I’ve been in one of those weird moods today that tends to happen when I read too much in one day. At the moment I’m reading Andre Dubus, who is sweet and sappy yet simultaneously pensive and painfully realistic about man-woman relationships, which of course has gotten me thinking.
BF and I hardly ever “make love.” Normally we have sex or fuck. I’ve specifically looked him in the eyes while kissing slowly and hungrily and asked him, Will you make love to me? And he smiles and continues kissing me and then ten minutes later we’re having our usual dirty-whore sex.
Don’t mistake me here, I love dirty-whore sex. Love it. Good stuff. I’m all about the dirty talk and slapping and demanding GIVE IT TO ME, BITCH, but sometimes I’m just not in the mood for that. Someimes I want to be told I’m beautiful and hold each other meaningfully and see tears in his eyes and feel them building up in mine. That’s what couples do. Part of the trade-off of giving up hot wild casual sex is so you can have the sweet chick-flick kind of sex, ie making love.
When I was younger and rolling around the sheets with High School Boyfriend, I didn’t get how couples (especially guys) could be so moved by sex that they would cry and hold each other and promise each other Forever. I didn’t get it. I attributed it to yet another Hollywood lie and good lighting. Then I met College Boyfriend who was among the sweetest guys I’ve ever met. After the first time we had sex we held each other and he smiled one of the most beautiful loving smiles and a few tears slipped out of his eyes and dropped onto my nose. Then I got it, I got what the fuss was about, and I was honored to be included in What Love Is About.
Now I’m with BF, the first person whom I’ve been in love with, and things are different than I expected. We still have those sweet I love you so much moments where our smiles say a thousand things and we don’t try to hide the tears in our eyes–but this never happens while we’re in bed. There’s no “making love” or anything that goes with it in the bedroom. We have plenty of these moments, but they don’t involve sex in any way. I don’t know if that’s really good or really bad.
There are plenty of those sweet random moments between us, where we’re grocery shopping and throwing boxes of Depends at each other when time slows down and his smile is so bright that I’m shocked anything else in the world can keep going without being blown off-course, where he’ll squeeze my hand and twist my pretty diamond promise ring around my finger and wrap his arm around me. There are the times when we’re snuggling on the couch with our huge dog trying to climb onto our laps and BF lets out a hearty satisfied laugh and I can’t help but let my mind wander about what a good father he would be and maybe I do want a family after all, and I want it with him.
Why don’t we ever have these sweet moments while making love? Why don’t we make love, but have sex or fuck instead? As much as I wish it were true, we don’t constantly fuck like rabbits, despite what my blog may suggest. The kinky sex only comes out every once in a while because most of the time he’s too tired from work and I’m too horny to complain. We haven’t really gone through that “making love” stage, but maybe there hasn’t been time for it to go there yet? Is that one of those things that takes time to really grow? We’ve been dating a year, but that’s still awfully young in a relationship. Poor BF only just figured out that “don’t order any for me, I’ll just have a sip of yours” is an outright hairy lie. There are still so many things to find out about each other. Including how we age. I’m terrified that my growing up won’t have room for him, because my dreams of starting my own firm and being wildly successful and moving back to Manhattan are just too big to include him. And these dreams of mine also include the horrible realization that only after I leave him behind I’ll understand just how much we loved each other, and maybe it wasn’t all Yet Another Lie propagated by a decade’s worth of romantic comedies.
What are the different stages of love that a couple goes through? A lot of it depends on age, ie we’re in our twenties and therefore still mostly driven by those beloved sex-crazed hormones left over from adolescence. But BF is five years older than me and has white hairs already to prove it. Perhaps his love-schedule is at a different speed than mine, meaning his libido is on cruise control with the Marriage and Baby stations in sight, whereas my libido is still a fucking rocketship with no plan of docking.
I don’t really know what I’m getting at. I suppose I’m trying to figure out whether it’s bad that we don’t spend time “making love” in the bedroom, when there’s so much other good stuff going on. I guess this is a follow up of How Much does Sex Matter? Sex is just so much more interesting when it’s new or casual. When you become a couple, it shifts to the background because there’s all the logistics of your family liking him, moving in together, who does the fucking dishes, Where’s my shirt, and fighting over who gets control of the remote. You know, the big issues. The ones that will keep you awake at night writing another post to your blog trying to figure out what the hell is so great about relationships again? Because the whole “dying alone” thing doesn’t cut it. Men die first anyway.
