Hot Monogomy

A good friend once told me that she had found a book in her parents’ bedroom entitled Hot Monogamy, counseling married couples on how to keep things alive in the bedroom. It is written into our DNA that any mention of the sex lives of our parents or their peers will induce dry retching and a constricting of the airways, but it’s not the disgust that I remember. It’s the pity. How sad, I thought, that a couple could be getting it so wrong, they have to refer to a book to make it right again.

In my early 20’s, I thought that the key to happiness in love was simply this: finding the right person. Informed almost entirely by romantic comedies, I knew with certainty that the struggle was all in the preamble, and that once I had decided to seal the deal with a man who felt the same as me, the credits would roll, and the ensuing 40 years would play out in the reflective glow of our perfect first kiss. It never occurred to me to ask why rom-coms rarely get a sequel.

My husband is a good man and a great dad, we make each other laugh, we are respectful of one another, we are kind, supportive and loving. I am, 2 years into my marriage, happy, but it turns out that daily life has a habit of getting under my skin. The frustrations I feel behind my front door are unleashed on him when he walks through it at the end of the day. He becomes a talisman of my discontent: he is to blame for all my grievances from the fact that we’ve run out of milk to the continuing global oppression of women. It turns out that amidst all the ‘better’ the ‘worse’ is not just squabbling about washing up.

Yesterday, as he left for work under the cloud of an unresolved row, I remembered the experience of another American friend. During a year of living an East Coast/ West Coast life with her boyfriend, they had religiously read the same books at the same time, so that their nightly conversations had some focus other than the boredom and loneliness of being separated by 3000 miles of land mass. This suddenly seemed like a great idea. My husband and I live in the same house, but we too are conducting a long distance relationship of sorts. His blossoming career, the burden that he carries of our financial well being, my desire for more help, time and sleep all prove to create a distance that physical proximity doesn’t always bridge. And as I formulated the sentence “let’s have two person book club” I felt a pang. I suddenly realized that I am that person. We are that couple. The couple who needs to come up with plans and activities in order to keep out marriage healthy. For us, it’s not our physical life that needs spicing up, it’s our intellectual one. It is Hot Monogamy for the brain.

I have no fear that our monogamous life is threatened. We’ve been there and done that, and right now I can’t imagine either of us working up much energy for an affair. When would it take place? In between Big Cook Little Cook and a trip to the park? I don’t even fear the dreaded “emotional affair”, but I do fear the distance. I fear that too many nights spent sleeping in front of the TV, and too few conversations which steer away from the big four (work, children, money food) will make us forget what it was that brought us together, and I don’t want my marriage to become a lonely place to be.

In so much of my married life and my parenting, I find myself doing exactly what I promised myself that I would never do. Not because I’ve given up, or given in, or run out of ideas, but because all of a sudden, the very thing that I dismissed as pedestrian or pointless seems to be exactly the right thing. It turns out that I’m not the mother who takes her 12 week old baby to India, and we’re not the couple who never have to think about how to keep ourselves happy. While I don’t think that I need to turn to Hot Monogamy just yet, I might just need to start taking some hints and tips from those who have walked this path before me.