The great news is that Pete is going to be a dad—the first in my little circle of friends. For no good reason at all, my little gang seems to have put off having kids. Even though Pete, Ben, Don, and I have all joked about being deaf to the ticking of the biological clock, our wives are beginning to get itchy. Fact is, all my guy friends would make great dads, and they are all signed up for eventual parenthood. Even Don, who is going through a sort of second adolescence involving lots of casual sex with women a decade younger than he is.
We’re all very excited about Pete. But something funny happened on the way to fatherhood. Amanda, Pete’s wife, decided that pregnancy created a mandate for cleaning the house. In particular, she went at the attic with a vengeance. Now, the attic is normally Pete’s domain. Every guy I know has carved a little space for himself at home—whether it’s a shop in the garage, or a corner of the basement. And it’s generally considered bad form to go into a man’s domain and mess around with things. Cleaning is an especially serious transgression.
So, Amanda found Pete’s inflatable sex doll. Needless to say, there were fireworks, recriminations, and tears. Pete claimed that it was a gag, given to him by his friends back in college when he was notoriously and involuntarily celibate. But Amanda did not believe him. Owing to her pregnancy, she said, she was especially disgusted with her husband and her husband’s friends, and she threw the doll in the trash. Knowing which battles are lost before they’ve even begun, Pete prudently did not object.
Technically, Pete’s claim was true, and I knew it. I had been one of the buddies who pitched in for the gift back in our college days, and was tickled to learn that Pete had held onto “Maureen” all these years. Of course, corroborating Pete’s story got him no closer to redemption with Amanda. That’s because we all assumed Pete held onto Maureen for reasons that went somewhat beyond comedy.
After the discovery, it was a tense week. It was unclear how big a deal Amanda meant to make of Maureen. Pete was officially in the doghouse, and Amanda seemed to be mulling the long-term consequences. So all the guys met up at the local to discuss the situation. It turns out that Pete had recently dug Maureen out of a box. Without getting into sordid details, Pete was feeling like it would be at least a year before he and Amanda would be making love again. He was anticipating a period of loneliness that reminded him of the bad old days of bachelorhood.
As usual, Don, Ben, and I all made fun of Pete. He deserved it! Did he really believe that pregnant women can’t or won’t make love? Ben said he’d heard that the hormonal whirlpool of pregnancy often made women very, very interested in sex. True, Don had heard that some women are so freaked out by pregnancy that they’d rather not touch a man for a decade. But the fact is, there is no reason to believe that pregnancy should have anything but a positive effect on the sex lives of married men. (Think about it: For starters, a woman can’t get pregnant if she’s already pregnant. No protection, no problem!)
Which brings us back to Maureen. I have no idea whether Pete had any intention of reinflating her, and that was hardly the point. The real problem was that she represented a kind of selfishness. There is nothing wrong with an inflatable sex doll in itself, and there is nothing wrong with using one for its intended purpose. But in Pete’s life, it represented a kind of self-centeredness that could easily be addressed by simply talking to Amanda about his fears and his desires. How did she feel about sex, now that she was pregnant? Would they need to try something new? If she felt like taking a break from intimate relations, would it be all right for Pete to go solo with a clean conscience?
So, after we made fun of Pete, we told him to go home—go home right now and have a heart-to-heart with Amanda about his fears and doubts, no matter how silly or selfish they might seem. Men hate to appear weak, vulnerable, or needy. And it’s only about a million times worse when those feelings involve their sexuality. But we have to get over that. It is not weak or shameful to worry about whether you’ll ever have sex again with your now-pregnant wife, but it is weak not to speak to her about it. And for heaven’s sake, Pete. Why the hell didn’t you throw Maureen away years ago? You made us all look like idiots!
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