LOVE & LUST

Virginia Rutter Ph.D

Who says marriage is where desire goes to die? We can’t quite bring ourselves to believe that passion can thrive on modern love—because our sexual imagination is stuck in the past.

“‘Hot is not the word I’d use,” says Hannah of her 23-year marriage to Barry.* “Slow simmer” is more like it. “One thing you learn over time,” she says, “is that, no matter how long you live together, two people always inhabit separate worlds. Some part of your partner is deeply unknowable.”

Although it is hard to coax any words out of her on a topic she considers, perhaps quaintly, so private, Hannah makes it clear that their sex life cleaves to the contours of their commitment. “There are nights, not often but indelible, when passion builds in molten intensity from an unremarkable start,” she says. And there are nights—”almost more transcendent,” she confides—when the two share the separateness, lying naked together, holding hands in rich silence. And there are many nights in between.

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