Laura Friedman Williams - Available: A Memoir of Sex and Dating After a Marriage Ends

Contents

A Memoir of Sex and Dating After a Marriage Ends

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021

Copyright Laura Friedman Williams 2021

Cover photograph plainpicture/amanaimages/LUSH LIFE/A.collection

Cover design by Claire Ward HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

Laura Friedman Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the authors experiences. In order to protect privacy, names, identifying characteristics and details have been changed.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008395896

Ebook Edition JUNE 2021 ISBN: 9780008395919

Version: 2021-05-10

For my mother, whose steadfast love and faith in me keeps me aloft, and for my three remarkable children, who rally and rise and continue to awe me every day.

In February 2018, I discovered that my husband was having an affair. We had been together for 27 years, and I believed we would be together into our golden years. I envisioned us jockeying to be the first to hold our grandbabies when they were brought to visit us and reading the SundayTimes together with a pair of reading glasses we would pass back and forth. That we would not be married forever had not so much as crossed my mind, nor had I ever had a fleeting concern that he would have an affair. We loved each other deeply and truly and his tendency to think like an absent-minded professor seemed likely to preclude him from being able to organize and sustain such a thing as an affair anyway.

We were young when we started dating I had just turned 20 and a few weeks after we started dating he turned 21. Up to that point my dating and sexual experience had been limited. My best friend and I had been desperate to lose our virginity the summer before our senior year of high school and I succeeded a few weeks after she did, on the plaid pull-out sofa in the basement of my familys house in the suburbs of New York. I had wanted to understand the allure of sex and why certain girls I knew had a sophisticated swagger. I was dating a boy named Rob who was home from art school for the summer and drove a yellow school bus for the camp at which I was a counselor. He took me out to a hibachi restaurant to celebrate my 17th birthday and by the time the chef had finished flipping grilled shrimp in the air for me to catch on my plate, I knew that Rob was the one I would cede my virginity to.

The first few times we had sex, I found it painful and, frankly, embarrassing. It seemed bizarre that we would be caught up in unspeakable lust one moment and then the next he would come and our bodies would simply deflate. Were we supposed to resume our conversation at that point and pretend something both magical and calamitous had not just taken place? Mostly, relieved not to have been caught by my parents, we would hurriedly pull our clothes back on, smooth our voluminous 80s hair and part ways.

When Rob returned to the city for the fall semester of school, he moved into an apartment, which was where I learned to enjoy sex, not having to worry about the potential appearance of disapproving parents. We saw each other on weekends, tumbling in and out of his narrow, unkempt bed, emerging bleary-eyed to pick up Chinese take-out. Our romps were hasty but fun, and I learned to be quick to come so that I wouldnt be left wanting when he was done an ability that I took in stride until decades later when I learned from friends and books this was not a God-given skill.

I went away to college in the Midwest the following year and a few months into the first semester, I broke up with Rob. It didnt take me long to settle into a relationship with Julian, who lived in a fraternity house. Minus the scent of stale beer that permeated his bedding, and the sounds of his frat brothers throwing up in the bathroom across the hall after a night of partying, I took refuge in his full-sized bed, relishing the space and privacy his room afforded us.

Julian and I broke up two years later and I wasted no time, within days going out with Michael, who had been my next-door neighbor the year before. Although I had never before thought of him romantically, sitting in his white Volvo after he took me out to a Jamaican restaurant for dinner, a James Taylor cassette tape tucked into the stereo, I looked at him anew. He kissed me, but then told me that between the tennis team and architecture school, he didnt have much time for a girlfriend. I told him I liked my independence and wouldnt require much of his time anyway. We spent our days separately, but when bedtime came I would practically skip across the lawn separating our on-campus apartments and sleep over in his room. His roommate had left for London for the semester and by the time he returned we had broken his wooden futon frame with the copious and vigorous sex we were having every night.

Marriage, three kids, and twenty-seven years after that first kiss in his Volvo, he fell in love with another woman. For several months after finding out, I did little aside from scrape myself off the floor and care for our kids, through my misery and theirs. But then that dismal winter turned into a blustery spring which evolved into a lush, fragrant summer. I had a vague memory of what it felt like when I had been wildly confident, when I had laughed with ease, when I had cared if I looked good, when I had felt content, even joyful. I wanted it back and I decided to actively figure out how to accomplish that.

My ensuing dating and sexual experiences were empowering, sexy and exhilarating, but they were also full of humanity. By the time we arrive at middle age, most of us have a long, twisting story of failed relationships, shifting life goals, heartbreak, abandonment, love, hope and loneliness. I found all these things in myself and in the men I slept with over the next few months. I had sex that made me feel euphoric and sex that made me feel dirty, sex that helped me find the sensuality well hidden in me most of my life and sex that left me craving intimacy and love, sex that was fumbling and cringeworthy, and sex that made me curl my toes when I recounted it to friends later.

I openly shared my dating and sexual experiences with friends all of it, the good, the bad and the ugly and was told over and over again that these stories were unusual and I should write them down. I didnt want to write about dating and sex though, I just wanted to live it and I didnt believe there was anything special to share anyway. Marriages end all the time and people move on. Mine was a story as old as time and embarrassingly clichd. Still, friends kept insisting. They said my stories were hilarious and educational, inspiring even. They all had sisters or friends whose marriages had likewise imploded but who had turned inward, not wanting to go out, feeling reduced and undesirable. These women had not embraced their newly single status with my vigor and ferocity. Friends asked me to meet these sisters or talk to their friends and give them pep talks, explain how I was moving on, let them know that the seemingly impossible was actually completely within their ability and control. Matthew, my staunchly supportive brother, was adamant that writing about my experiences would be cathartic and made me promise that just five minutes a day I would sit at the computer, even if it meant staring at a blank screen.