Grrr, huh?

Marriage is hard work. It doesn’t help that I was born into a long line of d0-it-yourself single mothers who didn’t take crap – or direction – from anyone. The message was: if the man doesn’t turn out to be what you wanted, dump his ass and move on. Until meeting my husband nine years ago, that was exactly the attitude I had. After having my first son, and leaving his father in the dust, I realized that there was nothing glamorous about single parenthood. I vowed that I would never do it again. I wanted to show my son a more picturesque idea of family, and, selfishly, motherhood has too many facets for me to be interested in doing most of those chores alone. For those reasons, I didn’t have more children until my son was 10, I was married, and had a bachelor’s degree. But, as I’ve said, marriage is hard. My husband is a wonderfully hard-working man who has provided for every single need I’ve had, and the vast majority of my wants. Still, there is a lot of compromise that has gone into our marriage. I’m a city girl. We live in the suburbs. I’m a spendthrift. He insists we maintain a savings account. I prefer to vacation four times a year. We take one long vacation alone, and one short one with the children. I like spontaneity. You could set your watch by my husband. After all I’ve given up, I sometimes ask myself why I stay. The honest answer is in a scene in Waiting to Exhale. You know the one where Lionel spends about 10 minutes grooming himself in the mirror, then climbs on top of Savannah without so much as a flicker of her nipple and begins his one-minute sex act during which time he has the nerve to growl with ecstacy. Lionel: Grrr…; Savannah: Grrr?; Lionel: Grrr…; Savannah: Grrr, huh? After Lionel quickly climaxes Savannah thinks: So now I’m a keeper at the damn zoo. Savannah got a big fat zero from that sexual encounter. More often than not I hear women complaining about all sorts of ills happening in their love lives. Men who don’t engage in foreplay. Men who are done too quickly. Men who are decent in bed, but bad everywhere else. Old man sex. The list goes on. And while I am aware that sex is not everything in a relationship, it is a very important part of it. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that my favorite part of being married is the on demand sex tailored to fit my needs. If I had to start dating and having sex again, who knows how long it would be, or how many partners I’d have to go through, to get the sex I’m already getting now. I am truly grateful to be done with the guys who want you to give their strange penises a blow job. And what about the ones always begging you to let them put their strange penises into your virgin backside? Worse are the ones who act like their penises slipped close by your butt on accident, bringing the sex to a screeching halt. There are the ones who have finished sex in five minutes flat then refuse to consider Viagra because they claim it’s all your fault they came too quickly. While I do like a few surprises, bad sex is one I can definitely live without. There are no more Lionel’s for me. From now on, when I want to pack my bags and run for the hills because my husband says, “No more Blahnik’s,” or forgets to take out the trash, or uses one of my spices and then doesn’t file it back alphabetically, I’m going to remember what I do have. I’ll thank goodness for a man who loves me, pays the bills on time, and doesn’t growl 30 seconds into bad sex. It might not be much, but it’s what I’ve got. Grrreat, huh?