You
can't have enough sex for it to wear off. Even if you could, it
would take 30 or 40 years of continually working at it. The theory
that you can get perspective by putting it behind you somehow, has
never been proven in a laboratory. To be sure, I have friends who
will tease and say that people who say “sex is no big thing” are
getting plenty. At the outset, that appears to bolster a claim that
sex is some kind of “big deal.” But upon closer examination, it
is really an argument that “when you're getting plenty of sex, it's
no big deal.”
Suffice
it to say that while sex is not an Olympic event, in can be done
badly as well as superlatively. If it's no big deal, you are in
shock or jaded, or otherwise not getting the full benefit. That
being said, this is not a book about how to have sex.
Remember
the third chapter, when Ethan became a Chess Champion and got Emma's
best attentions? If Ethan and Emma had consummated the doomed
relationship with sex, then every bad lesson they learned, would be
associated and re-enforced, with memories of sex. If the sex was
great, the bad memories are ground into the consciousness with vivid
painful detail. If the sex was mediocre, each secretly wonders if
better sex would have solved the problems.
Would
you agree with me that regaining objectivity at that point is
next to hopeless? Disease and Unwanted pregnancy only make it
catastrophically worse. This is as good a time as any to really
investigate exactly what we mean.
