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OK, you wanna talk about married sex?

On liking sex with your husband when he feels least like a husband. Also: households as 'capitalism's pressure cooker.'

Tracy Clark-Flory

Oct 16

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Reading Annie Ernaux’s ‘The Use of Photography.’

Today, I’m reposting this essay from the archives because it’s feeling timely.

In the latest episode of Dire Straights, Amanda Montei and I talk about the fifth shift of women’s work as being all the labor that straight women put into maintaining marital “intimacy” and “keeping the spark alive.” The listener response has been great—clearly, a lot of people want to talk about married sex. (Drop a comment or email to let us know how you want to see us cover this in the future, btw.)

In the episode, I mention the essay below, which talks about my “mid-life sex portal” without explaining exactly how the mid-life sex portal came to be. Well, I get into it on the pod, behind the paywall. Amanda also gets into her own experiences with escaping the suffocating constraints of married sex. Go listen!

The episode is already providing fodder for people’s pet takes (see: the fellow Substacker who appears to argue, without listening to our full episode, that “sex with your husband isn’t labor” and that if it feels like it is then you probably have a “medical,” “psychological,” or marital “issue” and should… put in some work… to fix it). Anyway, like I said, timely!

We were at swim lessons first-thing Saturday morning, sitting in the bleachers with a parent friend talking about our plans for the day as children splashed in the pool. C. explained that we were about to drive an hour away to an escape room with our kid. The three of us would be solving riddles and puzzles in a multi-chambered room with an enchanted forest theme.

It had been my idea—just a novel kid-friendly thing to do. After browsing the less kid-friendly rooms, though, I’d realized that I also wanted to do it for real, without my kid. There was one room in particular that stood out.

“I think our next date night will have to be the escape room modeled after a suburban living room,” I said to our friend, while keeping an eye on our kid kicking his way across the pool. “I like the realism, you know?”

“Yes,” C. laughed. “It’ll be a perfect symbol of our attempt at breaking out of domesticity.”

“Yeah,” I said, narrating like it was a movie trailer. “Can we escape the suffocating constraints of the nuclear family… together?”

We all laughed at the absurdity of us using a rare and precious date night to trade the confines of our actual living room for the confines of a fake living room, just so that we could collaborate on how to get out of it. It was also a perfect metaphor for what marriage—and parenting, especially—often feel like to me: a collaborative attempt at finding shared pleasure and freedom within a complex set of circumstances that are really, truly designed as a trap.

There are domestic demands (work, childcare, household labor) that compete with personal desires (friendship, creativity, connection, independence, novelty, eroticism). As Madeline Lane-McKinley wrote, “Households are capitalism’s pressure cooker.” Then you throw in norms and systems around gender roles, monogamy, nuclear family isolation, parental exhaustion, the privatization of care, the gender-sorting of hetero suburban parental life, and so on.

At times, the pursuit of shared pleasure and freedom inside of all that can feel like an impossible riddle; and I consider us to be pretty free of the domestic inequities typically found in heteronormative marriages, but even still. “All of us are seduced, or at least disciplined,” writes the feminist critic Sophie Lewis in the polemic Abolish the Family. “We can’t escape it, even when we individually reject it.”

Sometimes, though, it really does feel like we escape, together.

“This portal opened,” I told a friend several weeks ago. “A mid-life sex portal.”...