For our first married Valentine’s Day, my wife gave me a partners’ yoga class. This was a genius idea. Yoga is one of the few fitness activities that we both enjoy, and the class was billed as an acro workshop, which was something both of us wanted to learn more about. The posters advertising the class seemed to use the term “partner” broadly—a person you wanted to do balancing tricks with as opposed to a person you make out with more often than other people. It sounded delightful.
The night of the class, we grabbed a bite to eat and walked over to the studio. My wife stopped at the front desk to check us in so I took her mat, and continued down the hall to the room where the class would be held in order to save us spots next to each other. As soon as I walked into the classroom, two things were immediately apparent: one, finding space was not going to be an issue, and two, we had seriously misinterpreted that poster. The large classroom was dimly candlelit and there were maybe ten couples around the room—each pair sharing a single mat, limbs casually entwined. All of the other couples were heterosexual (unlike yours truly), the women were dressed in diaphanous pants and cropped tops, or low linen pants and plunging, stretchy bras, the men were shirtless, with the exception of one other couple who appeared to be in their mid-sixties, dressed similarly to my wife and I in t-shirts and yoga pants, sitting chastely next to each other on their yoga mat, wearing similar expressions of bemusement.
I pulled myself together and claimed a spot near the front of the room, turning to face the door so I could enjoy my wife’s face when she walked in. By the time we’d had one of those wordless conversations about the sheer absurdity of the situation, it was too late to just pack up and walk out, acknowledging that we’d clearly made a mistake. And so, we endured. We made it through almost three hours of synchronizing our breathing. Of long minutes gazing into one another’s eyes. Of a narrated “lover’s massage” tutorial set to the sounds of occasional ecstatic moans from our mat-neighbors and punctuated with sloppy, smacking kissing sounds. And one, measly, acrobatic yoga pose.
Solving Sex
When we decided to get engaged, one of the easiest marriage myths for me to believe—and subsequently freak out about—was how quickly our sex life would decline and how many ways there were to lose that particular aspect of our relationship if we did not take the proper precautions. In particular, once we had kids, if we didn’t have a good system in place beforehand, we would never have sex again and, shortly thereafter, we’d lose each other. We’d be doomed to an affectionate, solely child-centric marriage, falling asleep on separate couches every night while watching Fixer Upper.
My personality is such that, once I’ve identified a problem, I will solve it. Enthusiastically. With a (perceived) threat to our (totally delightful) physical relationship looming, I made a strategy, and put it into action. My underwear drawer was filled with frippery (partly because I wanted to be ready for seduction at a moment’s notice and partly because I feel like life is too short for ugly underwear even if no one sees it but me). Result: my wife would almost without fail choose laundry day to try to get in my pants.
Next, I made it a personal policy to never say no when she wanted to get naked. I still felt like this wasn’t enough. I was beginning to feel like our reliance on spontaneity was chancy. I was also afraid that she wasn’t taking the risks quite seriously enough. While the quality of our sex life has never been in question, the quantity could be sporadic. I was worried that in busy weeks or stressful moments, we had a tendency to let physical stuff fall off without notice, and maybe we needed to institute some sort of quota for when sex wasn’t occupying a primary spot in our minds until we naturally got back on track. However, my wife didn’t want to try to fix something that wasn’t broken, and started to resent my micromanaging.
Some Call It Hot, Some Call It Hell
Which brings me back to our yoga adventures. When my wife suggested the class, I felt like finally, she was taking my concerns seriously and initiating something we could do together, enjoy, and then go home and… enjoy some more. While it was clearly working on other yoga mats, it was one of the least erotic activities I had ever participated in. In fact, had I been with anyone else, that class would have been my personal idea of hell. To say I’m not fond of PDA would be an understatement.
My wife knew this, and as were starting the first sensual breathing exercise, she leaned over and breathily whispered in my ear, “This is going to be the best happy hour story…” She pinched me gleefully every time we were instructed to “sink deeply into a kiss.” She poked me in the ribs while the others were moaning through their massages.
When we finally got home, I poured us each a much needed glass of wine. We sat on our separate couches and laughed with relief, jokingly assuring each other that—while our love and mutual affection remained strong—we never wanted to touch each other, or anyone else again.
The next few days after the class gave me some needed perspective. I started to see what my wife had been talking about; of course neglect was a risk to our physical relationship, but one could take it too far in the other direction as well. The class was (clearly) an experience that did the trick for some people, but it wasn’t right for us. Perhaps, shockingly, a strong sex life looked different for different couples.
You Gotta Let Go To Get OFf
The first year of our marriage was, for a variety of reasons, an endurance test for both of us. We had to stay in the moment to survive for huge chunks of it. But once things settled down a bit, I was able to look back and see that we improved, and that the improvements happened slowly, and without a conscious, strategic effort on my part. We fight a little better. We handled changes and challenges with greater ease. And by the end of the first year, we enjoyed each other a little more.
I’m starting to figure out that I have to give up a little control in a marriage and go on faith: believing that things will work out because we love each other and want to be married. I cannot be the drill sergeant of sex. Our marriage is not a recipe or a research project. It’s not perfect, and it can’t be “perfected.” The more we enjoy it—and each other—the stronger we are.
And I’m hoping that this is the kind of thinking that leads to us continuing to misinterpret erotic yoga posters well into our sixties.
