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She Rates Their Sex Life a 10. She Hasn’t Had an Orgasm With Him Since 2013.
Happy Wife is 76. Her husband is 79.
She rates their sex life a 10 out of 10.
She also hasn’t had an orgasm with him since 2013.
I read those two answers a few minutes apart and immediately went back to make sure I’d read the first one correctly.
Ten.
Not seven with some generous rounding. Not eight because they’ve been together a long time and everybody is doing their best.
Ten.
Then, much later in the survey, I asked her to tell me something she’d never told her husband.
“I haven’t had an orgasm with him since 2013 when I had a knee replacement, A nerve was damaged. I fake one pretty good. I do it because it adds to his pleasure. It would break his heart if he knew this. I couldn’t handle that.”
Well.
There’s my story.
Happy Wife lives in rural Tennessee with her husband. They’ve been together somewhere between 20 and 30 years, and this isn’t her first trip through marriage. In fact, it’s at least her third serious partnership or marriage.
The name she chose for herself is Happy Wife 2024.
Normally I might be suspicious of someone who gives herself a name like that.
It’s a little like naming yourself Very Relaxed Person.
But she makes a fairly convincing case.
They’re both retired. They sleep in the same bed. They rarely argue. They know each other’s phone passcodes but wouldn’t look. She says neither has cheated and she’s never seriously considered leaving.
When I asked whether she’d marry him again, she didn’t merely check yes.
“Yes, without hesitation.”
I like the “without hesitation.”
That’s different from yes.
Their weekday evenings aren’t exactly material for a Netflix series. They sit in the family room, watch television, browse their phones and talk about whatever comes up.
“Just a pleasant evening,” she wrote.
This is exactly the kind of answer people think isn’t interesting.
I disagree.
Twenty-something years into a relationship, two people in their seventies sitting beside each other looking at their phones and having a pleasant evening is interesting to me.
So are the nightstands.
His has a lamp, clock radio and TV remote.
Hers has a lamp, sachet and clock.
That’s it.
I ask about nightstands because I’m nosy, obviously, but also because people don’t curate them for strangers. Ask someone what makes her marriage successful and you’re getting an answer she has probably thought about before.
Ask what’s sitting six inches from her head while she sleeps and you get a clock and a sachet.
Much better.
I asked about their last real fight.
“Truthfully, I can’t remember the last argument.”
Come on, Happy Wife.
I’m trying to snoop around in your marriage here.
Apparently the closest thing I could get to dirt was decorating.
They have very different opinions about it. She was accustomed to having free rein over the house because the men she’d previously been with weren’t interested.
This husband is interested.
That came as a surprise.
“He says we should compromise on this, I say, a compromise means no one gets what they want.”
Now that’s an answer.
She admits that they do, in fact, compromise. Sometimes he gets his way. Sometimes she gets hers.
“I can’t say I resent him though. It’s just part of who he is.”
So there goes my decorating scandal.
She says the worst thing he’d say about being married to her is that she has too much stuff.
She agrees with him.
The best thing he’d say?
“I love him with all my heart and can’t even think of hurting him.”
That answer gets more complicated once you know about the orgasms.
They have sex a few times a month, less often than five years ago. He mostly initiates.
She says age and illness have changed things considerably. Both have life-threatening illnesses. Both deal with fatigue. She’s 76 and says she’s simply not as interested as she once was.
He’s 79.
He remains interested.
“He says he finds his pleasure in pleasing me, I also find my pleasure in pleasing him.”
And there’s the problem.
Or maybe it isn’t a problem to her.
I don’t know.
That’s one of the things I like about asking people these questions. Sometimes I get an answer that doesn’t fit neatly into the box I expected.
She doesn’t climax anymore. She says he has great difficulty climaxing himself. But he tries to please her because that’s where he says he gets his pleasure.
She fakes an orgasm because she gets pleasure from him believing he’s pleased her.
And sometimes, she says, that helps him climax.
There is a whole little feedback loop happening in this bedroom in rural Tennessee, and one of the people in it doesn’t know exactly how it works.
She does.
“I have not told him I don’t climax.i fake it every time because when he thinks he has pleased me, that gives him pleasure and sometimes he will climax.”
I can see why someone might read that and focus immediately on the secret.
Thirteen years is a long time.
But I’m more interested in the fact that she still gives the sex a 10.
Maybe I’m using the wrong measuring stick.
She isn’t rating orgasm.
She’s rating their sex life.
Apparently those aren’t the same thing to her.
After sex, sometimes they cuddle. Sometimes they simply get up and continue with the day. They usually have sex in the morning because that’s when both are rested enough to enjoy it.
There are no affairs lurking around the edges of this story either, at least according to her.
“I have had no thoughts of being with someone else in 22 years. He says he has not thought of other women in that way, I believe him.”
Then she adds:
“We were made for each other.”
They met on a dating site.
Their joke is, “you can find anything on the internet.”
Fair enough.
Apparently you can.
I asked what she can’t stand about him but has never said.
Nothing. She tells him.
I asked what they’ve stopped talking about.
Nothing she could think of.
I asked how close she’d ever come to cheating.
“I have never entertained that thought.”
I even gave her the question about what she’d do if she could do one thing and know she wouldn’t get caught.
Nothing.
This woman was absolutely refusing to give me a proper scandal.
Except, of course, for the enormous secret she’d already handed me.
That’s what makes it so interesting.
She isn’t hiding money. She isn’t checking his phone. She isn’t fantasizing about somebody else. She isn’t quietly planning an escape. She says they can discuss most everything.
Most.
There is one thing she can’t tell him because, in her mind, telling him would hurt him.
Whether he’d want to know is another question.
I don’t have his survey.
She believes it would break his heart.
So every time they have sex, she performs this one small deception for the specific purpose of making the person she’s deceiving happy.
Marriage gets weird when you look at it closely.
I don’t mean their marriage.
Marriage generally.
We like clean categories. Honesty good. Secrets bad. Orgasms good. Faking bad.
Then you ask an actual 76-year-old woman who’s been married multiple times and believes she finally found the right man, and she gives the sex a 10 while quietly faking orgasms because she loves watching her husband feel good about pleasing her.
Good luck fitting that on a greeting card.
Her first marriage lasted 35 years.
She describes it very simply:
“I was married to the wrong man for 35 years.”
Then she met this one.
“When I met the right man, I knew it in an instant.”
That probably explains some of the certainty elsewhere in her answers.
She says the best thing about her current marriage is that he’s the best friend she’s ever had. She likes experiencing life with him. He asks for her opinion. He’s fun.
When I asked what they’ve figured out that perhaps isn’t obvious from outside, she pointed to their ability to work things out “like adults should.”
When I asked why they’re still together:
“We love and respect each other.”
And when I asked what she knows about marriage now that she’d tell herself on her wedding day, I got perhaps the clearest explanation for why Happy Wife 2024 chose that particular name for herself.
“It can actually be a good thing with the right partner. Love can grow more every day. If it doesn’t, you might be with the wrong man.”
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