Women & Sex

Are You Getting Enough?

Does it feel as if everyone else is doing the wild thing…that really hot sex happens only in other couples’ bedrooms?

By: Colin McEnroe; Photograph: Getty Images/Mark Povet
Published: April 2008   [ Updated: Oct 27, 2008 - 5:48:05 PM ]

In the waning days of my marriage, I watched scrambled porn.

I can’t believe I’m admitting that. I was married to an intelligent, pretty, sweet-tempered woman. Today we are, thank God, great friends, but back then we had stopped clicking in a whole lot of ways.

Your sex life is one of the first places that deficit will show up—a big, wet, pink canary slowly drying up and gasping in the airless coal mine of your mutual unhappiness.

So on some nights, rather than go upstairs, I would stay in a back room. And somehow, I would wind up flipping on a pay channel to which we did not subscribe. Spice, it was called, which was exactly what we were missing. It came in scrambled, a kind of randomized, endlessly shifting, cubist rearrangement of reality. I would watch for a few minutes anyway, hearing the moans and sighs and trying to guess what the Picassos might be doing to each other. Whatever it was, I wished I were doing it too, even if it involved having my leg grow out of my head and my spleen where my foot was supposed to be.

To me, sex—wild, carefree sex—was exactly like that. It was something other people did, in some other reality that was masked and inaccessible to me. But I was the geometrically misshapen cable-scrambled one, kind of sinking away from my physical self.

And everybody was getting more than I was. I knew that. Everybody was getting more, better, crazier sex than I was. And I was going to march right down that barren path to the grave, and it was never going to get better.

Is this all there is? I would ask myself, late at night. Is this it?