the hell out of it, then move on. A great therapist I once had said the horrors of life may never go away, but they can be muted to black and white. She said it better, but that’s the gist. Black and white from color may be overly optimistic, but at the heart is that you survived. Anyone can build on that.

  This means we each must acknowledge that we are responsible for our own happiness, not some man, your mother or father, your friend or anyone else. No one owes you anything, but you owe yourself all you can grab and hold on to. Once you get it all together, then you can give back.

  Oprah Winfrey has done several interviews with Steve Harvey, who offers the man’s point of view on dating, with women asking questions that are quite provocative and worthwhile on her website, Oprah.com. It doesn’t mean you need to follow everything or take what he’s saying as gospel, because remember, this is your life and you’re the navigator, not Steve Harvey. However, he does give excellent insight that validates what I’ve been told about how men think.

  Harvey talks about anxiousness coming off as desperation, especially since men consider themselves hunters. “Keepers” and “throw-backs” is how he describes men’s targets as they choose women. But the interesting thing is that Harvey strongly adds that the woman decides which one she is. Don’t be impatient, which is built into modern life. You’ve got time to let things unfold, attracting him into your life.

  Harvey is correct. Confident women are made this way through our own efforts. This includes having a life to live wheth
er the man reacts to you the way you’d like or rejects you. Your worth doesn’t depend on him. How this plays out when you’re dating is visceral when he meets you.

  One thing I’ve learned is that one of the worst things any woman can do is cast the man to type, according to height, financial portfolio and other factors, including in an online ad. You never know who can walk through an open door when you’re looking at a whole person instead of stats on a tally sheet. But if you must go that route, then you need to match what you’re looking for in a man.

  Harvey says he wrote his book, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, to empower women, which it does, up to a point. One of the things that resonated so powerfully with me is his assessment that men need three things: support, loyalty and sex. Few have put it more succinctly.

  Your attention to the man’s main focus, which is usually his career, has to go beyond casual interest. Men must now learn to reciprocate.

  As for loyalty, Harvey couldn’t be more right. A man’s whole world in a relationship revolves around this. Loyalty is so deeply hooked into a man’s being that if you cheat on him he’s likely never to forgive you and will never trust you again. There are exceptions, but they are rare. It may not be fair, but it’s a fact. A man in a relationship considers you his, not anyone else’s, and he’s territorial about it. If you make the choice to cheat, he gets that it was your decision, and that says all he needs to hear. It may not be fair, but forgiveness comes hard for most men.

  As for the sex, it’s like breathing for men. It’s why when I was Relationship Consultant I was so adamant that women lead with their sensuality. It illustrates confidence, but also is the only way the best men are going to respond. They have to get a sense of your sensual nature before they engage. I’d take it much further to say this applies for women, too, which too many men just don’t understand.

  However, men easily can have sex after a hard day’s work and sometimes actually want it to blow off steam. Women often have so many more duties at home that sex isn’t on their minds. The other issue is that it’s not all Fifty Shades of romance. Sometimes sex is just sex, which is certainly true on a Tuesday night when you just want a release.