“Hello? Is anyone home?” My daughter, Lindsay, had been talking to me about her upcoming party, but mind had drifted. She was a junior in college, but her best friend Kristy was a senior this year and would be graduating. They were making as many excuses as they could to hang out with each other as they could.
“I’m sorry sweetie. I haven’t been able to concentrate much lately.”
“Sounds like you need to get laid,” she quipped.
“Mmmph,” was all I could say to verbalize my agreement.
My wife was an amazing woman. She had the smarts, the sense of humor, the endless kindness; all of it. In fact, the only part of our relationship that wasn’t enviable was our sex life. We had our daughter in our thirties. While this afforded us a better financial situation and greater patience than we could have mustered had we tried sooner, it also placed a heavy burden on our already struggling intimate relationship.
We had already been together for twelve years when we had our daughter. By this time, we had settled down to only having sex a few times a year. When Lindsay was born, my wife refused to let her cry herself to sleep in a crib and took up sleeping on the couch with her. This went on for eight years before my daughter finally started sleeping in her own room. By the time she did, the damage had been done. My wife and I were never able to quite get comfortable in the same bed after all those years apart. We would cuddle for the first hour or so, and then she would inevitably make a comment about being sore – and go sleep on the couch again. Every once in a while, we would attempt a quickie here or there, but she was always so paranoid about Lindsay catching us that things usually ended with only one of us getting to finish, neither of us getting to finish, or her getting me so nervous and worked up that I couldn’t stay hard. Slowly, as time passed, we just tried less and less.
“Don’t you think it’s kind of weird to comment on your dad’s sex life?” I asked. I wanted to say that after almost four years of not having sex at all, the idea of “getting laid” isn’t exactly a realistic goal; but I didn’t want to dive any deeper into this conversation than I had to.
“Not really,” Lindsay responded. “We’ve always been open and honest with each other. Besides, you have to actually be having sex in order to call it a sex life.”
“And what would you know about that?” I immediately regretted asking that question; knowing it couldn’t possibly lead to anything I’d be comfortable discussing.
“C’mon dad. Mom and I talk. I know it’s been forever since you guys had sex.”
“Listen sweetie. I’m glad we can all talk about anything, but discussing sex, and discussing your parents’ sex lives, are two different things,” I stated.
“Whatever. I’m just saying that maybe if you got laid, you wouldn’t seem so run down and tired all the time. You know, put some excitement back in your life. Get the blood flowing!”
It was about this time that I realized this conversation could end up going into something I wanted to discuss even less than my own sex life; and that was my daughter’s.