Bad luck with men

"I had bad luck with men,” my great grandmother told me one afternoon while we were sitting in a small lounge of the senior residence where she had been living for over ten years. She was 86 years old, and I couldn’t tell if she was thinking about this just at this moment or if she had been thinking of it her entire life.

“I just couldn’t seem to keep one,” she continued. “You see, I always wanted to be married, have a husband to love and do things with, a home, laughter. As  a young woman, I loved to laugh. I married two of my husbands because they made me laugh. That’s never a good reason to get married, because if you’re not laughing, then you start looking around and seeing that you aren’t where you want to be, that you’re not getting what you need, that the man you’re with is not a man you should be with or some of all of that.

“I married a couple of others just for sex,” she added.

“Grandma!” I could feel my heart leap in my chest and choke me a little. This was my great-grandmother after all.

“I liked to have sex,” she admitted, “make love, whatever you want to call it.”

“Everyone likes to have sex,” I shared.

“Not everyone,” she corrected, and then explained, “which I learned reluctantly. But there was something more to that for me. I liked to have a lot of sex. At least once a day, in fact. And even men who think about sex all the time and would like to have sex all the time, just don’t or they can’t. Honey, I could get turned on by the squeeze of a shoulder and a look. And once I was turned on, there’s only one way to turn me off.

“Now it may be different for gay men like yourself. You have a kind of sexual freedom that women of my generation didn’t. So I would get married, of course, because that was the proper thing to do. The problems would arise when that fantastic first burst of sexual energy would wane, and I’d realize that my husband was, well, not the kind of person I wanted to be married to. He was a drinker or lazy or a slob or lousy in bed or want a servant or just downright mean. And men lie to get women into bed with them, even easy ones like me.”

I confess it was very disconcerting to hear my great-grandmother say she was easy, but before I could protest or even gasp, she looked right into me and shut me up. This was her time, and she didn’t want me to interrupt.

“I spent a lot of time in bars, and speak-easies during prohibition. At least in those places there was no question about what I wanted.” She sighed. “I met a lot of men that way, but mostly not good ones. Some of them were married, of course, and I wouldn’t knowingly sleep with married men. That would be unconscionable,” she emphasized with great seriousness. A few of them would be charming, and kind of woo me, which I liked, but really, they just wanted easy sex.

“It’s funny, darling,” she noted ruefully, “there I was, attractive, friendly, willing, available, dedicated, honest—oh I was never dishonest about my pursuit of men—and a good cook, housekeeper—a good wife—and yet finding someone who was equally good to me and sexually compatible proved to be impossible. But I tried. God knows I tried. I just didn’t have good luck.”