I Based My Entire Self-Worth On How Fuckable Men Thought I Was

So I opened my marriage and what happened next sure surprised me.

Hi there,

I had a little editorial discussion with Lovely Charlie yesterday in which he told me that he thinks my introductions to these stories can be more like a paragraph as opposed to the six or eighteen or forty-seven or whatever paragraph ramblings I've been giving you. There was a part two to his suggestion, which is that he thinks I should byline an additional couple of longer stories myself each month. I don't know which seems harder, holding back from telling you all the tiny little details of my existence every single time or composing more actually structured pieces. But I am up for trying anything and want this to be the best for you, of course. So here goes my first attempt at a brief intro:

Shit, this is already graf 2 (note that efficient spelling?), so I am now cutting 200 words I just typed without thinking, all about people I have encountered since I was with you here last (Tina Brown was one) and if any of you want to see them, ask and I will paste them in the comments. And as I keep inadvertently writing and then redacting almost as much as you know who these days, thus miserably failing the assignment, let’s move on to today’s featured story: Many of you know Dana from other incredible pieces she has written here, but she contains multitudes, clearly, and this story shows an aspect of her life that I think none of you had heard about. I very much look forward to talking to you and Dana about her piece more in those comments.

PLUS Coming up in mere days: New book club picks for your final votes, and happy results from our Beauty Editor auditions where you were the judges. With potentially minimal introduction from me!! You're welcome! Thanks, Charlie!

xo always, Jane

Likely the last photo of me and my blurred husband when we were still sexually non-adventurous.

By Dana Walker Inskeep

I used to base my entire self-worth on how fuckable men thought I was, and that’s why I opened my marriage.

My husband and I had hit a big slump several years into our relationship. Actually if I’m being completely transparent, it started not long after we were married, took a giant skid after our first child was born, and never recovered.

Neither of us had done the necessary pre-relationship groundwork to make our communication effective. I was still a major people-pleaser, suppressing my needs while prioritizing his…right up until I had our first child and any semblance of sexual desire I had flew out the window. I made excuses while he quietly grew more resentful.

Now call me crazy, but I’m the kind of woman who, in order to actually want to have sex, wants to feel desired. Maybe it was because I was raised on soap operas, but that’s how I’m wired, and it became a requirement once the initial new car smell of our relationship faded into…just smell.

Early on his attraction to me wasn’t in question, but since I was usually the initiator he didn’t have to make much effort...all he had to do was show up. It was much easier for me and my charming codependency to be the one to get things going and bust out the ambiance in those early days.

I was so afraid of losing him that I would’ve done just about anything to keep him around.

That was all before two kids came along and drained me of every iota of sexiness I had. At that point I needed him to kick the seduction into high gear in order to feel amorous, but since his romantic default back then was “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” I was only setting us both up for disappointment.

This family photo is from my older son’s tenth birthday visit to Universal. Nothing to see here…just a normal family doing normal things.

When I began to voice things like “I don’t feel sexy anymore” or “I feel like I’m drowning all the time,” he took it as rejection. When I’d offer suggestions for how to help me get in the mood, he’d reluctantly comply once or twice then revert back to his norm of waiting on me for direction. Eventually I stopped, because the last thing I want to do is force my partner to be someone he’s not.

And so our sex life — or lack thereof — devolved into both of us feeling unfuckable. Enter ENM (ethical non-monogamy), now known by the preferable term, CNM (consensual non-monogamy).

We decided to open our marriage because, in short, we both deserve to have our needs met. The process certainly wasn’t easy or linear. There was jealousy, miscommunication, and deception on both sides. But as it turns out, we love each other enough as human beings, family, and best friends to have forgiven each other for some pretty big mistakes and managed to figure out what works for us.

Our current arrangement of living together, co-parenting, but not having sex with each other (a.k.a. “platonic nesting partners”) has been steady for the better part of three years.

This cover of our son’s Ranger Rick Jr. magazine became a source of great merriment in one of our MeWe groups. (“Hummer” is slang for “blow job.”)

In the beginning things were happening mostly online. He was involved in a sex-positive community through Tumblr, but once the people who spend their wild and precious lives looking for things to be outraged about (like scouring Disney movies for offensive imagery) got wind of it and complained to the internet Overlords, that got shut down. From there most of that bunch moved over to an app called MeWe, which I would sum up as “Facebook with porn.”

For the first six months or so, I held off on participating in the scene and spent the majority of my time trying to figure out how to reignite my nonexistent sex drive. I overpaid for an online course led by a woman who markets herself as a “vaginal weightlifter,” purchased a few relatively useless sex toys, and proceeded to…ahem...get busy with myself.

The results were mixed.

This was one of the first pics I shared. (Obviously the black and white filter made it classy, not smutty.)

Being fully convinced by the weight lifter lady that strengthening my vag muscles would reinvigorate my urge to use them for something fun rather than functional, I bought a Kgoal — a device that you can pair to an app on your phone, insert in your vagina, and…how do I put this? Well, you squeeze and relax your muscles to operate what is basically a video game controller. It’s like playing pong on Atari, but with your cooch.

While I eventually strengthened things down there enough to clutch a yoni egg inside me until the world ends (yoni eggs are porous egg-shaped crystals made from jade that Gwyneth’s Goop crowd [I am cool with this Gwyneth reference because it’s neutral and seems accurate, but I am overall protective and careful with calling her out because people put her down for no reason -Jane] swears by to tighten your pelvic floor), I had no interest in developing a UTI as jade eggs are known to do. And honestly, it didn’t get me all that fired up, although it did help with the hiatal hernia I developed from having carried two fetuses with gigantic pumpkin heads.

Eventually I had enough of sitting on the sidelines while my husband had all the fun, so I decided to engage.

The biggest mistake I made right away was