Knowing I'm running the risk of harping about my sex dry spell too much, I've decided not to write about it again until something gives. That is, starting right after this post — I just couldn't shut it down without passing along these nuggets of hilarious wisdom from a couple of good friends!

One says regular sex is like going to the gym: You know it's good for you, you should go, you always like it when you get there, and you feel great afterward. It just takes a lot of effort to get out the door...particularly if you haven't been there in a while.

Another points out: "There are so many external and internal expectations about sex that can doom it. Why can't we just unscrew our heads and screw!" 

Ah, friends. The best ones know when (and about what!) we could use a chuckle.

Rob is away tonight. He's undergoing a sleep study in hopes of uncovering why he wakes so abruptly in fear at night. Poor guy, he's probably sick in the head from lack of sex!

Which reminds me: A reader asked what, when many men would go elsewhere for what they aren't getting, is Rob's deal? How can he manage to go so long without it? I've imagined the worse: he's getting it elsewhere (highly unlikely), prefers internet porn (could be), prefers MEN (I won't lie — it has occurred to me). I've asked him point blank, but he's infuriatingly evasive.

Okay, lots more to figure out, but no more writing about sex until I've had some!  

I'm sitting in the backyard the other night and it's late, past midnight, the house is dark and the full moon is one bright spot in the clouds. Crickets chirping and quiet all around them. The little white garden shed my girls have claimed as their one-room school house for playing "Mary and Laura" complete with bonnets and petticoats — lots of Little House going on at my house these days — and it hits me, I'm okay.

I'm okay.

More than that. I love my little house and my beautiful yard and I'm comfortable being here as a family of four again.

I keep searching for the reasons I shouldn't be. I don't know if the reasons I seek are for me or for everyone else. Not that anyone wants me to be miserable.

The thing is, I'm always feeling a little guilty about rebuilding my marriage, like somehow I betrayed everyone who stood by me while I pulled myself together and ripped my life apart a couple years ago.

My girlfriends heard the details, moment by excruciating moment, for three years before I left and they pooled their resources to help me when I finally arrived at that place where leaving is the only option.

They got me out. There was no leaving, would have been no leaving, without them.

So here I am again, back in. My friends are supportive and I am mostly happy.       

But, even now while Sam and I are in good grove and our biggest issues are temporarily dormant, I can't quit looking for what should be wrong.

After all these years, I'm not sure I know how to be okay with being okay.

I'm a Democrat and my husband is a Republican. It's never been that big of a deal because we're both pretty moderate in our beliefs and we aren't really the kind of people to sit around debating for hours about the issues, so it was more of a cute thing we bragged about in our early years.

"I'm a Democrat," I would say and then look at my husband, "and he's a Republican." Then we'd snuggle and everyone would laugh about how two people could have a bipartisan relationship in peace but the Senate can't stop arguing. It was like a cool parlor trick.

My husband and I talked about who we will be voting for this year a little, but for the first time ever there was some tension in our conservation. I would say it actually bordered on a debate. He hinted that he might be open to voting for either candidate. 

I said we should watch the debates together and talk about the issues and all the other stuff people do when trying to decide on a candidate. I wound up watching the debates alone and then when my husband recently sent in an absentee ballot he announced he voted with his party.

I made a comment — jokingly — about how I was glad he voted for Palin to become president, and he exploded. "Just wait until you make your vote," he snapped, "and see what I say about your candidate."

Apparently we no longer joke about politics together. I wish I had received the memo warning me of such.

I'll be glad when the election is over. 

I may have doubts about my marriage, or the relevance of the institution for me, but I do not doubt its importance to countless millions. I've not yet discussed here that I'm an active supporter of same-sex marriage rights.

My community of friends considers it one of the major civil rights issues of our times. My sister is devoting her career to the protection of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, and in Rob's and my circle of close friends we have two sets of married women, one of which is raising an adopted daughter.

Sickeningly, thirty-seven states define marriage in such a way to prohibit the marriage of same-sex couples. Vermont reversed this trend when in 2000 it enacted civil union legislation for gay and lesbian couples and rejected constitutional amendments limiting marriage.

California followed through on comprehensive domestic partner legislation in 2003, the same year in which Massachusetts legalized gay marriage when its courts ruled it would be discriminatory to not allow same-sex couples to marry. California has now joined Massachusetts in allowing full marriage rights, and Connecticut's Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage just last week.

But as with the hetero population, some marriages will end in divorce (same-sex marriage has been legal for such a short time, divorce rates have not yet been established). In Massachusetts, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD), the same organization that fought to gain marriage for all, must now help couples divorce.

The other day I received an email from an old friend whose been reading my FWW posts. We were college pals who hadn't been in touch at all in the 15 years since I graduated from Ohio State and pull up stakes from Columbus, until I found her via the all-powerful Internet.

Most of what she's knows about my life today is what she reads here.

She said a couple things about a recent post that I've been thinking on since.

First, she's never known anyone doing what I'm doing, returning to a marriage I left two years ago. Also, she said I seem ambivalent about it.

Funny how when you get a new car, you suddenly see them everywhere. I know a few other people who've been down this road. My eyes are keen to these situations these days. I have a couple of friends who were in and out of their marriages for shorter periods and another who was separated for two years, just like me.

She also wanted to know if I was in it for good now. Two years ago I would have said "No way." Actually, I would have said it was still "open ended," but what I way thinking was, "No. No. No going back."

Then time comes along and does it's thing, and here I am. It ain't easy, that's for sure. But I take it the same way I'm learning to take everything these days, as it comes and with a good bit of openness.

With remembering how suicidally bleak it felt to be hopeless in that marriage with no obvious way out. Heavy in my body. Shipwrecked.

That's the ambivalence. I know where I've been. The truth is, had we not been bound together by kids, I would have left without looking back. And yet, I did not reconcile "for the kids."

My husband and I are supposed to start marital counseling again this month. You may remember that the last time we went to counseling it didn't turn out so well...our pastor had to refer us to a professional because we were just too wacky, and then the professional guy got way too fascinated with me and stopped helping the marriage while he tried to wrap me around his finger.

No, things don't happen easily for us.

I asked my husband to try counseling again a few months ago and at first he was insulted, then he was apprehensive, and then he was agreeable as long as I waited until October. September is a really busy month for him at work so he didn't want to have to deal with marital counseling while working overtime. Okay, fair enough, so I agreed to wait.

It's October and he hasn't brought up marital counseling. I'm not going to wait for him to bring it up; I'm going to make an appointment for us whether he brings it up or not. Let's face it; if I didn't take the reins in this particular task I don't think it would ever get done.

I'm excited to see if counseling helps this time. Really, I would love nothing more than for counseling to show us how to be a happily married couple again and to save our marriage. The last few times we went to counseling all it did was give us an hour to get mad at each other, and then a week to simmer in anger until the next session.

Maybe this time it will be different. Maybe this time a light bulb will go off and we'll fall madly in love with each other again. Maybe we'll have a stronger relationship than ever because we've overcome our difficulties and came out of it all stronger.

...Or maybe we'll just find out that it's not going to work. 

Rob and I have been cutting back on driving lately, so until we were barreling north toward New Hampshire this weekend, I had forgotten the pact I'd made with myself to always be the driver when the two of us are in the car.

Rob doesn't get road rage, but he drives as if other drivers were the punks who bullied him in grade school, and this is his chance to show them who's boss. He is unforgiving, and never allows other drivers or even pedestrians the go-ahead.

He vies for the better position in a merge though it puts the passenger side in danger of being hit. He tailgates, a dangerous move made more so because his reflexes are molasses slow. For my own safety, I watch for brake lights on the highways so I can tell him to STOP! It takes him forever to notice and react on his own.

When I was learning to drive, someone told me to look farther ahead. It changed everything. Take your gaze another 200 feet forward, and you get to see what's coming much earlier, giving you more time to react if needed. Your peripheral vision will pick up what's immediately surrounding you anyway. When I gave Rob this tip, he thought I was nagging. When I try to talk to him about changing some of his driving habits, he never does.

So this weekend on the road, as Rob made one dangerous move after another, familiar thoughts returned. Does he respect me so little that he thinks nothing of putting me in danger? What if we had a child? I couldn't possibly allow him to drive anywhere with the baby in the car. Or, if he suddenly became a safe driver for the baby, could I forgive him for not treating me as carefully? 

And that's when it hit me. That's exactly what I already can't forgive him for — all the small moments in which he has betrayed my safety and trust. With us, it's not one big thing, but an accumulation of disregard. Our healing journey is a rough and pitted road — we get by one hazard to find many more ahead. 

Can't recall the last time I laughed so hard, for so many hours as I did last weekend. This is what happens when you put three women in a car for a good long road trip and throw in a few matching rainbow T-shirts.

My friend Tracy came out to Oregon for a quick spin through the state and lucky me, I got to ride along for the tour with her and another of our good friends.

The thing about travel is what it does to the soul, my soul anyway. There just is no quicker or more efficient therapy than driving away from life for a few days, for just long enough to fully appreciate everything you're coming back to.

Okay, of course there were a couple moments of "Hmmm, I could just keep going and never look back." Except, I couldn't. In every shop something took me home. Some little thing I couldn't resist buying for my girls, and for their dad, too. And then all the happy rush of waiting to see their faces when they opened the packages.

When we took a wrong turn, or more precisely, when we — slaves to technology that we are — mindlessly followed the GPS along a three-hour stretch of one-lane, shoulder-less forest service roads, all hairpin turns and death drop cliffs, straight up and over the Siskiyou Mountains instead of cutting down across the Redwood Highway through Northern California as we had planned, I just kept laughing. White knuckles and all. It's like that on the road. You take the adventure as is comes and let go of everything else. The plans we're so attached to.

I kept thinking on that drive, "This, this is the souvenir I want to bring home from the trip. Home to my relationship."

Every time my vision is jacked by an unfortunate turn into the wilderness, let me remember to drive slow, hold tight, and laugh myself all the way up and back down again.

I had a very eye-opening conversation with my neighbor. She and I like to take our kids for walks after dinner, and the other day we were walking along and I noticed something: she kept making little comments about her husband like I used to make before I gave up trying to reach out to anyone. She wasn't saying anything horrible about him, but it was obvious that something was bothering her.

As we walked I told her, "I'm going to ask you something, and please don't get offended, but I'm only going to ask you because I wish someone would have asked me this a year ago." I took a deep breath and asked her, "Do you and your husband have some issues?"

I braced myself in case I had just offended her, but she stopped walking and looked at me. "We're beyond issues," she blurted out. "We're at the kill-each-other stage." 

She then proceeded to spend the rest of the walk telling me all about how she hasn't slept in the same bed with her husband for two years and how she's miserable in her marriage.

What a huge eye opener for me! We had just been over to their house for dinner a few nights ago and they seemed fine. Here I was thinking that I was alone among my friends in having serious marital issues, and the fact of the matter is that I'm not.

After she walked home I stood on the sidewalk looking at the houses on my block.  How many other people are sad? How many other people dream of someday leaving a relationship, or maybe dream about the relationship someday getting better? How many of these houses have couples who can't stand each other?

How did we all get so good at pretending as if everything is peachy? 

I forgot to add this wrinkle to my post about my non-anniversary. A few weeks out, I told Rob I had a business trip to Chicago just after our big day, and suggested that since neither of us had ever spent time in the Windy City, maybe he should come along and we could tack on an extra night in the hotel.

We have no love life at home, so you know, I figured it wouldn't hurt to see what playing around in a new city and retiring to a lovely hotel room could do for us.

He said he'd check about getting a day or two off from work to make it happen, and then promptly forgot, day after day, to do so. Sounds like a guy who is not up for a romantic whirlwind trip away to a new city with his much-adored wife, right?

The truth is we both find excuses to avoid romantic situations. And week after week we work with a therapist on improving our communication and figuring out our shared goals, and never speak of the fact that there's nothing intimate about our relationship. We're all about denial.

A friend recently admitted he has to make a conscious effort to have relatively frequent sex with his girlfriend. He says it's too easy to forgo it in the name of exhaustion or lack of amorous mood, and that he find he has to work at it, as you would in creating a new, good habit. He's never disappointed once things get going, and always happy he made the effort.

But it has been so long for me a Rob — a year and a half — that I can't imagine getting over that initial hurtle...or enjoying the experience, much less make a habit of it.

Okay, I'm making a pledge now to bring up sex at couple's therapy soon. If you think you're getting tired of me posting about my lack of a sex life, imagine being in my shoes (or bed).