I knew the marriage I had thought was happy and as close to perfect as one could be was over as soon as I heard that phrase come out of Sylvia's mouth. You guys know the one I am talking about.
"Honey, we need to talk." Sylvia said to me that fateful Wednesday afternoon as soon as I entered the living room upon my return from work.
She was sitting in the overstuffed arm chair in the living room that she had dragged from its usual place in the living room arrangement so that it was facing my recliner with about six feet between the two. She was still wearing the clothes she had worn to work minus her shoes.
I turned, walked down the hall to our kitchen, and grabbed myself a beer. My mind was going a mile a second with all sorts of ideas as to what my loving wife of the past eleven years had to talk about. The most prevalent one being she was going to tell me she had an affair and if she said that; our marriage was done.
She had that unhappy mixed with pissed look on her face I am sure every husband the world over has seen on his wife's face at one time or another. I forced a smile when I was beside her then bent down and tried to give her our customary kiss that we'd shared every day since we'd first lived together and throughout our marriage. She turned her head and my kiss landed on her cheek.
I sat on the couch instead of my recliner and the look of shock that appeared on Syl's face showed me that my plan to upset her plan had worked. She started to rise from the chair but I motioned for her to stay where she was. I took a big gulp of my beer before I told her I was ready to listen to her talk.
"Don, you know I love you and don't want to hurt you; but I'm bored with our sex life and I think we need to do something to spice it up. I think we need to have an open marriage. We can date other people and tell each other about it afterwards. It will be new, exciting, and bring us closer together.
"Please honey; don't look at me like that. It'll be great, I promise. It's only sex for God's sake, it's not like we'll stop loving each other.
"Donald, please tell me what you're thinking." Syl said to me with a look of apprehension mixed with hope.
To be honest, I did not know what to say because I was in so much shock. This was the first I had heard of her being bored with our sex life. I knew that after twelve years of having sex together, we both knew what and how the other liked what we did together when we had sex; and I had tried to be spontaneous and change things up, but she had never complained. I always did everything I needed to so that she came every time we made love and I knew she was not a good enough actress to be faking her orgasms.
I knew her expressions, her sounds, the way her vaginal walls contracted and relaxed when she came and knew she could not fake those things. I knew the one time she did fake an orgasm because she wanted me to finish quicker than normal, but never let on that I knew.
I also knew the way my wife thought and the things she was saying now would never have crossed her mind on their own. I also knew I could not come straight out and ask her where she got these idiotic ideas. I did not want to be with other women, though I had fantasied about it, and definitely did not want her to be with other men or to hear about her experiences with them. That was one fantasy I had never had and the very idea made me sick to my stomach.
I took a deep breath as I bent down and sat my beer on the floor at my feet before I looked at the woman I had loved for the last fifteen years. Memories from all of those mostly happy years came flooding into my head and I sat back and let them roll along.
I remembered the party where we had first met at the beginning of our sophomore year in college; the one a friend had dragged me to as had a friend of Syl's, the fact that we had talked the whole night away, and how we each seemed to know we had found our life partner which led to our dating, and the way we seemed to always be together whenever we were not in class or asleep in our dorm rooms.
The heavy petting and other things we had done with each other's bodies short of intercourse because she wanted to be a virgin on her wedding night. Graduation, finding jobs in the same small town, moving in together to save us both money, the night she had abandoned her wish to remain a virgin, and given her cherry to me. The year of living in sin as both her parents and mine termed the most joyous and adventuresome time of our lives.
Learning about each other and sex together, how to please each other, what we liked or did not like. Our wedding, honeymoon, buying the house we were currently living in, advancing in both our careers; all of those joyous memories rushing across the movie screen I had inside my head.
The hard, painful memories came along right behind the good ones unbidden, but endured because they were as much a part of the life I knew would be over unless I could derail the train I saw rushing toward me.
Our trying to conceive, the tests that determined I was sterile, the crying we had both shared from the news.
I remembered the death of her parents in a plane crash while they were on their way to Las Vegas for the first time and the memorial service with only pictures of them because the fire after the crash consumed everything except the metal pieces of the plane and the metal in the cargo aboard it.
After the movie had ended in my head; a plan, however hasty, began to emerge from the chaos that remained inside my brain.
"Why haven't you said anything before now, Syl? Can we talk about other things we can try to spice up our sex life? How about role playing? Can we try that?
"The possibilities for role playing are only limited by our imaginations and you know how big my imagination is. Cheerleader and football player, or housewife and repairman, or even street walker and john; see Syl, I thought of those three off the top of my head. We can try anything you want without including other people. Please, tell me we can do anything else except an open marriage." I begged and pleaded with her as I watched the confusion, anger, and finally determination flow across her face.
