March 28, 2017
“2017”
It’s a refrain Emily and I have been repeating to one another, and to close friends and family, since we decided we were going to start a family together several years ago.
“We’re going to start in 2017, if all goes to plan,” we’d tell them when pestered about the status of our family.
We wanted to spend at least a year and a half as a married couple, enjoying each other, learning more about one another and solidifying our foundation of trust, love, understanding, and compromise in our relationship, that the unfathomable strain of a new child would find nary a crack in which to burrow.
By 2017, we would have been together for six years, married for two. By 2017, the adventures of our childhood and young adulthood would be behind us. By 2017, we’d be ready for the grandest adventure of all. And by 2017 Emily’d be thirty-six, which was the oldest we wanted her to get before she started having children.
Once 2017 was upon us, it was time to begin in earnest.
To start, we tracked Emily’s ovulation and planned a designated sex week, one where we’d fuck every morning and night, aligned with her most fertile period, in hopes of resulting in success. In a move that was amongst the most suburban I’ve ever made, I had even marked it on my calendar.
SEX WEEK! It read across the top of an entire slate of my weekly Google calendar, like a reminder that we’d be going to the beach or that my band had a run of out of town shows booked. SEX WEEK! Like it was some conference at the local Hilton or a preposterous promotion on the History Channel. SEX WEEK! It could even be the name of a terrible Brooklyn band.
Sex Week came and we geared up. Emily pulled out her sexiest underwear, some of it tasteful, some of it porn-set-level filthy. And I did nothing but salivate like a thirteen-year-old who just discovered his first Hustler. She looked amazing. A lifetime disciple of fitness, a health coach by trade and stringent liver of clean-everything, Emily’s body is flawless. Thus, these little tools with which to excite the easily excitable only accentuated her physicality and highlighted what she already was.
Still, something seemed a little off.
Our sex life has always been fantastic but the ceremony of Sex Week, the underwear and the scheduling, all felt like we were a middle-aged couple whose spark had faded. The idea of sex on schedule seemed somewhat off-putting to me, as if I needed that little red reminder on my Internet calendar that it was time to fuck my wife.
“Who am I to complain?” I thought. “You’re about to get laid twice a day for a week. What would thirteen-year-old-Mikey say to you right now? Are you kidding me? Shut up and go, buddy. This is going to be fucking awesome.”
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