The heat is brutal here, and it's messing with moods a little.
And, frankly, this morning I feel like I'm starting to slide back into that over-pursuing mindset a little bit. My wife was feeling sick Tuesday and Wednesday, then much better on Thursday, and I wanted to make love that night. It was clear to my wife what I wanted, and when I came to bed, she was reading a mystery novel. She told me she was just about to find out who the killer was, so I snuggled in next to her and waited for her to find out. A couple of minutes later, she closed the book (the killer turned out to be a patient of the protagonist's parents who blamed them the for a medical procedure gone wrong years before, apparently.) By this time I was getting the impression that we were not going to be making love. I tried to spend a little time self-soothing, and I decided I was still in a pretty good mood and might as well go ahead and find out a definite yes or no. I think about what would be fun to do if it happens tonight. She asked if I'd minded waiting. "No, I was just lying over here thinking." *Pause.* "What were you thinking about?" "Just a fantasy." *Pause.* Pretty sure the pauses are her waiting for me to say more. Not going to do it until she asks. Even if she says no, I figure, I'm going to enjoy the game and leave her with something to think about. "What were you fantasizing about?" "Nothing elaborate. Just taking your clothes down just far enough to hold you down on the bed and eat you out." "Oh." "Yeah. I was imagining how you'd squirm and giggle and kick your feet and fight so hard to get away, but you were giggling and gasping, and we were having fun, so I'd just wrestle you and hold you down and just keep doing you until you came. Actually, it was simple, but it was a pretty good one."
She was lying with her head on my chest by now, and she turned to me and said "OK, I want to tell you something, and you have to listen carefully, OK?" "Sure." My hands were wandering, but I really was listening to her. "OK. I'm tired. I'm not . . . really . . . in the mood right now. But I'm willing to try it. OK?"
Now, this is my post, so I'm going to point out here that not so long ago, I would have resented this. A couple of years ago, if she'd said the same thing, I'd have had to fight the feeling that she didn't really want me, it was insulting for her to "force herself to be with me." She even threw in a "Well, you always say I should do it even if I don't think I want to, so . . . " That would have started an argument before. Maybe she half-hopes it will start one now, but it doesn't, because I know I don't always say that. I don't think I've actually said it for months, and it was actually MWD's idea, not mine, but I know all that. I'm not going to argue about it, because the bottom line is that it's true no matter whether I always say it or not. And experience has taught me that it works and brings us closer together, so if she feels a little anxious about it beforehand, that's OK. We'll both feel better in a moment!
And we did. I told her I understood and I took over. I laid her back and went to it, and we had a lot of fun. Interestingly, I didn't act out my fantasy . . . I moved toward doing oral, but something told me that wasn't what she wanted (still not sure what it was) and as I moved up, I found we both wanted something else.
Several great things ended up happening:
First, and I don't know whether others here already know about this, but in the last couple of months I've started doing something new. My wife has never been able to reach orgasm from intercourse. It's not a huge issue for us, because she still craves and enjoys intercourse when she's in the mood for sex, and because I really enjoy oral and manual sex, so I bring her to orgasm by stimulating her clitoris. But I had a problem with premature ejaculation for years, and I'm only now starting to feel a release of performance pressure and finding that it allows me to last longer. What I've started doing recently is to slide my penis between her labia, but too high up to actually enter the vagina. This slides the shaft between the lips and against the clitoris, on the outside of her body. Apparently this is REALLY good clit stimulation, and it makes a penis feel pretty excellent, too. It's also hands-free and simple, and the risk of doing this unprotected is acceptable to me (I have a love-hate relationship with condoms nowadays.) I'd never heard of this kind of thing before, and I discovered it more or less by accident one night while trying to tease her while she tried to get a condom out.
Second, and more importantly, my wife's reluctance melted away in about 20 seconds and she was completely absorbed in sex with me. This happens every single time we do this "just do it" thing, and it no longer surprises me at all--one reason I'm so happy to do it now is that I know that the sooner we begin, the sooner her mood will spin 180 degrees and she'll be panting and snarling at me like a cat in heat. What *does* surprise me is that she apparently still finds this surprising or worrisome, as evidenced by her comments before we began. I don't know how many times she has to have it proven to her before she accepts that she's sexy and sexual even if she's not walking around fantasizing about sex all the time.
Third, I felt really good about the way we handled another "problem"--I lost my erection. Well, actually that's probably the wrong way to say it. She came, I didn't, and my erection went away. The thing is, I don't mind that so much. Lately I've been a lot less focused on reaching my own orgasm. If I come, I come. If I don't, that's really OK with me; I'm having good sex and the orgasm isn't that big a deal. So, there we are in more-or-less missionary position (which gets a bad rap, but let's face it, it's fun to have sex face-to-face.) By this time I'm wearing a condom, which I frankly don't like much. When I was younger, I'd never had sex without one, and I didn't get why people complained about them. When we tried to have a child, we spent two or three years without condoms, and I found out what everyone was raving about. Now I hate the things, but they're a necessary evil until we either have one more child or decide not to do so. The point is, the condom really de-sensitizes the penis and it does make a difference. More than that, by this time I'm really concentrating on my wife. I'm balanced on one hand, using the other to slide across her clitoris in various ways while still thrusting deeply. She's doing her thrashing, gasping thing that I love so very much, and it builds to a fantastic orgasm. We go through the whole process of her orgasm together, and I'm in heaven. This is beautiful, and I can't help but growl "NOW who's in the mood?" in her ear. This is all wonderful. I don't know if it happens because I've put all my focus on her and sort of forgotten the sensations from my penis, or because I felt so connected when she reached orgasm that I felt a profound release myself, but for whatever reason, my erection softened as we lay there together for a moment. I figured I was done, and I was happy. I started to move away.
But she looked at me quizzically. "Did you finish?" "You mean, did I come? No, but really, it's OK. I feel so good . . ." She smiled and took my penis in her hand. I'd thought I was satisfied (and maybe a little tired out!) and ready to snuggle in beside her and sleep, but I was wrong. She had me hard and aching in a moment (maybe it really was just a matter of changing the focus) and we came back together until I came. I think I'm beginning to move past the need to have an orgasm every time I have sex, though. I think the less sex is centered on physical release of a pent-up physical drive, the less you have to worry about whether you reach orgasm or not. It gives me the freedom to figure I'll do it next time or the time after that if it's important, but enjoy what I'm doing right now in this moment. What I liked about that moment was that I was satisfied and happy, and she was the one who reached out and playfully insisted that there could be more (without words, but the intent was clear in the action.) I don't know whether she completely believes me when I tell her the orgasm doesn't matter as much to me as it used to, because she'd be right to think that's a big change for me in only a couple of years and also because I think it's still very important to her that if we're going to have sex, she's got to check all the boxes, including orgasm, or she failed at sex somehow.
Anyway, I know I said I was going to write about my worry that I'd been slipping back into that sex-starved mindset a little bit, and here I've gone on about being happy with this and that and the other. I sort of think these things through further as I write, and it gets long and involved in a hurry. Next post, I promise. I don't know how many people are reading this anyway, but it seems like my thoughts make more sense to me after I've written about them.
