Sex and the Newly Single Man

In the carnival Fun House that is life after divorce, there are plenty of terrifying firsts that leap out at you from the darkness.

Dropping your kids off with your former spouse after their first every-other-weekend sleepover. Eating your first meal alone in a crowded restaurant on a Saturday night. Balancing your own checkbook for the first time. There’s one first, though, that far and away brings with it the most petrifying, mind-numbing, inescapable panic of all.

Sex.

I know, I know. It’s supposed to be exactly the opposite. Sex is the one thing that you’d think you’d look forward to in Life Two. At least that’s what nearly every married male I know thinks. Their version of my new life seems to involve my apartment becoming an annex to the Playboy mansion. The truth, however, is that at this point in my life, the thought of sex with someone new makes me only slightly less uncomfortable than the getting the colonoscopy I also keep putting off.

Don’t get me wrong. I hear good things about sex. It’s gotten some great PR over the years. Still, when you’re suddenly out on your own and you’re close to the age where getting up in the middle of the night now means having to pee at 3 a.m., the mere idea of sex can be pretty overwhelming.

Beginning with the physicality of the whole process….if it’s true that a guy reaches his sexual peak in his teens, what exactly does that mean for a 50-year-old man? An 18-year-old’s body has a lot more stamina and recuperation powers than mine does. (When it comes to sex and drinking, anyway.) I like to think I’m in relatively good shape for my age. I watch my diet carefully. I’m told I don’t look my age. However, in many ways, it’s like getting my old Dodge Dart repainted. I can fix up the appearance, but that doesn’t mean there’s a Porsche engine inside.

I realize the marvels of medical science have come up with some things that can help tune up that engine. Cialis, Viagra, Levitra …. All those products advertised during every sporting event known to man (okay, maybe not figure skating, but other than that, everything) featuring guys sitting in outdoor bathtubs or tossing footballs through tire swings. I’m not saying I don’t appreciate the help these drugs can bring. Even if we still can’t cure a cold, it’s nice that modern science has found a way to keep Hugh Hefner busy. However, the pills aren’t the perfect solution because they are artificial enhancers and seem similar to baseball players doing steroids so they can hit more home runs. Does it count if you needed artificial help?

Even if they do fix erectile dysfunction, they can’t do much with the emotional dysfunction that can kill the mood just as effectively. And that’s the piece of this that has hung me up the most. Coming out of the trauma of a divorce, getting close to anyone is naturally going to be difficult. You’re learning how to separate and be on your own, the exact opposite of what sex requires.

There’s also such sexual safety of marriage, which gets lost in this second life. With a spouse, sex is like baseball. There’s always another game tomorrow if you don’t do well tonight. The pressure to perform is a whole lot less when you’re doing it with someone who has pledged to spend life together with you no matter what. That’s a pretty liberating thought, one that I didn’t fully appreciate while I was married.

Which segues nicely into another reason sex seems so difficult now: guilt. If you’ve spent any amount of time sleeping with just one person, whether it’s a couple months or a couple of decades, you can’t help but feel it’s just not right to skip directly into intimacy with somebody new. It’s not cheating, but since your brain is used to someone else laying naked nearby, it’s tough to convince it that being with a new person won’t send you straight to hell without passing Go.

I realize plenty of people out there can have sex without a shred of emotional attachment to the other party, but I’m just not one of them. I have enough trouble undressing to get into the shower. The idea of being naked in front of someone I haven’t first done an FBI background check on is petrifying. So, that means taking the time to get to know someone first. The catch is, if she the becomes somebody I do know well, there’s the fear of letting that person down. The more I think about, it, I feel kind of screwed (figuratively, anyway) either way.

Part of my problem is I’ve watched too many of the movies I’ve talked about before. I don’t mean what’s on Cinemax after midnight on Fridays. I mean any romantic movie where you see the happy couple making out, then the screen fades to black and they wake up arm in arm in bed the next morning. They make it appear to be so simple. It’s like watching a show on The Food Network. You see all the ingredients set out to make a dessert, but they skip through the actual work part of the process. Literally two minutes later, a delicious pastry is pulled from the oven as if it was no work it all. This leaves me envious. And hungry.

Maybe it’s just me who is making it too difficult. I’ve built the whole thing up too much in my mind. A few years ago, I had a vasectomy (yes, apparently there’s nothing I won’t share here). When I went in a few months later for a checkup, the doctor asked me if I’d tried out the…well…repaired equipment yet. I’d said I hadn’t, that I was newly single and it wasn’t that easy to find interested, interesting at women my age. He frowned, looked me in the eye and said, “What the hell are you waiting for? It is that easy! Just get out there and do it!” Of course, that’s also what the teacher told me the first time I took a yoga class, and my hips still haven’t recovered from my initial attempt at Downward-Facing Dog.

At first, I was annoyed by his comment. Why is it that people who aren’t in my position think it’s like a sex grocery store out there, with every forbidden fruit you want waiting to be plucked from the produce section? The more I think about it, though, I suppose it’s time I shifted how I think about sex at this point in life. View it the same way the Scooby-Do gang would. It’s a mystery, but one to investigate rather than one to run away from. And if all goes well, maybe my treat for solving the case will give new meaning to the term “Scooby snack.”

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Read all of the articles in this series.

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