Juno's House Rules

without the paywall

Update, November 2023: “Juno’s House Rules” received Honorable Mention for the 55th New Millennium Award for Nonfiction!

***

Today, in lieu of a newsletter, I’m republishing “Juno’s House Rules.” This essay was first published by Roxane Gay in The Audacity on January 26, 2022 and edited by Meg Pillow. It was a huge honor to be included in the Emerging Writer Series, and I was paid handsomely. If you don’t subscribe to The Audacity you should. This essay is now behind the paywall, so I’m running it again here. It’s about friendship and the confines of romantic relationships and the weight of expected sex. But really it’s about play—pushing against perceived limits. Juno’s House Rules the book is in the works.

juno

On Ken’s 40th birthday, we did drugs. We were “just friends” then, regular confidants, dependable allies. It was the middle of the night, November, 2012.* Our small group of friends picked up instruments and found ourselves united on a single cloud, convinced we’d hit musical perfection. Later, we sat around the fire, melting in a puddle of comfort. Ken turned to me. “Bean, you want me to take you home?”

Some people call molly a sex drug, but I was schooled in set and setting: only with friends you know and trust, somewhere beautiful, in lots of warm, soft clothing. 

“I can’t go home with you,” I said, searching his eyes for my friend. I didn’t like what lurked under his question.

The next day I called him. I told him I’d felt a crack in the foundation, that I needed the safety I’d always felt with him to be true. He assured me he’d only meant to drive me home. He said we were on the same page: our friendship was sacred. 

***

I’m delighting in the mingling of bass and chatter, the warm Oakland breeze and wafts of urine. It’s my first time to a city since the pandemic began, and my friend Christopher and I are walking around Lake Merritt. Taking a walk has become my preferred method of socializing; I’m less interested in small talk, in drinking, and walking side-by-side makes it easier to cut the bullshit. His business has recently been destroyed by a fire, and he’s toying with changing its name. 

A chain of rollerbladers swerves around us. “If you were gonna change your name, what would it be?” he asks playfully.

Juno is my friend Lisa’s cat, which is why the name is on my mind, though not why I pick it. It was high on my list six years ago when I was pregnant and looking at baby-naming websites for the first time. I liked it aesthetically, phonetically for the spunk it invoked. It had been long enough since the movie starring Elliot Page was released that I figured the association wouldn’t last a lifetime. I also learned it was my grandmother’s middle name. 

Then I found out Juno was the Roman goddess of marriage and crossed it off the list. 

Juno the cat used to live in an abusive house and was often locked in a bathroom. Thus the current house rule: no closed doors. She needs to be able to see the door ajar, Lisa says, enough to feel she’s choosing to be where she is. 

***

I use the term “partner” to signal to others that Ken and I aren’t married, though we’ve been together more than eight years. People get flustered, assume I’m bitter, and I quickly assure them I’m the skeptic. It’s juvenile to force others into discomfort, but it leads to good conversation.

“I gotta tell you, Serena, it really sounds like you don’t want to be in the relationship you’re in.” The guy who says this, a friend of friends, knows me only in this setting: at the local tavern, away from family life, tipsy and ranting about systems that don’t make sense. I’m drinking with a group of younger islanders, none of them parents, many of them single. I look down at my pale ale. There’s no one more familiar with my cycles of discontent than Ken. Every four to six months, a feeling of claustrophobia builds until I unload a barrage of stream-of-consciousness doubt on him. He’s a true friend, so he listens, even agrees with many of the things I say. But he’s also my partner, and it hurts his feelings. I watch the tiny bubbles rise to the top of my beer. Our family of three lives in a 500-square-foot home with only one interior door. If I want solitude, a moment of peace, I have to sit on the toilet to get it. In our tiny bathroom, I access a sliver of freedom. 

I take a generous sip of my beer and turn to the friend-of-friends. “It’s not him. We expect too much of relationships.” 

Early in our romance, Ken and I put our rules on the fridge: #1: friendship first. Since before we admitted we were in love (which I’m pretty sure is a place: we’re in New York; we’re in love), we’d been walking around the lake every Sunday, musing about the world and our places in it. Once, on an unusually frigid morning, our conversation was interrupted by an eerie harmony. We stopped, stood side-by-side, looking out over the frozen lake; the ice was singing. Forest Ken saw and loved me for all my crazy selves, and I’d listen with curiosity as he shared his perspectives. Being in the woods with him was the epitome of safety. We could say anything. 

We vowed to guard that place. Friendship Walks are still a staple of our story, a time to hear the other talk, untwine our lives, zoom out, listen, reset. We examine more objectively; even when it’s about us, it isn’t.

Often, I leave the woods with my unconditional love renewed. Other times I can’t quite get there. I make him admit that the things he liked best about me then—maybe even that helped him fall in love with me—are the same things that hurt him now. I insist we loved each other more truly before we got together. 

***

When I was a kid, I worried my dad was possessed. He still looked like my dad, but it occurred to me some other man could have taken over. I hadn’t yet seen an actor peel off a mask in a Mission Impossible movie to reveal another face, but if Dad knocked on my door to ask a question, I’d cock my head and search his eyes for some sign that he was the real deal. Could I trust him? Can I trust Ken? He swears things aren’t different now, that he’s still my friend first, that it’s even fine we rarely have sex. But I’m always left with the creeping feeling that the man in the forest must have been overtaken by someone else. I wonder if my best friend turned into a man who kind of, a little bit— just maybe—wants to own me. 

I don’t remember a time before the chalkboard. Invisible but heavy, it hangs above every bed I’ve shared, keeping track of how often we are—or more often, aren’t—having sex. It’s mounted on the wall early in the relationship, when that shift to expectation happens. Where every gesture, touch, and smile was before a gift, we now want this chore done just so, for our partner to be home at a certain time, and we get frustrated when the other forgets a plan. The famous trash arguments begin. Underneath it all, the implication that we will be having sex. Because sex is a need people have, and now we have each other for all our needs. Is sex in relationship ever a choice? It’s been too long. Gotta get your numbers up. 

***

“Oooh, I bet you have to fight off the boys in that dress!” 

Rebekah smiled, waving her pruning shears at me. She did the flower arrangements in the San Francisco restaurant where I hosted, and we shared familiar banter. It was a balmy September day, and I’d come to work in a bright red prairie dress. 

“Oh no, I’m not a sexual being,” I said. It’s not that I’d never had sex at 22, just that I’d never seen a sign that sex could be more than an assumed act performed to check a box that sometimes felt pretty good. Even now, after more than a decade, after discovering I’m among the lucky women who regularly orgasm, after knowing that expanse and nature and curiosity reliably turn me on, the voice is still strong: you must just not like sex. 

When Ken calls humans “animals, you know?” I don’t know. I can go a week or two without thinking about sex at all. Masturbating occurs to me rarely enough that it seems novel every time. But I’ve also been in relationships for most of my life. Lisa, my balancer of the silly and the sacred, Juno’s pamperer, has playfully asked countless times over the years, “You love your boyfriend today?” knowing she’ll either get a definitive “yes” or high-pitched “meh” and that next week the answer will be different. We laugh. It’s just how it is: sometimes you like having a boyfriend and sometimes you don’t. 

When our family moved from the island to the East Coast, far from our tiny community, our new (very old) home had sloping floors and grooves in the stairs from hundreds of years of footsteps. There were two bedrooms and so many doors. This was our opportunity for redesign. I suggested separate beds, exhausted by the looming sex debt, the avoidance and resentment. But we hadn’t bought new furniture, so we started out in the same queen bed we’d always shared. With each passing day of domestic monotony, I grew more and more desperate—we were blowing it. I expected our brand-new therapist to come up with a solution in our first sessions, and when she didn’t, I exploded on the street.

“Well, if I were you,” Ken said miserably, “I’d try to find a place to rent in the city.”

I did, and for about a week, he thought I was leaving him to single fatherhood. I assured him we were shaking things up like we’d always planned, that dropping him from my life was never going to happen—if friendship was really first, there was no need to run away. We just needed to let out the edges of possibility.

***

One Monday evening early in the experiment after I return from the city, Ken says, “Honestly, it’s better when you aren’t around. We bond in a totally different way when Mama isn’t an option.” He’s said for years he hoped at some point he could be the stay-at-home parent. We’re lounging on our new blue Ikea couch where I’ve been sleeping since the rocky week. I haven’t given it up because separateness is working. He asks if I’ve had any epiphanies over the weekend. I tell him I have. “I don’t want to be solely responsible for someone else’s sexual satisfaction for a lifetime.” 

Open relationships have always made me uncomfortable. Maybe it’s just standard imagine-new-things jitters since I don't exactly have a history of grand sexual adventures. Maybe it’s my aversion to being wanted—consumed—and I imagine lecherous looks from not only men, but everyone. Maybe I don’t like the suggestion that we all accept marriage as a closed bathroom door and agree claustrophobia is a good thing.

Mostly, I don’t like that we assume open relationships are about sex. Sex is a pretty weird goal. Aren’t most affairs about wanting to experience other sides of ourselves, the new and unexpected, wanting to savor vitality? Isn’t falling in love the same thing? It’s about what’s under the sex, about discovery and creation (not to be confused withprocreation). Sex, like art and music and dancing, is just an agent of something else. Elected and unbounded, it’s an expression of our rawest freedom.

I like sex, like the organic moments, the sense of possibility, the mystery. It’s hard to find that inside a rigid contract. Few things are more intimate than mutually unguarded sex. But presumed sex is intimacy’s greatest threat. Men have been taking sex from women for all time. We’ve accepted that women have to defend daily against the threat of sexual predators. But isn’t a model that assigns you the role of exclusive pleasure-provider also a threat? Maybe expecting sex from a partner and taking sex without consent aren’t as different as we’d like to pretend they are. We call it a choice, but no true friend would rope another into such a twisted covenant. However strongly he pleads to be seen the same way, the man in my bed is not the man from the woods.

“It just sounds so misogynistic for me to be the one with permission to sleep around.” We’re on the couch again, limbs overlapping. We’ve been talking for hours, and he’s admitted he’s not ready to think of me with anyone else. I’ve explained I couldn’t be less interested in making out with a stranger. I want to be alone.

“You’re lifting a massive burden from my shoulders,” I assure him.  

I watch as he considers it, see the bashful half-smile emerge that shows up when he’s pleased but flustered by the spotlight. 

“Well, I guess I’ll go download Bumble right now,” he jokes. Already, I’m lighter.

 For as long as I’ve known him, I’ve said I’ll need to come and go, not always totally sure what that meant. Week by week—listening to soaring music on the train, walking among strangers on my way to a new job, having conversations with people so unlike me—I come back to life. I come home happy to be there, to share my adventures, to hear about his. He doesn’t want anything from me. We have more sex than ever. 

Sex lives on an edge. Ecstatic and world-bending, it can also be the deepest of traumas; in all its shape-shifting moments, about a thousand things could go wrong. Sex and risk and creativity are obvious allies. But marriage, the poster child of safety and security? Who invited marriage? 

Not long ago, marital unity meant a woman gave up recognition as an individual in favor of the combined sole entity of the husband. He devoured her autonomy. Ate it up. I'm at my best when there’s room for solitude—separateness and space. When I can see Ken across a room, no ties binding, I adore him. As soon as anything suggests I’m being subsumed, or that we’re slipping into a net he may not see but I very much can, I want out. 

***

When a relationship is fragile, we say “this isn’t working” like it means we aren’t working. But it’s not us (except when it is). This limited model has been around for so long: woman + man + sex = marriage. Our options laid out like a multiple-choice exam: 

A. Get married. Stop having great sex.

B. Don’t marry. Like sex. 

It should be an essay question; paragraph after paragraph prized for unique perspective, for thoughtful consideration: Imagine the role of the following in your future marriage: sex, creativity, solitude, friendship. If marriage doesn’t interest you, explain. Consider where you’d find the same qualities without marriage. 

Every time I’ve ended a relationship, I’ve felt utterly high. There was sadness and nausea, of course, but only for the pain I’d caused another, not for anything lost. Each little hang-up or snag vanished, replaced only by well wishes. When single, I was playful. I sat on the beach writing letters on a portable turquoise typewriter. I left bouquets and love notes in friends’ cars. I sketched all the time and pulled over on a drive just to paint a quick watercolor. One afternoon in my kitchen, I told my friend Ken I liked being single: I had wonderful friends, people I’d carry with me forever. I was free to make creative discoveries. There would be lovers, collaborators who I’d hold dear, but never attempt to partner with. One day I’d have a child with a solid, trusted friend and we’d be successful co-parents. Maybe we’d be lovers. Maybe not.

For those fleeting months back east before the global pandemic disrupts the world, I glimpse the impossible: I can marry Ken, and it can be vast and expansive and ever-changing. There can be no sex in our marital contract. We can have great sex. 

Six months into our new life, the pandemic hits. We’d come to Massachusetts to be near Ken’s aging dad. As summer unfolds, it starts looking irresponsible to head into a New England winter with no jobs and little community while a virus wreaks havoc. The 88-year-old agrees to move west, so we return to the small town, the island, actual constriction-by-sea. No more anonymity, no trying out new things without commentary. The doubt-diatribes resurface: we get a babysitter to carve out more time for playfulness and spontaneity, but when I hear the word date, it sounds too romantic, too loaded with expectation. I don’t want to be on a date with a romantic partner. I’m so worried about pure friend time that I spend our friend time spinning out about marital expectations. 

Are the edges of possibility shrinking? A familiar voice: it’s time to go. Again, a hump to get over, flickers of doubt and fear. Then the departure and a few days later, the return, vibrating and expansive. Oh right, this is how this works: every time, love begets love. 

I want my friend Ken to be vibrant and happy, fully alive in all that means for him. What that means for him is his to figure out. For me, it means solitude and socializing, intimate conversation in all forms, the freedom to fully love whoever I do. Which is not a euphemism for sex. I want true intimacy as much as I can find it. I want friendship. 

I do also want sex. Unfettered sex, sex as weird experimental artform—I want sex = freedom. I want that for everyone.

It turns out Juno, mother of the feminine, wasn’t all chastity and baby-making—she was also Queen of the Gods, goddess of vital energy, of love, and sometimes war. Could she have been armed with all that because she was striving to find the purest meaning of love and willing to blow up every obstacle along the way? Maybe Juno, goddess of marriage, was more overseer, in charge of the continual redesign of marriage. Maybe she was hopeful about a future with unbounded sex and thriving creativity. Maybe she believed in healthy partnership, true friendship. 

I’m glad we didn’t name our daughter Juno. It’s a lot to put on an infant. But maybe I want to take it on.

*this is a correction from the original publication, which said November 2013.