Why Is Mommy Giggling?

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​“My biggest problem is getting enough sleep,” said my client.  He’d come to me with his wife because they were having problems with intimacy. 

“My wife is asexual,” he told me during his first official visit. Pre-COVID, obviously.
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“Oh,” I said, knowing that asexuality is a specific way of being for some people. I asked him to tell me more about his wife.

 “She never experiences pleasure and she’s completely uninterested in me or in intimacy of any kind,” he told me. “She’s got problems.”

When I interviewed his wife, the story was quite different. She told me that he was right about her in some ways. She wasn’t open to being intimate with him, but she did have lots of desire.  She just didn’t know how to tell him. She was embarrassed and shy.

When the three of us talked together, it was profound. Her husband listened carefully to his wife as she told him the truth. She wanted to be with him but she was hesitant. It was difficult for her to tell him what she needed to say. He didn’t know what she wanted because she’d never said anything out loud. 

He felt a lot of emotions. He was happy that she was open to being with him and to share intimate times. But, at the same time, he felt terrible that they’d been married for over 10 years and hadn’t figured how to talk about something so important. It was a simple communication problem. Nothing more. 

Seems impossible, but it’s true.

After we finished our work together, I had a follow up call with the husband. He told me that he was in the market for a new bed. It turns out their bed was very squeaky, something he hadn’t realized before. Noise from their room had been waking their young daughter. 

One night she knocked on their locked door and asked “Why is mommy giggling?” 

It’s stories like these that make me wake up delighted to do my “work.”