365 Nights Page 22

  We had made intimacy routine, rote, customary. Sure, we had managed to throw in a couple of lovely no-kids, weekend-away connections (our awesome trip to the winery) that added some flavor and fun, but for the most part we turned the occasional into the daily. And it was wonderful, this daily date with Brad—even after twelve months of habitual snuggling, smooching, and yes, sex. For sure there were days when I was sick of the sex—I was tired of the same old thing, I just wanted my own space, or I didn’t really feel the mojo all the time. But I was amazed to discover that I was never once sick of Brad. In a way, it was as if I have been reintroduced to this nice man I had married. “Charla, I’d like you to meet the person whom you vowed to cherish and honor. His name is Brad.” And likewise, “Brad, this is your wife, Charla. You might see her every day, but here she is . . . with you at this moment each day . . . with no distractions.”

  I am ashamed to admit a year ago there were days when I was quite distracted and could get quite bogged down in what Brad was or wasn’t doing to step up as a husband and a father. I really had neither the time nor tolerance to contemplate Brad as a person. But this daily gift unfolded many layers of surprising generosity in me. Instead of worrying about what I wasn’t getting from Brad this past year, it made me wonder—besides intimacy, what else was Brad not getting from me? Daily intimacy brought some humanity to our marriage that I didn’t know was missing. You know how those oxygen masks are designed to drop out of the ceiling of an airplane if needed? I wish something like that could happen in a marriage. Because just as we can suffer from oxygen deprivation, marriages can suffer from intimacy deprivation. And like me, you might not even know it until you start to turn blue.

  A few years ago I was at the mall getting the battery replaced in my watch. I was waiting patiently and they finally called my name. I headed to a secured window at the back of the store where they handed me my watch in a black velvet drawstring bag. I reached for my wallet and the salesperson put her hand on my wrist and said to me, “No charge today, just pay it forward.” “I’m sorry?” I said. “You know, pay it forward.” Ohhhhh. Yes, it was about the time of said movie and I had to admit I was immediately touched, completely sucked into this whole idea of paying forward kindness and goodwill. In fact, I couldn’t believe someone had picked me! Had thought me worthy enough to pay it forward! Had seen something in me that made her believe I could keep the tradition going!

  As I walked out of the store into the mall atrium, I was quite caught up in the moment. I was overcome by the desire to pay it forward . . . right that moment. So looking around the mall, I spied a woman standing in front of the fountain. I raced over. She was perched on the side holding a large bulky handbag under her arm. It was hard to tell her age . . . she was definitely older than me but younger than my mom. She looked to be waiting for someone. “Hello!” I announced loudly. She blinked hard and looked at me. “I’d like to buy you some ice cream!” I declared, louder than I probably wanted. The lady looked around and pulled her handbag a bit closer. She squinted as she looked at me as though she should know me. “Um, no thank you.”

  “No really,” I responded. “I really want to buy you ice cream . . . why don’t we walk over to the Food Court and I’ll buy you any flavor you want.”

  The woman looked at me like I was some kind of mall stalker. Meanwhile, I was working hard to close the deal and it was all just coming apart at the seams. I started to blabber to her about how I was trying to pay it forward because the woman at Tiffany who fixed my watch was so generous and I couldn’t break the “pay it forward” chain. I kept insisting over and over to just let me buy her some freakin’ ice cream . . . or at least let me give her the money so she could buy her own ice cream . . .

  She walked off and I trailed behind her for a few steps, calling out to her, still trying to buy her some damn ice cream. In the end, I was left standing there feeling like I had been stood up by humanity, when I was only trying to pay it forward.

  I realized that despite my good intentions, I still appeared like some freak mall stalker (and only by grace did I pick a woman of age . . . can you imagine if I had approached some teenager or kid with my ill-planned scheme?). I had not taken the time to think through the proposition and what it might mean. In many cases, good intentions without proper thoughtfulness make for a giant embarrassing mess or a situation where you are either arrested . . . or escorted off mall property.

  Embarking on this intimacy-every-day arrangement would not have worked either if I had not planned properly. While I knew I wanted to offer Brad intimacy every day, I had to slow down and think through the logistics, the ramifications, the planning and scheduling, the promise of what I was actually offering—and what it would require from me. Was I paying it forward? Perhaps. Although the concept of paying it forward involves helping strangers for the overall good of society, I was working closer to home by reaching out to my husband for the good of our marriage. But it doesn’t make the concept less poignant or less meaningful, does it?

  I am not naïve enough to think that the universal panacea to all marital woes is more sex. What I am suggesting is that frequent intimacy in a stable relationship with a spouse or partner you love and care about brings about a near all-over conversion of sorts, or at least it did for me. I was certainly invested in our marriage before we did this (as one would have to be to embark on such a crazy ride), but I have never been more invested in Brad as a husband and partner than I was during this year. Being intimate daily forced me to be. Before last year, I would have told you that a regular intimate relationship is a nice thing to have—it’s icing on the cake of a great marriage. Not anymore. Regular intimacy in my marriage is now a requisite. I didn’t appreciate what Brad really needed in this kind of intimacy and I had no idea what I was missing. Nearly every day for a year I invested in a physical connection that paid off in emotional spades—we communicated better, we talked more, we had more fun (between the sheets and out of them), and we were teammates that connected more. There is no denying that this might be the best year of our marriage . . . yet.

  Life can be divided up into fragments: infancy, early childhood, school years, college age, working life, marriage, parenthood, retirement; but each of us has moments that stick out in our lives, and define a year, or a decade. The eighties, for me, were all about bad hair and cheesy music. The nineties were all about becoming an adult, and being out on my own. The early 2000s were about starting a family. But the year we both turned forty, hmmmm, how would I look back upon that?

  The summer I was fourteen I arrived home from sleep-away camp. Coming home from camp can be such a letdown. In some ways you are happy to be home, sleep in your own bed, and be around your own stuff. On the other hand, summer camp is way more fun than hanging with your ten-year-old brother at the pool, waiting for all your other friends to come home from summer camp. My parents picked me up in the church parking lot, loaded my dirty laundry into the trunk, and I hopped inside.

  “Hey. Anything happen while I was gone?” I asked. My parents turned down the eight-track, glanced at each other and then at me. “Well, we did get cable,” my dad said.

  “And your cousin Denise got shot,” added my mom.

  Wow. That was weird. I knew there was a right way to respond to this statement, but my mind was just not tracking properly—I was running on a total of fifty hours sleep over a two-week period, had an itchy rash from icky lake water, and had run out of my Body on Tap shampoo halfway through the session.

  “Is she okay?”

  “Um, yes,” they responded.

  “What happened?”

  “Someone broke into the house and shot her.”

  I mean, this sounded like a bad case on Andy Griffith. I demanded that Andy and Barney get to the bottom of this and right now! It was so weirdly strange and obviously troubling. I personally had never known anyone to get shot before (little did I know I was going to get shot in New York—how weird is that?). This was new territory.

/>   That summer simply became known as “The Summer Denise Got Shot.” It just as easily could have been “The Summer of MTV” as we did get cable that summer and that was fairly life-altering. It became an emotional benchmark—a year of initiations—summer camp, cable television, and people you love getting hurt.

  Years later, the season Brad and I are in has become a benchmark of sorts, and I feel it deserves some kind of moniker. “The Year We Saved Our Marriage”? Nah, overblown—things were going fine, at least I thought so until things got so much better. “The Year We Had Sex Till We Thought We Would Croak”? Too over-the-top, and applicable only to me. “The Year Brad Walked Around with a Stupid Grin on his Face”? Maybe . . . “The Year Wifey Lost Her Marbles”? No, we need to save that one for later, maybe when I turn forty-five. “The Year Charla Cracked the Code on Her Marriage”? Hmmmm, we might be getting somewhere.

  But despite my little “I rock!” self-congratulatory dance, I worry about what can possibly come for us as a couple after daily intimacy for a year? At the end of the day, we’re still an average, now middle-aged couple who are still susceptible to the ups and downs that life throws at us. I mean, it’s not like we can have sex every day forever . . . can we? (The answer is no, no, no, NO!) We have to figure out what we can do next.

  Brad and I started out together as a rather smug couple. When we were engaged, we had a great sense of self-satisfaction. We’re “different,” we told ourselves. We wouldn’t be like those other couples who bickered all the time, we told ourselves, as we listened to another couple bickering. We wouldn’t be like those other couples who sat in stony silence at restaurants, we told ourselves, as we watched a couple sit in stony silence. We wouldn’t be the couple whose world revolved around children and 6:30 P.M. bedtimes . . . puhleeze, not us. And we certainly would not be a couple that, slowly and ever so slightly, drifted away from a life of intimacy because our sex life rocked! No, we considered ourselves an enlightened couple. We would be different. We had too much respect for ourselves and for each other to have just any old marriage. (Cue the laugh track.)

  No one aspires to be that couple who bickers all the time, or who sits in stony silence in a restaurant, or who drops everything—even friends and family—to have a baby in bed by dusk. None of us aspires to a bad marriage or a thorny relationship with a spouse. No one intends to neglect a marriage. And no one intends to get married and have little or no intimacy. It often just happens, sometimes when we’re not looking and sometimes right in front of our eyes. And that’s when we realize that being married is really quite humbling. I went from smug to humble in about 365 days—the same amount of time as this little everyday gift. It was a swift reality check when you think about it. I went from realizing that I am not only not different from everyone else, but also that I am painfully, laughably, comically exactly like everyone else. I fell out of touch with my husband and had too many moments when the kids came first and too many nights when I fell in bed exhausted and depleted.

  So, back to Oz. My girlfriends are dying to know: What did I learn? What will I do differently now that I “know”? While I’m not a therapist or a marital expert, I did take one for the gals’ team over this past year. Sure, there were some incredible personal benefits, but what I learned was too important not to share, too life changing to keep to myself. I spent a year down in the trenches of intimacy, friends. It was hot, it was steamy, and many times, it was very redundant. Here is what I know:

  I discovered that despite our busy lives, I do have time for quality intimacy on a regular basis. If I can assemble twenty-four goody bags for a birthday party, do four loads of laundry, answer a few e-mails, shower, empty the dishwasher, take a conference call, and make all the beds before I take my kids to preschool, I can figure out how to take twenty minutes to get up close and personal with Brad. I have time for quality intimacy because I need it as much as Brad needs it.

  I discovered that sometimes, even if I’m tired, or not interested at that moment, or distracted by a dozen other things, I can’t overanalyze whether I want to, whether we should, and what’s in it for me. I just need to say yes. I just have to put on my big girl panties and be intimate with my husband. And I’ve realized that he will do the same for me. The daily tug-of-war in marriage didn’t start in my lifetime; it was around when Eve was offering Adam a fruit bowl. Because it takes two. Because I married a person with feelings and a sex drive and a desire to connect. Because I signed on for this, so I can’t be surprised or resentful Brad wants something, even when it’s not at the top of my list. And I not only have to participate, I need to thoughtfully initiate and really mean it.

  I discovered that despite my stellar performance this year, I can’t rest on my laurels. I realize that while I had sex with my husband nearly every day for a whole year, a year from now it won’t count. Remember the whole time value equation . . . My relationship, in some ways, is only as good as my last tryst. Which is okay, because it all makes Brad really, really, kidlike happy. If you want to see what an adult Disney World would be like (and I don’t mean that in a raunchy kind of way), have sex with your husband more often. Brad was practically giddy—only a hat with mouse ears would have made the picture more complete.

  I discovered that our house is no longer fraught with tension because we’re no longer silently or verbally negotiating whether or not we’ll have sex that day, that week, or that month. We’re both more relaxed and comfortable, and for every married woman out there, that idea has to be a huge stress reliever. Brad likes to think there is less urgency on his end and I think there is less pressure on mine. We both know that intimacy is now part of the landscape of our relationship and we’ve both lightened up.

  An aside: You might think this past tension would have led to some loud confrontations, but here is the funny thing. Before The Gift, Brad and I didn’t fight much, and when we did, we didn’t do it very well. I don’t mean there wasn’t conflict; it was just low simmering conflict, like a pot of hard-boiled eggs on the stove. This was due primarily to Brad’s passive-aggressive nature and burning desire for peace, and my chronic frustration that after all these years he can’t read my mind. (For example: How could he not know that I’m totally stressed out by this church commitment and I just need him to get the kids dressed and out the door—now!? ) It’s not that he acquiesced to me as much as he simply shut down, went on autopilot, and flew underneath my stormy fury. I would go into my seething silent treatment mode and after a few hours—or a few days—we were exhausted. After things had cooled, I would force him to talk to me about whatever my beef was, and we would haggle through some sort of weak resolution.

  Sometimes we would try to “talk through things,” but the bottom line is that I take criticism better than he does. I find this hysterically funny as there are not many areas where I trump Brad, and most are pretty lame, albeit useful. Let’s see, I have better penmanship, I am a far better gift wrapper, I can cook (which is very, very important to us all), I can multitask with the best of them (but this is simply a gift of my gender) . . . and I take criticism far better. And it’s not like I even take criticism all that well—just relative to him, I’m freakin’ Mother Teresa.

  Brad thinks that criticism is an indictment of his character, and it offends him to the core of his being (remember, bringing up errant nose hair was almost cause for couples arbitration). It truly wounds him. I have found that if I preface criticism with some assuring words of support, it helps. This goes something like this: I place my hands gently on his shoulder and I look him deeply in the eyes.

  “I want to tell you something. But I don’t want you to be alarmed, I am not planning to file for divorce over this, and I don’t love you less . . . but could you please consider not putting the grass clippings in a spare trash can to compost in our closed garage, as the compost breeds maggots and a really bad smell?” I then hug him and loudly affirm, “I love you.”

  Sometimes it works, sometimes not, and he snarkily reminds me that
perhaps I should be thankful someone around here is doing some yard work for a change.

  In light of this I discovered that our daily tryst forced me not to be mad at Brad. Believe me, I can’t. I think Brad—and probably most men—could still be intimate even when there’s some argument or disagreement brewing. I mean, aren’t there some great movies based solely on the meager premise of “makeup” sex? I couldn’t have hopped in the hay even once if I was peeved at some spousal transgression. Picture a moment of intimacy with someone who only moments before did/said something that rubbed you every which way the wrong way. See, it doesn’t compute, does it?

  Sex wasn’t going to happen if I was totally cranked up about something. I didn’t have it in me and we both knew it. So instead we were required to be pretty nice and pleasant to each other so that our moments of intimacy were real, genuine, and actually consummated. As Brad’s yearlong gift progressed, I realized that I’d become a lover, not a fighter. Cheesy puns aside, it’s worthy to note because I had to be on my best behavior all the time, not just behind closed doors. I must admit I wasn’t counting on having to be nice most all of the time.

  So as a follow-up to what I thought was an incredibly generous gesture of daily intimacy, I ended up giving even more— something I would not have thought remotely possible 365 days ago: I was crafted into a more gracious spouse (some days by the skin of my teeth, I might add). I became a kinder, gentler wife because of all the things that this experience forced me to do and think about during the course of my day. Not just the logistics, although they were important, but that we needed to work to stay in each other’s favor so that we (well, really I) could deliver on this kind of connection. I was more thoughtful, more attentive, gentler in how I treated Brad because I knew that regular intimacy required me to be in a fairly good place emotionally.