Crowded beds

Q. How many people are in your marital bed?
A. (At least) six. The couple, and all their parents.

There’s a surfeit of holiday-themed porn – Santas being sucked off by jolly elves; red, white, and green lingerie on models prancing and preening and posing in snow. There are lots of pronouncements by sex bloggers and others about all the hot sex they have around the yule log.

But for me, this time of year – a time that features an overabundance of an overabundant family – often is anathematic to sex.

Marital beds are, the saying goes, crowded: there’s not just us, but our parents have a way of creeping into the bed. Hopefully, not literally, but still. They’re there. Look around. They are. For most of the year, we have (I have) strategies, more and less effective, of keeping them at bay.

But during this time of the year, when the distance between these projections and our parents’ (my parents’) physical bodies is measured in feet rather than miles, those strategies often crumble.

And if your metaphorical parents-in-the-bed are anything like mine, they’re not just creepy voyeurs, sitting on the edge of the bed watching. They’re much worse, much more challenging: they’re talking, and moving, and acting, and judging.

And these psychic realities have ways of metastasizing exponentially. So it’s not just my parents in the bed, but their parents. And not just my versions of my parents. But their respective versions of one another. And T’s versions of them.

And that’s before we get to my in-laws….

There’s barely room to breathe, let alone to fuck.

I’m looking forward to the coming of the new year.

One comment

  1. Another thought provoking post. I’m having trouble getting access to the Internet, so I’ll keep it short for now : imagine how great it will be once they’re all gone! At least you’ve got that to look forward to 😉

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