There comes a precise moment in the life of every long-term couple when romance relocates from the bedroom to the Google search bar, strictly typed in Incognito mode.
It’s half-past two in the morning. You are lying there, motionless in the dark, staring at your smartphone screen with the same white-knuckle tension of a bomb disposal expert defusing a nuclear warhead. You are absolutely petrified that Google’s autocomplete might decide to grass you up to your spouse, the dog, or the local vicar. You type in highly improbable keywords, convoluted synonyms, and existential questions that would make a UN ethics committee blush.
And what welcomes you into the vast and wondrous world of the web?
A brick wall of clinical hypocrisy. On the one hand, you have glossy magazine psychology websites explaining, with the soothing voice of a mortally smug secular priest, that “the secret to couples’ intimacy lies in quality dialogue andactive listening“. (Right, cheers for that: try discussing the mortgage, overdue gas bills, and hanging the washing out while trying to rekindle the flame, and see exactly where “active listening” gets you). On the other hand, you have sterile, dusty sexology treatises that read like instruction manuals for assembling a flat-pack Swedish wardrobe, where human anatomy is described with all the emotional pathos of a coroner’s report.
Nobody, absolutely nobody, has the bottle to tell the truth. Namely, that the real sex life of the human species is a magnificent, hilarious, flawed comedy of errors: a farce oscillating between who we pretend to be by day, and what secretly gets our blood pumping by night.
1. The Great Mystery of the “Routine” (or When the Marital Bed Becomes an IKEA Annex)
The classic dogma of the modern sexologist is: “Boredom is a couple’s public enemy number one”. And down comes the shower of Boy Scout-style advice: buy yourselves neon swimwear, make love in the kitchen amongst the cabbages, change rooms, stick on a Venetian carnival mask.
The actual reality? After ten years of marriage, the ultimate erotic fantasy shared by both spouses isn’t some exotic orgy on the rooftops of Marrakech; it’s an entire night of uninterrupted sleep. Each on their own mattress, with no one snoring, without the dog throwing up on the rug, and without the alarm clock going off at six in the morning.
True eroticism, for a grown-up couple, is the constitutional right to absolute acoustic silence. But psychology manuals will never print that, because publishers would rather flog you a guide on “Armchair Tantric Sex” than admit we are all simply dead on our feet.
2. The Incognito Ward: Desires That Aren’t in the Rulebook
And then there arethe taboos. Those little, big,bizarre inclinationsthat people stealthily search for on their browsers, desperately hoping to discover they aren’t the only remaining specimen of a psychopath left on the earth’s crust.
Because if you listen to conventional morality, sex should only ever be that polite, symmetrical, hygienic, and strictly orthodox ritual described in school textbooks. But then you go and look at Google search statistics, and you realise that half of humanity spends their nights searching for answers to things that would make the central committee of a Puritan party faint dead away.
The point is that our society is terminally ill with a form of self-righteous middle-class decorum: we all have to pretend to be immaculate, transparent, and perfectly aligned with polite society, while our minds, thankfully, are a bubbling cauldron of contradictions, hyperbole, dark humour, and utterly bonkers desires.
The Moral of the Story
The next time you find yourself at2 AM googling answersto questions you wouldn’t have the brass neck to say out loud, don’t feel guilty.
Sex, passion, and human fantasy are not some Sunday school homework assignment to be ticked off with the rubber stamp of public morality. They are a free zone, a private playground where logic is denied entry and the only rules are made by curiosity and fun.
Let the prudes and armchair sexologists carry on pontificating in their manuals of good manners. We, in the meantime, will carry on doing bonkers Google searches, laughing at our own human frailties, and remembering that a good laugh, at the end of the day, is always the best aphrodisiac on the market.
P.S. Seeing as this is a hot topic that opens up a world of unspeakable truths: if this subject tickles your fancy and you want to know more, let us know in the comments! Let loose without filters, and we will satisfy your every curiosity in the upcoming blog posts!