Because desire is the body’s way of saying thank you.
It’s a Tuesday. Nothing about it is special. She is standing at the kitchen counter in yesterday’s sweatshirt, waiting for the coffee to finish, and he is up on the step stool, fighting a cabinet hinge that has been squeaking since roughly the invention of the iPhone.
He has his reading glasses pushed up on his head. He is muttering at the screwdriver like it owes him money. They have been married twenty-two years. She has seen this man with the flu. She has seen him lose an argument with a lawn mower. She has seen him wear socks with sandals to a wedding.
And then he reaches up, and his sleeve slides back, and she sees his forearm. The tendons. The faint dusting of gray. The particular way his hand closes around that hinge, sure and patient, like he has all the time in the world.
And out of nowhere, standing in her own kitchen at 7:40 in the morning, she feels it.
Schwing.
She has to set down her coffee cup.
A Word About the Word
I’ve been tossing “Schwing!” into my writing for a while now, a little exclamation point of delight that shows up whenever something deserves a standing ovation. I borrowed it from two guys in a basement in Aurora, Illinois, circa 1992, and I have no intention of giving it back. If you’re too young to know what I’m talking about, ask someone who owned a VCR.
But I’ve never actually told you what it means. So let me make it official.
The Sacred Schwing is the sudden, involuntary jolt of wanting someone.
Not the erection. That’s just one of its announcements, and it has already had plenty of airtime around here. I’m talking about the feeling underneath. The lightning strike. The moment your body notices a person before your mind has finished its sentence, and something low and bright and wordless says: Oh. Yes. You.
It happens to men. It happens to women. It happens in every body that has ever loved anybody. And I believe it is one of the holiest things a human being can feel.
Which is why I call it sacred. Not sacred in the hushed, stained-glass, don’t-touch-anything sense. Sacred in the sense that it is true, and it is given, and nobody has ever once been able to manufacture it on command. You can’t schedule a Schwing. You can’t negotiate one. You can only notice it when it arrives, and then decide what you’re going to do with the gift.
The Long-Marriage Schwing
Everyone romanticizes first-date desire. The candlelight. The nerves. The electric not-knowing. First-date desire is lovely. It is also cheap.
Of course you want the stranger across the table. You’ve known him for ninety minutes. He hasn’t left a single wet towel on the bed. He has never once explained to you the correct way to load a dishwasher. Desire for a stranger is desire for a beautiful mystery, and mysteries are easy to want. The long-marriage Schwing is a different creature entirely.
It’s wanting someone after you’ve seen everything. After the kidney stone. After the layoff. After the twelve-hour drive to his mother’s where nobody spoke after Bakersfield. It’s looking at a man whose snoring you could pick out of a police lineup and feeling your knees go a little weak anyway.
That isn’t desire for a mystery. That’s desire for a person. The whole person, the one you actually know, with the bad back and the terrible puns and the habit of narrating his parking. And in a world that has convinced us passion comes with an expiration date, a twenty-two-year Schwing is a small act of rebellion. It’s the body casting its vote, against every cynic and every sitcom, for this one. Still. Again.
Here’s the secret nobody puts in the wedding toasts: the long-marriage Schwing usually doesn’t show up during the big moments. It rarely arrives at the anniversary dinner, when everyone is trying very hard to feel something. It ambushes you instead. He’s reading to the grandkids in three different voices. He’s quietly fixing your windshield wiper without being asked. He’s standing in the rain at the soccer field holding an umbrella over somebody else’s mother. And there it is, out of nowhere, twenty years in, as fresh as the first time.
I’d take one kitchen Schwing over a hundred candlelit first dates. Every single time.
Women Schwing Too (And We’ve Been Hiding It)
Here is something I wish more men knew: women feel the Schwing. Hard. Often. At deeply inconvenient moments. We feel it when a man rolls up his sleeves. When he laughs with his whole chest. When he’s patient with a toddler, or competent with a power tool, or carries something heavy without making a production of it. We feel it in the hardware store, in the church parking lot, across the table at a perfectly boring dinner party while somebody explains their kitchen remodel. And then most of us, very politely, put it away.
Men were taught to hide the evidence of their desire. Women were taught to hide the desire itself. A boy spends his adolescence learning to stand behind a binder. A girl spends hers learning that wanting a man out loud makes her too much, too forward, too easy, too something. Good girls are desired. Good girls don’t do the desiring. What a colossal waste.
So we’ve become experts at the Schwing cover-up. The sudden fascination with the menu. The very casual sip of wine. The “Hm? No, I’m fine, why?” Some of us are so good at it that we’ve started hiding it from ourselves. We feel the jolt, and before it can even finish arriving, a little voice files it away under Inappropriate,
Unladylike, or Not Now, There’s Laundry.
Because here is the tragedy of all that hiding: the men in our lives almost never find out. A woman can feel the Schwing ten times a week for her husband, and he can go a decade believing he is merely tolerated. She’s lit up like Times Square on the inside. He’s quietly starving on the outside. And the one piece of news that would feed him is sitting right there, unopened, behind her very good manners.
Ladies, I say this with enormous love: your desire is not a secret you are obligated to keep. It is information he desperately needs.
Let It Show
So what do you actually do with a Schwing? You let it show.
That’s it. That’s the whole practice. No technique. No lingerie budget. No twelve-step program.
When it hits, don’t swallow it. Let it reach your face. Let your eyes linger a second longer than is strictly polite. Say the true thing, plainly: “Do you have any idea how good you look right now?” Walk across the kitchen and put your hand on that forearm. Lean over in the grocery store and tell him you’d like to take him home immediately, then enjoy watching him try to finish choosing bananas.
You don’t have to act on every Schwing. Some of them happen at a funeral. Some happen while you’re both twenty minutes late for work. A Schwing is not a contract. It is not a demand. It is not a promise that anything has to happen next. It’s just news. And the news is: I want you.
Most people go their entire lives without hearing that sentence nearly enough. Men especially. A man can be respected at work, needed at home, and relied upon by everyone he knows, and still lie awake wondering whether anyone actually wants him. Not needs him. Wants him. One unhidden Schwing answers that question better than a thousand anniversary cards.
And gentlemen, this goes both ways. When she walks into the room and the jolt hits you, don’t just think it. Let her see it. Plenty of women have spent years quietly assuming they’ve become part of the furniture. Your face lighting up when she walks in is the cure. Tell her she looks incredible in that old flannel shirt.
Stop mid-sentence when she comes down the stairs. Let her catch you staring, and don’t you dare pretend you were looking at the clock behind her.
Two people who let their Schwings show are two people who never have to wonder.
The Schwing as Praise
Now let me get a little holy on you. You knew it was coming. Real praise isn’t something we manufacture through effort. Real praise rises up. It escapes. It’s the “Thank you, God” that flies out of your mouth when the test results come back clean, before you’ve decided to say anything at all.
The Schwing is the body’s version of that. It’s involuntary gratitude. It’s your whole animal self looking at another human being and saying, without permission and without words: Thank you for existing. Thank you for being exactly this.
The mystics have always known that desire and devotion are kissing cousins. The Song of Songs is not subtle. Neither, frankly, are a few of the saints. But somewhere along the way we decided that holy meant cold, and that anything that made your pulse jump must be at least a little bit sinful.
I don’t buy it. The jolt of wanting the person you love is one of the purest compliments a body can pay. It cannot be faked. It cannot be bargained for. It doesn’t show up because you earned it. It shows up because something in another person is so beautiful to you that your body simply could not keep quiet about it.
If that isn’t a hallelujah, I don’t know what is. And like any good hallelujah, it’s meant to be sung, not hummed under your breath. Gratitude that never reaches the person it’s about is only half a prayer.
When you let your Schwing show, you’re finishing the sentence your body started. You’re telling the one you love, out loud, what your whole being already said in silence: I see you, and you are a wonder to me.
The sacred and the sensual were never enemies. Sometimes they hold hands. And sometimes, at 7:40 on a Tuesday morning, they knock you sideways in your own kitchen.
Back in the Kitchen
So there she is. Coffee cup on the counter. Twenty-two years in. Watching her husband slowly win his war against a cabinet hinge.
She could look away. She could tell herself it’s silly, that they’re too old for this, that there are lunches to pack and emails to answer and absolutely no time for anything ridiculous before nine o’clock.
Instead, she walks over. She puts her hand on the back of his calf, right there on the step stool, and when he looks down at her, puzzled, screwdriver in hand, she says it.
“You have no idea how sexy you are right now.”
He laughs. He tells her she’s crazy. He is wearing a T-shirt from a 2009 fun run.
But he climbs down a little faster than he strictly needs to.
The hinge, for the record, waits until Thursday.
That’s the Sacred Schwing. It isn’t rare. It isn’t reserved for honeymoons and hotel rooms. It is happening right now, in kitchens and cars and hardware store aisles all over the world, to people who love each other.
The only question is whether you’ll let anyone know.
Schwing.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Companion Song:
— “I Got You (I Feel Good),” James Brown, 1965
This article is based on concepts from Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.’s book Magnificent Men: How Men Are Undervalued and How Worshipping and Being Worshipped Can Bring You The Hot and Holy Love You Desire, exploring the restoration of men’s dignity and worth, the sacred and sensual dimensions of intimacy, and hot and holy love.
Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author and provocateur whose work explores love, relationships, sexuality, spirituality, and the magnificent complexity of being human. For more than three decades, she has explored what helps people connect more deeply, love more courageously, and create extraordinary relationships. Her writing blends psychology, spirituality, humor, and eroticism, with a particular passion for restoring the dignity and value of men and exploring the possibilities of Hot and Holy Love. At the heart of her work is a simple conviction: all human beings deserve and are capable of extraordinary love — and a beautiful life.
