How We Survived Lesbian Bed Death

It’s time for another edition of SE(N)O, an essay series on A+ for personal stories we wish we could tell on the accessible-to-our-employers-and-everyone-we’ve-ever-known mainsite, but can’t for personal and professional reasons.

Oh hi there. You are here to read this piece, which is super special and really personal, which’s why I’m writing this super-long run-on sentence because although this entire essay is available to A+ members, the first paragraph of this essay is visible to everybody including search engines and employers and family members and this is just way too personal for that, so if you can only see this part you should really consider becoming an A+ member because then you will be contributing to our Survival Fund and you will be able to look beyond this paragraph and get the real story I’d really like to share with you because I love you and you are really smart and your hair looks great today and I feel like you and I could have something special, like this post, which I am making extra secret by writing all of this text, because I’m about to get really real and maybe there is some strong language in there and some stuff that I can only share with you, if you are an A+ member and desire to know the intimate details of my sex life with my long-term partner and how we survived lesbian bed death, so get in here.

We fuck. Everywhere. On everything. No surface, no one’s personal space is safe. We are in lust and we don’t care if you care. The sex is dirty, rough. Skirt hiked up fist deep face smashed up against the Pine-sol’d walls of a public restroom sex. Door unlocked fast fast hurry up waiting to get caught legs spread on the office desk sex. Drunken grasping gasping fearless live sex show on the patio of a drag bar concrete scraping knees sex. Words spoken shrieking neighbors stomping on the ceiling spanking subbing cunt red red red stop don’t stop safe word sex.

We collect pleasure, measured in multiple orgasms. You buy me a sterling silver Ring of O and a black hood. I pet your thigh as we shop for deviant accoutrements on JT’s Stockroom. I feel uninhibited, bare, with you, and something else is surfacing, too.

At a rally with a new queer activist friend a few years older than me, the topic of sex comes up. We are standing outside the police department building, holding signs on our lunch break. “Oh,” he says, sarcastically. “I wouldn’t know. We haven’t had sex in months.”

I don’t know how to react. “Really?” I ask, hoping the twinge of judgement I am feeling is not coloring the tenor of my voice, “Is that… OK… with you?”

“Oh, yeah,” he says nonchalantly. “Please. We’re practically married, for gods sake. It isn’t that important.”

When I go home, I share this gossip with you. “I kind of feel bad for them,” I say. “Do you think they’re really happy?”

When we aren’t fighting, we’re fucking. You go to counseling. I get my own place, but I never sleep there. Makeup sex is the best and worst kind of sex. Breakup sex is even better and worse. We know because we are in an endless loop of sex and crying and screaming and kissing and trauma and forgetting.

One night, I pack all my things in my car and immediately get pulled over for speeding. I buy spite cigarettes, which you find me smoking alone on the steps of my apartment that I never sleep in, puffing bursts of ghost-flavored resentment in your face as you apologize. I let you inside. We sleep in my bed for the first time. I am coming and crying. I bring my things back to your place. We don’t sleep at my place again.

We move to a new city. You are unemployed and rooted to the couch and deeply, deeply depressed. We have our worst breakup, the one where we both thought it was over for good. It’s not.

When you finally get a job — two jobs, in fact — we are working opposite shifts. This becomes our new normal. Leaving notes and text messages for each other: “Can you pick up __ on your way home?” “Did you feed the cat?” We sometimes go days without speaking to each other in person. You come home after I’m in bed and get up for your second job before I am awake. I have to examine the trajectory of the blankets on your side of the bed to discover whether you were even there. We are invisible lovers, imaginary friends, leaving traces of our existence in empty bowls in the sink, opened mail, and empty toilet paper rolls.

After three years, the sex tapers off. A gradual fade, but still a surprise, like when you spend the day inside and suddenly realize you missed the sun and everything is dark.

There are quizzes: “Do you have a healthy sex life?” “Are you sexually satisfied?” “Should you stay together?”

There are articles: “10 Ways to Spice Up Your Sex Life.” “Is your sex life normal?”

There are strategies: schedule sex in advance, do it in the morning, do it even if you don’t want to.

There are long talks, tears, the constant fear that we are failing each other.

I am crying into my pillow and I don’t want you to know. If you hear me crying, you will know I am sad. If you hear me crying, you will know I am sad because we don’t fuck anymore. Because I said I was okay, but I’m really not okay. Because I don’t know what this means. Because I’m scared of what it might mean. Please don’t wake up. Please pretend you are not awake.

I put on a lace thong and corset, black fishnet thigh highs. I slip into a garter belt and snap the garters into place. I change the sheets and smooth the comforter. I tuck my hair behind my ear. I slip my heels off and sit on the bed. I wait. When you come home, you flop onto the couch. You look at me for a second, linger, say nothing. You talk about work, your shitty night. You get up and poke around aimlessly in the fridge. My face must show my disappointment, because you say, “What?” I say that you didn’t even notice me. You say that you did notice.

“Oh,” I say.

“What do you want me to say?” you ask.

“I don’t know,” I say and I close the bedroom door while I change into an old t-shirt.

I ask you if maybe you are asexual. You are not and you are annoyed by the question. What do I really mean? you ask. I say it’s OK if you are, but we should talk about it. You say that you are not. I say I’m just asking. You glare at me and then look away. This is the end of this discussion.

“What are you doing?” you ask.

“I don’t know. Um, putting on music…?”

“What for?”

“To make it less… awkward.”

“OK.”

“OK.”

“Did you brush your teeth?”

“Yeah.”

“OK, I did, too.

Scheduling sex is the absolute worst.

Understanding sexual communication and living it are not the same thing. I stand on stages and teach others about consent, about sexual communication, about hearing “yes” and “no,” about asking for what you want, about respecting what your partner wants. But I don’t know how to talk to you in our own bed. I don’t want you to associate sex with anxiety, desire with fear. I want you to know I love you, no matter what. You are crying anyway. I feel rejected anyway. You’re apologizing. Please, don’t apologize. We go to bed holding hands.

We have survived more than I ever could have fathomed at 22. When we met, we were flagrantly mismatched. We still are. I never could imagine myself settling down with one person, with a person like you. 10 years was a lifetime away. 10 years has been a lifetime. A lifetime is what I have with you.

You are the best and worst person I know. You smile with your ears. You adopt my weird idioms without crediting me. You make fun of my idioms. You are anal retentive about how to fold a t-shirt. You have places where trauma will probably never leave your body. You are imperfectly whole or close enough. No one has hurt me the way you have. No one has loved me the way you have. I like the way you smell like rising bread, sour and warm and familiar.

Saturday night, we check the DVR for shows we might have missed. Our shows. The ones we only watch with each other. I was out of town earlier in the week and I know you waited for me because of course you did. We sit in separate chairs: you on the couch with the cat, me in a corner chair with my laptop set up on a TV tray. I am drinking weak coffee. You are scrolling through Facebook on your iPad. There is nothing new on the DVR. We turn on Saturday Night Live, except it doesn’t start for another 30 minutes, so we leave it on the evening news.

I decide that I don’t want to schedule sex anymore. It is not worth the triggering, the crying, the awkward attempts at making what is horribly embarrassing feel sexy. I don’t care what anyone says about sex and healthy relationships. The times when our relationship was the most unhealthy were the times we were having sex the most. We are healthier than we’ve ever been. We are more in love than we ever have been. I love you more every single goddamn day. I look at your face and I think, “Damn. That’s a really good face.” I like your face.

I am very good at handling my own orgasms, when I need to. I don’t need this lukewarm sex, this take-your-vitamins fucking, fumbling and faking and unable to come because all I can think about is whether you are into it and I can tell you’re not. Sex shouldn’t feel rudimentary, like practicing the piano or filing your nails or leveling a shelf. I want to feel hot when we fuck. I want to know that you want me, that you want to taste me and fill me and be inside me. I want you to feel sexy, too, to feel comfortable in your skin, in your body. I would rather have hot-as-fuck sex once a year than awkward sex once a week.

Except for our sex life, our relationship is very healthy. No, our relationship is healthy, period. Who says that everyone has to have sex all the time? Who decides that you can’t have intimacy and love without sex? I decide that I am no longer worried about it. As soon as I stop worrying about it, it stops bothering me.

When we talk about sex now, we talk casually. “Do you want to maybe have sex this weekend? If you’re up for it?” We hope our timing matches up. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes we end up falling asleep on the couch or getting sucked into a Netflix marathon. This is OK. When you are not in the mood for sex, but in the mood to play a little, you sometimes assist me with masturbation. “Boob-touching,” we very not-sexily call it. Sometimes you also whisper dirty secrets or breathe hot right behind my ear while I’m getting off. Sometimes you get turned on, too, and we end up having sex after all. Once, on our anniversary, you gifted me a new Feeldoe and a sex playlist. On the rare occasion that you press me up against the kitchen counter or bend me over the bed, it is a happy surprise. We are satisfied. It is enough.

I run into my intern at a local bar. Shortly after and maybe too-many-drinks-in, we are talking about our sex lives (because that’s an appropriate thing to talk to your intern about). I tell her that we only have sex every few months or so, sometimes less. I tell her it’s been almost a year since we’ve had sex. I tell her I’m okay with this, because I am. I am so okay with it. I am surprised, sometimes, how okay with it I am.

Her eyes open wide in surprise. She is not masking her reaction well. She is the age we were when we were fucking every day, more than once a day. She is in a relationship that is fresh and palpably hot. She can’t imagine 10 years of monogamy, much less going without sex for a whole year. I assure her I’m very satisfied with our relationship. These are not conversations you should have with your intern. I regret this conversation and these drinks. I can feel the pity in her offer to buy the next round. You were smart to stop drinking.

What intimacy looks like in a so-called sexless marriage:

• Talking to each other about our day and really listening;
• Sexual or romantic touch that is not meant to initiate sex;
• Being present together, putting down the phones and the devices once in a while;
• Treating each other with kindness;
• Respecting each other’s boundaries and desires;
• Calling each other to squee over funny things the cat does;
• Making space for each other as individual sexual people;
• Supporting each other in pursuing hobbies and passions apart from each other;
• Pursuing hobbies and passions together;
• Scratching each other’s backs (literally), which can be orgasmic all by itself, IMHO.

When you reach around my waist like that, I know what is coming. We fuck. Sometimes. When we feel like it. Mostly in our bed because we are too old for carpet burned knees and navigating couch cushions. We want comfort. We don’t need validation. We are sexual people with or without each other. Our sex is satisfying, fun. Fingers pressing exact knowing just where there there there don’t stop lip biting low growling coming embracing sex. Hair pulling face down say my name fun quick you know how I like it yelling dirty rough playful sex. Darling moaning slow on top fingers hair stroking sweet body rolling whispering whispering “I love you, I love you, I love you.” I love you.