The Best Lover You Will Ever Have Might Be Asleep Right Next To You
LET'S TALK ABOUT IT
The Best Lover You Will Ever Have Might Be Asleep Right Next To You
It is 2026 and grown people are still too embarrassed to say one true sentence to the person they married. That silence costs more than anybody wants to admit.
Somebody asks me a version of this almost every week. How often is normal. What is everybody else doing. Am I asking for too much.
Nobody ever asks the real one. Have you told them what you want, out loud, in words, all the way to the end of the sentence.
Almost nobody has.
The Arrangement Nobody Signed
Here is what I hear instead. Sunday night. Maybe Wednesday if the week was kind. Same room, same hour, same order of operations, finished in about the same number of minutes it took last time. Two people who love each other running a script neither one of them wrote. It happened once, then it happened again, and after a few hundred times it stopped being a choice and turned into the arrangement.
Here is the part that gets me every time. Both of you think the other one likes it this way.
You think they would be offended. They think you would think less of them. So you both lie there being considerate at each other. Meanwhile there is a whole grown person in that bed with ideas, and they have been holding them for eleven years.
So let me say what I actually came to say. You are probably not with the wrong person. The best lover you will ever have may already be in your house, on your lease, folding your towels wrong. You have just never met them. You met the careful version. The polite one. The one who learned early that certain things do not get brought up in this house, and who has been a good sport about it ever since.
"You are not bored with each other. You are bored with the two people you both agreed to become once the door closed."
Why Nobody Goes First
Now the honest part, because somebody has to say it.
People do not usually step outside because somebody else was better. They step outside because somebody else was curious. Somebody asked what they liked and then acted like the answer was interesting. That is a low bar, and strangers clear it every day.
And let me kill something while I am here. This is not a men problem. Women are out here doing the same thing for the same reason and they are quieter about it. Unmet is unmet. It does not care about your gender and it does not care how good your marriage looks in the pictures.
So why does nobody speak first.
Embarrassment. Plain and simple. People will get naked with somebody they will not be honest with, which has to be one of the strangest things we do. There is a fear that if you say the true thing they will look at you different. They will wonder where that came from. They will decide you are not who they thought they married.
Underneath that is a ruler you picked up somewhere else. From church, from your mama, from a friend group, from something you absorbed before you were old enough to question it. Somebody told you what a decent person is supposed to want, and you have been measuring yourself against it ever since, in a room they will never be in.
Because nobody is in that room but the two of you. Nobody is grading it. There is no committee reviewing your marriage. What two grown people agree to in private, both of them free and both of them willing, is nobody's business but theirs. Not your friends. Not your family. Not the internet.
How To Actually Have It
I am not leaving you with a feeling and no instructions.
Do not have this conversation in bed. Not at eleven at night, not after a hard day, and never in the ten minutes right after. In that moment it is a review. On a Saturday afternoon in the car it is just a conversation.
Do not open with what is wrong. Open with what you are curious about. There is a mile between "we never" and "I have been wanting to ask you something." One puts them on defense. The other makes them want to answer.
Each of you brings three things. Something you have thought about and never said. Something you would try once. And something that is a no, and gets to stay a no forever, with no debate and no follow up question. That last one is what makes the whole thing safe. Nobody tells the truth when they are scared of what it signs them up for.
Then pick one. Not a whole new life. One thing, one time, and you agree ahead of time that it is allowed to be awkward. It probably will be. Laugh, get it wrong, try it again next month. The couples who have this handled are not more talented than you. They got through the first awkward twenty minutes years ago and you have not.
So here is what I want from you this week. One question. Not a summit. Not a sit down with an agenda. One question, asked like you actually want the answer, by somebody who is not going to make a face.
Ask what they have been curious about. Then be quiet long enough for them to tell you.
You might find out you have been sleeping next to somebody you have never met. That is not the sad part. That is the good news. They are right there. They have been waiting on you to ask.
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