Dreams, Deferred

Today I wanted to write about hot, steamy sex. Unfortunately, I am not having any hot, steamy sex right now, so I find my mind sadly blank.

After nearly 12 years of marriage, middle age has begun to take its toll on our sex life. Prior to this year, we enjoyed active, fully participatory encounters 2 or 3 times a week. But this year...this year we just can't seem to make it all click.

And by "it" I am referring not to the act itself -- that still pretty much works -- but to the milieu of our sex life; the thousands of interactions that occur throughout the day leading up to the Big Nasty (remember that term? Ah, high school). It's all that extraneous stuff that seems to be consistently derailing us.

One of the most pernicious is the sudden realization that we are not hip, young twenty-somethings anymore (or, sadly, even thirty-somethings). We are not as slim, toned and unlined as we were when we got married. One of us has been through 3 pregnancies, which do such a whammy on the bod that's it's often hard to feel desirable. Things just aren't as perky as they used to be. One of us has had to curtail his weight-lifting regimen in favor of gymnastics and Little Ninja classes. We both bring a lot of insecurity about our older selves into the bedroom with us now, and that occasionally makes us circle each other like embarrassed teenagers ("will she notice my zit?" "what if he finds out I stuff my bra?")

I mean, we knew we weren't getting any younger, but somehow that has been made blindingly clear in the last few months.

Then there's the constant round of childcare for our three monkeys that often leaves us too tired for sex, no matter how much we've been thinking about it (like, all day. Or whatever.)

There's also the Mandatory Waiting Period in the evening, so you can be absolutely certain the kids are fully asleep. This is a dangerous time because one or both of you might get too wrapped up in either working out or watching TV and opt not to have sex so you can finish Law and Order or get in that last set of bicep curls.

And then there are the Romance Killers. For me, these take two forms. First and foremost is any sound that indicates a child might be a) awake and/or b) about to burst in on us in such a way that s/he will see things requiring years of therapy to exorcise. We have a lock on our door, but that doesn't entirely relieve me of stress in this area. The second mood-killer is something I like to call Negotiations. This is like the Yalta Conference of Sex, when you have to look each other in the eye and say "are we having sex later? I can do it before 10, but after 10 is a no-go." and your partner says, "Well, Lost is on at 8, so 9 looks pretty good. But if we don't do it tonight I'm not free again until Friday because of basketball." Or my personal favorite: "We can have sex now, but it's kind of late, so no foreplay." (No what? ) Nothing ruins the romance like Negotiations. If I have to hammer it out like this, ain't nobody gettin' laid, least of all me.

It makes me nostalgic for the days when we reached for each other in the dark, heedless of the time because what did we care about the next day? All we had to do was stay awake and maybe explain the dopey grins on our faces. Desire never had to take a back seat to breakfast or bus schedules. The sheer scarcity of our encounters now makes each one that much more critical, which increases the sense of pressure we have to really make it count -- and sometimes you don't want to be the author of fireworks and love poems; you just want a good roll in the hay.

On the other hand, the odd firework wouldn't necessarily be unwelcome.