365 Nights Read online

  Let me be clear here—we were never some hyperintimate couple. The year our daughter was born, I think my husband could count on his fingers and toes (or perhaps just his fingers) the number of times we even had sex at all. I tell you this to iterate just how painfully average we are. It was good when we had it; we just didn’t have it all that much. Our sex life took a nosedive very quickly after the honeymoon was over, with the arrival of our daughter thirteen months after our nuptials. It was, not surprisingly, an occasional silent sore point between us, until my husband, bless him, convinced himself for the sake of his sanity that quality was more important than quantity. This was an attitude I was grateful for, but we both knew he was kidding himself. And I was kidding myself that it wasn’t important to how I felt as a wife and about our relationship. There was some tension around this, but little time for contemplation as, twenty-three months later, one baby turned into two.

  Since our sex life was indeed fairly abysmal as we entered into Brad’s fortieth year, I wanted him to know that I was willing and happy to make such a huge about-face for him and for us. I wanted this gift to show him that I valued him and our relationship enough to go do something really nutty like trying to have sex every day for a year. Sex for a week? Certainly doable, probably forgettable. Sex for a month? Well, sure . . . a bit more challenging. But sex for a year? Now that was knock-your -socks-off, the-stuff-that-dreams-are-made-of fantastic. And that was the gift I wanted to deliver.

  And the other good news about this life-altering, mood-enhancing, relationship-building opportunity? It didn’t cost any money. It wasn’t some harebrained idea that required us to take our kids out of school, quit our jobs, move to Alaska, and live in an igloo. We didn’t have to take out a second mortgage to finance a trip around the world and take language lessons (Parlez-vous français? ) before we left. We didn’t have to change our lives in order to change our lives. We could keep our jobs, raise our family, maintain our friendships, but our whole marriage could change. And it was legal . . .

  This crazy idea of mine met all the criteria for a great gift— unexpected, thoughtful, memorable, cost-effective, and especially well suited for the receiver. Did I feel as though I owed this to my husband? Absolutely not. But I wanted him to have it and give the relationship a boost in the way that his steadiness had given me a boost. Despite our differences, Brad (Steady Eddie) and I (Big Idea Girl), for the most part, made a good team. I am a born and raised Southerner; Steady Eddie grew up outside Cleveland. Big Idea Girl attended a giant public university, Steady Eddie a small private liberal arts college. I am loud and irreverent . . . Well, surely you’ve guessed Steady Eddie is a solid, unassuming guy. And to boot—I really love him.

  A week later I approached Brad again—it was a few days before his fortieth birthday. Time was running out if we were going to kick this plan into gear. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I still want to give you sex every day for a year for your birthday. You game?”

  “Of course I am—it’s a great gift! I just want you to make sure you feel comfortable with it.”

  “Of course I’m comfortable with it, it’s my idea!”

  He smiled, relaxing into the idea. “How would it work?”

  I was dismayed. “What do you mean, how would it work? Has it been so long since we’ve had sex that you’re suggesting we’ve forgotten how?”

  Brad blushed. “No. What I mean is . . . what are the details, the specifics? Are there some parameters to this arrangement?”

  “Well . . . yes, actually. Thank you for mentioning that.” This is what I came up with:

  We will actually discuss and schedule intimacy. You cannot be married, have a grown-up job, kids to feed, and a house to keep and have passionate, spontaneous connections . . . every day. It is simply not a workable model. You can spontaneously decide to get a manicure on your way home from work or to call your old college roommate who lives in L.A. just to say “hey,” but you cannot spontaneously burst into passionate and smoldering lovemaking in the “married with kids” model. And anyone who is married with kids and says they can and they do . . . well, they are lying. This was a hard admission for my guy, who hangs mightily on to the memories of our courtship, back when kids, mortgages, and yard work did not interfere with our ability to burst into a passionate moment at any time.

  Brad complained that discussing sex somehow detracted from its loveliness. Fiddlesticks, I said. Since I go to bed early and Brad goes to bed late, timing is important. Nothing is more maddening in my world than entering into a hard-earned hour of REM sleep and having someone nuzzle up to you, getting a feel for opportunities.

  Daily scheduling requires some finesse, another adjustment we had to make. Therefore, television does not trump intimacy. This rule works for two reasons. The first is the undeniable and noble defense that anything on prime-time television (or cable, for that matter) is not more important than connecting with my spouse in a meaningful way. The second is that we have DVR, which is a fundamental game changer when it comes to time management of any kind. Now, my husband can pause the football game, I can fold a page in my book, we can have a delicious little romp in the hay, and then return to our lives, already in progress. Quickies count. In fact, quickies often are preferred if you’re doing this daily.

  Another rule was that either party could decline. I have to say that, being a nice girl from the South, I do not think it is polite for me to offer regrets to the party I planned. So I would decline only under physical or emotional duress. And I just had to think my husband would never, ever in a million years (or at least for the next 365 days) decline something that is “so unbelievably awesome” (his words, not mine).

  “So those are the ground rules. Whaddya think?” I asked.

  “I think that all sounds great. I have some more questions, though.”

  “Okay, lay it on me,” I said. “Oops, no pun intended.”

  “What about when I’m out of town? Or you’re out of town . . . or out of commission, so to speak.”

  “Hmmmm, yeah. Why don’t I get back to you on that,” I said.

  Just like learning good study habits can prepare you for a “lifelong love of learning,” we needed to work on the basics. And maybe, if we worked on these ground rules, I would acquire a lifelong love of having sex daily. Dare to dream, right?

  So, back to the ground rules—when Brad’s on the road, there’s obviously no sex. And please, phone sex does not appeal to me at all, nor is it in the spirit of The Gift. We are in this for a physical and emotional connection with our spouse, not long-distance pillow talk. In reality, my husband’s travel schedule is not that heavy, and we agreed to try to “make up for it,” though that is not required, nor will it be tracked and/or counted. No score sheets for us. No play-by-play criticisms.

  That leads us to the rather delicate definition of what counts as sex, and what does not (as Bill Clinton was so famously asked). Well, for the purposes of viewing this as a team sport, we did have a rather liberal definition of what counted as a connection, but it did require active participation from both parties (i.e., both parties had to be awake or it didn’t count). Regarding other issues (you know, the, ahem, monthly cycle or an occasional UTI) . . . well, we would just try to work around them. Of course, reliable birth control was a must, too. And if I really, really had a headache, horrible cold, or some semblance of the plague, then of course no sex. This was not set up to be a marathon or some record-setting contest, mind you, but a considerate and sincere attempt to bond via daily intimacy and connection.

  Once we committed to the theory of this arrangement, Brad went back to his Wall Street Journal, and I went to unload the dishwasher. There was no big to-do. We did not celebrate in anticipation of The Gift, although I wish we would have had some sort of kick-off celebration. Some champagne would have been nice, as champagne is always nice. Instead, I felt as though we had just moved on to the next task at hand. Birthday present— checked off the list.

  While I st
ood sorting plastic forks and spoons shaped like animals, I was reflective. I simply assumed this would enhance our relationship, but I had to wonder: What if it didn’t? What if this was a mistake that ranked up there with my mustache-bleaching incident? What if I couldn’t follow through? What if Brad couldn’t? What if it didn’t do anything to enhance our relationship but simply created stress? What if we grew sick of it and, likewise, sick of each other? What if having more intimacy didn’t really make a difference? And while I didn’t think this experiment could do any extreme damage, perhaps some nice cuff links would have done the trick.

  I mean, on one level I knew Brad wouldn’t do anything crazy like leave me—barring something horrendous like infidelity—he had told me as much. But on another, I didn’t quite believe it. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him—I knew his passionate assertion was from the heart. Rather, I was suspect of any rational person’s ability to make the claim in the first place. How can any of us know what life will be like ten or twenty or thirty years from now? I was committed to the idea of staying married, but as trite as it sounds, there are simply no guarantees, despite wedding vows to the contrary. In some ways this put me on notice—it nudged me out of marital complacency and into this experience, I guess. But what if I jumped out of the complacency pot into the “Oh no! What in tarnation have I done?” fire? Of course, we’ll grow closer, I thought, how could we not?

  I was getting a little jittery, and it occurred to me more than once, as we approached Brad’s birthday, that perhaps these were issues I should have considered earlier. Ah, hindsight.

  JULY

  Fireworks

  “Honey, what if we don’t like it?” I asked.

  He looked up from the paper, distracted: “Don’t like what?”

  “Like having sex every day . . .”

  He smiled. “I don’t know about you, but in my case . . . I think it’s pretty close to genetically impossible for me not to like having sex every day.” He looked a little more intensely at me, trying to read me: “Are you changing your mind?”

  “Absolutely not! I’m just . . .” I hesitated, and then continued, “thinking through some things.”

  “I don’t know, sweetie, it sounds like you’re backpedaling. Just say the word, and we go out to a lovely birthday dinner for two and call it a day.”

  It was an inauspicious start to Brad’s birthday. We were on our annual vacation in the mountains at my parents’ house. Dreamy, huh? Wait, it gets better . . . In addition to my parents and my children, my brother, his wife, their toddler, and their new baby were there, too—a family affair, to say the least. Très romantique, non? So this was not exactly a secluded, lovey-dovey place to kick off having sex with your husband daily for a year, but hey, a birthday gift is a birthday gift, right? It was a standing tradition that we spend the week of July Fourth up in the glorious mountain town of Asheville. Not even my offer was going to push this trip aside. Perhaps it was sleeping in my old bedroom on July second, the night before Brad’s birthday, that made me worry whether I could pull off this endeavor. It had been redecorated since I’d moved out, but my flute was still in the closet, along with my high school yearbooks and my wedding dress, professionally cleaned and packed away for who knows what.

  Surrounded by the stuff of old dreams and tossed-aside possessions, I had some lingering doubts as I surveyed the site of what was to be our first attempt at intimacy every day. I mean, if I could throw away my daily commitment to that flute so easily (and I did . . . snap, just like that), couldn’t I just as easily dismiss this whole 365-nights-o’-pleasure thing? I didn’t want Brad to think that I was reneging on my offer, because I wasn’t, but I did want to be honest with him. What if we didn’t make it? What if, instead of this being the great year that I had envisioned . . . it turned into the year where Brad chuckled and said, “Char, remember when you made me that great offer and then retired twelve days later?”

  Arg.

  Brad’s suggestion of tossing aside my birthday offer and enjoying a gourmet dinner sounded nice, but it would be only marginally adequate, and we both knew it. I took some nice deep breaths, centered myself, and got back in the Sex Every Day Zone. I could do this. I had promised some serious once-in -a-lifetime action to my husband and I could not be an Indian giver on this one.

  This reminded me of a time during our engagement when I was backpedaling for a different reason. Brad was engaged before we met, and I was a little unnerved by that, not because I had concerns about the former fiancée, but rather, what if he changed his mind about getting married, again?

  “I won’t change my mind,” he told me over and over again with extreme patience.

  “How do you know?” I asked. “You thought you had it right the first time. What if it’s not right this time?”

  “Because I know. Because I’ve been there. Because I know what it feels like to feel right. You should know that there is nothing you can ever do that would ever make me leave you.”

  “Really? Nothing?”

  “Nope.”

  And that exchange changed the course of our relationship. From then on, I worked harder to make sure that this lovely man who would never, ever leave me had a great life, not in spite of me, but because of me. And while I failed miserably at times, he had faith in me. I had tempted him with this offer of my own making, and he let me know that he wasn’t going to let me do it unless I really wanted to. This was all the reassurance I needed. “Don’t be silly. It’s going to be great.” And with that, I was ready.

  There was much to do to prepare, for the actual birthday, I mean. In addition to Brad’s birthday, my family gathered to celebrate birthdays for my brother and my daughter. We were surrounded by a dizzying number of birthday dinners, cakes, celebrations, and gifts. There was a whole red, white, and blue color scheme going on, which has always bummed out my baby brother, who swears red cake icing tastes different. He should know as he’s had a red, white, and blue birthday cake every year for the last thirty-four years.

  Fourth of July parades, cookouts, fireworks, and family birthdays, and you’ve got a fairly typical July vacation with the Mullers . . . one big, happy family affair. But this year, things felt different for me. Sure, I was nervous about my gift to Brad, but I was also excited. I’d never taken on this kind of commitment before that hadn’t fizzled out. Besides employment and marriage, I can’t think of anything I’ve done for an entire year—by choice.

  “How in the world will you do it, Char?” I asked myself. There were so many variables to manage—time, energy, availability, nosy kids, ringing phones, housework—the list of distractions was really, truly endless. Even though we had worked out some of the logistics beforehand, the best-laid plans can go amiss. Normally, our mountain vacations included dinner with friends, lots of time at the pool, golf for the guys, some shopping, and serious family time with my parents and brother. Now, we had to incorporate a daily tryst in a bedroom loaded with tons of nostalgia, including a giant nightshirt from high school tucked in the drawer, ready for wear. It featured a mammoth pink ice cream cone and the words MY DIET STARTS TOMORROW emblazoned on the front. That bedroom did not at all ooze romance, I tell you, including the fact that it was attached to our kids’ room via a bath.

  But despite my worries, this annual mountain retreat became a giggly, sweet, and fun reintroduction to some revved-up intimacy. The only questions we had to answer were: “Will we do it this morning, this afternoon, or this evening?” I was more relaxed about the chances of our kids interrupting us, because they were so preoccupied with cousins and grandparents and all the play, fun, and games they could ever want, they wouldn’t for a moment wonder where we had gotten to. In fact, there was so much chaos and entertainment in that house that no one missed us a bit when we slipped upstairs on our own. I’m happy to report that we did indeed make our kickoff a little flirty and definitely romantic, even while in the mountains with my entire family. Do wonders ever cease?

  Some say that it
’s very easy to be happily married on vacation, but it’s much harder to pull it off in the real world. Which is why honeymoons were invented, don’t you think? And of course, it’s true. On vacation, the stress of everyday life dims in the background of being together. There was no homework to finish, no lunches to pack, no clothes to launder, no meetings to staff, and no conference reports to write. Instead there was golf, massages, long walks, longer dinners, great wine, reading the newspaper, doing a puzzle, and the chance to sleep in (but who can actually sleep in anymore, right?). Even on the drive home from vacation, you can still bask in the glow of a great time together (until your kids get carsick driving down the mountain). But the memories remain. And in our case, the memories of our summer vacation in Asheville remained, too.

  However, when our big SUV rolled back into our driveway, the sweet vacation was over. It’s amazing how quickly the thrill of vacation is stripped away by forty-three messages in your e-mail box, thirteen more on your voice mail, a spastic cat who is mad that you left and madder that you came home, pounds of mail piled on your counter and sliding onto the floor, some dead plants, and a slightly weird house odor (I know you’ve had one, too, don’t deny it).

  It was crunch time—I had to figure out how to live the chaos of everyday life and how to keep my promise to my husband.

  So I started at the most logical point—my to-do list. Like everyone juggling marriage, kids, a husband, a semigreat career, a house, church commitments, preschool events, and the occasional girls’ night out, my hand cramped before I could even finish writing the list. My to-do list is a work of art, by the way. It is created by hand each week and has three key areas: a day-by -day list; a list of things I need to get done on any one of those days; and a work section that lists all my business commitments. I cross-reference my Kinko’s photo calendar with my weekly to-do list to ensure I’ve not missed anything, and both tools accompany me almost everywhere. As a result, I’ve got a day-at-a -glance, a week-at-a-glance, and a month-at-a-glance. (I thought about a minute-at-a-glance, but I know when to say when.)