COURTING, RE-COURTING, AND THE SUPER SEX BOND: THREE LOOKS AND A SHIFT
“Oh no! He’s coming over here.” The woman placed both hands around her glass of Perrier water, looking down as if preparing to dive into the carbonation. She had been married for nineteen years, had recently divorced, and was making her debut on the courtship carousel.
“You brought him over here, Sheila,” said her friend Pam, a veteran of three marriages and several years in what she now called “meat-ing places.” “You never look at one of them three times unless you want them to come over.”
“I wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at me,” said Sheila, still afraid to look up from her drink.
“Come on,” said Pam, “How did you know he was looking if you weren’t looking? I don’t believe you. If you look three times, he comes. Now you better go to the ‘shift.’ ”
“What is the shift?” Sheila could feel her heart pumping, skipping beats as it had done when she first used the word “divorce” seriously.
“It’s survival,” said Pam. “The shift means giving him to me. I can get rid of him, but you have to shift him to me.”
He arrived tableside, his glass of half-flat beer held between himself and Sheila. “I know this sounds like a line, but you look familiar.”
At any other time, Sheila would have been unable to hold back a giggle. He might as well have tried “Come here often?” Now, however, Sheila was a player, not an observer safely protected within a stable relationship. There was nothing funny about this. Her heart was beating faster, and her mouth was dry. She remembered this feeling from her speech class in college. She had failed to master this eye-contact thing then, too.
“I am,” she stammered, looking into his beer. “No, I mean, you think I am, but I’m not—familiar to you, that is.” She felt her face glowing. Unbelievable, she thought. I’m an English teacher and I can’t even talk.
“Now that I hear your voice, I guess I was mistaken.” he said. She could see his undershirt beneath his shirt. It was the old-fashioned type, with shoulder bands. She had never liked that style. In fact, she had never liked undershirts at all. This style in particular usually meant the man was wearing boxer shorts, the kind that goes down both legs and comes in weird prints. She hated those. Where do they put their penis in that kind of shorts? To which side?
She was startled by her own thoughts. Why was she thinking these things now, about this stranger? Who cared anyway?
Pam took his beer glass and led him to the dance floor. She glanced back over her shoulder at Sheila with a “now look what you made me have to do” look.
Sheila looked around, hoping that no one else had seen this disaster. She wet her napkin with the bottom of her glass, lifted it, and let it drop, playing a lonely game, waiting for Pam to return.
She saw Pam coming back, putting her finger to her throat in a mock gesture of self-induced nausea. “Let’s join his table,” said Pam. “That’s where the action is.”
Sheila rose with her glass, napkin still attached. The three of them grouped around a small table already crowded with more than ten people. Someone shoved a chair into her thighs and she fell into it. She was two rows from the table, a bench player in the dating game. The man next to her offered her a pretzel.
Sheila summoned all of her courage. “You look familiar,” she said, and then bit into the pretzel. It shattered into little pieces, with one big piece left dangling from her mouth. Another piece n0w floated in her drink with the napkin still attached.
“Have you met Al?” asked the man. Sheila had just been shifted by an expert.
If you read this passage in disbelief, then you have not been on the dating circuit for a long time. The game goes on. Courtship in America is training for divorce, a hypocritical, stressful, dishonest, and sad attempt to find someone to love. It is based on five rules that can be learned only in the field of action. No one can teach you; you must learn by experience.
Take some time now to rethink your own courtship, to recall the bonding process in your own marriage. How, why, and where did you fall in love, bond, decided to commit to and with someone else? Failure to understand that process results in the continued reliving of the same errors within your own relationship. This chapter adds the bonding dimension to the intimacy and systems concepts you have learned in the first two chapters. This bonding is not a onetime thing; it goes on forever. The thousand couples learned much from reliving their bonding process on the way to super marital sex, on the way to a stronger, more adaptive martital bond.
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