Read an excerpt from nona's new book, BAD SEX: 'The truth is I was secretly terrified of being single in my thirties, despite my feminist posturing about independence'
Photo: Millennium Images/Gallery Stock It was six months after we’d broken up when Aaron found the pros and cons list. It’d been ripped out of a yellow Moleskine notebook, presumably so I could stash it somewhere more discreet or maybe dispose of it altogether. Yet it was diligently dated “11/21/13,” which apparently I couldn’t help noting for posterity.
After that night, the damp late-fall weather mostly left me tucked inside the cottage with my yellow notebook, consuming the bakery’s three-euro wine and bread and soft cheese and various spreadable meats. Fabien only enhanced the appeal of hunkering. Every morning, he came to my cottage, which he’d built himself, to start a fire in the wood stove and bring me little treats like fresh eggs, fig jam, and homemade vinegar.
Aaron found the list one day in our protracted post-breakup period when, amid the rage and its rebound into knee-jerk intimacy, there was also a deluge of mundane tasks to do, like going through a bunch of boxes together and divvying up the items. When the paper fluttered out, he scanned the list, unsurprised by its content , but flabbergasted by the date.“There were just as many pros as cons,” I replied weakly.
But the doubt seeds that turned into saplings, and then giant weeds, were the bad-sex seeds. I can now say with certainty that our sex was bad, and toward the end it got worse, metastasizing in a hideous way. It was bad in 2008, when it mostly took place drunk at six in the morning or hungover at noon.
It was partially because Aaron’s good qualities routinely quelled these moments of misery. He was vibrating and alive, a well of empathy who wanted to absorb the world’s beauty and pain. Aaron was my ravenous partner in consuming pleasures — beaches and bike rides and cocktails and all kinds of food — and he was also down for a depressive cry while listening to Cat Power or Explosions in the Sky. His soul was stripped bare for me: no guile, no shade, no contempt for me ever.
Before women were encouraged to compare notes, slogans like “Sisterhood Is Powerful” had the force of shouting a taboo. The young radicals were calling for women’s liberation, not just the right of women to participate in the same oppressive societal structures as men. In the meetings, the women talked about all kinds of things that were previously considered private affairs, from pregnancy to abortion to harassment to rape to beauty standards to the tyranny of childcare and domestic chores.
And at the tail end of 1973, when she’d just turned thirty-two, my mother initiated a breakup with Steve, too. He remembers it not as one defining incident — although their fights were at times acutely painful — but as a result of her amorphous desire for freedom and solitude. It wasn’t a clean break. She and Steve felt like family to each other, and for years they would occasionally sleep together after a night out on the town. But partnership never felt quite right.
Instead of providing every single unvarnished detail of every one of our dumbass melodramas, like I did in the beginning, now I’d give a sanitized version of Aaron’s and my struggles. I’d gloss over whole leitmotifs of our daily lives. There were fleeting expressions of doubt about our future, and equally fleeting hints from my friends — kind and tactful — that they’d had the same thoughts about our relationship. It felt improprietous to go further.
Still, those markers of modern romance didn’t allay my fears, some of which I detailed in an unusually candid 2011 email to my friend Kate, a writer ten years my senior. In the email, I expressed a growing desire to end my relationship because “something is missing,” but
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