The Most Important Sex Organ

On intimacy, honesty, and being truly seen

The first form of communication shared between my husband and me was eye contact. I try to remember the beginning, now that we are standing in the middle of an eighteen-year marriage, struggling to talk about sex, let alone have it, without the awkwardness of teenagers.

Because honestly, in sobriety, that is how sex can feel sometimes. Yes, even with someone you have known for nearly half your life. Take away the drugs and booze, and it is really like learning how to ride a bike all over again.

That’s why I try to remember the beginning. The first time he communicated with his eyes, he watched me from across the computer lab. At first, I was too afraid to return his gaze. I felt ashamed for the way he made me feel because I was already someone else’s girl, and I was miserable. So, of course, I wanted to run away into the arms of this tall, dark-haired, green-eyed man, looking down into my V-neck sweater as he pretended to help me with my homework.

His name was Sunny, and he worked as a lab tech at the community college. In the hallway on the last day of school, when I knew it was now or never because he was about to graduate, I asked him if he would give me a ride home.

I wanted him so bad that I stopped caring about the words that people would call girls like me. Girls who always left men for other men, girls who were always chasing desire. I stamped out the voice in my head telling me, “You’re just running from your problems.” It was now or never, green eyes, it was now or never.

“Hey, you want to get a drink?” That’s what I said as we drove past a bar on Hawthorne Boulevard. He went against traffic to make a U-turn, almost getting us in a head-on collision. That is how much he wanted me.

By then, I knew I had a problem. I just didn’t have a word for it yet. I would have been with Sunny for ten years by the time I found a diagnosis for my compulsive need to have sex. By the time I knew I was a sex and love addict, our marriage would be dead of all communication, all trust, as a result of too many drunken fights and secrets buried beneath deleted search histories, emotional affairs, porn addiction, and recreational drugs.

No, Sunny wasn’t perfect, but we spoke the same language. We worshipped the same gods. I think that is why we stayed together as long as we did. Underneath all the rubble, there was a real connection, real love.

When I first met Sunny, he was a philosophy student, a musician, living with a coke dealer. He looked like a young Nicolas Cage in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. He was a torn T-shirt rock n roller. I wanted to be his runaway Laura Dern, his wild at heart, love you forever, no matter if our past comes to torture us, and believe me, it did. It nearly destroyed us.

That first date, as we chain-smoked and talked about subjective reality in a sticky leather booth, we were communicating with our eyes and our mouths, and our ears. He was really listening to me, and I thought I was going to cum right there in my leopard print mini skirt. But isn’t that always how it is when you first fall in love? It is a drug that I chased for so much of my life as a love addict. The eroticism found in romantic connection is better than any shot of high-grade pharmaceutical dope I have ever cared to wrestle with.

Fast forward, eighteen years later, and we are sitting across from a sex therapist because our sex life is complicated and unbalanced and full of broken words and buried secrets. I ask our therapist why sex is so fucked up for so many people, why so many are lonely and single, or raised in broken homes. She believes in Jesus, but not the Catholic one bleeding for your sins, no, she believes in a loving, all-encompassing G-d and vegetarian living. In fact, she quite disdains the church. She blames it for all the issues we have in the West with sex. There is really nothing to it, she tells us. “Communication is the biggest sex organ. If you don’t have good communication, then you will never have good sex.”

In that first year of our courting, I left my abusive boyfriend, and Sunny moved out of his coke dealer’s house. We got a dank and dirty low-rent studio together. Yes, we had sex, and lots of it, and in my immature mind I was thinking that was the be-all and end-all of any good relationship. But I was forgetting about what came before the union of our mouths. There was connection, there was communication. There was creative inspiration; he was more than my lover, he was my muse.

I pondered for years after things went south between Sunny and me why we stopped having sex. At first, I blamed his porn addiction, and then, when he broke that, I started to blame my own intimacy disorder.

Until recently, I didn’t understand the connection between sex and artistic creativity. For the first few years of our relationship, we were always working on creative projects together. Looking back at those days of high highs and low lows, I don’t think we were making movies and playing music together because we were having lots of sex; I think it was quite the opposite. Sex is the final destination of a relationship built on communication. That’s why they say you can’t have a healthy marriage without honesty. Honesty leads to connection. You can’t have one without the other. And as anyone in recovery for addiction knows, addiction destroys one’s ability to be honest with anyone.

Not long after Sunny and I started seeing a sex therapist, his dad died, and his mom’s dementia got so bad that she could not remember who he was. During all this tragedy, I finally realized that it was not the amount of sex or the lack of sex that was the problem in our marriage. This realization was triggered by the way I responded to Sunny’s grief.

I wanted to do what a wife does in that kind of situation. I wanted to hold him, I wanted to experience his pain so I could maybe help release it, just a little bit. But in that moment with him curled up next to me, crying, I didn’t feel anything. We had been together for nearly two decades, and we had ruined our marriage and then separated and gotten sober, and by some miracle, my Higher Power told me that it wasn’t over.

And believe me, if you go back to a marriage that was train wrecked by infidelity, liquor, and drugs, it is a real shit show trying to make amends and seek restitution. It doesn’t matter how much you love the person. And here I was, and we had been through so much, and our marriage had gained back some trust, but there was something still not working in the intimacy department, and it was really hitting me hard now that my husband had just lost his dad and his mom was coming next. I just felt so emotionally numb, so disconnected from him.

I asked him if we could do the exercise that the sex therapist showed us, where we set a timer for three minutes, and the other person listens and repeats back what their partner is telling them. I felt so shitty, but all that came out was, “We don’t know how to communicate about sex.”

And Sunny was hurt, because this statement had triggered the past, and he felt I was criticizing his manhood. And how insensitive of me, you know, talking about sex at a time like this. And what I had meant to say wasn’t even about sex; it was really about me not feeling like I could hold him or touch him as he needed in his time of need. I was too afraid to tell him the truth, or I couldn’t find the right words. Finally, the right words came out: “It’s not even sex, like it isn’t even about that. We don’t touch anymore, we don’t hold each other. I need that from you, so I can feel safe giving it back to you. I need to be seen by you, so I can see you.”

And in that moment, he understood what I meant just as he had that first day we met. His hair was black then, and I was some too skinny, high-strung thing desperate for love. Now we were turning gray and were paying in some way for the years of treating our bodies like wrecking balls, but it didn’t matter because we could get that moment back. It was really that simple, all it took was a look, and a desire to listen and understand. Because the most important sex organ is communication.

Sunny and me on our honeymoon in Puerto Rico in 2012.

What helps you feel truly connected to another person? We’d love to hear in the comments.

And before you go, would you take a second to tap the heart? It helps more people find this work and supports our sober community.