When Sex Is More Meaningful Than Having The “Big O”

“Henry. Henry, wake up! We have to have sex.”

“No, we don’t!”

“Yes, we do. Now come on.”

“I can’t.”

“If the musicians on The Titanic could play their violas and cellos ’til the ship went down you can wake up and have sex with me.”

“Please, don’t make me,” he cried, like a stoolie ready to crack, “Please, just leave me alone!”

I stood there in my wedding gown, hair infested with the 500 bobby pins it took to create my updo, looking down at my husband, who lay splayed across the bed of our Four Seasons’ hotel room like a gut-shot gangster.

(Forgive me. Recent Sopranos binge).

Henry was still wearing his tuxedo with the green cummerbund.

He’d wanted to wear a kilt, which would have made the consummation of our marriage far easier. But I didn’t want him to upstage me.

I was determined to get that tux off of him, despite the fact I wasn’t in the mood for sex either.

We’d spent an entire day getting married; which included the usual retinue of activities:

• Shellacking of hair.
• Donning of the push-up bustier, (in Henry’s case a weight belt around the middle).
• Getting rid of whiskers (I donated mine to Locks of Love).
• Drinking Schnapps with the wedding party, wondering which of them would end up in the sack by day’s end. (Dan and Edie? You know you did. Didn’t you??)
• Walking down the aisle with my weeping father (who’d been certain I’d end my life in a nunnery sporting an atrophied womb).
• The I Dos, scored with insulting, grateful sobs from my mother.
• Walking into the reception to the Star Wars theme song. Or was it the Death Star march?
• Dancing like Ginger and Astaire (if they had vertigo and titanium legs) for our first dance.
• Talking to and kissing relatives and people we weren’t sure we knew.
• Gingerly feeding one another cake because Henry said he’d be really mad if I shoved it in his face, cheating me of a bride’s marital right! (You’ll never live that one down, Nancy Boy!)
• Finding out my brother-in-law gifted us a day on a movie set with Robert DeNiro.

“Can’t we just sleep?” Henry moaned.

“No, we’re having sex!” I declared.

He buried his head under a pillow and curled into a fetal position, the better to protect his manhood.

I realized I had to change tactics.

I spoke to Henry the way his proctologist might reassure him before inserting gloved fingers up his rectum, “I’m just going to roll you over, very gently and remove your pants and do what needs to be done. You can just lie there. You can probably even sleep through it.”

Henry emitted a piteous groan.

Why? Why was it so important to me to have sex with my husband that night?

At the time, it was an inchoate impulse. I couldn’t explain it. I was absolutely as exhausted as Henry, but knew it had to be done.

Now, years later, I realize that sex with my husband that night consecrated my marriage.

It felt, to me, that our marriage wouldn’t actually begin until we made love.

Being Irish, I tend toward morbidity. What if one of us died in our sleep that night? Then we never would have actually been married. I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. I simply had to be Henry’s wife, if only for one night, should the fates decide to be brutal.

And so we had the quickest, snoring-est, physically flaccid sex in our sexual career.

But, when I laid my head on the pillow next to his (still stuck full of all those bobby pins I was too tired to remove) I felt my ship had come in to harbor, so to speak. That I was safe, loved and complete.

I’d love to hear your meaningful sex stories because it just makes me feel so hopeful about humankind.