I click on the search bar and type in: HOW TO REKINDLE YOUR ROMANCE.
YOU’VE BEEN married for a long time. You wake up with your significant other, you go about your lives, and then come home to each other. You stare at each other from across the dinner table, conversation stifled and awkward, and you notice things that maybe you hadn’t noticed before, like the way your SO slurps their soup obnoxiously or chews with their mouth open. You begin to resent them, and soon it spirals down into a murder-for-hire plot that explodes out of control and ends with either one or both of you dead on a pier in the pouring rain.
But what if there was a way to avoid that?
What if there was a way to bring back the spark that drew you together before it ends in a murder/suicide?
By following these easy steps, you and your SO will be more in love than you ever were before, and you will be able to avoid becoming a killer!
Have a three-way! Look, most people believe that the lovemaking is the first thing to go when a marriage is choking itself to death. By bringing in a third party, it could bring a different form of excitement to a relationship. Fellas, don’t you want to see your lady love with another woman? Ladies, don’t you want to see your fella getting plowed with his face in the mattress? Whether it be a onetime thing or if it evolves into a polyamorous relationship, one out of sixty-four marriage counselors agree that bringing in another party to the bedroom is the perfect way to solve those doldrums.
Do the little things! Honestly, folks, we sometimes forget that not everyone needs a major event to prove your love. Send a text message that says you just saw a dirty city pigeon and it reminded your SO of them. That way, it lets your SO know you were thinking about them, even when apart. Send flowers! Or, if your SO loves treats, send them a tin of cheesy popcorn, because nothing says I love you like orange-stained fingers.
Go on dates! We get tired, don’t we? We work long hours, we have to come home and take care of the kids. We make dinner, help with homework, get everyone ready for bed. And by the time we’re finished, we’re exhausted. But it helps to step away for a little while. To go back to when it was just the two of you, when you didn’t have those little bloodsuckers that want nothing more than to tear your sanity down piece by piece until you wonder what would happen if you left them at a fire station and then moved to Nebraska and lived under an assumed name while working in a cornfield. Dates are a good way to avoid having to do all of that. Go to the movies, or go to a quiet dinner. Or better yet, spice it up with a little role-playing! Pretend to be strangers who meet in a hotel bar and are cheating on their spouses with this person they just met. Trust me, you won’t regret it when you can’t keep your hands off your “one-night stand” while riding the elevator up to your hotel room.
***DON’T ACCIDENTALLY get so caught up in the role-play that you end up going up to the hotel room with the wrong person. Because that would be actually cheating, and cheating is a terrible thing, and anybody who actually cheats deserves to fall into a live volcano and melt in magma.
I slam the laptop shut.
“I’m not doing any of that,” I growl in the dark.
11. Where Bear and Otter Role-Play at a Hotel Bar
THIS IS the stupidest thing we’ve ever done.
No. I’m being serious.
This is the fucking stupidest thing we’ve ever done.
And yet, for some reason, I’m more turned on than I’ve been in a long time.
And we haven’t even done anything yet. He’s not even here.
I’m sitting at a bar in a fancy hotel on the boardwalk in Seafare. It’s only been a few days since Anna had basically told me that my marriage was falling apart, and I blame her entirely for the situation I’ve found myself in.
It probably hadn’t helped that when I’d told Otter about what I wanted to do, he’d stared at me for a long time without speaking. Then he’d leaned up, kissed me on the forehead, and told me that I really should stop listening to other people talking about our relationship. But then he’d given me a really fucking sloppy blowjob in the kitchen, and when I came on his neck after he jacked me off, he said he was going to role-play the shit out of this. I had stood there, knees weak, slumped against the wall, mind mostly mush, agreeing to whatever he wanted.
Which is why I’m sitting in a dimly lit bar, nursing a glass of wine, nervously waiting for my husband to show up after he’d told me earlier in the day to “Just leave it all up to me, Bear, and play along when I get there.”
I’m wearing a crisp pair of gray slacks and a blue button-down shirt, open at the collar, Otter having picked out my outfit. He whispered in my ear that the dress pants made my ass look good, so I put up no argument. When Otter Thompson growls in your ear that he wants to rub his hands over your ass while wearing gray dress pants, you can sure as shit bet you’ll put those on as quickly as possible.
It’s going on eight o’clock, and I realize we actually need this when I think about how late that is, and that by now, I’m usually at home in my pajamas. I’m only thirty-three years old. Otter is forty-one. We should be out having the times of our lives and—
Okay, that sounds exhausting, and I really would rather be wearing pajamas right now, but Otter started really getting into this idea, so I figure I’m doing it for him. It has nothing to do with my own insecurities.
Or so I tell myself.
Izzie’s with Dom and Ty and Ben, and they’re supposed to be out getting pizza. Ty and Izzie had made fun of the “old guys” having a date night. I threatened to put them both up for adoption, only to have Izzie’s bottom lip start to tremble, her eyes wide, hands shaking. Immediately feeling like shit, I’d started to apologize before she burst out laughing, saying, “You’re so gullible, Bear, how embarrassing.”
I know the absolute worst people.
“Get you another glass of Riesling?” the bartender asks me as he comes back my way.
“No,” I say. “I’m meeting my husband here, and we’re going to pretend we don’t know each other because of sex reasons, and I want to be sober for that.”
He walks away without another word.