Chapter Promiscuity - (or the lack of there of)

 Chapter Promiscuity 

(or the lack of there of)

in the lineage of Erica Jong’s clear eyed rebellion

She had married young — twenty one, an age when the world still felt like a corridor of closed doors and inherited rules. People joked that her husband was her ball and chain, but that was never the truth. If anything, he was the long haired refuge she chose because the world outside felt too chaotic, too unpredictable, too much like the childhood she refused to repeat.

What no one saw — not then, not for decades — was the neurodivergent engine humming beneath her choices. The intensity, the fire, the aggression mistaken for attitude rather than wiring. The way dopamine shaped her attachments long before she knew its name. A long term partner wasn’t a moral stance; it was a stabiliser. A single, reliable source of emotional and sensory grounding in a world that overwhelmed her on contact.

But society had its own script for her. Women were not to be promiscuous. Women were to be careful, contained, respectable. Men could scatter themselves like seeds in the wind; women were expected to bloom in one pot and stay there.

She had grown up watching the opposite — marriages that fractured, men who bruised, partners who drifted in and out like weather systems. She vowed she would not live that life. She would build something steady, something safe, something that did not echo the chaos she came from.

And so she did. Two lovers in a lifetime. A statistic that would make Victorian moralists proud.

But midlife has a way of unravelling the stories we were handed. It asks questions we avoided. It holds up a mirror not to shame us, but to show us what we never had the language for.

She began to understand that her so called restraint was not purity, nor prudence, nor virtue. It was conditioning. It was survival. It was the internal metronome of a girl who learned early that giving too much of herself could be dangerous — and that withholding was safer than scattering.

Erica Jong once wrote about the zipless encounter — desire without fear, without consequence, without the weight of expectation. But this woman’s life had been the opposite: zipped tight, stitched shut, bound by rules she never consciously agreed to.

Not because she lacked desire. Not because she lacked fire. But because she had been taught — by society, by family, by the ghosts of her mother’s marriages — that women must guard themselves while men roam free.

Now, standing in the middle of her life, she could finally see the architecture of it. The choices that weren’t choices. The freedoms she never claimed. The rebellion she never permitted herself.

Promiscuity had never been the danger. The danger was believing she wasn’t allowed to want more.