Originally published in ESSAY, 2003, Issue Two

An Excerpt from a Personal Letter

What has stuck in my mind and simply won’t let go since our last phone call is the term “sexual nurturing” as something being supplied by your spouse. I’d like to share my thoughts and maybe learn some things when we talk further on the subject.

For me, these two words, “sexual nurturing,” are an oxymoron; they are inoperative together. Is there such a thing as sexual nurturing for me the sexaholic? Sex may serve a lot of different things, including propagation of the species, but do we call that nurturing? I as a human being need air, water, food, others, and God; I am nourished by these and am malnourished without them. I as a (married) recovering sexaholic don’t have to have sex, and yet I can, in that abstinent condition, be as fully nourished as any human ever has or can be. My experience and our growing SA experience is telling us that being single and abstinent or married and abstinent in no way leaves one deprived or abnormal.

Sex as “nurturing” was for me another of those expressions like “committed relationship.” “What is sex for?” is one of the great unanswered questions of our time. In SA we’re just beginning to know what sex is not for. Let’s give ourselves time to see where true recovery will lead us in seeing what sex is for. The place of sex in our lives may turn out to be something different than what we’ve been programmed to imagine. Sex is what everything from worms to woolly mammoths do—as the procreative mechanism.

When I see the pair of mated ravens sitting on the telephone pole nuzzling and talking to each other, I see what may be construed as nurturing in the animal kingdom. But when I see them nesting and having sex I see them concerned with something larger than themselves, for which they will forgo not only nurturing but their own self-preservation, that is, the destiny of their own kind! If anything, both of them in that sex act are nurturing their species, not each other in the current narcissistic self-indulgent sense of the term.

What I thought was sexual nurturing in my marriage turned out to be support for my addiction. I was addicted to marital sex. I simply wanted sex and thought I had to have it; but it was a demand based on my programming and self-will. Through sexual abstinence I am only now beginning to find how the true bases of love and nurturing have escaped me. Growing into these is the tough work of recovery and program.

Here’s to all the blessed ravens, worms, and woolly mammoths! And to our loving wives and husbands!