I used to fantasize about being married. Not about having a house, a white picket fence, a steady job, and a beautiful wife and adoring kids to come home to. No, I fantasized about my marriage being one camera shy of an amateur porn film Hugh himself would have envied. And as a single man, I was an expert on marriage. Lots of sex makes a healthy marriage.
On my honeymoon, I was going to lock us away in a hotel for a week and live on nothing but sex and cigarettes. The beat generation would have been envious of my whiskey and oxytocin enduced spaceman prose, high and poetic off the aura of my Helen of Troy.
Because sex is as close to perfection as any of us will ever get. In theory, one could say this is why we seek so frequently seek copulation outside of marriage. Because everything: anxiety, stress, depression, all of it, whether you love that person or not, dissolves into the stratosphere for a few near-perfect seconds when you’re tangled beneath the sheets and around each other. No drug nor drink does anything quite like it. Of course, in the case of, say, a one night stand, the crash back to planet earth from the heavenly stars above is painful enough that the only cure is to become an astronaut again.
I knew the high. I was determined, destined, desperate, to safely orbit the the earth for the rest of my life.
Then I actually got married. A whirlwind romance I wouldn’t recommend to anyone who gets queasy on ferris wheels and other carnival rides that go round and round. We read our vows and committed the whole hoopla of our love in front of 14 other people and God Himself six months after we met in person, on a cliff. And our honeymoon – - 3 days in a Denver hotel where we instagrammed pictures, watched a movie starring Matthew McConaughey, had dinner with my family, and enjoyed a couple of root beer floats amongst other acceptable activities upon our undefiled marriage bed – - was not exactly something Ginsberg would have been compelled to write about.
3 days wasn’t a week, nor did we do anything no one had ever seen or experienced before, but I was in love and found it a success nonetheless. Next, we were going to have our own apartment in a new city. We were going to work from home, which meant sex in the morning, sex in the afternoon, and sex before bed. We could spend entire days naked and marveling at each other’s bodies.
Except we went from our hotel in Denver to living in the backwoods of Oregon for 3 months in a half-finished basement where the nearest neighbor was seven miles away and reports of Bigfoot ran rampant through town. It’s hard to be naked and having sex every night when someone is constantly walking around upstairs where the vents conveniently carry your cries of passion, and a big hairy apeman with a possible penchant for the voyeuristic is lurking right outside your window.
The sex will get better when we move to LA.
So we moved to LA. And got a place of our own. But that didn’t change the fact that my wife married a man who lives in constant speculation that a Zombie Apocalypse is around the corner, and her new home sits right on a fault line. I find it far more difficult to be protective of my wife when I’m not wearing pants, no matter how often I go to the gym. I’m convinced Adam didn’t cover up because he was ashamed, but because if he had to slay a lion for his beloved, defeating such a beast seems immensely more probable when your reproductive organs can’t be mistaken for a midmorning snack.
I’m not expert on being married. In fact, I know less about marriage now than when I was single, but I can tell you this: the sole value of a woman in a man’s life is not sex. Unfortunately, ask any single man, particularly Christian, and he’ll tell you how he can’t wait to have a wife so he can have sex.
Here’s the thing ladies and gentlemen, it turns out the value I find in my wife, my lady, my queen, is not how quick she is to jump in the sack and perform a marathon with me. (I’m sure I sound like a scumbag for believing that the most important part of being married having sex. It’s not that I didn’t think women were valuable, but I was so far gone from my pornography addiction, it makes it more difficult to see women are capable of anything else.)
The first thing God deemed “not good” was being alone. So he gave Adam someone to do life with, not someone to just, well, do.
Max Dubinsky is a writer. He lives on the road and sometimes in Los Angeles. He once drove across America in search of faith and God in the streets. Along the way he slept in 50 different beds, visited over 40 cities, and drank some 4,000 cups of coffee. He also met a girl on the road, fell in love, and married her on a cliff in Denver.
