Since that first summer together when I was charmed by every flag shade, so much has changed. We’ve weathered a global pandemic, moved three times (internationally, nationally, and same zipcode), shouldered an emergency cesarean surgery, a mostly-alone home birth, job changes, and the usual stressors of life.

When I think back to our happy-go-lucky courtship, we seem like different people. So I wondered, were all the things that captivated me about my (hopefully) lifelong lover still present in him?

Here are the green flags that woo’d me and whether my husband still waves them:

He was a sweet drunk

When he got drunk, he was the guy who’d sit smiling from his own thoughts, his legs crossed on his bar stool. He might want to pick up a kebob. But he always just wanted to go home, crawl in bed, and snooze. If I made a move, he’d delightedly follow my lead, but mostly we’d have uber-intimate morning hangover sex. I’d only seen him get non-sweet drunk once. He was angsty over class injustice, and said things like “Fuck em, ya know what I mean? They’re all bastards.” It was still sweet!

And he still is.

Our drunk selves do reveal our inner worlds, don’t they? He’s still just as cheerful, and just as interested in a good night’s sleep. We get fewer kebobs in Brooklyn, but we’ll have a cheeky cheese and biscuits after our rare nights out. With our years, I’ve of course seen him angry, but even in our fights, I know he’s a sweet one.

He planned dates

He baked a plum cake for a park picnic in the middle of a pub crawl. He bought tickets for a gig he thought we’d enjoy in the moment, and as a longer-term introduction to each other’s tastes. I appreciated his initiative and his commitment to what he loved — music, food, and the amble of it all.

He still does, kind of.

He’ll orchestrate an afternoon rock hunt with stops for paints and pint (singular (he’s a responsible parent)), culminating in a craft hour at home with our kids. His ideal amble now includes our offspring, so we plan fewer date-dates, but fortunately for both of us, our ideal ambles are complementary.

He read aloud to me

A seafaring turn-of-the-century tale over coffee, hungover in bed. A random page of a hardcover original McSweeney’s collection over tea before meeting friends at the pub. It was years before the ‘performative male’ meme, so I had no reason not to be dazzled. He did subdued character voices. He paused when pauses were apt. I was charmed every time.

He doesn’t any longer.

The only things he reads aloud to me lately are things he’s written. It’s maybe more sweet. But less romantic. We have fewer of those leisure moments to fill with idle happenings right now, as parents to young ones. We prioritize to save our sanity. But I know one day we’ll find this habit again.

He had his own hobbies and interests

He had a collection of guitar loop pedals that he tinkered with regularly without ever feeling the need to record a track. He got lost in Wikipedia holes. He lifted weights and went to the swimming ponds with his guy friends. He frequented punk shows with his gal friends. He made pasta by hand because it tasted better, but when he had it from a box, he had his preferred brand. He was discerning. He prioritized joy, well-being, and fun for those reasons, not status or some shit.

He still does.

He finally transcribes and publishes some of his creations. But he still enjoys the ephemeral: He’s currently working out the best pizza dough, and he recently perfected the breakfast burrito.

He shared (well recc’d) art culture with me

After our first date, he gave me the recently published Convenience Store Woman. I adored it. He texted me, “‘Venus in Furs’ is so Abigail.” It was an accurate representation. He texted, “This made me think of you,” with the link for “Maria’s Theme” by The Liminanas, and I understood why. It touched me. He suggested we watch La Piscine, and we viewed it side by side on his pink corduroy loveseat. From these recommendations, I knew he knew me, and I knew I wanted to keep knowing him too.

He still does, kind of.

He’s the chooser for 90% of our post-kid bedtime evening viewings. He’s our lingerie shopper. He recently told me I “had to” listen to The Kink Machine, an audiobook by the FT. He was right; I did have to. Our diminished time for leisure and dates has impacted personal explorations, so we send each other fewer things, and when we do, they’re much more functional (sex, work, leisure). I’m sure we’ll spread ourselves more toward the gratuitous (which is never where sex is slotted, lol) soon enough.

—

To me, these were standout characteristics of a compelling mate. There are many more, of course: He had many real friendships. He had a real job and ambition, but he knew how to slack off. He listened. He cared. He wasn’t a poet, but he knew how to express his feelings enough to be vulnerable.

Lucky for me, he’s still the man I fell for, just with a few more gray hairs.

As for my red and green flags, well, I asked him. I’ll share soon. xx

I’m wishing you a love filled week, dear reader. Did you catch my last pieces — the summer erotic reset, or the sex story as demonstration of the hot potential of hetero communication gaps? If something related to this current piece interests you, consider this:

The solstice has passed, and here, in Super El Niño USA, we’re on the eve of a holiday weekend. By every metric of time, it’s time for our next seasonal erotic reset.

My first one made the case that even though ‘tips’ are homogenous BS, everyone (even me) benefits from the occasional jolt to their routines.

For the vitality of my sex life, I’m prioritizing the following four pieces of erotic wisdom as I summer with my family in Minneapolis.

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He grabbed it.

“Grab it harder,” I said. “Jiggle it.”

He did each with progressively more heart but never quite the whole.

“Am I too demanding?”

“No, you’re not demanding.”

I felt relieved.

“But sometimes I just don’t get you.”

That was also a relief to hear, because I didn’t expect it. I was glad to know he understood the lack of understanding.

I felt misunderstood. And I could tell he felt misunderstood. It was always in that order. Because he never went looking for this information the way I did. Then, when I felt it and came to him with my sad feelings, looking for affirmation gracelessly, he got confused. When he was confused, he was not himself.

I could be inconsistent. He was never. I could be irrational. He thought he was never.1 But he could be.

This is what girlfriends are for, I thought to myself on the better days. But some days, I wished he could do it all. He’d never fool himself into thinking that doing it all was possible. But I could.

“This is all connected to the same part of you that burns you out,” he said.

He wasn’t wrong.

“You’re not wrong,” I said.

I had a hard time prioritizing when it meant offloading things I found important. And I expected him to do the same. But to him, that was insanity.

“I look crazy,” I said a few days earlier, looking at a photo he sent me of me holding our kids.

“Well,” he said, with a glance.

I laughed. “You’re saying I’m crazy?”

“Well, I’d be crazy to say you weren’t.”

That’s what inconsistency, and the nonmathematical understanding of what can happen within one hour of human time, looked like to someone reasonable. Good thing he wasn’t stupid enough to believe insanity was a problem in and of itself.

We communicated in different languages sometimes. We could be a trope of gender stereotypes. But it wasn’t all bad — he knew what I wanted. And I knew him. Even if we drove each other mad from time to overly-stretched-time.

I put my shoes on as dinner was served. He set the plates in front of our kids. I kissed their heads.

“Bye mom, I love you!” they said.

Then I left, walked down the sidewalk without headphones in, and found my friends at the end of my journey.

I got home after a few margaritas, some tears, and some laughter. The dinner plates were empty, still sitting where I’d last seen them. The kids were asleep.

My heart felt rosy, my body light. My headphones pumped funk music into my temples.

My husband found me smiling at nothing. Then I pushed him down onto the couch, as I wiggled an unintentional lap dance to the funk music only I could hear.

“What are you doing?” his lips moved.

“Shhh,” I said, thinking he didn’t have to know, to know.

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As I type this, I have three days of accumulated summer city life on my body. Layers of sweat on my sun-shined shoulders, car (and emotional) exhaust on my neck, park dirt on my shins, and some other dried brown film on my knee from when I kneeled while helping my kid out of a climbing frame. It’s not that I don’t appreciate cleanliness. I do. I love lying with nothing on my body — no clothing and no random brown film — on and under clean sheets, rubbing up against my husband Joe’s clean, hairy body. I just don’t prioritize cleanliness. I don’t require it.

I still feel sexy with dried salt and grains of sand on my scalp. I am capable of arousing myself and feel capable of arousing others with a knotted ponytail. If I held up my arm right now, I’m fairly sure Joe would tongue my unshaved armpit. But my dirt endurance is more than anyone’s approval.

When I fell in love with my husband, he probably had some type of oral bacterial overgrowth. I could taste and smell it when we kissed. He loved to tongue my mouth when I had sweat dew on my upper lip. The first time I remember this filthy make-out was the first morning after I slept over at his place. After we woke, I rubbed my teeth with my finger and his toothpaste. In a park an hour later, I let him French me that way, even though deep kissing wasn’t really my thing. But when his irregularly aligned teeth bonked into mine as his tongue petted the roof of my mouth, it excited me. Maybe it was our exposed insides, or the imperfection and rawness of it all.

The filth got worse when we became parents. We prioritized fucking before cleaning the dried rice from that night’s dinner. I prioritized my children over myself. I showered more infrequently. We had sex just as frequently.

I thought it was relatively harmless, but I’ve had opportunities to learn otherwise. One time, while our eldest child was one or so, my husband fingered me with unclean, unmanicured hands. I got an internal scrape and a yeast infection that lasted for months.

After we recently moved, we had drunk feral sex. His tongue moved from my clit to my ass hole and back so many times that I got, drum roll, a yeast infection. It was hot in the moment, but in the end, it was not.

After this last occurrence, I drew the line on tonguing succession. After the first occurrence, I suggested he stop biting his nails. The filth slowly stopped arousing me, but I hadn’t yet gotten an aversion.

When I was young, someone told me that rubbing soap on my vulva could promote, you guessed it, yeast infections. These post-douche PSAs and the awareness that my bacteria were self-cleaning were my laissez-faire facilities-management origin stories. But it was more than logic, as it was more than water-saving environmentalism.

I’m not righteous about my infrequent bathing. Although I do think that obligatory cleansing borders on indoctrination,1 and the root of shame.2 Technically, the genuinely pure is impure.3 All symbols of purity — the lotuses, lilies, and lambs — are coated in debris, contaminated rain residue, and bee vomit. Greater than any potential filth kink, or filth tolerance kink, is my belief system: I reject the concept of purity so deeply that I subconsciously prefer to be filthy.

I do clean myself. I even find a bath erotic. Joe and I loved visiting the Hampstead ponds and having a natural bath with the ducks and algae that first feral year together. With our current closest bodies of water, the active EPA Superfind Site, the Gowanus Canal, and the East River, I’ve taken to our indoor bath.

Preparing myself with a soak, scrub, and an oiling is a celebration and appreciation of my body. But my body doesn’t need extra celebration. Bolstering my confidence was never more important than pushing away suitors who might have been averse to it. Part of my filthiness is a strategic rejection of purity, to repel those who would require me to shower pre-sex, which I only consider permissible in extenuating circumstances. I knew that type of partner wasn’t compatible with me, so I didn’t accommodate them.

Those courtship days are long gone, and in their place are parenting days. The constant, my filth. Although a change may be near for the same reason as I’m sending this newsletter later than usual.4

Yesterday, I woke up in clean sheets, the three-day brown knee smudge gone, this essay sat without an ending in my Drafts, and a pain throbbed throughout my body. Despite feeling clean, I was rocked by my second stomach bug in a month.

It’s not a coincidence, of course, that we’ve been potty training my youngest during this time. It might be a coincidence that I sucked Joe’s dick three nights in a row (Father’s Day Weekend triple header5), two of which followed him sharing a bath with my two boys. Whether the specific cause of my pain is the bath cock, the traveling yellow toddler potty, or that three-day brown knee smudge, I know the overarching issue is myself.

Many sweaty hours in a bathroom and many more curled around myself in bed provided ample time for reflection. Is it because I didn’t wash the backs of my hands? Is the Trader Joe’s soap not antibacterial? Did I not wipe every part of the potty? Or was it the doorknob? Should I have thrown away all the knickers with accidents? The contemplative pose upon porcelain, in a sweat-wet pajama shirt, also leaves one feeling as asexual as humanly possible. Why did I ever find exposed insides erotic? Do I need to ask Joe to shower before sex? A more horrifying position than the fetal one. Then, I know how to finish today’s essay.

Before I ever met Joe, a friend told me I was “very tidy.” I side-eyed her. She said, “I didn’t say clean.” My face was fresh. I didn’t often shower or shave, but my pubic and armpit hair were in cute, contained little mounds. My kitchen counters were wiped with a natural product that probably wasn’t protecting me as well as it protected the environment. Has my preference for toxin-free products left my home ironically uninhabitable for humans? So many parts of myself have changed since that conversation, but not my state of cleanliness.

I am filthy. It was a sexy thing. It was a belief-system thing. It was a self-protection thing. Now, well, I am not so sure I want it to be a thing. I’d like Edgar Degas’ visions of bathing to supplant the PSAs in my psyche.

Recently, Joe and I started flossing together. It’s sexy watching him prod his gums. Seeing it, I imagine his longevity expanding. Us growing old together. I winced this morning, keeled over on the couch, “I want to grow old with you,” I said. I was thinking about all the ways he took care of my kids and me that morning. I was thinking about how great a partner he was, filth and all.

Filth or not, I want to be the same.

But ask me again when my baby wipes his own butt.

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Thanks to The Cut’s comment section on this piece about Alex Cooper, host of Call Her Daddy, and her pregnancy, I don’t have to wonder. Plenty of people see a woman who celebrated slutty singledom opting into conventional motherhood, and they read it as betrayal. Cooper’s listeners (of which, full disclosure, I am not one) want her to apologize. To repent for leading them down a path she didn’t follow to its end. I find that insane. Let me explain.

If People Didn’t Change, Who Would We Be?

When I knew I was falling in love with my husband, Joe, I was scared. I thought I’d figured out myself, and love. I was comfortable as a relationship anarchist. I didn’t need commitment. I was 27.

The moment before I realized, I was standing at the Clapton Overground platform on my way to get drinks with Joe near London Fields. My boss called. The wind whipped my hair in my face as she said the team would love me to move to New York City. She remembers this call. She said I was aggressive. What I remember was an intense, overwhelming wave of confusion.

Logically, moving to New York for this job was exactly what I wanted. But leaving London meant leaving the person I was about to get pints with for the seventh Friday running. On the phone with my boss, I wasn’t ready to admit this to myself — that I, the woman who loved being single, wanted to do something monogamous. I was so emotionally constipated that instead of saying, “I’m so glad you’d like that, I’d like it too, but I need to think about timing,” I said something more like, “I thought you were fine with me being remote? Are you not fine with me being remote?”

I’ve found it’s common to see betrayal when really what you’re feeling is confusion. I wasn’t ready to admit I wanted something I thought I never would. I wasn’t ready to change. But clinging to what felt comfortable wasn’t who I was either. So a few weeks later, I told Joe I loved him.

One’s Relationship Status Doesn’t Negate Another’s

I loved being single. Being single rocked. As a single woman, I learned who I was. I learned to love myself, and after a lot of practice, I did it very well. So well that when I found someone worth sharing the limited resource of my time with, I discovered that loving myself and loving another person who loved me back was also — key word, also — a great thing.

Being single is no better than being in a relationship. They’re both great choices for different people, or for the same person in different seasons.

When I tell people that I loved being single, it says nothing about my marriage. When I write about how brilliant this relationship feels, it says nothing about how I once felt being single.

The trouble isn’t which relationship status one has, but the contentment one has with their relationship status — or, really, the contentment they have, period.

Your Relationship Status Says the Least About You

I started Happy Endings partially because I was stunned that a “modern feminist” could feel so satisfied inside a traditional system. I’d expected to find contentment difficult. What I found was the opposite: partnership lifted my life. I don’t want to convince anyone to follow my path, only to show it’s possible. The marriage wasn’t the point. It was the sex, the love, the joy, and the navigating of pain, together. Sluttiness isn’t relegated to singledom. Mothers can be whores, too.

At its bones, Happy Endings is me as my friends have always known me — oversharingly honest, slightly provocative, and a sap for love (of the self, and others). Even when I was in a codependent relationship that should’ve ended earlier. Even when I was in the midst of heartbreak and wishing I wasn’t single. Even when I embraced the solitude.

And when I hear Call Her Daddy acolytes annoyed at the host for “abandoning” everything she applauded, I hear myself on that Overground platform, talking to my boss.

No One Can Tell You Which Relationship Style is Best For You — Not Even Past You

When I’ve felt dissatisfied, I’ve been quicker to feel misled. It’s easier to blame than to make a change.

To deal with dissatisfaction, I’ve learned to investigate it. To look inward for what feels lacking, and find a way to give it to myself.

Sometimes that meant breaking up. Sometimes a therapist. Sometimes getting really obsessed with karaoke, or a haircut, or a new job working for an alternative to conventional porn. Sometimes it meant admitting I loved someone even if it wasn’t logical.

But like most moments that require self-reflection, these decisions (minus karaoke and the haircut) are fucking hard. Knowing what’s best for yourself isn’t quick or painless. It’s a never-ending, ever-unfolding process. It can feel like backsliding when you measure yourself against everyone around you, and it takes even longer when you’re pouring all of yourself into someone who might not be loving you well, because you don’t yet know what that looks like.

It’s far easier to keep doing what you’ve always done. Easier still to swap internal validation for external: to take your cues from someone who seems to have all the answers. A podcaster. A friend. Especially in a world that is increasingly challenging to thrive in.

So when that person makes the human, progressive decision to change, the people following her who are dissatisfied with their own lives feel hurt. The person who helped them outsource their self-acceptance stopped validating their choices. Choices that might be great for them, or not, but nobody but them will ever be able to say.

The last time I was annoyed by someone changing, I threw my own pity party — outside the comments section, thankfully — and then I looked in the mirror and asked myself what I actually needed. Then I forgave myself for not giving it to myself. I didn’t ask for anyone to apologize.

As I won’t be doing myself. My husband thinks I apologize too much as it is (I’m a Minnesotan!), and that piece of advice feels useful to me. And as for Cooper — she said, “Choosing motherhood in my 30s doesn’t erase the right to have enjoyed my 20s.” Who can argue with that?

I love that you love love, too. Thank you for reading, dear person. I will see you again on Monday. In the meantime, drop me a note — tell me your trajectory, or opinion, or perspective on unapologetic versus apologetic behavior:

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I don’t think anyone can argue that the best time to enjoy some face sitting is when you’re in the mood for face sitting. But there is much debate over the best way to enjoy face sitting.

If there’s a wide (or widening) pussy and a horizontally inclined consumer nearby, the following are my recommended face-sitting postures, in unranked order.

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My vagina is the same.

When I’m my horniest, my vulva spreads itself, and I have an urge to spread myself further. I know my lips are parted. I can feel them thickening and dampening. I want to reach my hands back behind my butt and put my fingertips where my vulva reaches my thighs and pull myself more open.

I want a wide pussy.

I want the place between my legs to feel like a black hole with gravity so heavy nothing near can escape. I’m the gatekeeper to a pleasure-obsessed, ever-expanding horizon.

I love my wide pussy.

When I feel wide, my husband says I don’t *feel* wide. I asked him after he made a few confused faces as I described this sensation. He said, “You feel pillowous and juicy.”

When I pressed my husband about what “pillowous” meant, he said, “It’s like the inverse of anal sex.” When I pressed him about what that meant, he said, “Like the opening isn’t tight, but the inside is plumped up and constricted from blood flow.”

I said, “Like warm, firm, slippery pillows are pressing his penis in 360 degrees.”

“Sure,” he said.

Talking about wide pussies feels revolutionary in a thin-preoccupied, loose-pussy shaming society. But that’s not why I’m doing it. I’m doing it because I love a wide pussy.

We could take the obligatory nod at human creation. But that’s not why I’m writing to it either. I love my wide pussy because it feels incredible.

Having a wide on feels incredible.

Thank you, reader. I hope you feel some deep wanting this week that spreads your whole heart wide open.

If you’d like to continue reading Happy Endings, might I suggest these recent pieces:

• a massage during a blowjob leaves us both renewed

• fantasizing about someone new comes in many (secure) forms

• play two sides of a paradigm, sexually: are you the corrupt or the incorruptible?

Or these vaginal pieces:

• actually, really, touching a vulva

• kissing bloody vulvas

• a pussy smorgasboard

But I looked up from my phone. My husband sat there, on the couch, with his legs crossed. His ankles always look so cute with his bunched-up white cotton socks.

I was on the carpet, one knee tucked up by my chin. I stared so long that the blue light went out.

He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. He looked handsome with uncharacteristically grown-out facial hair. His chin had more gray hairs than I’d realized.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he said.

“I love you,” I said. “You look good.”

“I don’t feel it.”

We had that in common.

Receiving is active, I thought. Doing nothing, especially when you’re not feeling good, is tempting. But that would give me less than something. And we both needed something.

I’d written the note in my phone during a post-massage haze a few days after we moved. I’d seen the masseuse, Melissa, for years. On this visit, she’d told me what she’d told me before: how pleasant it was to massage someone who participated in the treatment, who breathed deeply instead of tensing, who pulled attention to the tight spots as her hands did. I’m sure that when I was a baby massage client, I just lay there and took the touch. Or worse, subconsciously clenched and fought the care. But practice makes for understanding, and I understood it was time for another, related technique my husband and I have practiced.

“Do you want to rub my neck and shoulders as I suck your dick?” I said.

“How could I say no?” he said…

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So you don’t have the time to coordinate the physical and emotional logistics of a sexy third-party rendezvous, but you’d like some “more the merrier” erotic excitement? Well, I’ve got a few ideas for you.

We don’t have to add “ish” on a monogamous label to find the prospect of a new entity in our bedroom enticing. Neither do we need an actual entity in the bedroom to enjoy that specific seduction.

Here are three things my husband and I have enjoyed, which I dub “Threesome Lite.” Based on chats with my IRL subscribers (aka friends), I have a hunch this will appeal to at least one of you:

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The first time I was asked to have my vulva kissed, I said, “Oh my gosh! Are you serious? That is so disgusting.” I was wrong about that.

I was also wrong about kissing other parts between my legs. The best oral includes my husband eating my arsehole, but I used to be too squeamish. That fear of dirtiness was evidence that I was living too much in my mind, but it’s so much hotter to live in your dirty body.

I was wrong about Disney adults. I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve the side eyes. We all deserve to consume a well-crafted happy ending.

I once told an ex that “I only do things for two years.” The self-deprecation was accurate, historically, but I was wrong. I mightn’t have been good at commitment before, but I welcomed longevity when it felt right.

Which might be why I didn’t want to move, as I shared last week. But I was wrong about our new apartment. It was the right call. My husband, Joe, was right.

I was wrong about the longer walk to my kids’ school being a problem. Now, a walk through my neighborhood with my family is an obligatory part of my routine, instead of a bonus to fit in.

I was wrong about this apartment’s bathroom being shit. Prioritizing a too-big bathtub at the expense of floor space proves the renovators had better priorities than I. Hopefully, living in this space will teach me to inhabit that excessive self-indulgence in more ways than bathing, which, I can already say, inspires hot sex (with lots of parts kissing).

I am not sorry for being wrong. I find my abject failures comforting. Like how I feel now in this new, beautiful apartment, which I tried to fight against. Some of the best experiences ahead of me, I’m not yet capable of noticing. And, without the help of my lovers, I may never be.

Or as my husband and kids said last night over dinner, “Sometimes everyone is a wally.”

What have you been delightfully wrong about?

P.S. this post is a happy anniversary wish to my friends, and ’s, reading series, Late to the Party! Joe and I celebrated with a packed KGB Bar last week, right before we moved. Click on their Instagram to see a disposable camera photo of us with red eyes.

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I’ll see you in your inbox again on Thursday for a Praxxxis post — upgrade to read the whole thing.

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He was an old man, very short. He stood to the shoulder of his daughter, who had box burgundy hair, who stood to my shoulder. But the second time he told me, “It was from ‘75 to ‘95,” I was sitting, so they wouldn’t have known.

Both times, he asked me if I owned the building, which was flattering, given that it must be worth 5 million, or maybe it was just a generous assumption from someone hoping for commonality. I said, “No, we rent one floor,” both times. But the second time, I added, “But we’re actually moving next week.”

I didn’t know we were moving when I first met him.

“Why is that?” they said.

“The landlords want their daughter to have the apartment.”

“Oh,” they said.

I said, “We’ve been lucky to be here for five years,” then my face got red, as it had every time I discussed the move, from trying to hold in my grief.

The daughter who could’ve been my mom smiled sympathetically.

This conversation transpired on our last Friday in the apartment. My kid, Henry, was playing in the dirt – a small patch of garden to the side of the stoop. I watched him smash a large chunk of cement against smaller chunks for an hour. There were a dozen piles of dust by the time the old owner arrived.

Our new apartment is on the second floor, like our current one, but it won’t have a little garden. It doesn’t even have a stoop – just two steps. I used to complain about this garden. I often said that Brooklyn dirt wasn’t real dirt; it was dust from all the car exhaust and sidewalk garbage off-gas. But now, seeing the smashed cement on top of the dirt, I knew that wasn’t accurate. It was all finely crumbled rock, but it was fun nevertheless.

Speaking of things turning to dust, the same day our landlords gave us notice, our eldest neighbor died. Someone set a four-foot Mets baseball-shaped floral display on their stoop, where he waved to us over the last five years. He’d say, “Hi, baby,” to Henry. Then he did the same to our secondborn, Louis. Then he stopped calling anyone in my party “baby.” Then we stopped seeing him outside.

When the old owner of our building stood outside our garden, I saw tears in his eyes, too. But he also smiled. Our two inner experiences didn’t make for great chat, so he said, “Well, I wish you all the best!” I smiled and said, “Same.” Then a neighbor girl, Henry’s age, walked up with her dad and said “hi” to Henry. She told us she was going to have Italian ice from the bakery around the corner. I almost stopped them to share the news, as they were one of the few neighbors I’d not yet told, but it didn’t feel like time yet. With them, I knew our relationship would be the same. Smiles and greetings on the way to the school, where all our kids would continue to go.

As my eyes traveled from the little girl back to Henry in our garden, I caught the eye of a man whose gaze I usually avoided. A helicopter overhead cut off the words from his mouth, but I smiled, looking at his mouth and the American flag mask around his chin, as if I heard him. Then I heard, “I never used GPS, but I always got where I needed to go.”

I said, “As we always do, eh?”

He nodded back and smiled.

The thematic resonance occurred to me mid-sentence, and my eyes and face reddened for the second time in fifteen minutes.

He was holding a pizza box from the shop around the corner. My family goes there nearly weekly.

“Good old-fashioned fun,” he said, nodding toward Henry. “You don’t see that much these days.”

“Yeah,” I said. Then my red eyes welled up, so I just smiled and nodded. The unmasked man noticed, I think, because normally he didn’t walk away without a discussion of Jesus, but that day he did.

The day our landlords gave us notice, a different miracle happened. A baby was born down the road. I knew because there was a human-sized plywood stork with the infant’s name and birth date out front. They do that for people who’ve lived in this neighborhood long enough to know the person who has the stork. Or, that’s what I assume. We’ve only been here five years. It has been my kid’s whole life, though, so maybe their kids will have a stork if they stick around.

The baby was born in the apartment where Henry’s best friend’s dad grew up. Her grandpa reminds us of this most Tuesdays when we see him at school pick-up. The building is supervised by Larry, who does handyman work for our landlords on the side. He fixed up our apartment before we moved in and will fix it up after we leave. We met Larry at Thanksgiving at our landlord’s apartment, underneath ours. They invited us the year Louis was born. He was one month old and had never left this building. Larry smiled at our baby, which was when I noticed he was missing his front four teeth. He’s been smiling more and more around me these days. Like the other day, the day before my second encounter with the building’s old owner, when Larry gave me advice on where to move, despite knowing we’d already committed to a spot. He thought our rent was too high. He told me to speak with the magician who lived around the corner. He said he’d help me get a good deal. But nothing in this neighborhood near our kids’ school with two bedrooms goes for less than $6,500. “We even toured places for $10k,” I said, “And a dozen people applied on the first day.”

My husband, Joe, found our new apartment just three days after our landlord gave us notice. He’d spent those days looking at a dozen places in person, after surveying Zillow, StreetEasy, Compass, Craigslist, etc., etc., etc., and even combing back through the last two months of rentals, for information’s sake. “This is the best we’ll find,” he said, after we looked at the apartment without a stoop. But I wasn’t ready to commit, let alone consider. All I could see were the negatives: a 20-minute walk to school instead of 2 minutes. Joe said, “A two-minute walk isn’t an option anymore.” And I said, “But it could be, if we waited.” I wanted to wallow for longer. The grief of the news wore hard on me, but the stress of the instability wore hard on him.

A lot has changed around here since we moved in in 2021. The neighborhood now ranks among the 5 highest-rent areas, says the newspaper of record. So much so that the neighborhood we had to avoid when house hunting previously is now the one we can better afford. Our local pizza shop will change. Our local bodega, too. Our neighbors. Everything, really. And also, nothing. We’ll walk past our old block on the way to the same school. More importantly, we’ll be together, of course.

My kids were concerned about our things – the couch, their toys, the TV.

“We’re taking everything but the fridge and stove with us,” I told them.

“My stuffies?”

“Of course, the stuffed animals are coming.”

“My bed?”

“Yes, the bed too.”

But as the weeks between notice day and moving day went on, they started saying things like “I’ll miss this apartment. I don’t want to leave.”

I said, “I know, baby. I don’t either. But sometimes life goes on like this, even if we’re not ready. We just have to trust we will be when we land.” And they didn’t respond, which I didn’t blame them for, because even my own words felt insufficient for myself. So I said, “And if we’re not, we’ll have another cuddle.”

I’ve never found it hard to trust the universe. Even on notice night, I cried on Joe’s shoulder, but I didn’t want to fight it. It was sad. I didn’t want it. But it was what was happening.

There were many times in the last five years when I thought about leaving, though, and finding a bigger spot with more space, a dishwasher, and a laundry machine. But I knew my control-freak nature was trying to exert control during upheaval, like when my husband needed a new job. Or when my body shrank too much, then lost a pregnancy, then grew larger from another. So I deleted the Zillow app and made myself celebrate what I already had in front of me. The tiny apartment where we cuddled through thick and thin.

Once a move wasn’t an option but the only option, I didn’t seek control through action; I wanted to do nothing at all. My husband and I’s different coping mechanisms seemed like a positive at first. I could have a little cry and keep the house moving while he invested all available mental space into the house hunt. But once I realized that meant more major life decisions would be made without my direct oversight and direction, the quaint idea of being an easygoing woman who entrusted the universe and her husband to carry her through existence evaporated. The inner control freak had a death cry. I felt like a kid. I felt like a trad. I wanted to sabotage everything, subconsciously. But I didn’t. I chose to trust the man I found smarter than anyone I knew, the man I felt was meant for me in ways that defy the laws of probability, even though it felt like a knife in my gut, which felt like the first time I’d really trusted anything, ever.

I kept mumbling, “What if it’s the wrong choice. What if we’re not happy there? What if the little issues build into a big, unresolvable issue?”

Joe said it was the right choice. And if it were wrong, we’d figure it out.

I was, I am, afraid how a new space and a new neighborhood might rock all the good we have going. I can’t help but feel like our happiness is my responsibility. Self-dependence isn’t an issue, of course. Until, or unless, it pushes you away from the people you want to be happy with.

Last night, on our last Sunday at our apartment, all four of us sat out on the stoop. I picked up a pop for each of us from the bodega. Our kids ran over from the garden patch with dirty hands to collect their Martinelli’s sparkling apple juice. I tried to crack open the glass bottle of Coca-Cola for my husband on the fence, but failed, so we shared my Italian orange soda.

“I’ll miss our orange home,” Henry said.

“Home. Miss. Me too,” Louis said.

We packed all that weekend. Rented pink boxes with vacuum-sealed stuffed animals and board books in towers through our 750 square feet.

Our neighbor, Tom, a gay man in his 70s who was our kids’ first non-familial friend, walked up from their basement laundry.

“You’ll have your own laundry soon,” he said.

I smiled. It was true. Come Thursday, we’ll have a dishwasher, laundry machines, a few more square feet, and a view from the bedroom window full of trees and vines and fire escapes. We’ll be near Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Hudson River. We’ll have an office to sequester into during video calls.

When we told Tom about the move, he called our landlords rats.

“I loved living here,” I said. “They’ve been good to us. It’s just a bummer.”

He agreed.

Joe said, “We’ll still bring you pavlova. And Henry will come weed your garden.”

We gave Tom a homemade block print today. It was of a home with a flower. Henry wrote, “We’ll miss having you as a neighbor,” on the back. Then we saw that little girl come out of the apartment above Tom’s. Her parents said Tom told them we were moving. We talked about it, and I didn’t get red or teary. Maybe it was because I’d finally taken down all the kids’ art from our walls. Or that we’d reached a percentage of packing that made this home no longer feel like ours. Maybe it’s just the exhaustion, and the exhaustion-influenced argument Joe and I had last night. Or maybe it’s the Aeon card reading I did for myself and Henry’s best friend’s mom, which told me that I’d been viewing this move as a prison sentence, but it would create the opposite – not punishment and solitude, but togetherness.

I wanted certainty that we’d be happy. But how can I ever be sure of anyone’s feelings? All that mattered was being together. This tiny apartment did that for us because of its limited space. And of the life and death that transpired here. It’s hard to see how it could get better. But it’s always hard to see what you haven’t seen before. To get where I need to go, I can’t use a map.

The first time I met this building’s old owner, my boys crawled out of our wagon, and Joe hefted grocery bags onto his shoulders. The old man stood there, looking up at the burnt-orange-painted brownstone with his family. I guessed that looking at the home he spent twenty years of his life inside would feel a lot like looking back in time. You can’t be within what’s passed.

We wrote a letter to this apartment: Thank you, house, for taking care of us. We love you so much. You did a good job helping us grow and pop out our boys. We’ll always remember you fondly. We wish we didn’t have to say goodbye. But we know it’s time.

We each signed it: Henry, L~~~~~, Joe (Dad), Mom (Abby)

Maybe we’ll get to walk past in forty years. Maybe my kids will be tall. Maybe I’ll only reach their shoulders. Maybe I’ll remember when they only reached my hip, or were born from between them. I bet I’ll think about how lucky we were, we are. To be here. And to keep growing, together.

Thank you for being a part of my non-geographic community, and thank you for reading the ramblings of a tired mom who has bonked her head three times this week.

I hope that your world is more zen than mine, and if it’s not, or if it’s even more chaotic, know I’m with you.

All my love I have to spare xoxoxoxoxo

The hottest role-play doesn’t involve a nurse costume, step-family trope, or a handiman script. Dressing up as Barbarella is fun, don’t get me wrong, but that superficial play is never as erotic as the sex that excavates your Self.

My husband and I’s secret to role-play is that we treat it like Individuation.

It’s hot. It’s deep as fuck. And it has exponential erotic benefit.

We don’t have to be full Jungians to recognize that archetypal characters reside within our psyches. Within myself, I have the mother, the maiden, the child, the hero. I wear a persona mask intentionally and unintentionally. Both my shadow and my ego are present in my life, and especially in my sex life. (If you’ve read the Happy Endings deep cut, “The Psyche is in Sex Position Preferences,” you’ll know how.) These are heavy topics that I could sit, clothed with a stranger, analyzing. But I’d far rather strip myself back literally and figuratively with the love of my life.

My husband and I do this via character-driven archetypes. This isn’t something we named literally before delving in. We didn’t create scripts and roles. It formed naturally. One of us took on a persona, the other took on the mirror persona, we got frisky, and by the end, we found ourselves with a greater understanding of our individual wholeness and collective connection. After this happened a few times, it became a favorite, secret, role-play style.

Here are a few ways you (with a lover, or on your own) could do the same:

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I’m not above the allure of a gift, so I bit. I watched a few of her reels. It entertained me.

I told my husband about her that night. He didn’t quite get what “high vibration” meant, so I did a little performance.

“Hi, babe,” I said, breathless with a head tilt and eye flutter. “I took a moment to reflect on my mood lately. I know I haven’t been the positive, peace-spreading wife you deserve. I’m going to do better for you.” I pinched my entire face like those cutsie people do.

He put a hand on his crotch. He thought I was initiating role play.

“Okay,” I said, dropping character. “Now fast-forward a week.” Back in character, I said, “Hi baby, I’m so grateful for how well you take care of me. I know you feel the same. For Mother’s Day, I’d like a Porosus Birken. You can choose the color. I love you!”1 Then I did a couple air kisses, without touching him.

This, as thirty minutes of research taught me, is a high-vibration woman. She is dutiful, but has boundaries. She’s positive femininity incarnate, but with an undercurrent of masculine authority. The kind of woman who lets her partner order for her, but only after training him with overt and subversive tactics.

It’s a little hot. But it is not me. That’s why my husband assumed it was roleplay.

I am not a high-vibration woman. I am not constantly cheerful. When I spread peace, it’s after I’ve spread a low hum of anxiety. My vibrations are in flux. I contribute high vibes to our relationship and home life, but they’re intermittent. And if I aspired to any stasis, it would not be high. I aspire to be a low-vibration woman.

A low-vibration woman, as my imagination defines it, has an uncurated personality not because she’s ‘cool’ or anything, but because curation itself is far too much energy for her. She is too consumed with savoring the (sometimes sweet, sometimes sour) flavors of her inner and outer worlds to even have a preferred restaurant order, let alone deal with the orchestration of instilling that in another human. She’s a gently plucked C minor on bass. A head rocking to Lana Del Rey.

I complain. I have moods I don’t conceal. And never aim to. Sometimes I lean fully into said moods and do a wee pity party and pout. This isn’t an inconvenience to deal with in private and wrap up in toilet paper to discreetly dispose of like a bloody tampon. It’s opportunity.2 For my spouse and children to see me dust myself off, do a dance, move on, and through. Not in a manic pixie way.3 The low-vibration woman does these things intentionally because she is too lazy to deal with the repercussions of suppressed emotions – how they build into ugly things like resentment and numbness and loss of self – and she knows that concealing these feelings, or pushing through them rapidly in private, deprives both herself and her partner from being/seeing herself. Which is also laziness – she teaches and trains simply by being.

Yes, this means that my stress vibes send my children into flight-or-cling states, and makes my husband say, “What is wrong with you?” in that way that makes me glare and say, “Nothing!” until I’m ready to explain (once I myself recognize what exactly is wrong). The low-vibration wife hums up and down, and because of the lack of resistance to the downward hum, she maintains a grounded wave. The kind that feels like a children’s smile and fresh lake breeze. Not a fluttered eyelash. She rolls with and through her emotions, letting that low frequency keep her closer to the floor rather than manufacturing an airborne state.

I don’t want to elevate my home. I like to bring my husband down, ideally to the bed or couch, but the ground works too. Isn’t that also hot?

The impulse to hide our ‘bad’ vibrations from a partner is understandable. But being bratty doesn’t make me a bad wife. It makes me an honest one. One who doesn’t require a strategic, manufactured perfection to train my spouse to provide me with my desired gifts, or baseline safety and acceptance.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t shit on transactional relationships. Every communion among humans is defined by give-and-take, and those who realize this are often better for it. But I like my exchange to operate on a separate plane from my state of being.4

Aspiring to be a ‘low-vibration wife’ isn’t an avoidance of personal growth. I long for an evermore reliable state of zen, an increasing aptitude to notice my triggers, pluck the chord I’d rather vibrate at, and to more gracefully express fear. Like the other day, when my husband said, “Oh, did Henry pee already?” and I, in the midst of fear manifesting as anger, said, “How could you possibly think that?” I don’t want to be snappy, or even the less hostile version, snippy. But I would never, ever, consider intermittent moodiness or any non-exclusively positive vibration to be a bad thing. Expressing myself with unmanicured insecurities allows my partner to see me, so he can know me, and help me be a better me.

Some people are, as I’ve been fortunate enough to witness, innate positive angels. Bless them. But even angels experience strife! And angels deserve a patient partner to bear witness to their bitchiness, too. Because then, with their full demigod humanity in view, perhaps fewer people will expect others to be exclusively heaven-sent, and fewer people will pretend to be perfect themselves.

I am positive. I do exude peace. But high vibrations aren’t meant to be constant.

It’s not just me, it’s science! Good vibrations are only ‘good’ in short doses. Low-magnitude, high-frequency vibrations help with pain, circulation, relaxation, and even (unsubstantiated claim!) DNA repair or curing diseases. But turn that high wave into a high magnitude, or a full-time high-vibration, and we no longer have a useful, or even entertaining frequency. We have tinnitus.5

Perpetual high vibrations are not human. The front makes me wonder what’s hidden.6 Pretending, outside of the container of roleplay or showtime, is a lie. It is non-disclosing parts of oneself for a convenient narrative. It’s diminishing one’s wholeness into palatability. That is a fear-based behavior, too – constructing oneself so loved ones stay with them, and reward them with luxury goods as evidence of their value. And it is manipulation. It’s a strategy, not intimacy. Besides, the partner who expects perfection in mood is the person who doesn’t accept imperfection in the physical. And who wants that?

I want a partner who takes me at my intermittently bitchy, and realizes it’s not only a natural ebb on my zen cycle, but also an opportunity to coquettishly request his steadfast guidance. Which is what my husband thought I was doing that evening when I told him about the high-vibration wife.

First, I sucked his dick, and then let him fuck me, but I never let him use me, and had strict guidelines for how he could touch me. The sex was fine.

My husband said in the morning that he found it confusing. He felt he had to treat me a certain way, and he’d rather be himself – a man who likes his bratty wife in the streets, and wounded bird in the sheets. A man who likes to use me, and doesn’t mind if I do the same with him – because in that mutually selfish dance, we become even better, together. Knowing him – and getting to see his fantasies, and the fears and insecurities behind them – is more valuable than a Birken. Genuine intimacy is priceless.

I don’t know that beautiful freckle woman’s real relationship, only what she shares online, but pretending to be her reminded me how lucky I am to be me.

Thank you for reading this exhibition of love. I hope it’s brought aspirationally accessible amorous living to your life. Your support — whether in paid subscriptions, likes, comments, shares (publicly or privately) — is immensely appreciated. I’m sending love to you (literally)!

The soundtrack for this piece is, unsurprisingly, the following:

I called it Monster Mommy. I haven’t done it in a while. I have new tactics. But I used to get down on all fours and growl a little, and the kids would scamper from me. Sometimes we’d all laugh, but sometimes they’d say, “Please stop.” So I would.

This might seem cute, or it might seem troubling. I consider it a coping mechanism.

The new coping mechanism looks like this:

After lying on my back in a child’s size bed for an hour, I said to my husband, “Can we go to sleep?” I was crabby. I was shattered. I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

He said, “No, babe, it’s a quarter to nine.”

My brain moved in such a way that it needed to do the math. A quarter is fifteen, minus 9:00 equals eight forty-five. I couldn’t argue with him — it was too early to go to sleep. But I wanted to argue. So I squatted and pouted at the edge of the couch that he sat on. I had a lip a bird could poop on, as my dad used to say.

“Why are you being so cute?” my husband said.

“I’m not being cute. I’m pouting,” I said with a glare.

“We can’t go to sleep before 9:00,” he said.

I hmpf’d. “If you’re going to make me stay up…” I said, unsure how I’d finish the sentence, “You need to pound me awake.”

He chuckled. “Is that right?”

I watched his little cheeky smile form, which was probably the reason I said it in the first place. I like to be monstrous to him. To get a rise out of him.

Then he said, “Look at your cheeky smile.”

“I was looking at yours,” I said. I crawled toward him. I raised up onto my knees. The pout still on my bottom lip. Then, without thinking about it, I punched his arm.

“Is it going to be like that, then?” he said.

“Does this hurt?” I said. I braced my fist in its best, untrained form, and punched him again.

“No,” he said, smiling an extra cheeky smile. I could see the child in him.

“How about this one?” I said, punching the other arm. He tensed before that one. I could tell he felt nothing. It didn’t frustrate me, though. I liked it like that. And I knew it would be so. We did this whole routine now and again. He found it silly, and it comforted me to remember that no matter how hopelessly unrestrained I was, it wouldn’t move him.

“And this one?” I said. But as my fist moved toward his chest, he grabbed my forearm, mid-air. “You bastard,” I said. My eyes felt alive, but I squinted them like the whiny, pouty bitch I was.

Read more

When I want to feel horny but don’t want to meditate on erotic thought-starters while listening to Divinyls and circling my hips like Patrick Swayze, I get non-sexually literal and touch myself.

Not nipples or lips or pelvic creases. No treasure trails or ears or erogenous zones. No spanking or tickling or flogging me softly with his suede fringe.

This is my list of the sort of body parts, and how to touch them, that gets me straight where the hottest orgasms live — in my body. This is my go-to for when I’m craving arousal, but it’s evading me slightly. Try one or all six… I think you will enjoy them, too:

Read more

He smiled. “That was out of nowhere,” he said, grabbing his can of Modelo.

It was. But it wasn’t. Earlier that day, I decided I needed to determine whether my new boyfriend would be the right father for my children. Because three weeks before, we stopped using condoms. A few times, we hadn’t even pulled out. It felt great. It was exciting. It was closeness. It left a noticeable need for discussion.

“As you may have noticed,” he said. “I already am.”

I huffed a laugh from my nose and took a sip of my mezcal margarita.

We were at a restaurant in Mexico City. The trip was to visit a friend of mine. But the day I booked my flights was the day before my new boyfriend and I started having unprotected sex, which was two days after we verbally declared what we’d nonverbally known – our mutual love for one another. We didn’t want condoms or oceans between us.

“Would you circumcise your child?” I clarified.

“Honestly, I don’t have strong opinions on the matter,” he said.

“That’s a first,” I said, with a wink.

He and I always talked, but rarely about us or our future. We talked about ideas and didn’t always agree. But that week, we hadn’t had much time alone, let alone time to talk alone. My friend was with us. She took the bus in from a more distant village and stayed in the Airbnb I booked. For seven days, the three of us did everything together except sleep.

Back when she and I lived in the same Midwestern town, when she and I were concurrently healing from juvenile heartbreaks, we’d sometimes even sleep together. It was messy. Life was. We drank and danced and tried to grow up, but sometimes it was down. When we both moved to different countries – she followed a guy, I followed a job – I thought it was a good thing.

“I have a proposition for this meal,” I said.

“Beyond the eight courses of tacos?”

“Yes, and beyond cleansing ourselves of this trip,” I said.

He laughed.

The vacation wasn’t fun. It wasn’t exactly meant to be. I’d warned him of this in advance. I said, “It’s an intervention masquerading as a reunion. You can be my moral support.”

The man my friend followed to Mexico stopped sharing his heart with her soon after her arrival. Her preexisting condition, a dependence on spirits to maintain her spirits, filled his place. Back in the Midwest, I never acknowledged that. I knew she was hurting. I wanted to help. But I also didn’t want to push her away.

On our reunion, she wanted it to be like old times. But it wasn’t. The first night, she blacked out and tried to kiss my new boyfriend. The next day, she made sure he knew she’d done even more with me. “She must have told you,” I heard her say when I got back from the bathroom. I hadn’t.

I apologized to him that night in bed. I didn’t want to stir shit up. I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to say what needed to be said when it needed to be said, but I was still figuring out how.

Our server arrived. “Are you ready to order?”

I said yes. Then my new boyfriend ordered us sixteen tacos.

We were seated next to the window of the second floor of a converted warehouse. I looked out past the streetlights below us. Wind blew in, bending the tea light’s flame sideways. I thanked the server as he left, then I looked my new boyfriend in the eyes and said, “Given our recent foray into unprotected intercourse, I wondered if you’d be up for discussing the hypothetical questions someone like me would discuss with someone she might have a baby with.”

“So,” my new boyfriend said. “Circumcision.”

I smiled. He recounted how his English mother took him to a Mohel in Derby to remove his foreskin. It was too tight and made his urine spray. He said he’d prefer his theoretical son to avoid that pain, but he was open to his partners’ perspective.

“Boy or girl?” he said.

“Good question.”

I knew we should have discussed whether a pregnancy was wanted before reciting the recipe for procreation. But it was better late than never. I wasn’t sure I felt that way about my period. My period was late, but nothing about me was regular. My family and the friends I once depended upon were buses and plane rides away. I was in the midst of starting a monogamous relationship, even though I considered myself a relationship anarchist. And despite the madness of being prepared to create life with a man I met months before, I was not worried. Not about myself.

“Not a boy,” I said.

He said, “I think it’s natural to want what you know.”

“How did you feel after that circumcision anyway?”

“I thought the Rabbi turned my tip into a lychee fruit,” he said.

“How did you know about lychees at six? I hadn’t even tried mango until I was an adult.”

He told me how his dad would surprise him and his siblings with exotic fruits “like coconuts” for special occasions. I thought about my friend’s parents. So many of her stories included them not being around.

I asked, “Do you worry about your parents’ influence on how you might parent one day?”

“What do you mean?” he said.

I told him about how I didn’t really know what moms were like in private. I saw moms on TV, my aunts at parties, and my friends’ moms when I was a guest in their home. But I wondered if I was missing some fundamental experience.

He said, “Parents don’t have to be perfect. They just have to be there.”

I smiled to myself. We agreed on this.

Ever since he’d taken me to meet his aunt in his hometown the month before, I knew family was at least not not important to him. But very little in our lives could have shown me whether our idea of parenting – and even, if it came to that, co-parenting – was compatible. And given all death and distance taught me about depending on the status quo, I wanted to know if our contingency plans were compatible.

I kept swirling the last ice cubes in my watered-down cocktail. I asked if he wanted to try it. He said it tasted like “ham juice.” I couldn’t believe he’d limit the flavor of smoke to meat.

Our first tacos arrived. Chicken. We both liked them. The next was steak. He liked it, and I thought it was fine. The bean one, the opposite. He had another beer. I didn’t.

We spoke about private education, childcare, and date nights. We knew we knew so little, but our hearts were in good places, I thought. Not equivalent perspectives, but compatible.

Carne asada was served. Then cactus. Pescado.

I wondered whether my friend’s bus had gotten back to her town safely. If her dog was waiting for her. I wished I could’ve kept following her. I wondered if I was wrong to bring my new boyfriend. I knew she’d have done the same, but what did that mean? I watched his eyes grow soft as the restaurant’s lights dimmed. The tablecloth tickled my bare thigh.

“I have another question,” I said.

“I’m ready,” he said.

“Talking hypothetically here,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Ten years from now. We have kids. You’re not happy. I’m not happy. We decide there’s not much else we can try other than separating for our mutual joy. How do we manage this?”

He nodded as he wiped his mouth. He scrunched his eyebrows in a way that told me he was thinking, not judging. I took a bite to conceal my eagerness. This was my only dealbreaker.

“This is a good question,” he said, continuing to eat.

“I think kids need their mom. So that would have to be a priority.”

“What if I moved back to Minnesota?”

“Then they’d have to be in Minnesota.”

It was what I needed to hear. And I didn’t think that’s why he said it.

“And, you know, if I died,” I said, looking down, but aware his face pinched up in worry. “Would you keep my dad in the picture?”

“Of course,” he said.

I smiled toothlessly. He did too.

“Do you think you’re pregnant?”

“What would you say if I were?”

“You know, it’s mental. It’d be insane. But,” he said. “I’d be excited.”

“I feel the same way.” My stomach felt light, despite being full. Then sick, for feeling excited for my future while worried for others. “I’m probably not,” I said. “It’s just a few days. I blame the stress.”

“It’s sure been something.”

“Thanks for coming,” I said. “You really got a glimpse of my past.”

“We all have one.”

On our winding drive from the restaurant, I texted her: Let me know when you’re home. I love you.

She responded: I’ll be ok. I love you. Abby = Family.

Then: BTW, I like him for you.

After my new boyfriend and I got through airport security, we went to a convenience stall to buy water bottles and saw pregnancy tests behind the counter. I asked the airport kiosk attendant for a “prueba de embarazada,” and blushed. Not because of the purchase, but because I was unsure if that was the correct phrasing. The Spanish word for ‘embarrassment’ is so similar to the word ‘pregnancy.’

She smiled. She understood me. She was so happy for my new boyfriend and me. She didn’t know we weren’t pregnant.

Flying back to London, my new boyfriend, Joe, shared his headphones with me. I leaned my head on his shoulder as he clicked play on “Waterloo Sunset.”

We started trying, or at least not not trying, the next week.

That’s all we can do.

Soundtrack:

Thank you, reader.

You could be doing a million things, but you read this, and I’m sincerely touched to have spent that time in your head.

If you’d like to keep me in your thoughts, check out the below. If you’re on to the next moment, may love follow you.

When I’m an object for them, I retain independence of mind. Chairs are free to think chair thoughts while upholding chair responsibilities. But frequently those thoughts are on other chair responsibilities.

So, I’m a chair.

I like to be my children’s radio. If they want to listen to someone counting to 999, I count. They count along. I’ve sang row row row your boat for hours on end with a sore throat while driving on a highway at night through road construction and torrential rain. It comforted them. I teach them. This pleases me. Plus, it’s meditative.

I do set boundaries. I no longer night drive with babies.

But mostly I am a mother object. Even with a sore throat.

I pick up snacks for them. I pick up snack wrappers after them. I pick them up from school, then unpack their snack boxes.

I heat their bodies in bed in the morning. I heat their bodies in bed at night.

In the mornings, I think how am I so lucky? It is a truth.

On some evenings, I lie on the dirty part of our dining room rug, and tears spring to my eyes, not from sadness, but exhaustion. It is a truth.

When I reflect on the exhaustion and consider offloading some of these duties, the thought brings the sad type of tears to my eyes.

So, I’m a tap.

I read somewhere it’s the estrogen that makes me do this. It elicits a sacrificial response for women of childbearing age.

But even as my battery, with its diminishing endurance, recharges on the dirty rug, I know that if the ‘mother object’ were a pill, I’d take the drug recreationally. In fact, on drugs, I’ve reclined in far worse. And then, there was never a five-year-old who found me, reached out their hand, kissed my cheek, and said: “Here, lovely mother, let me help you stand back up.”

Then we lie on his bottom bunk with his little brother on my other side, and read a book that I used to find a terribly dangerous tale of self-sacrificial generosity.

And as my children drifted off to sleep, I thought to myself, take my time, my mind, my body, my apples, my leaves, my branches.

I have everything. I am a mom.

P.S. I also enjoy being an object for my husband. You may consider any of the following part two:

Buying something to fix a problem is a coping mechanism I’m not unfamiliar with. The whole parenting industrial complex runs off of it. Call it my Midwestern work ethic or my learned, lower-middle-class thriftiness, but I actively fight this impulse.

I know I could’ve saved myself a lot of discomfort if I’d just bought an umbrella attachment for our stroller instead of jimmying a couple into the crevices. But when it comes to my sex life, my self-dependence has served me well.

Nobody can buy their way to better sex. A vibrator can help you come, of course, and my husband and my lingerie habit is not cheap, but no external tool (neither our new silicone dildo nor any garter belt) has improved my pleasure so much as internal work.

It’s not sexy. But (stay with me!) it will be sexy.

To feel things I’d never felt, these are the things I prioritize(d)1:

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That thing you each put your mind and heart and body against, beyond each other. It could be your obsession with weightlifting, or being amateur critics for your local music scene, or crossword puzzles… It doesn’t matter what, but I’m starting to believe that if one wants to feel close to one’s partner, a shared preoccupation is a prerequisite.

The relationship itself is, of course, a group project. The ultimate project, if you will. And for that highest pursuit to be satisfactory at worst and stimulating at best, an external activity — for which you both share interest, and have the potential for passion and excitement — is necessary. Because in those superfluous, not explicitly relationship-coded, pastimes is when two people connect. We’re in this random thing together, and so we’re in it together.

It’s not exclusive to romance, of course. It’s why half my friends I’ve met in writing groups. It’s why corporations that only care about profit, and want their employees to make them as much money as possible, still spend money on random bonding activities because they know they’ll be more committed to their colleagues if they take a pottery class with them.

It’s why in films, to visually demonstrate two characters quickly developing a closeness, they cycle through home-building vignettes. The couple is painting, then assembling bookshelves, laughing as one drops the tiny Ikea wrench down their shirt. These external projects implicate the internal project. Two grow closer.

Even sharing a meal together is a group activity. The etymology of ‘companionship’ supports this – to break bread together is to be together.

And when there is no shared bread or passion projects, and all a couple has is the relationship itself, that relationship has fewer legs to stand on. The phrase “growing apart” even implies a lack of shared activity.

I don’t share this perspective to set a new benchmark for you to measure yourself against. I don’t want anyone to feel something lacking in their life that makes them believe they need to buy or look beyond themselves for answers to their problems. Because that itself is the root of many problems. The trick is that only you can judge whether you’re satisfied, decide what brings you passion and excitement, and discover what that may be with your partner.

It can be activism, gardening, spectating art, or creating art. It could be watching sunsets, swimming, or recipe testing, even if only one partner is the chef and the other is the appreciator. It could be camping, pub trivia, puzzles, or collecting antique vases. For some, the house-building persists beyond those early years into a perpetual nesting, renovation, and decorating as a prolonged bonding ritual.

For my husband Joe and me, well, we love being together, so we have an unreasonable amount of projects: our unending ideas debates, backgammon, curating and dancing to late 70’s disco mixes, repairing clothing, our sex life (which I wouldn’t have normally classified as a project except for the depth with which we treat it as a hobby (the videos, the scenes, the outfits, the audits)), and this publication — we have a creative fixation with entreprenuerial endeavors, so we discuss his and mine, and theoretical ones that we may or may never make, and we share support. (I might’ve added our children, but I don’t believe that considering any relationship to be a superfluous project is a positive thing. People aren’t means to ends, after all.)

And without those things, I wouldn’t know him. Not really. Because when we debated, in our early courtship months, whether social media’s democratization of attention has been a net positive for the arts, I learned how his mind works. And when I got angry with him about his perspective, I learned how he resolved differences. And when we discuss the ventures he and I are dabbling in, I see how he responds to opportunities and inevitable problems. And I can help him. And over the years, through our individual and collective changes, our closeness has deepened from these group projects. Even the banal ones, like finding the perfect potatoes and helping my spine feel more nimble.

It’s through the group projects that we affirm the point of it all. Our team-man-ship. That we’re not doing this whole living thing alone. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. We are just group project people.

How about you??

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When this song hits, I’m initiating a mid-afternoon dance.

This was one of those evenings.

I walked into the living room after putting our boys to sleep. I found him, my husband, on the couch. And I dropped my body around his.

The collapse was like a hug. A straddle. A languid scissoring, but not the sex version — the thing kids do on swings.

I wasn’t planning to. When collapse is on the mind, mounting isn’t usually the first association. But his response to my arrival was enthusiastic. Oh, hey, baby, I think. The greeting beckoned me, and my lifeless body answered.

He said nothing after my collapse, and neither did I. At least for a while. He wrapped his arms around me, one at a time, and squeezed a little. His hands held his biceps, or his elbows — I don’t know, I couldn’t see. He kept me upright, and I closed my eyes.

After I didn’t even know how long of muscleless sitting, I said, “You’re getting me horny.”

He laughed. He wasn’t doing anything. But the contact and the relaxation aroused me. I started grinding on him.

“You still on your period?” he said.

“Yes, but I don’t mind,” I said.

I turned my face into the side of his. He turned his face into mine. Our lips touched. I pressed my bottom one between his. They smacked together. I kept grinding. His pelvis tilted up toward mine. His arms unlocked. He felt me up my back and down.

The whole room felt right. Objects were out of place, sure, but the lights were dim, and my husband was warm, and his mouth tasted like him.

We made out for long enough for me to moan with sincerity. An “mmm” came out of my mouth after traveling up from the bottom of my spine. I licked his earlobe. Then I said, “I will lick you every day of my life.”

He said, “I thought that’s what you wanted me to do to you.”

“Well. I do,” I said. “Let’s come. Me first. Then you.” I stood up before him, still in my faded cotton lounge clothes. “Unless you’re scared,” I said, joking about our habit of avoiding penetration during menstruation due to mess, my tender vaginal walls, and the stinging sensation of blood in his urethra. Then I said, “Unless you want to fuck me with something else?”

“Funny you should say that,” he said. “Look in that package on the shelf.”

We unboxed a small parcel addressed to him, with no sender's name. Inside was a metal butt plug, a marbled blue silicone dildo, and a promotional keychain of a hand in a gesture that’d make the dildo superfluous.

I asked him what the occasion was, and he said, “We only had the one butt plug,” which made sense to me. I told him so and that I claimed the keychain. He didn’t argue.

I was naked on the ground covered with a blanket, beside the lube and vibrator he laid out, when I laughed and said, “This is how my favorite type of sex looks.”

“What’s that?” he said.

“Fully concealed under a blanket.”

He chuckled. He pulled his shirt off.

“Take those off too,” I said, nodding toward his shorts.

He did so and pulled his cock down with his hand.

“I love you,” I said. “I love this.” My eyes grew misty.

“Me preparing to service you?” he said.

“Yes. Watching from here,” I said. “This. Well, it might be the best feeling of my life.”

It was. But then it was matched and surpassed…

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