Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction

the bride, the groom, and the dogStanding under a black walnut tree in front of my parents' eighteenth-century house on a spring afternoon, I prepared to get married for the third time in a broad-brimmed white straw hat and a gauzy blue and white dress. One hand held the crumpled, preprinted wedding vows; with the other I tried to comfort my sobbing six-year-old daughter, dressed for the occasion in a beloved pink jumper. My heels sank into the green lawn near a shaft of June sunlight.Weddings make the heart soar. If second marriages are the triumph of hope over experience, as Samuel Johnson famously wrote, third marriages may be the triumph of imagination over experience. They are even more improbable and require something closer to delusion than simple hope. There is something delicious and heartening about a wedding; a wedding is a chance to let our dreams seem real, a frothy ceremony that is both a great party and a powerful symbol, and this is even truer when the bride and groom are experienced and knowing.My mother had spent months planning the afternoon of the wedding, and in spite of her own ambivalence about having a daughter who was getting married for the third time, she had pulled out all the stops: there was a creamy canvas tent behind us between the walnut tree and the house, a small dance floor, platters of poached shrimp, and a gleaming, many-tiered white wedding cake decorated with garlands of flowers and a miniature marzipan bride and groom. Three hundred friends and relatives had come to Westchester from as far away as California to celebrate. The groom's family stood behind us. My two handsome younger brothers in their Brooks Brothers suits tried to calm the boisterous children from various families and the undisciplined family dogs. My mother's Labrador retriever growled to warn my corgi away from the house, while the groom's naughty basset hound explored the smells near the buffet table.I was marrying the love of my life, a wonderful man I had been in love with for years, a man it seemed I had fallen in love with the moment he walked into a party on Potrero Hill in San Francisco where I had gone with my first husband to meet some writers. It was 1972, Richard Nixon had just been reelected by a landslide, and the Washington, D.C., police had arrested five men for what appeared to be a minor break-in at the Watergate complex. Politically, anyone left of center felt under siege. At the party, given by the journalist I. F. Stone's sister Judy, I was talking to Alvah Bessie, one of the men who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era for refusing to answer the questions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Bessie and Stone were our heroes.Suddenly, there was a stir on the other side of the room near the door. I looked up and saw Warren entering the room like a king. Although we were both married to other people, and although I lived with my husband in New York and he lived with his family in San Francisco, our connection arced across all that like electricity traveling between two poles. Warren had a Victorian house with a library that he had painted deep red, a beautiful wife, two little girls, and a ditzy basset hound named Alice.Now, seventeen years later, on our wedding day, we knew that our love had survived every obstacle -- great distances, years apart, family opposition, job changes, other people's pain, our own pain, an avalanche of advice, the death of Alice, and the acquisition of Bentley, another basset. I was certain that I was marrying my great love. We had moved heaven and earth to be together. Our feelings had even endured through my marriage to someone else and subsequent divorce, Warren's divorce from the mother of his daughters, and the death of my father. Our connection was as strong as it had ever been. We made each other laugh. We continued to surprise each other. I loved him for the way his mind worked, for the generosity that had u