I wasn't going to talk about this but....

A couple of weeks ago I spent the evening at Lauren's house. It was Girls' Night, but the other girls were busy and Lauren's mom, Double D, was in town visiting and staying with her daughter. I love Double D so it was the perfect opportunity to catch up with her on a low-key evening and hang with Lauren's son TC, whom I adore.

After TC went to bed, the conversation eventually turned to (put on your big surprise face) sex. It all started because Lauren and I were rehashing a recent conversation we'd had with Anastasia for Double D.

"D, Anastasia still hasn't had the sex talk with her kids and she's freaking out," I said.

"How old are her kids?" Double D asked.

"Fourteen and twelve," Lauren answered.

"And Anastasia asked us to have the birds and the bees talk for her," I added, gesturing between Lauren and myself, "because she's afraid that she's going to be too, 'It's all about YOU, not the other person, so make sure YOUR needs are taken care of,' and she doesn't want to give them the wrong idea."

"Uh, Mom," Lauren announced. Loudly. I knew something was coming. "Speaking of which, you never gave me the birds and the bees talk. Almost, did you get that talk from your parents?"

I almost spit out a mouthful of wine as I looked at Double D's eyes widen with each passing moment. "Oh, geez, my Dad would never have talked about that, but my mom gave me that talk when I was 5 because I asked where babies came from. It was pretty clinical. She even went and got a book from the library. I remember the first page had a dot on it and said, 'You started out smaller than this pencil dot.' Then it detailed the procreation process with clothed stick figures lying in bed together. I swear, I thought I'd get pregnant lying fully clothed next to a guy until I was in college."

"Well," Lauren said dryly, taking a sip of wine and arranging her face into the I'm-about-to-drop-a-Lauren-line-on-you-bitches face. "Thanks to neither of my parents giving me The Talk, I didn't have my first orgasm until I was 35, MOM!!! Thanks a lot."

Double D hooted with laughter while she delivered a line right back, "Well, HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW??"

Poor Double D.... although her line cracked me up, I do know her plight. You see, sex with Ex was not that great. Frankly, most of the time it was downright lame. It wasn't that bad before the wedding (it might have actually been good then, but I shudder to think about it as I choke back some bile), but starting Day 2 of the honeymoon, the tracks shifted, directing the bedroom compartment of the marital train through Dullsville with a layover in Rarely City, final destination: Nevertown.

There are specific reasons for this, which I'll discuss soon, but at the time I was simply shocked that a man would reject his new wife for such (to me) insignificant reasons. To be brutally honest (and totally TMI, so Mom, if you're reading this, you can skip over the rest of the paragraph), in our first year of marriage I once went into his office in the house specifically to give him *ahem* uh, non-reciprocated pleasure, and he actually pushed me off of his lap. With force. I landed unceremoniously on my ass and I can only imagine the look of shock on my face. Reliving the memory now makes me giggle, but frankly, at the time it was a tad humiliating.

I had a health scare one year to the day after we were married and that picked things up a bit since he was grateful that I wasn't ill, but the sex dropped off again shortly thereafter and I was once again left to ponder what was wrong with me. (As I said in my first post, did I grow a third nipple? No!)

The evening with Lauren and Double D ended up with D proclaiming that she'd just had a very informative education. This was after the detailed description of what my friend Sarah calls "the battery operated boyfriend." D's face was priceless as we detailed the different models, functions, prices, and places in which you could obtain such "boyfriends."

But the conversation left me wondering about the importance of sex in a relationship. Perhaps in our parents' time it didn't assume the role it does now, for whatever reason. But at this point it's certainly of primary importance. I can say with clarity that deprivation on either party's part is the beginning of the slippery slope. After that transpired, at least in my case (and I'm not assigning directionality, i.e., did the deprivation lead to the dissolve or did the dissolve lead to the deprivation?), the end was nigh.

Well, at least I know what I'm getting Double D for Christmas this year. It's easy to pick out, since I know personally all too well.