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  • A Celibate Marriage
  • Anita Gill (bio)

Not long after my husband and I moved into our one-bedroom apartment in Westside, Los Angeles, the sound of a creaking mattress roused me from a deep slumber. Propped on my elbows, I inspected the darkness, trying to determine the origin of the noise. It came from one floor up. My new upstairs neighbors were making love. At three in the morning.

With nothing to suppress the sound, I stared at the popcorn ceiling and hoped they were in the final stretch. Next to me in bed, my husband remained curled on his side, his breathing slow and deep. The romp became a repeated occurrence, the squeaky mattress springs interrupting my sleep a few times a week. Afterward, the neighbors, audibly satisfied, fell silent until around 7:00 am, when a woman's heels echoed across the hardwood floors.

On one morning when I finally got up, groggy and annoyed, I entered the kitchen to find my husband still in his blue pajamas. He hovered over a large wooden board placed on the table where we were supposed to share meals. His wire-framed glasses reflected the terra cotta clay he molded onto the surface. The project would soon move to his studio, where the rest of a wall-length relief sculpture was in progress. I padded to the cupboard to start coffee and mentioned over my shoulder that the couple upstairs had been at it again in the middle of the night. He looked up and shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe they can teach us," he said and chuckled. At the sink, I kept my back to him, my jaw clenched at his joke. I glanced up where the heels kept puncturing my thoughts.

In our cozy apartment, surrounded by photos marking our happy marriage, we suffered in silence with our secret: Our sex life was dismal to nonexistent.

Before we said our vows, we had been passionate lovers eager for intercourse, but holding off. I was the one who requested patience, having sworn off sex after a previous relationship that had been borderline abusive. [End Page 145] Abstinence came easy because sex never felt good. Girlfriends told me the first time was painful but then it got better. For me, the first time was excruciating. And the second. And the third. Soon, sex turned into an ordeal of biting my lip to distract myself from the discomfort, my solace coming from the fact it would end soon.

When I found my future husband, he was content with waiting until marriage. Part of me felt this was the "right way" to enter intercourse, and that after marriage, my body would welcome that level of intimacy. We jumped into our red Nissan pickup truck and headed toward Virginia Beach for our honeymoon. When we tried, a throbbing pain filled my groin. Muscles tensed up and locked. I told him to stop. We sat side by side, our backs against the headboard. My lower lip quivered, and he touched my cheek to assure me this didn't change anything. We had a lifetime to learn.

But one year of scarce sexual encounters turned into two and then five. And every botched attempt left us at opposite sides of the bed.

I'd heard of toxic couples who stayed together because of great sex. Our marriage was the inverse. Without that expected intimacy, we became roommates.

________

A few years into our marriage, we lived in an apartment not far from the D.C. city lines. On a quiet summer evening when the humidity finally died down, my husband plopped down next to me on the sofa, where I was absorbed in a novel. He reached over and kissed me in a way that signaled hunger. I froze. My mind jumped to the sequence of events, how I'd encourage his advances and the inevitable discomfort and disappointment that would ensue. With my palm pressed to his chest, I whispered, "Not now." He sighed and walked into the kitchen and out of my line of sight. How long it had been since we were last intimate? I followed him into the fluorescent light of the kitchen...

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