If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon Read online

  “Why don’t we see if we have time for the hot dog after we shop?” he suggests, leaning heavily on the gas pedal, as if to prove that he is going to do everything in his power to make sure I get my death rocket. Now, Joe swears that he doesn’t tailgate just to piss me off, and since he is the most honest man I have ever met, I’ll have to concede that he truly must not realize his own unconscious need for vehicular vengeance.

  “Honey, honey, honey!” I sputter as I see the rapidly approaching rear bumper of the truck in front of us. I am gripping the oh-my-God bar above my head furiously with one hand; the other is splayed firmly against the dashboard, bracing for the imminent collision.

  “What?” Joe barks, easing up on the gas just a hair and putting a few comforting inches between our bumper and the truck. “That jackass is going fifty in a sixty-five, and he just switched lanes to get in front of me and hit his brakes. I’m just encouraging him to move over.”

  “Why don’t you just go around him?” I ask. The very man who lives for the thrill of passing semitrucks in the pitch-darkness on curvy, two-lane highways has suddenly lost the will to overtake another automobile? I find this hard to believe.

  “Don’t need to,” he says, speeding up again. “He’ll move.”

  I close my eyes and pray. Dear God, I know I haven’t been over to visit you there at church in a really long time—oh by the way, happy belated birthday to your son!—but if you could see fit to make sure I make it home alive, I’d really appreciate it. You know, for the kids’ sake and also so that I can continue to do your will here on Earth, which I promise I am going to start doing if you let me live. Love, Jenna. I mean, Amen.

  I suppose you are wondering why I don’t just get behind the wheel myself. The thing is, I am a perfectly good driver—until my husband is in the passenger seat. I don’t know what it is about having his physical presence up there next to me, but whenever he is there I’m a nervous wreck. I plow through red lights, stop at barely yellow ones, and bounce along the center line of reflectors like a drunken kangaroo on casters. For this reason (and admittedly, the half dozen fender-benders and handful of speeding tickets on my record), Joe thinks I am unfit to operate anything motorized. And since his driving record is pristine—minus that one speeding ticket he got in Bumfuck, Montana, which he paid cash for on the spot so there’s no actual record of it ever happening—it gets me nowhere to point out the well-documented fact that men break the law more, drive more aggressively, receive more traffic tickets, and get in more accidents than women (who aren’t me) do. So I shut up and hang on and pray silently and occasionally let loose with a spontaneous, terrified obscenity.

  For a while, I thought my iPhone was going to be the simple solution. I could almost completely tune out what was going on around me—even the bumper-kissing action on all four sides of the car—as long as I was surfing the web or checking the weather or texting or playing hangman or responding to e-mail. This, of course, quickly began to drive Joe insane.

  “Who are you texting?” he’d demand angrily, obviously bitter that I was allowed to do it and he wasn’t because he was behind the wheel.

  “My boyfriend,” I’d answer, poking him playfully in the ribs. “Come on, why do you care what I’m doing? I’m bored over here. I have nothing to do! I might as well answer a few e-mails. It’s called being productive.”

  “No, it’s called being rude,” was the reply. “I’m right here. Talk to me.”

  “We’re going to be in the car for hours,” I remind him. “We’ll run out of stuff to talk about, so I’m saving some of it for later. Besides, you don’t mind if I’m reading a magazine or flipping through a catalog even though they make me totally carsick, so what’s the difference?”

  “It’s just different. It’s like talking on your cell phone in public. It’s disrespectful.”

  So we frequently ride along in annoyed silence, him whistling some Creedence Clearwater Revival tune he’s got in his head (is there anything more annoying than gratuitous whistling?), and me having to fight every urge in my body to not look at my iPhone.

  “This is fun,” I might say, unable to resist my innate need to be sarcastic.

  After endless debate and compromise, it’s come to this: I’m allowed to drive only if I am violently carsick, in which case Joe always quickly and wisely hands over the keys. I occasionally—and covertly—check my iPhone for new text and e-mail messages, but I reply only if something is urgent or work-related or relevant to where we are going at the given moment. Joe will never stop tailgating, and pointing it out only intensifies his need to do it. If I play the freezing card, I sometimes win the windows-up war. (If Joe suspected I was trying to preserve a blow-out while compromising his precious comfort, he’d install an eject button beneath my seat.) Regarding the climate issue, it turns out there is a solution—and it will only cost us about $65,000. Apparently they make cars with individual “climate zones” that each passenger can control. I can picture us zipping along the highway in our luxurious mobile greenhouse, frost covering Joe’s side of the car while warm moisture drips down the windows on my side. It’s an absurd image, but at least we are both smiling in it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Why Don’t We

  Get Drunk and Screw?

  Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time

  and causes the most amount of trouble.

  • JOHN BARRY MORE •

  When you stood at that altar or beneath the diaphanous branches of that romantic willow tree or beside those gently lapping waves or under that stunning chuppah your parents paid a fortune to festoon in seasonal foliage, you said some version of the words “I do.” You promised, before God and family and possibly a curious squirrel or an oblivious sand crab, to love and cherish the man standing beside you. Forever. The part you didn’t say out loud was this: “I solemnly swear not to grope or be groped by anyone but the guy in the monkey suit—the one who looks slightly sweatier and more faint than all of the others who look just like him—for the rest of my life or at least until he ceases to have a pulse.”1 What other reason is there to get married? The tax break isn’t enough to make it worth it; if you’re desperate for companionship, you could always get a dachshund; and if your answer is “to start a family,” we’re back to the groping thing. All of that being the case, the odds are, by default if for no other reason, your husband would very much like to rub his naked body against yours from time to time. If you’re lucky, you’ll want to do the deed with the exact same frequency for the exact same duration in the exact same position using the exact same props, potions, and method of contraception as he does, every single time.

  Yeah, right. Good luck with that.

  But thanks to that one tiny clause unique to the marriage contract, you are each other’s single option when it comes to getting lucky. No other relationship you have operates within such strict confines. I mean, you love your hamster, you cherish your friends, you obey your boss, but the only living creature on the planet for whom you forsake all others is your spouse. Right? You could go out and get thirty more hamsters or three hundred more friends or switch jobs tomorrow, and it’s not like your other hamster/friends/bosses are going to take your kids from you and demand lifelong financial support. For the most part, the more the merrier!

  Let’s look at the intimate exclusivity business in terms to which most women can relate: If people were clothes and clothes equaled sexual partners, you would be the only shirt hanging in your husband’s metaphorical closet. When the man wants to “get dressed,” you’re it. And if he’s like most guys, he would like to get dressed every freaking day. (The nerve, right?)

  Again, I don’t mean to stereotype. I am sure there are plenty of women—I even know one myself—whose husbands can’t keep up with their turbocharged libidos. For all I know there may even be guys out there moaning to their buddies that their nymphomaniac partners “never just want to cuddle.” But from many years of my own unscientific research—usual
ly involving copious amounts of wine and a handful of outspoken girlfriends—it seems like the most common marital scenario is the one in which the wife believes her husband wants sex 24/7, and the husband feels like his wife could go the rest of her life without ever doing it again.

  “I’d have sex with him all of the fucking time if he would just be nice to me and help a little more around the house,” she grumbles frequently.

  “I’d be nice to her and help her around the house all of the fucking time if she’d just have more sex with me!” he fires back. (It’s worth noting that another study out of the University of Oxford—and this one was wholly separate from the sex-andsweeping-correlation one—found that the more willing a guy is to chip in with the household chores, the more attractive a woman will find him—which could potentially lead to more sex, so clearly he should make the first move here and pick up a goddamned broom. Am I right?)

  Here’s what I find amusing about all of this: At one point in time, it’s entirely probable that this composite couple was having sex all of the fucking time. Isn’t that how most relationships start out? I can recall weekends where Joe and I left the bed only to refill the chip bowl or use the john. Anthropologists explain that the novelty of new love causes both partners’ brains to release the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinepherine, which basically are nature’s amphetamines. When these love drugs are coursing through our veins it causes our hearts to race, makes us alert and immune to fatigue, and basically turns us into lust-driven hussies. Sleep, schmeep! I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Now get over here and penetrate something! It’s the honeymoon phase and everyone knows it doesn’t last—if it did they’d call the whole damned thing a honeymoon. Scientists have actually determined that this passion-fueled, impossibly idealistic stage lasts exactly, on average, two years, six months, and twenty-five days. (I know, that seems long to me, too.) After that point, guys in the defining study admitted they pretty much stopped trying to pretend to be tidy or feign even a semblance of interest in anything their ladies might be saying, and the gals confessed they no longer really gave a shit if their partner found them attractive. I might be paraphrasing the findings a bit here, but that was the gist.

  Looking at this data and factoring in my own hindsight, here’s what I can’t help but wonder: Was there a gradual waning of desire that nobody noticed? A moment of total neutrality? And how do you go from a dozen prolonged, romantic romps in a weekend to two quickies a month without noticing, if nothing else, that you have several extra hours of free time on your hands and that it’s been ages since you had to call your OB/GYN for an emergency urinary tract infection prescription?

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  If I refuse to have sex more than twice in a week, my husband accuses

  me of being “stingy.” I’ve tried to tell him that most husbands are lucky

  to get sex twice a month, but he doesn’t believe me. Imagine that!

  MARA

  The experts won’t come out and say how much sex we should be having, but most agree that married couples who are reasonably healthy and have partners who engage in thorough, consistent grooming practices should at least be having some. (And folks who do it less than ten times a year or less are considered to be in “sexless marriages,” which basically means those ten times don’t even count.) There’s a saying that goes something like this: “Sex is only ten percent of a marriage. Unless you’re not having it; then it’s ninety percent.”

  There are several subtle indicators Joe uses when he wants to let me know it’s been too long since we’ve been biblical. For instance, when every single thing out of my mouth earns a suggestive reply, it’s time. (Me: “Honey, could you please pass the sausage?” Joe: “Oh, I’ve got your sausage right here, baby.” Me: “Did you fix the dishwasher yet?” Joe: “Oh, I’ll fix your dishwasher, hot stuff.”) And though my husband is characteristically affectionate, when I can’t bend over to scoop the cat litter without getting goosed or brush my teeth without being fondled, the guy really needs some action. Sometimes—although not as often as with the other methods—he resorts to a simple whispered “Can we please have sex tonight?” It’s enough to break a girl’s heart, I tell you.

  Newsweek did a big exposé on who’s actually getting the most action, and it turns out it’s not who you might think. The rich, powerful CEO who folks assume can get as much ass as he wants in fact scores a dozen fewer times a year than his fresh-out-of-undergraduate-school son with the starting salary in the high twenties. Think your party-loving single pals are doing it around the clock? Turns out those of us who have forsaken all others fornicate with our singular option an average of seventy-one times a year. Spinster Sue and Bachelor Bob—with their limitless fields of potential partners—get off just forty-six times in that same time span, or less than once a week. Inexplicably, the profile of the most sexually active Americans includes a penchant for PBS, a disdain for organized religion, and two or more kids living at home. Really, the only not surprising part of the whole study was the finding that there is a positive correlation between exposure to pornography and frequency of sex. (What? Watching other people have sex makes you want to have sex?)

  Whereas poor Joe gets turned down more often than a stolen credit card, neither of us is able to recall a single time that he’s rejected my advances. He can be filthy, buried in work, furious at me, engrossed in a riveting playoff game, running a 104-degree fever, have one arm trapped under a boulder the size of a pickup truck, or all of the above, and it matters not; if there’s even a whisper of a chance I might be up for a tangle, my husband will be stripped down to his boxer-briefs faster than you can say “Hokey Pokey.” (As long as there’s TiVo available in the playoff example.)

  Not long ago, Joe and I had been enjoying one of our rare but lethal marathon battles. It was probably day four of the total and absolute mutual silent treatment—I’m talking not even a whispered “Rot in hell” behind the other’s back—and though I’d sort of forgotten what we were fighting about, I was positive that I was still waiting for an apology. You know, for whatever heinous thing he’d done. So anyway, it happened to be a Saturday and the girls got invited to play at a friend’s house. It wasn’t five seconds after I’d shuffled them out the door before my husband turned to me—practically molesting me with his limpid, lecherous eyes—and propositioned me with this winning pickup line:

  “Wanna get naked?” he asked.

  Are you fucking kidding me?

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I replied. “I don’t even want to talk to you until I get an apology.”

  “I have nothing to apologize for,” he shrugged.

  Here’s the thing: I write a regular sex column, and I’ve interviewed some of the foremost researchers on the subject in the world. I know on an intellectual level that giving in at this moment and enjoying a nice tryst with my life partner would be the best thing in the world for my marriage. Physically, we’d feel less stressed afterward and both get a better night’s sleep. Emotionally, we’d be flooded with bonding hormones that would make the whole spat seem silly in the first place. Practically, we could quit walking around on razor-sharp eggshells and commence with the regular business of running a household. There was only one reason not to respond with a giddy “Take me now or lose me forever”: Stupid, selfish pride.

  “Hrumph,” I replied, storming into my office and slamming the door and proving once and for all that Joe is unarguably right every time he calls me a stubborn pain in the ass. Sorry, but I can’t be pissed off and turned on at the same time. It’s just not possible.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  We never kiss at all anymore. I’d love to make out and cuddle again

  like we used to, but there’s just no going to first or second base. With

  him it’s all or nothing—so it’s usually nothing.

  CATH

  Here’s the thing about sex: Innumerable articles and books have been written
about it, and there are untold ways to do it. Thanks to HBO, YouTube, and skanky, aspiring “actors” everywhere, you can watch real people doing it from the comfort of your office or your living room couch. If the parts God gave you aren’t enough to send you screaming over the edge, there is a bottomless assortment of wedges, whips, cuffs, clamps, rings, swings, dildos, and DVDs you can buy to blow your randy little mind. If you’re not quite in the mood, a strategic drop or two of a certain sort of lube will have you begging for it within minutes. (And if you’re not familiar with Zestra—or Liquid Gold, as I like to call it—get thee to the Internet, pronto. That stuff is libido in a bottle, and no, I am not a paid spokesperson, but if you work for Zestra and would like to have me on your payroll, we should definitely talk.) You probably couldn’t imagine—and wouldn’t believe—what your neighbors are doing over there in that seemingly innocent backyard hammock. And that gal sitting next to you on the bus, the one with her nose in her laptop who appears to be diligently working? That’s not a spreadsheet on the screen; it’s porn. Sex is used to sell everything from beer to breakfast cereal (oh, come on, you haven’t noticed the sultry way the cream is being drizzled over the firm, ripe peach on the box?), and urban legend even suggests that there are steamy subliminal messages in every single Disney movie ever made. (Think about it: Bambi? Pocahontas? Lady and the Tramp?)

  And yet in a poll posted on the survey site TheSkinnyScoop .com, 81 percent of the women who responded admitted they’d rather get a back massage than get busy with their husbands. (The other 19 percent work for Zestra, I’m guessing.)

  Since copulation is meant to be a delightful deed for all involved parties, you’d think we’d be tripping over ourselves to get into bed. Instead, women in particular seem to spend the majority of their time and energy deflecting advances, avoiding innuendo, and coming up with excuses not to get naked.