To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Books Aug. 31, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/books/col/keil/1999/08/31/oral Oral history He says he did it once and didn't like it. How can I get my boyfriend to go down on me? - - - - - - - - - - - - By Garrison Keillor A number of you took umbrage at my response to the woman who was in love with a man taking a solo vacation to Alaska who (according to the woman's friends) would surely take her along "if he were really in love with you." I asked her if this truly dumb take on the situation didn't come from her women friends. Some of you wrote in, wounded and betrayed, 'buked and scorned, and whipped the word "sexist" around like a car antenna, but indeed the woman in love wrote to me and said 1) the advice cheered her up, and 2) yes, they were women friends. I enjoyed the righteousness of the letters, though. The missive of chilled dudgeon is an American achievement -- the righteous disdain, the shocked innocence, the vow to shun the sinner forever -- and the letters I got brought back sweet memories of strolling around the Upper West Side with my stepdaughter back when she was 17. She is a sweet kid and liked to hold hands while walking. The censorious looks of passing middle-aged women seeing a cheesy old duffer walking hand-in-hand with a beautiful teenager were truly wondrous to behold: I wish I had them all on video, we could all sit and laugh ourselves sick. On another matter: I gave bad advice to the Ph.D. candidate who was having trouble with her dissertation committee, going through a long and convoluted rewrite process, comprehending their vagaries: The following two letters convinced me I was off the beam. Dear Mr. Blue, About your advice to the woman Ph.D. candidate getting the runaround from her dissertation committee: Rather than an isolated and possibly illegal case of discrimination, her story sounds quite typical of the Ph.D. candidate in today's highly politicized and bureaucratic graduate schools: paranoia-inducing bureaucratic delays, needless nit-picking, the setting of hoops ("That's good; now let's try it again a little higher ..."), personal animosities and jealousies, petty infighting, redundant forms and copies and endless revisions, elusive committee chairs ... the list goes on. It is a ritual ordeal. But contrary to your advice, she should not be tempted by the futile tactic of a lawsuit. Universities have bottomless wells of money for litigation and will humiliate her in court. She must do as the system tells her. Eventually they will tire of beating her slumped and bleeding form and award her the Ph.D. in order to move on to fresh meat. And if she persists in academia long enough, she may get to serve on a thesis committee herself, and show that she can dish it out as well as she could take it. Masked Doctor Dear Mr. Blue, The purpose of the dissertation is to get the piece past the committee in such a way that the members support you on the job market. That is the sole purpose of a dissertation. Usually there is a definite form that most committee members have in mind. For my dissertation, I did six drafts. That's good training. When your committee says this or that needs to be changed, you trot away and do it. No tears, just do the job. The process burns people out. Half don't finish their dissertation. But if you do go through it you (may) get good letters of recommendation and get an academic job and summers off and tenure. A professor can write no letter of recommendation, maybe say he'll do it, but "forget" to do it. There is no law or rule that says s/he must write one. Or the professor can write, "Ms. XYZ completed the requirements for the Ph.D. in our department in September 1999. Sincerely, Prof. Blank." This says nothing bad, and it's a killer. Or the professor can write a two-page letter about the significance of Ms. XYZ's work and how she's completely original and God's gift to scholarship. In the ultracompetitive job market today, that's what you need for a job. If you can't do the work, you don't belong in the game. I did my graduate work at MIT and let me tell you, MIT was an intellectual Marine Corps. You were told to do something and you went and did it. You felt crappy, but you listened to the profs and you did what they said, as precisely as you could. It was brutal (the writing phase), and I wanted to kill myself much of the time (literally). Here at SUNY, when you tell a student to revise, s/he's as likely to have a heart attack and quit as do the work. It's a constant struggle to get something into shape without the student giving up. There's not as much steel in the spine. Professor Blank - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dear Mr. Blue, Please don't use my name!!!! I want your advice on how to get a guy to participate in oral sex. My boyfriend of nine months is fine with receiving it, but he will not reciprocate. I've tried being seductive, begging, withholding, rationalizing, but he still won't do it. He says he did it once and didn't like it. I'm starting to become obsessed. Please help. Hoping Dear Hoping, You don't "get" a guy to do this, he does it on his own steam and for the same reason he performs any other erotic feat, because it excites him and it gives you pleasure and your pleasure excites him further. You could recite to him the old limerick: A young lady got on her knees/And said to her lover, "Oh please!/It will heighten my bliss/If you do more with this/And pay less attention to these." You could ask him if he'd like you to trim your pubic hair. You could suggest things involving food -- chocolate or strawberries or whipped cream or, if he's Norwegian, herring. Or you could put this question on the shelf and give him the chance to perform without a cue. Men respond to cease-fires. You nag and nag and nag without result, and then stop, and a few months later, voilą! the garage gets cleaned, or the screen door gets patched, or the cunnilingus starts, whatever it is you need. Dear Mr. Blue, I have decided to write a novel, a big novel. I have the characters. I have the plot (more or less). Here's my problem: I am absolutely clueless when it comes to knowing what to write NEXT. I finish a scene and have no idea what the next scene should be and feel overwhelmed and spend a lot of time at the keyboard frozen like a deer in the headlights. Is there any hope for me? Stunned Dear Stunned, The problem may be that you've plunged into writing narrative before you've gone far enough in the discovery process, the process of gathering the facts of the novel -- who the characters are, where they've been keeping themselves for the past 10 years, what brand sneakers they wear, what time they go to bed, why they comb their hair that way, and so forth. This marshaling of factual material helps give you a sense of authority in telling your story. You say you have the plot "more or less" -- perhaps you need more, an outline, say. An outline sets out a narrative path and represents your clearest intentions; you're free to diverge from it later, but only as the story dictates. And if plot is crucial to this tale, as your troubles suggest, then you ought to construct the outline backward from the denouement so you feel a gravitational inevitability pulling you toward the end. Dear Mr. Blue, I can't take the whining of the wannabe artists and writers who seek your advice each week. "I think I could be a great writer but I can't seem to find my muse." "I want to write my novel but I am sooooo tired after a full day of work." What a pack of whiners! They don't understand these simple facts: Writers write. Painters paint. Artists make art. They just do it. Every day. They don't wait until they aren't tired or until they feel like it or until the muse seduces them. They work when others hate the results. They work when they hate the results. They work because if you don't work you will never create anything, good or bad. These people aren't tough enough to write, to paint, to draw, to dance. They don't want it badly enough. Period. Painting While the Muse Sleeps Dear Painting, Fair enough. You're right, of course. Though I am reminded of a painter I once knew who kept working without the Muse's help and produced immense canvases, one after the other, and his friends lived in fear that he'd give them one, and of course he did, and sometimes two or three, and if you got one, you had to keep it around, at least in the basement, though they were truly awful. If only he'd had a moment of self-doubt, someone could've encouraged it, but he plowed ahead for years. A book of bad poems is no big imposition on the world, but a bad painting, 6 feet by 4, is a real headache. Dear Mr. Blue, I've been dating my current boyfriend for almost five years now. For the first few years it was great, but lately, serious problems have caused us to separate several times. He had an affair, which was very shocking for me, and things haven't been the same since. I don't feel attracted to him anymore and have no interest in sex whatsoever. About five months ago I cheated on him with another guy a number of times and then I got caught too ... so, my life is a big mess now. I love my boyfriend. He would do anything in the world for me and is a truly wonderful person. He desperately wants us to work things out. His rationale is that we've been together for five years. I'm just very confused. I can't stand it that I'm not even interested in sex or attracted to my boyfriend anymore. Can I get what we used to have back, or is it too late? Confused Dear Confused, The situation is confusing but your feelings seem clear: You're not attracted to him anymore. You may love him and think he's a wonderful person, but the music has stopped and the lights have come on. If you had been together for 10 or 15 years and then fell out, you'd have a greater chance of bonding again, assuming a happy history, but this relationship is brief and troubled, and your declaration of unattraction is so clear that one has to wonder if what you're feeling isn't some last lingering nostalgia before you move on. Dear Mr. Blue, Six years ago I had a brief affair with a man I met on an archeology dig. He was manly, gentle, brave and intelligent, and I fell intensely in love with him. We went our separate ways, and I had fantasies of a life with him until I heard he had another girlfriend (whom he has since married). Obviously, I was wrong. But it's been soooo long, and I am still plagued by flashes of intense desire for this guy, although I haven't seen him now in years. Obviously I am nuts. But what I want to know is this: A) Why am I still at the mercy of this passion? B) Will I ever know such intense desire for anyone else -- i.e., is this evidence more of his attractiveness, our chemistry or my own obsessive tendencies; and C) How do I make it stop? Obsessed Dear Obsessed, You don't say what you've been doing or who you've been seeing for the past six years, a crucial detail, but I'll assume you're busy, have a bevy of friends, have had other affairs with intelligent men and are not sitting around Miss Havisham-like in your wedding gown at a table covered with cobwebs. A) These flashbacks recur because the romance was intense, and who could forget something so beautiful? You are excited by thinking about him, and surely that's a good enough motivation. You're not nuts. You're teasing yourself. B) The intensity of the romance has a great deal to do with its brevity. C) Why must you make it stop? Be grateful for having known him and relish the memory. It's your life, and you don't get to edit it. So enjoy living it, lost loves and missed chances and all. You tell me about yours, I'll tell you about mine. Dear Mr. Blue, About four weeks ago at a party I met a woman who took my breath away. We exchanged numbers and went out a few days later and subsequently spent several days practically joined at the hip. I was/am falling for her; she is witty and warm and possessed of boundless affection. During our conversations she made several somewhat cryptic allusions to a "condition" she was living with. One night she came over looking a bit frazzled and over dinner she revealed that she has been living with a low-grade form of lymphatic cancer for the last two years; though it had been a "watch and wait" situation, she'd just received some bad news from a test and would have to begin a course of chemotherapy imminently. Thus, what was a wonderfully light, new romance one minute became something entirely more heavy the next. I care a great deal for this woman, but I am just getting to know her, so I am very unsure as to whether I should be occupying a central place in her support network, whether a relationship can have a healthy beginning in the midst of such an ordeal. Oh, and she lives on the opposite coast. What do you think? Confused and Desirous Dear Confused, Low-grade lymphomas often respond well to chemotherapy: This ordeal does not necessarily end in tragedy. That said, I think you should look at this woman not as a cancer patient but as the witty and warm and affectionate woman you met and started to fall in love with. She didn't approach you looking for a caregiver, so don't think of yourself as one. She is probably as taken with you as you with her, and you should advance the cause of romance and delight, I think, and give her what laughter and pleasure you can at a distance, and let the chemo proceed. If you feel emotionally inadequate to this drama, nobody would blame you if you allowed the romance to expire, but why let a little lymphoma rewrite such a sweet story? Dear Mr. Blue, I had a complicated on/off friendship/relationship -- high highs and low lows -- with someone who over the years became one of my best friends. He's the greatest in a number of ways. He is also screwed up, rude and thoughtless, and now and then he hurts me to the quick. We made a disastrous attempt to be a couple, but that's over, and I thought we could be friends. The last time he hurt me, I was helping my father to die, and I couldn't deal with my friend, so I said I would get back to him later. Since then, I have not responded to his communiques. I don't want to lecture him, and I don't want to explain my absence. Do you think it's all right to break my promise that I would contact him? I do care about his well-being, and don't want to do anything ugly. However, I can't imagine any words from me would change anything, so whaddya say? Silent Dear Silent, I think you should write him a note. You'll feel bad if you don't. Tell him in a hundred words or less that you want to take a break from the friendship, that you care about him and that there's something destructive between the two of you; perhaps after a year or two of silence you can be true friends. And then recall the happiest time you spent together, and wish him well. And then, farther down the road, maybe something else happens, who knows? Dear Mr. Blue, I am 29, divorced after a four-year marriage, and I have fallen deeply in love with a woman (and she with me) who I dated over 10 years ago. The problem is that she is Italian and lives in Italy. I am a ho-hum American in the Midwest. We both love each other and want to be together, but currently both of us lack the courage (or whatever) to make the big move. At different times in our lives, we lived outside our native countries and truly enjoyed the experience. (Coincidentally, my first wife was also a foreigner, who was miserable after leaving her country, so I am quite conscious of the difficulties involved.) I am truly intrigued by the idea of doing something very different, and I'm wondering what is stopping me from moving over there. Please help. Frustrated Dear Frustrated, I know the feeling. It's like finding yourself suddenly onstage singing in "La Traviata," and it's a great antidote to the ho-hum life. The romance is not to be missed: The problem is what comes next. It's not necessarily courage that leads a person to leap -- to burn your bridges and get on a plane and start making a life in Italy -- and it isn't cowardice or lack of romance that makes a person hesitate. It's a firm sense of reality. You're 29, a little old to become Italian, even if you apply yourself -- you've got a life here, and do you want to trade it for the expatriate life, and do you want to bring up your children in another country. Deep down in your heart, you know that a person cannot base his life on the love for another. You can't live on wedding cake; your love for her, strong as it is, is not enough; you need a life of your own; you can't spend it adoring her. So you have a large decision to make, and you're taking your time with it, which is only reasonable. Good for you that you don't expect your Italian friend to solve the problem for you by moving here. You shouldn't ask her to do anything you wouldn't do for her, although I imagine her English might be superior to your Italian. As for you moving there, I'll just say, from my limited experience, that ho-hum Midwesterners transplant pretty well: They have less attitude and a good ear for nuance. Dear Mr. Blue, I have been married for 15 years. My husband has been unfaithful several times over the years. We have been going to a counselor and all is truly forgiven. We have forged ahead in our relationship and have come to a new understanding of each other and our sex life has definitely improved. Anyway, now I have met another man who is married and lonely as I have been for such a long time. We don't want anything serious, just a fling. I am tempted but don't know if I could live with the guilt. It would also make me a hypocrite. All the same, I can only think of this other man right now and what could be: one night of passion and sex. I love my husband and do not want to leave him; would I be so wrong to have one night of pleasure with another man? So Confused! Dear Confused, There isn't a Bureau of Adultery to which you can apply for permission. You're an adult, and you know all the arguments against infidelity, having been on the receiving end of the lie, so I won't harangue you here, but only suggest that it's never ever a simple matter. If you go ahead and have your fling and it is wonderful -- and why shouldn't it be? -- why stop then? Imagine it goes on for three or four years and you're careful to the point of paranoia and then, digging through your purse for your address book, your husband finds the motel key and you must go through some very tense weeks at the end of which he decides he hasn't the strength to go through the rebuilding process again and you find yourself, in your mid-40s, quite dramatically alone, a woman in a small new apartment in a singles complex ordering Domino's pizza for supper and watching a lot of videos. Maybe it wouldn't happen quite that way, but before you board this boat, do try to imagine where it's headed. Dear Mr. Blue, I have been happily married for four years to a smart and strong-willed woman. I love her, and like her, we laugh together a lot, but we don't have sex anymore. Four times so far this year. She likes to watch TV at night to put herself to sleep, and she has an aversion to kissing, and both of these bother me. TV is a big distraction, and kissing is a stimulation I find necessary. I feel that she essentially wants me to service her until she is ready to be penetrated. This is not an appetizing prospect for me. So we watch the news, turn out the light and pretend to go to sleep. I want to make love with my wife. I am fresh out of approaches. Happily Married but Horny Dear Happily, Kill the TV. Stick it in the attic and tell her you took it to a repair shop. And then offer to read her to sleep. Your choice of reading material, but maybe the short stories of John Cheever, or Annie Proulx, or Jane Austen -- whatever you read, lie next to her and stroke her back with your free hand as you read, and if she seems responsive, stroke her face and neck, and arms, and if she responds, stroke her wherever she seems to want to be touched. Let touching take the place of kissing. Very gentle, very slow, not insistent. Chances are that one night she will be aroused by this slow touching and want to have sex. It may not be the first or second or third night, but maybe the fourth. Or fifth. I don't know. (Leave the TV in the attic until she's asked about it at least three times.) The sound of your voice and the touch of your hand have the power to arouse this woman, provided you don't try too hard. If you touch her shoulder delicately, she will turn her breast toward you, and then she will hike up her nightgown and invite you to touch her thighs, and all in all, it may take you a while to finish Jane Austen. You may have to settle for Emily Dickinson. Dear Mr. Blue, The man I married almost 40 years ago is not the same person today. That youthful soul, thoughtful and affectionate, has become a stoic person enduring life's ups and downs. His main source of pleasure is fishing. He will accompany me to any museum, film, festival, you name it. But he doesn't share my passion for these activities; he's only going along to keep peace. As Peggy Lee sang, "Is that all there is?" Just asking. Over the Hill Dear Over, Underneath that stoic exterior lives the same thoughtful and affectionate guy you married. Skip the museums and films for now, and try to find friends in whose company your man feels happy and comfortable and can express his mind. Every couple has a few true mutual friends, and they're a treasure and crucial to your happiness. And think about travel. Don't drag him to places you're intent on seeing -- the Louvre, the Tate, the Prado -- but someplace that's at least partly his idea. Travel can loosen up a stoic and excite that youthful soul within him. But it has to be a journey for both of you. So there better be fish there, too. How about Scotland? Dear Mr. Blue, My wife and I have been married for over 20 years, but I don't see how the marriage can continue much longer. The only thing we have in common is our kids, ages 10 and 15, who are wonderful. We don't argue, my wife and I, we don't even talk to each other. Of course we've tried marriage counseling and all the usual things, but the relationship is simply dead at this point. There's no question that we would divorce by mutual agreement were it not for the kids. Some people say a good, amicable divorce is possible and if the parties cooperate, there's no reason why the kids would suffer at all. Others say damage to the kids is unavoidable in a divorce, no matter how amicable. I would love to move on with my life, and feel my wife would be better off if we divorced, too. But would the kids really be damaged if we did? Stuck and Confused Dear Confused, Yes, they would be. Of course they would be. Your children have a home and two full-time parents right now. They lose this in a divorce, which dumps them into loss, mourning, grief, anger and anxiety. It is better not to give them this lump of coal, though of course they will deal with it as best they can. Amicable divorce is tough to achieve, the process being so adversarial at heart, the lawyers stoking the fires, and plenty of couples who intended to be amicable wound up in a WWF wrestling match. You've had more than enough advice about your marriage, so I'll just suggest that you and your wife move to opposite ends of the house for a while and work on being polite. Learn how to sit down and speak to each other in a collegial way about your mutual life, particularly your children and your finances, and eventually about your future. You have some challenging child-rearing years looming ahead. You'll need to be able to talk, whether you proceed together or separately. salon.com | Aug. 31, 1999