Keeping erotica alive when the bedroom is also the home office

So, how are you planning to make this Valentine’s Day special? Maybe take a RAT together? If you can find one. No wonder it’s proving hard to keep romance alive when the most intimate thing you’ve done in the last few months is to take a nasal swab for each other.

Nor are we looking at our most attractive. Not only are we exercising less, we’re also carrying excess COVID kilos from all that anxiety-quashing wine quaffing. I don’t know about you, but my liver is running up a white flag of surrender. But, stuck at home, how can we not be driven to drink when we’re also daily driven up the wall by the sight of one another? How on earth do you keep erotica alive when the bedroom is also the home office? (An “office romance” sure loses its allure when you’re both tapping away on laptops in tracky daks on opposite sides of the duvet.) Staff shortages have also stymied escape plans for a romantic restaurant dinner.

Obviously, years of sporadic lockdowns mean it’s make-or-break time for couples. A girl starts to wonder if perhaps she didn’t fall in love, but stepped in – and now it’s time to wipe him off your shoes. Who would have thought the light of your life would turn out to be such a bad match?

But before chucking your partner out with the recycling, it helps to remember that one woman’s trash is another’s treasure. Consider Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Once known as Bennifer, the couple split on the eve of their wedding in 2004. Now, 17 years later, they’re back together and so far above Cloud Nine they have to look down to see it. If only they’d patched up their differences at the time and avoided all that angst.

So, perhaps this Valentine’s Day we should reflect on ways to achieve matrimonial harmony. For hubbies, the best way to foster a good marriage is to talk through any problems with sufficient honesty and mutual respect to be able to agree that you are always wrong and your wife is always right.

I also recommend nasal strips. Of all the matrimonial woes, the number-one annoyance for females is snoring. It’s a design fault, I know, but most men spend half the night sounding like the grinding gears of a combine harvester. A disgruntled bloke might finally agree to sleep in another room but this will only work if the room is in, say, Coober Pedy. It would be so much simpler to just whack on some nightly nasal strips. Oh, and boys, just for the record, women don’t snore. But we do, just, occasionally, sleep out loud.

For hubbies, the best way to foster a good marriage is to talk through any problems with sufficient honesty and mutual respect to be able to agree that you are always wrong and your wife is always right.

It’s also one of life’s mysteries why some people like camping and some people don’t and why they invariably end up married to each other. While I like a five-star hotel, every man I’ve ever dated likes a no-star tent. If a relationship hits the doldrums, the male of the species often suggests spending
a restorative weekend immersing ourselves in the Great Outdoors. When a woman thinks of the Great Outdoors, she imagines it immersing itself in her: under her nails, in her hair. The worst aspect of camping is that it’s not even fun having a fight about how much you loathe sleeping under canvas as there’s no satisfaction storming out and slamming a flap.

Another major area of incompatibility is communication. Most females feel our small intestines communicate with us more often than our fellas. A boyfriend once asserted that the reason he didn’t talk to me is because he didn’t like to interrupt. This led to a long argument about how the only thing we talked about was how little we had to talk about. Which is why, the next time he grumped, “What’s up?“, I replied, “The warranty on our relationship.”