Post 3: Working on our relationship

originally created as column 3, September, 2000

Child educators say to call a spade a spade. That means a penis a penis, a vagina a vagina, etc. etc. Yet some people still have a problem or are embarrassed to call body parts by their rightful name or even having sex by its name. Having sex, making love, screwing, fucking, fornication, sleeping together, “knowing in the Biblical sense” “were intimate” “were romantic”.

The intimacy one I love. I mean you can have sex without being intimate at all, without knowing your partner’s last name, or how many sugars he takes in his coffee. Does he drink coffee? Does he offer you coffee? Ok – but we’ll leave that for “how many dates to wait” chapter. My friend, married about a year, found a solution to talk about sex without giving it away completely. When she has sex with her husband, she refers to it to “working on her relationship”. So if I’ve called late at night and her answering machine is on, yet I had spoken to her only a half-hour earlier and I didn’t think she was going out anywhere, chances are she is working on her relationship. Or when I ask couples how their weekends are or what they did on Saturday and they say “nothing”, then I know that they are also “working on their relationship”.

This writer wouldn’t mind an entire weekend to work on her relationship, if she had one to work on.