Well, hair pets can resume as soon as he gets back? If that is still desirable?

Very much so. 

I should really invest in a headband that does wisdom and intelligence both, I can't always get by substituting one for the other. 

Owl's Wisdom. 

And he turns the painful thought over in his mind until it settles into focus, as clear and plain and obvious a lead. 

It's not really about sex at all, is it? It's about affection. Wanting to be held, wanting to be – wanted. And not wanting anything to know I'd want anything so – heh – silly. 

That's not silly. ...I actually thought you were the one who was clearer on that not being silly.

Sorry, I'm trying to characterize a strain of – let's not even dignify it by calling it thought – which my faculty of higher reason can't seem to do anything about. 

That's fair.

Well, he can have lots more snuggles about it, anyway. That seems like it might be helping.

I'm admittedly not immediately sure what to do about it if I can't reason at it. I guess if you generally want lots of affection and find it very hard to say anything about it, then I feel somewhat less weird about the idea being very affectionate without any sort of invitation, and not necessarily expecting it to mean anything about sex. Although that might be moving us backward on the original problem.

I think I'm the only one who can do anything about it. I just have to acclimate myself to the fact that if I initiate sex it doesn't make you any more likely to laugh in my face if I want to stay in bed with you afterwards. 

I guess that makes sense. On the bright side, it should be very easy to gather the desired kind of data, since I really can't imagine that happening. Maybe if there's an apocalypse in the middle.

Even then, I don't think you'd laugh. Not like – well, you wouldn't, anyway. 

That's probably true. I guess maybe if it were a really sudden apocalypse and I were stress laughing? - you know what, this is not the most helpful thing to be trying to figure out, is it. I am not going to think you're ridiculous or pathetic for wanting to be with me. Or for caring about whether I care about you. Which I do. A lot.

I know. I know. 

My first really serious lover used to think it was very funny when I wanted to stay the night. I think about him sometimes. He's dead now. I don't know if he lived long enough to love someone else, or allow himself to be loved. I used to worry I'd die like that. 

She cannot think of any reasonable or clever responses to that for a little while. She knows it makes her want to hug him tight, so she does that, at least.

I keep wanting to point out that we literally have the same bed and the same house. I am aware that this is not actually the point, but - or maybe it is. I guess the fact that I have set up my life to avoid being in different places from you as much as I can - without interfering with work, anyway - is still information about what I want and what I expect to want in the future.

I know you know all of this. Just.

I do hope your lover had a better time at some point. I'm - sorry. For and about everyone who left you like this.

There's no one to blame for it. You can't raise children thinking it's wrong to expect their parents to hold them, or comfort them when they're sick or hurt, and then when they're older tell them that sex is the only reason to want to be close – I mean, physically close – to another person, and expect them to grow up entirely sane. 

I think my generation – Charles-Alexandre included, that's his name – handled it rather better than our parents. I don't want to promise I'll raise our children without some sort of deficiency of spirit that's only obvious in retrospect, but I'm sure they'll be better off than me.  

She thinks there are totally people to blame for it, just not the people who are coming up in this conversation. No reason to dwell too much on theories of blame now, though.

I very much doubt that any mortal has ever been raised without any deficiencies in spirit.

But you must acknowledge that our children are extraordinarily gifted. 

Of course.

...I didn't mean to get us on the subject of our children. 

Thank you. For bringing this up. Gods know I wouldn't have. 

Well, you're welcome then. Happy to try to figure out solutions to social and emotional problems by ramming into them with all the subtlety of a hippo. Actually I guess I am not always happy to do that, but I am happy that it works pretty well when tried, despite the drawbacks.

Hey, Élie?

Yes?

You don't - ugh - just, as long as we're ramming into annoying and awkward questions that happen to have occurred to me as potential ramming targets -

You don't - think that - well, you were framing this as a moral failing, earlier, and now I feel weird about not asking if -

Do you think it's bad or unfair or anything if I don't really, uh, want to directly ask you for sex? I realize I'm basically doing that now, but - it just seems like if I know you don't really think of things as having gendered components and you feel like you're being unfair to me here then I should at least ask if I'm also being unfair to you by having, uh - I mean I don't even think of it as a problem, just, now I'm thinking about it in terms of how inconvenient it might be for you, if you've got all this stuff, and I don't have all this stuff, and it seems -

Am I making you sad?

...I would ask you to elaborate on gender-based expectations in your culture but my experience is that you do directly ask me for sex. 

I nonverbally indicate that sex would be welcome. Which is different. According to me.

That's interesting. Why do you think that is?

Well - I mean honestly it's a mildly ridiculous hacked-together chain of reasoning and I am a little worried that staring too closely at the convenient assumptions it's relying on will break the whole structure, which would be kind of inconvenient because it seems to be the only thing that generally results in sex occurring ever at all, but as long as we're cutting through all of our nonsense anyway - 

Uh, I guess - I think about it as not wanting to be a nag, sometimes, and that's some of it but it's not the whole of it, it's more - self-centered than that? I guess in general want to have sex under circumstances where you want that to happen and not otherwise. Maybe this is just the same thing you talked about before we got married, but - no, it's not exactly the same thing, I'd expect it to be skew from that. It's -

I guess I have - a story, or something, a model of the world in which to a first approximation men actively desire women and women want to be desired by their husbands, where men enjoy women and women enjoy being enjoyed? Cannot believe I am actually trying to articulate this. Anyway, you can only have that dynamic if you're having sex because your husband actively wants to have sex with you. And - I guess the rule I came up with is that it counts as that occurring if I am deliberately bringing this about by reminding you that your wife is desirable and you might want to have sex with her about it, and would not count if I were bringing it up by suggesting that maybe you should have sex with me because I wanted to have sex with you. 

Yes I am aware that the fact that I in fact do this whenever I already want you to have sex with me kind of punches a little bit of a hole in the fundamental premise. And also now that I have thought all of that it occurs to me that I have literally no idea whether any of that was happening on your end or if you have just ended up parsing nudity as equivalent to me saying the words 'I would like to have sex', which I suppose would be reasonable and unsurprising but might make me slightly grumpy.

Naima does not often feel the need to hide when talking about things, because there are very few things that she has any innate sense shouldn't be said. She does, however, have a sense of propriety around this in particular, and so now it is her turn to bury her head in Elie's shoulder and hope that he doesn't tell her that all of this is stupid. She doesn't, actually, think it's stupid, although she's not at all sure that she's explaining it in a way that makes it sound non-stupid.

Oh, does Naima want her hair stroked now? He can do that. 

Do you really believe that only men experience active desire? I don't think that's true – though it does sound like you don't either. Would you be happier if it was true in our marriage? I want to find a – maybe a story is the best way of putting it – that we can both be happy with, and that isn't one where I want you but you never want me. 

The hair pets are nice, although she's not really ready to stop hiding yet.

....I guess I don't actually believe that this is an entirely accurate description of the world as it actually exists. And I wouldn't put it that way, either, it's - but I guess I can see how it kind of ends up sounding like that.