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The question: After two years of hot secret sex, my paramour and I are out. But now that she's officially the love of my life, I find I am less eager to push sexual boundaries -- and she's frustrated. Advice?
Dear Bound,
You had two years of breathless, steamy and illicit sex à la Diane Lane and Olivier Martinez in Unfaithful. Together, you sought out bathroom stalls and windstorms to stage your R-rated lust. Now, having declared yourselves official, you fall asleep wearing your mouthguard and grey sweatpants, spooning your babe in front of reruns. Of course she is frustrated.
The transition from mistress to certified lady friend, affair to common law, can be jarring. The differential? You no longer have a set of limitations around you. That pulse-quickening charge of secrecy is gone. There's no lie to concoct. No roadside motel to check into. No pseudonym to invent. The element of the forbidden has been stripped away. What is left in its place? The neatly groomed, conformist suburbs of sex? Only if that is where you choose to live.
Why is it, dear Bound, that when we are presented with a new freedom, we can be so lazy with it? Create excitement in novel ways. Resuscitate your sensual effort. Just because you are "out" does not mean you are doomed to a puritan life of quick pecks and hosting barbecues in matching aprons. Coupledom does not make for boring. Far from it.
Ask your babe what she wants and what she misses. Now, deliver. You may hearken back to your amplified tryst years: book a room, have tiger-like congress in a storage closet or get your high jinx in the back seat of your car. Locate the forbidden at home; be it in the form of props or the nature of your play. The only boundaries here, for you dear Bound and Mrs. Bound, are the ones you impose upon yourselves - or the ones you are too complacent to lift off.
Claudia Dey is the author of How to Be a Bush Pilot: A Field Guide to Getting Luckier.
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