“Sex isn’t just about gratification,” I found myself explaining to my wife, Erin, one night. “It’s about overcoming your inhibitions and conquering fear and shame on behalf of a shared pleasure.”
Stay with me, guys: this preamble was meant to lead to a list – our sexual goals – that I wanted us to write together.
See, we had fallen into a routine, as couples sometimes do, and I consulted a sex therapist, who suggested this experiment as a way to break us out of it. But I couldn’t just assail my wife with such a list. We needed to have a discussion.
RELATED: 7 sex positions women want you to stop asking for
So I did what any man would do: I went out and bought an expensive bottle of wine. Then I cooked Erin a gourmet meal, with plenty of salt to facilitate drinking. Pretty soon the wine was gone and we retired to the bedroom. Then I suggested, as casually as possible, that we make a few erotic resolutions.
And with that we sat down, compared our lists and uncorked a second bottle.
Erotic Massage
Erin kicked things off. “We need to do more massage,” she said immediately. I nodded thoughtfully. But honestly, I was hoping she’d start with something involving a busty dominatrix. Massage, to me, has always been a kind of sweet but exhausting form of foreplay.
“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”
The edge of petulance in my tone was not particularly subtle. “I don’t think you’re getting what I mean,” Erin said. She was speaking the same way she does when our children struggle to connect two dots. “Two words: happy ending.”
Right.
Outdoor Sex
My first suggestion was that we have sex outside. I had in mind a very public place. The danger of getting caught, the adrenaline surge, a cool breeze on naked flesh – I could see it all.
I was drawn to this scenario, I told Erin, because our sex life, with its scheduled date nights and same old venue, had come to feel a bit safe.
Erin was not entirely convinced. In fact, she laughed. “Now that I think about it, I’ve never actually had sex outside, if you don’t count a car.”
Good Idea! Sex in a Car
This led directly to my back-up suggestion. I had done my share of backseat groping but had never gone all the way in a car. “What could be hotter than doing it in a Prius?” Erin asked.
“How about doing it in a Prius with three car seats?” I replied.
“Yeah, we’d have to remove the car seats,” she said. “And you’d have to buy me a six-pack to get me in the mood.”
This felt like progress.
A Threesome
Having reached a moment of genuine erotic connection with my wife, I naturally proceeded to overplay my hand. I mentioned our maybe thinking about, you know, a threesome.
Did this make me feel like a slobbering masculine cliché? Sure. But what can I say? It’s something I’ve thought about a few thousand times over the years.
“Here’s the problem with a threesome,” Erin began. “It’s a great fantasy. But in reality you’re not just bringing another body into bed, you’re bringing a whole person.”
“Right,” I said carefully.
“It wouldn’t work if we knew the person. And if it’s someone we don’t know, then it’s basically just casual sex with a stranger.”
“Right,” I said, even more carefully.
Erin knew exactly what I was thinking, which is why she said this next: “I assume you’d be cool with our third being a man.”
I wanted to say, “Of course I’d be cool with a man.” I wanted to say, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right?” But I didn’t say that. I said, “Define ‘cool’.”
My wife shook her head. “Right. So it would be another woman. Honestly, I don’t think I’d be able to watch you with another woman.”
“I’d be happy just watching you,” I said. Erin didn’t buy this for a second. As a reminder, though, we’d had a lot of wine at this point. “The only way it would work,” she said, “is if it were someone who was in the business of pleasure, almost like a sexual massage therapist.” She proceeded to tell me about a show she’d seen on HBO in which a woman hires a sex worker to be with both her and her husband.
She then admitted that “threesome” had been on her list too.
I stayed quiet for a very long time.
“Is that a green light?” I said finally.
“Well, it’s not a red light.”
Anal Sex
I will preface this by mentioning that while I love all of my wife’s body parts, my feelings about her bum are especially tender. And yet, for reasons mostly having to do with her low pain threshold, anal sex has never been on the menu. Nor does it need to be. I made this perfectly clear to Erin – that I was expressing a desire, not an expectation.
This may be the key to this whole exercise – because the truth is, everyone approaches sexuality with a different agenda. And it’s not just due to gender differences but also because we all have distinct physiologies and temperaments. The important thing Erin and I realised was that we were both full of untapped desires.
The fact that we hadn’t acted on them had more to do with exhaustion than anything else. So the real commitment we made to each other at the end of the night, just before collapsing into a drunken sleep, was not simply to check a few new sex acts off our lists. It was to set aside the time and energy required to remain connected as lovers.
As for my final ask, Erin couldn’t quite green-light that. “But it’s something we can keep talking about,” she promised, “and working on.”
“Working on,” I said gratefully. “Yes. Perfect.”
