Eventually, thanks to a rutting dog-man of a lover, I realized that the fantasy of picture-perfect sex did not mesh with the grunting honesty of colliding genitals. This guy wasn’t satisfied until we were both covered in fluids, our hair tangled, the covers on the floor. He made snuffling sounds and offered an endless stream of coarse commentary. I couldn’t help but laugh at how unashamed he was of his swinging balls; I even appreciated it. Once I accepted the squalid, seamy, earthy reality of sex, it suddenly got a lot more fun — and funny. The revelation was like being hit over the head with a rubber chicken. Satisfying sex should never look like a Hollywood movie, unless it’s one starring Will Ferrell.
Most men I know figured this out long before I did. Take farting in bed, which, I concede, is embarrassing. You have a choice there: Either cry about it or laugh. Guys will laugh every bit as hard at the hundredth fart as they will at the first. They have no hang-ups about being the ridiculous human animals that we are. Perhaps their acceptance of bodies as gassy, lumpy, leaky amusement parks is why men have orgasms as easily as they say, “Pull my finger.” Men know they’re imperfect. They embrace their imperfections. Any guy would be pig-in-mud happy to do the goofiest, stupidest thing in bed, as long as it felt good.
I’ve come to feel the same way, which is why my now husband, Steve, and I are a sexual match made in Catskills heaven। We tend to conduct ourselves with a certain abandon that makes us forget where the edge of the bed is or that a shower curtain isn’t weight bearing. I’ve pulled leg muscles, sprained my neck, nearly dislocated my jaw. My husband has bloodied his eyebrow, twisted his knee and bent his glasses. We’ve broken lamps, a lawn chair, the towel holder in the bathroom. I’ve had splinters in my elbows. He’s endured bruises and bug bites. We’ve both had rashes, chafed skin, cramps and carpet burns.
Neither of us intends to harm the other, or ourselves. We’re not into bondage or S&M. The most outré we get is light spanking, and even that we do with affection and witty mockery. Apologies to sadists and masochists everywhere, but I don’t see how pain wormed its way into pleasure. I suppose if you really are a very bad boy and need to be punished, fine, then bend over and take the paddling you deserve. But my husband is a well-mannered grown man. He deserves kisses and clenches. If, during a position change, my elbow happens to fly directly into his nose, the Pow! is an accident of passion. And I feel much worse about it than he does. You might not be able to tell from the tittering, but really I do.
Just this week, we started kissing in the hallway — hot, steamy, with blazing intensity. In an energetic fit of passion, Steve picked me up, threw me down on the bed and lay on top of me, pinning me beneath him. If I were writing a sex scene, I’d describe how I then exposed my vulnerable throat for his delectation, swooning and writhing beneath him, already eager, urgent for the dizzying, shattering release of long-built-up tension. What actually happened was when Steve lifted me in his arms, his back gave out. Throwing me down on the bed? It was more of a drop. His release of long-built-up tension? It arrived a day later, under the ministrations of a chiropractor.
Even worse, at a friend’s party one night, where we both drank too much to compensate for the fact that we didn’t know anyone, I friskily pushed my game husband into the powder room and knelt in front of him. The crunch of my kneecap on the tile floor should have been a warning. But I was feeling no pain (yet). I reached for his belt and started to unzip. I tried a super sexy move of pressing my cheek to his bulge, only to ensnare my hair in the zipper of his jeans. The disentanglement took forever — longer than the blow job would have, had we ever gotten to it. I eventually had to yank out a clump of my snarled curls to free myself. By the time we left the bathroom, a line had formed. Each smirking person assumed we’d begrudged his inalienable right to bladder relief for our own selfish pleasure. The next day, I hobbled to the hair salon for bangs that took months to grow out.
One of my fondest romantic memories is of an evening we spent in the Bahamas a few winters ago, when my intrepid husband and I took off from our hotel after dinner in search of a deserted strip of beach. The moonlight bathed us softly. The waves lapped. We started going at it. Before long, a rock was digging into my back, and my husband’s knees were shredded on the sand. Beach fleas savagely attacked. Still, we completed the act on principle. Then we tried to clean off in the ocean, wading into the water in the darkness, stepping on broken shells that cut our feet. Sexually speaking, it was OK. The recollection, however, of the two of us limping back into the resort lobby, feet oozing, limbs covered in sand, clothes wet and torn, flea-bite welts surfacing, busboys and guests staring as if we’d just been resurrected from a shipwreck, always makes me laugh. It’s a shared treasure from our past, a sexy, funny home movie of the mind that, whenever we replay it, bonds us more deeply than if we’d had some majestic, music-swelling “From Here to Eternity” moment. Because when it comes right down to it, nothing is quite as life affirming as reaching a rousing climax while accidentally head butting the man you love. When our bodies find each other, I don’t care that I’m not trim, hairless or gymnast flexible. I don’t care if I’m seen from my best angle — and, God knows, neither does Steve. The ultimate secret of our unique chemistry: Much as we love sex, we love to laugh even more. We are real (clumsy) people, having real (sloppy) sex and very real romance together.
Quite possibly, we’ll die in some bizarre sexual mishap. Given the options, it’s not such a bad way to go.
