Couplehood by Paul Reiser

momentarily takes her hand off your back, you get nervous. “Where’s her hand going? What is she—going to stab me?” You open that eye right up.
    Maybe she’s using the free hand to steal things. “I could’ve sworn I had an ashtray right there.… This lunatic is swiping ashtrays from right under my nose.”
    So you sneak a peek. Just to be sure. Which is only fair, because while you were still kissing, she was sneaking peeks at
you.
    A very unfortunate moment is when you both sneak a peek at the same time. This is not good. Because now what you have is two human heads with their lips locked and their eyes wide open. There’s no romance, there’s no passion—there’s nothing. There’s just someone standing very close with their nose against
your
nose. The whole concept of kissing becomes suddenly grotesque and perverse.
    And you both get defensive.
    “What are you looking at?”
    “What are
you
looking at?”
    “I wasn’t looking.”
    “I
saw
you looking.”
    “Yeah, well, you wouldn’t have noticed
me
looking if
you
weren’t looking in the first place.”
    “Look, this is obviously not working. Why don’t we just call it a night, huh? Just put the ashtray back and we’ll forget the whole thing ever happened.”
    S ometimes, even with a partner you know by heart, you can be jolted with new information.
    One night, after what I thought was a particularly impressive display of sexual know-how, I turned to my bride, very proud of myself, and with a knowing smile said, “Not too shabby, huh?”
    I actually said that.
    (I share this with you, and no one else.)
    She smiles back, but not enough. I know something’s wrong.
    “What?”
    She says, gently, “I didn’t really have the moment I think you think I had.”
    I’m confused. “What are you talking about?
Sure
you did.”
    “No, I didn’t.”
    “Yes you did.”
    “Okay, when? When did I have that moment?”
    “Before. When you made that sound. Don’t you remember? Right before I made that sound that
I
made.”
    “I remember
that.”
    “Yeah well, I never would have made that sound if you hadn’t made your little throaty noise first. I took my cue from
you”
    She says, “I didn’t give any cue.”
    “Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but when you make that sound …”—and I demonstrated; people really hate when you do that—“when you make that sound, is that not like a signal for ‘Hello, we have a winner’?”
    She pauses. “Sometimes.”
    My brain races. “What do you mean ‘sometimes’?”
    “I mean
sometimes
it means that and sometimes it means I’m just very close.”
    Now, understand: This is not someone I just met. This is a woman I’ve known for many years. And this is something I honestly never heard.
    “You’re kidding me, right?”
    “No.”
    “There’s no way you could expect me to know that.”
    She says, “Well,
now
you know.”
    “Yeah, but it’s a little late now. You can’t make the same sound to mean two different things.”
    “I can’t?”
    I was adamant. “No, you can’t. You have to have two distinct sounds. One for ‘Thank you, no more calls’ and another one for ‘We still need a few more calls to hit our goal.’ ”
    She looks at me, sees that sadly I’m not joking. “Fine. I will try to distinguish my sounds.”
    “Please. That’s all I’m asking. Let’s lock this down. Because, hey, this is for
your
benefit—not mine.”
    See, I don’t think women understand this. The whole concept of the sensitive, giving, patient lover is not something that comes to men instinctively.
    Obviously. We’re the ones who made up the Bing-Bang-Boom approach. And not because we’re bad people—it is simply that
that’s
how we would make love if we were by ourselves.
    And I’ll tell you something else: Even within the Bing-Bang-Boom, we only made up the “Bing” and the “Bang” to get the “Boom.” “Boom” was the objective the whole time.
    But we came up with the “Bing”