Marzipan and me

I first discovered the joys of marzipan when in the UK. For the uninitiated, marzipan is (according to dictionary.com):

A confection made of almonds reduced to a paste with sugar and often molded into various forms, usually diminutive fruits and vegetables.

However, this is not how I discovered it. The Belgian chocolatier Godiva makes some the finest marzipan I've ever had, but it's not sold here in the U.S. The people in the local Godiva shop at Northpark looked confused when I asked for it. But there is a reasonable marzipan sold at some grocery stores, made by a German confectioner called Ritter. Here's what it looks like:

So, every time I visit the U.K., I take myself to the Godiva shop near Harvey Nichols (another of my many vices) and buy some.

I remember the last time I did this. It was getting dark, so I boarded the train out of London to Weybridge, where I was staying with a friend. I noticed a fresh-faced young soldier next to me surrounded with shopping bags, looking as if he had some secret he was desperate to share. So I finally asked him if he were on leave.

This was what he was waiting for. During the next half-hour, he had not only shown me every single gift he'd bought for his girlfriend - who he hadn't seen in 18 months - but he told me where he'd met her, when they were getting married, and what he loved most about her. In hindsight, I don't think he shared all this with me because I was anyone special. It was only because I asked.

After he departed, I looked down and realized I'd eaten the entire quarter-pound of Godiva marzipan during our chat.

Marriage and eroticism

Last week I had a delightful date with a man. I had stalled for a long time as I was initially suspicious of him, as he was an unmarried man shopping at Adultery Central online. I was afraid he was thinking married chicks are easy. (Oh all right, we are. Touche.) But when I asked him why, his answer was that he was freshly divorced. And he loved the latest version of Twilight Express. Like Esteban Vihaio in Kill Bill Vol. 2, I am extremely susceptible to flattery.

Later in the evening, we ended up in a bar atop a hotel drinking single-malt scotch. The conversation turned to marriage and sex. Or, to be more precise, why marriage and sex don't cohabit successfully for any length of time, even when the two parties profess to love each other and go through the sex motions once or twice a month.

I think the answer is that, in almost all marriages, the art of eroticism is quickly lost. We don't understand its importance because we never managed to identify it correctly in the first place. We think that eroticism equals love, because we often fall for the person who supplies a particularly mind-boggling dose of it. This wouldn't be such a tragedy if we realized what was really going on, but most of us are clueless.

This misconception sounds minor, but the problems it causes are not. It leads us to believe that if we are with someone we love, and we manage to maintain a reasonable sex life, we cannot wish for anything more. This is where we're wrong. Eroticism is a slow-moving but fluid quality in our lives. When we stake our claim via marriage, we well-meaning lovers inadvertently start out on a path that has plenty of roadside attractions at first, but eventually we realize that the path is no more than a never-ending Mobius band of repetition, boredom and squabbling.

Marriage is the trap initially set by medieval religion to keep us in line. Instead of outliving its usefulness, members of royalty realized that the right marriage was as effective as a merger and not nearly as expensive. Nowadays, finding Mr. or Miss Right is something we all feel is necessary to fit into society, much like having a house in the suburbs and a newish car. We plight our troth until death, no matter how terrifying this is. And we keep telling ourselves that once we marry someone we love, we will never want to fuck anyone else. Ever.

This is a sad and masochistic joke we play on ourselves. We keep telling ourselves that our monogamous lifestyle is the cat's pajamas and that we're married to the most wonderful person in the world. We chant Monogamy instead of Om. But one day we spot someone in a bookstore, or a park, or at choir practice, and we suddenly feel alive again. Our black and white rerun world turns to High Def color. We realize that we want to drag that person to a dark place and beg him or her to help us out.

Whether we realize it or not, we need eroticism as much as we need sunlight, food and a good book. And since our erotic needs are as intellectual as they are physical, it's almost impossible to depend on one person to provide this need for a lifetime. It's asking too much of one's spouse. It's not fair.

Eroticism's journey-like structure practically dicates that new characters be introduced so the plot will keep moving along. This is compounded by the fact that familiarity does indeed breed contempt in the marital bed. There just isn't any way around this; your spouse is always going to feel the same way, taste the same, make the same little noises in the dark. Finding a cure for this has contributed to a new industry populated with marriage counselors, sex therapists and authors, all with suggestions how we can "work on our relationship" and magically cure our sexual boredom. Their suggestions insult the intelligence, but we want to believe.

So where does this leave married folks? They have a several options. They can pretend everything's hunky-dory at home and bury themselves in a libido-dampening hobby, or work later and later as the months turn into years. Or they can try to fill the void with food, as it's safer that indulging their carnal needs. So many of my married friends looked good for the first year or two after their nuptials, then began overdosing on ice cream when their sex lives evaporated.

And there's the adultery option; nothing new, but actually less acceptable than ever, as those who choose it are admitting to imperfection in our world of spray-on tans. Previous generations were usually too busy with other things to divorce a cheating spouse.

But even though adultery may appear to be a shortcut to our libidinous selves, it usually backfires. The adulterous become the confused when they recognize they're searching for more than sex. So they attempt to compress their desires like oversized computer files. Erotic pursuits are downgraded to "a bit on the side", or what the French wittily refer to as their "five to seven". We can't simply accept our primality and let it have its way; we have to be smart-asses about it.

In addition to our lack of understanding, we usually sabotage our needs with guilt. This robs eroticism of one of its high points: its langorous, unhurried charm. Instead of taking our sweet time, we grab the TV dinner of Sex With A Stranger. We're terrified of taking the time to locate the cheesecake buffet, get acquainted with the choices, and go back for seconds. But the TV dinner never tastes as good as it looked, and it only lasts minutes.

As soon as I figure out how to conclude this, I will. But it's past my bedtime and I'm tired, so for now I'm going to publish and be damned.

springtime for adulterers

Apologies for being a slack tart blogger - it's not that nothing has been happening, but I have been a little hesitant in sharing publicly, as some readers may disapprove of my actions.

The condensed version is as follows: After almost two years of celibacy, I decided to do something about it. My dozing libido had come back to life in the last months. And since I'm still technically married, I decided to check out the Web sites that cater to the adultery crowd.

It's rare that any of us feel like they're a seller in a seller's market, but after the first few days after posting a profile at one of the more popular "married and looking" sites, I felt like one. It was flattering to receive a dozen new messages a day, but I kept reminding myself that the male-female ratio at these sites is heavily skewed in the females' favor. In short, we can pick and choose; most men cannot.

As to degrees of success? Nothing is ever as simple as it seems it should be (or will be, for that matter). However, I have no shortage of correspondents.