Tears Before Bedtime

Well, last night was kind of a debacle. We had arranged a sex date to make up for the other night.

I was really looking forward to it, and this made me happy. Because the sorry fact is that, while I spend a lot of time thinking about sex, I don't always get excited about opportunities when they arise. Part of it is self protection. There have been so many occasions where things haven't worked out as planned that I don't like to get my hopes up. Its just too crushing.

And part of it is a kind of sadness about how I know it will go. What I want is for the man I love to want me for himself, to see desire in his eyes. Or, failing that, for him to at least touch my hand or kiss me at the door in a way that tells me that tonight will be special in some way. There is something about the matter of fact way that my partner acts like it is just another night, except that he has added making love to me to tasks like taking out the garbage, that just robs the whole thing of eroticism.

Don't get me wrong. I appreciate the thought and the effort. While I would love for us to rush towards each other with total, spontaneous mutual abandon, I do see the love and thoughtfulness in the earnest gathering of all remaining physical resources by a sick man to please the woman he loves. Seeing the effort he is making does make me love him more. But the honest truth is that, when he turns towards me with the same faint-but-determined expression as he turns towards a pile of unwashed dishes, it doesn't turn me on. It touches my heart but it turns my body stone cold.

Especially when I've been expected to keep myself on ice for three lonely, sexless months. Icy has become my default mode in this endless winter where it is never Christmas.

So among other things, I have been worrying about the way I seem to have turned off to him. While I have felt all the usual frustrations, I have not been able to feel that having sex with him in that I-don't feel-like-it-but-its-good-for-the-relationship way he does it is actually going to meet my needs or address any of the issues. And this worries me because, well, when one partner is sick or their libido is low, the other needs more enthusiasm for things to work, rather than less. And if that doesn't happen, then sex between us will die. And what lies beyond that is a country I don't want to explore - of complete sexlessness, of endless solitary masturbation like a goddamned teenager, and, even worse, of an instability that undermines our love and the security of our much loved child, of possible infidelities and betrayals.

But last night, I just had this little flicker of desire, hope, anticipation - this feeling that things might go differently.

But of course, they didn't.

By the time I'd had to ask, well into the evening, whether it was going ahead (nothing in his manner sugested that anything of particular interest would happen that night), by the time I'd watched him string out chores as long as was humanly possible, by the time he'd settled down in the front of the TV until so late that, even if we started, our baby would wake up any minute (and you know how impossible it is for a woman to focus in on sexual pleasure when a baby might cry any minute) - well, by that time my little flicker was totally snuffed out.

And I was disappointed. And I was angry. And I was sad. And, to be honest, even though I knew it would be better to do it just to give him some encouragement in the trying, I just didn't want to have sex with such an utter dork.

So when he finally grabbed some candles and headed confidently into the bedroom, happily anticipating my excitement and gratitude, he didn't get the response he was expecting.

There was no sex. There was just tears before bedtime.

At least the tears before bedtime resulted in something - after the initial drama, a decent discussion about what went wrong, some plans to work on his overall health and for him to have some counselling about his feelings of depression and depondency about his health, and genuine empathy on both sides.

But still, there was no sex. We could have gone to bed with each other. But instead, he got to go to bed with a big, steaming pile of guilt and inadequacy and I got to go to bed with my frustrations and fears for the future.

Maybe we should have just watched TV.