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Love in the Time of Layoff: Unemployment Jacked Up My Libido

Up until recently, if anyone had bothered to ask about my sex drive (which they never did), I would have said it was normal. I enjoyed sex as much as the next woman. But like many urban professionals, I was often too busy thinking about, say, the implications of some new regulation to give much thought to the sexual impulses that spiraled through my brain each day like dust motes.

Now that I have traded in my dry-cleaned, button-down, inoffensively colored work shirts for a set of neon green pajamas, the dust is gathering attention.

If I’m any example, unemployed girls do it better–or at least they want to do it more. Layoff has sent my libido to frenzied new heights.

Trying out that recipe for linguine in a sundried tomato-wine sauce is really just code for doing it against the kitchen table. Discussing the posthumous publication of selected excerpts from Elizabeth Bishop’s notebooks leads to sex against a bookcase.  Don’t even get me started on watching Planet Earth in Blue Ray format.

The desire for humpin’ and bumpin’ didn’t start the minute I lost my job. Like most over-achieving, over-educated, Type-A people, I had been told my whole life that the world was my pearl-stuffed oyster. I’d been informed that hard work and determination would take me far. So I had every reason to believe my current status as a jobless American would only be temporary. I would beat the odds.

Fortunately, if unemployment makes for more time for long dates and  flirty texts, it leaves just as many hours for doing it doggy style.

Or not.

I used to apply my over-active mind to getting an education and
succeeding at work. After I was laid off, I began going on mental
Wikipedia adventures, teaching myself about topics as far-flung and
useless as Thalassemia, the history of geology and the social impact
of the television show My So-Called Life.

But then, I started realizing that my situation would not be temporary. Outings with friends who remained flush required me to save small water bottles, fill them with cheap vodka, and discretely consume them while out on the town. Having been raised in a small, dry, Baptist town, I had never had the opportunity to be that under-aged kid sneaking drinks in a dark corner. At 28, I occasionally
experience the special kind of shame that comes when a waitress in a posh meatpacking district bar sternly informs you, “Ma’am I’m going to have to confiscate that.”

So I turned my thinking machine to the one thing money is not supposed to be able buy : Love.

What better time to focus on finding love than when you’re unemployed? After all, as my gainfully employed veterinarian sister will attest, dating takes a lot of time.

But love is damn hard to find in good times and bad. Fortunately, if unemployment makes for more time for long dates,  flirty texts and mooning over Facebook profiles, it leaves just as many hours for doing it doggy style, against the windows, on a bathmat, and even missionary in a four-poster bed.

My old, employed self might have turned down sex for any number of reasons. Being a reasonable and diligent employee, I might have decided, for example, that 1) The image of my scowling boss is preventing me from getting even slightly wet; 2) Ripping off these pantyhose in a frenzied moment of desire will leave an outrageous run that cannot be remedied before my meeting; or 3) If I remain at his
apartment tonight, the Blackberry will be dead by midnight, thus cutting me off from all contact with the office for a harrowing nine hours.

Without a job, I don’t have business meetings, BlackBerry missives or work stress to interfere with my sex life.  I don’t fret about having time to shower or wash the sheets. Positions don’t aggravate the minor aches and pains that come with sitting at a desk all day.  And that’s freed me to not just have more, but more interesting sex.

It is this meandering path that has led me, unwittingly, to a peculiar sort of sexual prowess. By applying valued skills in the workplace such as goal-setting,  organization, and the development of healthy interpersonal relationships to the obtainment of satisfying sex, I’ve thrown my arms (and legs) wide open to a more orgasmic life.

Isabel Pen has little work experience and even less money.  She spends her days in New York poking fun at herself in the shadows of her expensive law degree and chronically ill cat.

Tags: Love in the Time of Layoff, relationships, The Unemployed Life