Love Is Supposed to Have Teeth

This has been a long year. I’ve been thinking of the story of the Jews wandering for 40 years in the desert after escaping bondage in Egypt, in particular about the interpretation my chavurah favors of just what we were doing there, turning a 2-week journey in 40 years. We say that those born into slavery were not ready to be a fully free people, that we needed to birth and raise a new generation who knew not the Pharoah’s cruelty nor the predictability and Stockholm Syndrome-safety of our constrained role under his cruel thumb. We say that our minds and bodies born and raised in slavery were not capable of imagining a nation of free people, or directing our own hands to build it; we needed our children, born and raised in the danger and possibility of desert travel to achieve this goal. And this year I’ve been thinking this story applies all over again to my own mind and body. I thought that my years as a feminist theory major in college, all of my years of living as a self-aware, very therapized woman, had allowed me to see enough of the structures of patriarchy and racism and christofascism in our society to be getting on with the work of dismantling things. I didn’t think I had any big blind spots left.

I was mistaken.

I have only just realized that patriarchy turned the best thing I have, the part of my self I’ve been most proud of and reliant on, into a glue that I was using to keep these unjust structures stable. I learned that my love, my faith in love, my trust in love, which has been my interpersonal compass since adolescence, can be twisted to act like one more tool in the master’s kit.

A man helped me learn this lesson about myself, about my own complicity. He is a man I’ve known since my first week of college; a man who was one of my closest friends from our first year of college, when we discovered that although our families of origin are very different, it was as though we had two halves of the same soul. We were close friends through the beginning and end of my first marriage, until that day he showed up at my apartment door and suddenly I realized that I didn’t just like him, I wanted him. This lovely surprise romance led to falling in love and getting married and having two children, and then realizing that marriage and parenthood were too great a weight for him to carry along with his anxiety and addiction, and so we severed that legal tie but remained best friends and co-parents for 9 years. And over those 9 years, even as I dated a few other men, we were best friends still. Through what I thought was a conscious choice to always choose love and respect, even when anger would be easier, we managed to navigate all of this without cruelty to each other. We did sometimes hurt each other without intent and we apologized sincerely and forgave each other, but we never stopped loving each other and wanting our friendship to survive. Even after he moved out, he spent more weekends at my place, with our kids and me, than at his own home over the water from us. We took vacations together, talked on the phone, went to birthday parties and family holiday parties together. We loved each other, or at least I loved him, without the sex or romance, but with something more than standard friendship.

Because I’m just no good at casual sex, I learned through experience to turn down his requests for best-friends-with-benefits sex. When you don’t fall out of love with the father of your children, sex is never ever just sex. Not in my body and mind, anyway. We talked about this each year, and he knew how I felt and what my answer would be when he offered me no strings sex, just for fun. I made it clear that I was flattered, but not interested in sex without a different sort of love, without more than what we already had.

Then this past summer, after some productive months with a new therapist had him feeling like himself again, this man called to ask me out on “a real date.” And I said “yes,  you are the only man in the world right now that I’d go on a real date with, so yes.” Because when a man you already love, who is also the father of your children and your best friend, and who knows how you feel about casual sex with him asks you out on a real date, you’d be a fool to say no. So we went out on that real date,  and it was lovely, and led to a very fun night and a few more weekends of the same.

It turns out, though, that he and I had very different definitions of “a real date.” To me, a real date is a date with interest in a possible relationship. To him, it seems to be any date with guaranteed sex.

I learned of this difference when he came over one night to sit on my couch and tell me that he had “taken advantage of me”; that he “was really just horny and lonely” and knew I wouldn’t say no if he asked the right way; that he hadn’t only wanted sex, he also wanted the “feeling of intimacy and connection” but only the “feeling” of it because while he loved me still, this was all part of his journey thanks to his new therapist and that he needed to date strangers to prove himself worthy of love; if I wanted to keep being his best friend and keep having sex and the feeling of intimacy and connection, he would be down with that, while he was working towards asking new women out. At which point I surmise he assumed I would quietly step aside to demote myself to co-parent while he built a new best friendship with his exciting new stranger lady love.

He was genuinely shocked and hurt at my level of hurt and anger upon learning all of this. He claims naivete, something I find puzzling coming from a 48 year-old-man who has had more than a few romantic relationships with women over the past 30+ years. He has said several times that he didn’t mean to hurt me and here I believe him. And this is where I begin to see how the patriarchy played me: I think it’s true that he didn’t mean to hurt me; he simply forgot to put my emotions and everything he knows about me from 30 years of best friendship-marriage-co-parenting into his calculations. He treated me like a sex and comfort robot, a tool for his use, something without sentience of its own, except a simple machine-like adoration that could be used to meet his own needs with a smile. And he did this, not with malice or even any consciousness, but because the patriarchy allows this, encourages it. He could do this because I let him, because I stepped right into that role. I was writing poems in my heart while he was focused on mundane prose, checking off boxes on his therapeutic journey and scratching an itch.

I turned myself into that sex and comfort robot because I forgot that love is supposed to have teeth. I’m fierce in my politics, in my activism, in my outside world life, and even in my friendships, but I love the way I’ve been taught to since childhood – with my whole heart open, with lines in my veins, ready to give my lifeblood to my loved ones, and I know how to hold my heart open even when it’s been knifed, how to re-hydrate so I can keep tapping my veins, over and over again. I love giving my love this freely, I love being unafraid to love, but I’m seeing that it’s been serving the patriarchy even as I take pride in this strength of mine.

All of this softness and openness and allowance and unconditional support and warmth isn’t love in its totality. It’s sweet, non-threatening Disney Princess Love when we need the whole picture, mother goddess love, Queen of the Cosmos Love. We need the love that is all of these things plus unconditional calling out of weakness, we need love that lifts up and also holds the line on boundaries of decency, respect, and equality. We need love that promises both the open vein and flames that keep feet on track. We need love that offers and demands passion and desire throughout adulthood, as all bodies change. Every mother goddess in every religion I know of has both sides, the light and the shadow, the hands that lift to life and the hands that guide to death, the clear-sighted unconditional love that praises when praise is due and corrects when correction is warranted.  Our current patriarchy has room for male gods but no room for goddesses, and we play this out in our hetero relationships, in which we women are trained to embody only half of what Love is. Our half-love treats men like kings while we accept the role of royal consort; we are allowed no societal claim to be queens on equal thrones. We women are supposed to be all yielding rosy lips and sugared tongues, we are supposed to dull our teeth around the men we love.

One night when I was in my 20’s, my friend Lori was exciting men by pulling cocktail cherries into her mouth to then display on her tongue their stems tied in knots, her magic trick hidden behind her lips. During a break in the flirting, when the men were holding forth without listening, she told me the secret: It’s all about your teeth. You break the stem from rigid to supple with your teeth, then you hold it into place with those same teeth while your tongue swirls it around, over and under and through, and your teeth anchor while you pull it tight.

Men love this trick because they think it’s all a tongue trick, because it’s veiled from their view behind our red lips, and they can almost feel our tongues on their dicks while we’re working those stems into tight, tidy knots.

“Don’t tell them how you do it, though,” said Lori, “that ruins it.”

No man wants to hear about our teeth, they don’t want to know the secret, they just want our tongues and our lips on their own rigid stems, no teeth, only slick soft flickering attention. I taught myself this cherry stem cocktail party trick because I wanted that too, I wanted the power that comes from being the one who kneels and only looks submissive while knowing that you have all the power, the power to conceal your teeth, to set aside your sharpness and skeletal weapons in favor of the power to please, to draw that out, to finish it off, to drive a man out of his bluster to a moment of whole presence. Men, for all their strength and violence, have a boneless fragility that generally likes only a hint of our teeth, or to know us only as pink openness, breath and tongue and oceanic wetness; inland personal seas of rolling tides and waves to sail, no barnacles or rocks.

I’ve kept the cherry stem secret, and I’ve kept my teeth to myself, I’ve steered men around the damaging rocks and monsters, I’ve have scraped myself smooth and safe and appealing and pink. And now I’m realizing what all of this has cost me, all of this complicity and toothlessness. I’ve weakened myself and helped to coddle my generation of men, making them weaklings in half-love, too.

Before 2017, before our pussy-grabbing president took up residence in the White House, before the #metoo movement took off running with new steam, before this dumpster fire of a year, I looked at my long best-friendship, my dedicated co-parenting, my unaltered albeit platonic love and devotion to the father of my children as a crowning achievement in my life. I was giving my children a sense of intact family, I was providing my best friend with the love and support he needed to heal and grow strong again and build his best life, I was loving myself because I loved what I was able to do for my kids when they needed me as teacher, therapeutic specialist, guide to neurotypical life. I loved all of this giving love, it didn’t make me feel diminished or lost, I felt strong and found and powerful.

Now I’m looking at myself and my choices through a different lens, the vision of the world and of women that allowed my best friend and father of my children to think I would be happy to serve as his comfort and sex robot while he looked for a new, real girlfriend. Through this lens, I am a fool. I gave up a decade of my life, sinking into single mother poverty that I won’t likely recover from, because I didn’t ask for spousal maintenance when we divorced, when I took on the role of primary parent. I gave up years to caring for our “special needs” children without asking for parity in parenting and thereby set myself even further away from a career with a living wage and any life-work balance. I am now, at almost 50, too poor to pay for the gym membership, personal trainer, bikini waxing, new makeup and perfume and haircuts and colors, flattering new clothing, and nights out that I would need to find a man to love me, while my blind, soft love has set my former best friend up to find a woman like the one I can’t afford to be, to build himself a new life funded by the new career that my time and energy over the past decade has allowed him to focus on. I held up more than half the sky of parenting our children out of love for him, and now I find myself where so many other women have stood: too old, too poor, too fat and misshapen to find any respectful sort of love partnership, but most of all too smart to think that any sort of respectful love partnership is possible with the men of my generation.

When I was younger and beloved, when I had curves and concavity in the right spots and to the right degrees, when men desired me, I was scared of the single, middle-aged women, the witches whose bitterness seemed like a hex, one that I needed to stay clear of. Now that I am one of them, I see that their bitterness is something different, not bitter, it is clarity of sight, wisdom, truth, all honestly earned. This is how smart I am now, Crone Witch Smart.

I’m done with the sort of love on offer to me here and now. I want no part of the inequitable and binary adoration and mutual service offered by our patriarchal culture, in which women cede worldly power to men, and serve them as personal gods, in order to be royal consorts in the confines of their shadows. I’m done being measured as desirable against a nubile standard with no room for the changes that motherhood and lucky years of survival write upon my skin and bones. I’m done being valued only for the sex and feeling of intimacy and connection I can offer to shallow, self-centered men who fail to recognize my equal sentience. I’m holding out for a balance of power much more ancient, one that will allows for mutual desire and respect, the fullness of our bodies, our voices, our power, all of us, not just some of us, not just those of us who are straight men.

I know that it’s possible because I got a taste of it with one man once, a good friend in college who was never a boyfriend, but whose bed I shared a few times, whose love I could feel even when we were states apart, years later. His bed was an altar, his grandfather’s down quilt our holy raiments. There was humility, gratitude, respect, and full equal presence on both our parts, and it never ruined our friendship, it elevated our connection without demanding either of us be less powerful. He is the one man who made me feel like a high priestess. That’s what I’m talking about, and if I could have that kind of connection for a little while, I know it’s possible for all of us still, I know we have it in us to get back to this once and future sort of love, the kind that has teeth as well as kissing lips.  The kind that demands we see each other as true equals in elemental and worldly power.

Until then, we are wandering in the desert, and we’ll be meandering lost here for some time. We have a lot to unlearn and a lot to remember, a lot to change. We need to teach our children of all genders love that allows for mutual service and adoration, that allows for royals on equal thrones, love that has the power and strength of lips, tongues, and teeth.  I do not expect my generation to reach this promised land, but I’ll keep trudging through this wilderness with this dreamland in mind for my daughters. We need toothed love to be strong and to keep each other strong.