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Marriage Talk 5

Maybe, the young wife thought,

I made a mistake telling him ‘I pretend’.

Even so,

Really, she further thought,

I don’t give a damn!

Sighing, “No,” she said,

“that’s not altogether true .

That’s not always the way it is.

Sometimes I do like having sex with you.”

“ ‘Sometimes’?”

the young man mockingly questioned.

“You mean every now and then,

‘occasionally’,

you like making love…

excuse me;

‘having sex with me’.”

“Yes, sometimes it is that way.

I hate ‘just’ having sex with you

because when it’s ‘just’ sex

it seems like it’s only for you.”

“I don’t quite follow you.”

The husband seriously asked,

“What do you mean by,

 ‘just sex’?”

“Without love.”

Sighing, the wife said,

“Without love.”

Disbelievingly questioned,

his words whispered,

“ ‘Without love?”

Intercourse still a spiritual experience

possibly because he’d only had

completed intercourse with

his wife and did not,

and could not make a distinction

between love and sex

because in his mind they were one and the same;

except at times the mental and physical

aspects were stronger and

so much sweeter than at other times.

“Believe me,” he said,

“I ‘never’ want it to be ‘just for me’!

You know I always take as much time

as you’ll let me before we do it

because I ‘always’ want you to enjoy it!”

Loving to perform oral sex,

he would do so until she’d say,

in, so he thought,

a rather disinterested tone,

“F*** me.”

And by then

—not knowing if she were wet with her fluid

or his saliva—

his head of steam near bursting,

he would enter her.

“You name it!”

He went on.

 “I’ll do ‘anything’ for you to enjoy it!

 But whenever I ask what you’d like,

what you want me to do,

you always say,

‘I don’t want to talk about it’!

You never tell me what I can do

to make it better for you!

And when we do do it,

you never show emotion!

You never make a sound!”

“What am I supposed to do,”

she said sarcastically,

“become a ‘screamer’?”

Marriage Talk 6

Hey, he thought,

so long as you’re pretending,

why not pretend that, too.

But, “No,” he said,

“you don’t have to ‘become a screamer’!

But once in a while

I’d like to know that you

enjoy making love to me!

Occasionally a deep breath would be nice.

Shit!” he said emphatically.

“Sometimes I don’t even know if you’re awake!”

A man, the wife thought,  

a real man is supposed to know that stuff!

A real man wouldn’t have to be told how

to make a woman happy!

“Okay, yeah,

I know sometimes I ‘come’ fast,

but that’s the reason I like to take

as much time as I do doing other stuff,

like, uh… you know.

And you know

I try real hard not to ‘come’ too fast.”

“Yeah,” she quipped,

“like reciting the Gettysburg Address.”

The mood lightened somewhat,

“Yeah!” Smiling in the darkness,

he remembered once,

during intercourse,

when he had attempted to last longer

by trying to take his mind off

what he was doing

and where ‘he’ was,

when thinking he

was only thinking began saying:

“Four score and seven years ago…”

But he wasn’t ‘only’ thinking and

she had heard him…

and both laughed over it when ‘through’..

This remembrance was thought

of in a jocular sense for the young man

and, so he thought, for his wife also.

To the young woman, though,

the Gettysburg Address was

but one of a growing

list of reasons for her

rationalization of the way

she then felt towards her husband

and for her lack of emotion, passion, enjoyment

and any communication regarding their sex life.

“The problem is,” she said,

“you don’t understand how I feel!

You won’t even try to understand how I feel!”

“Bull­shit!

I do want to understand!

Tell me.” Said sincerely,

 “Please!”

The wife said, “Okay, I will.” Adding,

 “But this isn’t meant to start a fight!”

“I want to know.

I really want to know!

And if there’s anything I can do to change things,”

—anything to live what he considered being a normal life—

“I promise you, I’ll try!”

Hesitating a number of seconds, then,

her floodgate of antagonism open,

her words tinged with anger,

“First off,

—and I’m just mentioning it because I

want to get it off my chest—

To be continued

©April 21, 2012 / Mark M. Lichterman