Sunday, May 8, 2011
Ian Kerner, a sexuality counselor and New York Times best-selling author, blogs about sex on Thursdays on The Chart. Read more from him at his website, GoodInBed.
I started a family in the Age of Terror. My wife Lisa and I were married on December 1, 2001, and we chose a simple trip to the Caribbean for our honeymoon over the dream of Bali.
Some of our friends thought we were crazy to let the fear of terrorism affect our plans, but when a nightclub in Bali’s tourist district was bombed months later, we felt justified in having allowed our world to become that much smaller.
Lisa and I were eager to start a family, but in the wake of 9/11 I personally didn’t even believe that morning would necessarily follow night. Urban legend tells us that there was a baby boom after 9/11 and that hospitals were overrun with births in the summer of 2002. And while that’s an optimistic way of thinking about human perseverance in the face of tragedy, in retrospect we know that such a boom didn’t materialize.
If anything, my guess would be that condom sales went up - because there was indeed a lot of sex happening, maybe just not the procreative kind. What I did observe in the wake of 2001 was a re-prioritization of sex for many couples, which was part of a broader re-prioritization of connecting with loved ones and living a more meaningful life.
September 11, 2001 was a wake-up call for Americans to seize the moment in and out of the bedroom: From squabbling couples putting their differences aside to make love not war, to acts of infidelity and divorce that reconfirmed that you only live once, to casual sex and one-night stands that just seemed to channel the excitement and uncertainty, sex was in the air.
My first son was conceived on September 11, 2002, and born almost 9 months later to the day in 2003. In the year following 9/11, the world began to feel a bit more stable, morning did indeed follow night, and I have to admit that part of me wanted to create an American baby and “stick it to the terrorists” that sought to eradicate us.
As I carried my newborn son in a Bjorn up and down the streets of New York, the ground beneath my feet felt solid and familiar again. Stroller wheels soon turned into scooter wheels, and now my son is already past the point of wanting to hold my hand on the way to school as he runs ahead. In my professional life as a sex therapist and founder of Good in Bed, familiar problems have returned as well. Gone are the days of re-prioritizing sex and love; if anything they’ve fallen to the bottom of the to-do list as most Americans are consumed with work and just getting by. Couples are being battle-tested: not by terrorists, but by their own financial stresses and anxieties.
With bin Laden gone, I am reminded of Milan Kundera’s novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," the title of which comes from a meditation on the philosophy of Nietzsche, who said that we should live every moment of our lives as if we were sentenced to repeat it over and over, forever and ever for all eternity.
Easier said than done. We can’t live every moment as if it were eternally indelible; it’s simply too hard and would make life much too heavy. So instead we attempt to escape and live with a sense of lightness. We postpone our goals, we get into ruts, we distract ourselves with trivialities, but deep down we know that we could be living life more fully.
In the novel itself, this paradox is explored through the erotic relationship of a young couple who flit in and out of each other’s arms over the years against the background of Soviet oppression. For the most part they are out of balance with each other, but there are moments when political reality punctures the bubble of their everyday “lightness” and compels them to tap into the gravity and heaviness of their love for each other.
For many of us, 9/11 was a call to action, or at least a call to “re-prioritization.” The death of bin Laden is certainly cause for celebration - but it won’t send us running into the arms of our spouses. For that, we’ll have to look inwards and find our own call to action.
I started a family in the Age of Terror. My wife Lisa and I were married on December 1, 2001, and we chose a simple trip to the Caribbean for our honeymoon over the dream of Bali.
Some of our friends thought we were crazy to let the fear of terrorism affect our plans, but when a nightclub in Bali’s tourist district was bombed months later, we felt justified in having allowed our world to become that much smaller.
Lisa and I were eager to start a family, but in the wake of 9/11 I personally didn’t even believe that morning would necessarily follow night. Urban legend tells us that there was a baby boom after 9/11 and that hospitals were overrun with births in the summer of 2002. And while that’s an optimistic way of thinking about human perseverance in the face of tragedy, in retrospect we know that such a boom didn’t materialize.
If anything, my guess would be that condom sales went up - because there was indeed a lot of sex happening, maybe just not the procreative kind. What I did observe in the wake of 2001 was a re-prioritization of sex for many couples, which was part of a broader re-prioritization of connecting with loved ones and living a more meaningful life.
September 11, 2001 was a wake-up call for Americans to seize the moment in and out of the bedroom: From squabbling couples putting their differences aside to make love not war, to acts of infidelity and divorce that reconfirmed that you only live once, to casual sex and one-night stands that just seemed to channel the excitement and uncertainty, sex was in the air.
My first son was conceived on September 11, 2002, and born almost 9 months later to the day in 2003. In the year following 9/11, the world began to feel a bit more stable, morning did indeed follow night, and I have to admit that part of me wanted to create an American baby and “stick it to the terrorists” that sought to eradicate us.
As I carried my newborn son in a Bjorn up and down the streets of New York, the ground beneath my feet felt solid and familiar again. Stroller wheels soon turned into scooter wheels, and now my son is already past the point of wanting to hold my hand on the way to school as he runs ahead. In my professional life as a sex therapist and founder of Good in Bed, familiar problems have returned as well. Gone are the days of re-prioritizing sex and love; if anything they’ve fallen to the bottom of the to-do list as most Americans are consumed with work and just getting by. Couples are being battle-tested: not by terrorists, but by their own financial stresses and anxieties.
With bin Laden gone, I am reminded of Milan Kundera’s novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," the title of which comes from a meditation on the philosophy of Nietzsche, who said that we should live every moment of our lives as if we were sentenced to repeat it over and over, forever and ever for all eternity.
Easier said than done. We can’t live every moment as if it were eternally indelible; it’s simply too hard and would make life much too heavy. So instead we attempt to escape and live with a sense of lightness. We postpone our goals, we get into ruts, we distract ourselves with trivialities, but deep down we know that we could be living life more fully.
In the novel itself, this paradox is explored through the erotic relationship of a young couple who flit in and out of each other’s arms over the years against the background of Soviet oppression. For the most part they are out of balance with each other, but there are moments when political reality punctures the bubble of their everyday “lightness” and compels them to tap into the gravity and heaviness of their love for each other.
For many of us, 9/11 was a call to action, or at least a call to “re-prioritization.” The death of bin Laden is certainly cause for celebration - but it won’t send us running into the arms of our spouses. For that, we’ll have to look inwards and find our own call to action.
