Impatience Is A Virtue
It’s not easy being the primary partner.
The nonprimary partner — well, every date with them is date night, right? One is primped, prepared, primed. Sex-ready right out of the box. The nonprimary partner may also be new and shiny, but most critically, the nonprimary partner is *elsewhere.*
While my relationship with Holly has grown to be far more than “date night,” my sexual appetite for Bryce remains undimmed. I don’t feel right if our sexual bond is not strong. Part of that may be my own conception of marriage; though I’ve grown a great deal by listening to people like David Jay and would never say “I want a mate, not a roommate” anymore, for a long time, I believed that sex was what made our relationship different than a friendship, and perhaps I still do a little. Nonetheless, whether sex makes our marriage “real” or not…
…I still want it.
Which leads us to the enormously complex psychological-logistical issues of sex with a long term primary partner. Our sex life is embedded within our enormously rich and varied life. Laundry, parking tickets, the car, my mother, your dad, the kids, the dishes, the pure cacaphony of domestic life; the XBox drowns out the siren song of lust.
Trying to find the sex in all that is like trying to land a jet fighter on the deck of an aircraft carrier in a pitching, rolling sea.
Nonetheless, we set up for the landing. Bryce prepares the room. Sure, we’re going to gloriously fuck up the bed but that doesn’t mean we don’t make it first. We’re not barbarians. Then there are the candles, and the white-noise machine, and the music, and the careful selection of rope and implements of ouch.
Then he says, “Come in when you’re ready.”
Most of the time I’m still waiting for my mojo to arrive, for that little red dot to appear on the bullseye screen of my libido’s radar.
We’re trying to get matched up, and that’s the part that is different, the part that takes more skill, than it does with a nonprimary partner: matching up our readiness amid the distractions of our life together.
So I end up sitting at the living room table. Thinking. Generally attempting to think of something really filthy.
Bryce is an enormously, almost preternaturally patient man. I swear he could win a staring contest with a gargoyle. But through building his own specific dominance he has learned to cultivate his impatience.
I guess I waited too long.
He comes out and stands in the doorway. I stand up, ready to follow him, but he yanks my hand behind my back and now I’m bent over the dining room table, my nose about an inch from one of the uncleared dinner dishes (broiled trout, roasted peppers, braised escarole with shallots)
He yanks down my panties and fucks me, pressing my head to the table with the palm of his hand, growling.
It feels amazing, even with the uncleared dish an inch from my face.
We triumph, once again, over the circus of glorious domestic distraction that we have built.
Yes, patience is a virtue.
At times, so is impatience.
