How much do you share with your partner? Are you the couple in the movie? Earnestly chatting, while one of you sits on the toilet reaching for the roll, the other just metres away, brushes their teeth at the sink? At a recent Film Festival a Director explained that scenes like these are written to show the “intimacy” in the relationship, to make the characters partnership believable. I actually snorted out loud when he said it. If G sat down on the loo and started getting busy while I was brushing my teeth, there wouldn’t be ANY intimacy and that toothbrush would be going straight in the bin!
Like most couples G and I were very well behaved for the first few months of our relationship, no nose picking, no farting, no magazines or newspapers in the toilet. I always find it intriguing that men can stifle their farting within the first few months of any new relationship. “Do you know how much pain I was in?” a past boyfriend told me after his talent for farting at 5 minute intervals became a part of our daily routine.
We’d been married for about a year when G said “I’ve never heard you fart?” and just a little bit too quickly I answered “I don’t”.
I was kind of telling the truth. I didn’t fart. In front of him. In fact, I didn’t do any of those things in front of him, the toilet door was not only closed but locked, if he happened to walk past I stopped everything I was doing until I knew he was out of earshot.
Why? I guess I had this belief that some things needed to be kept private, that I would be less of a sex goddess if he could picture me sitting on the loo or squeezing a pimple. Maybe it was growing up without brothers, there were no fart jokes in our house. Although, my father was the master of sneaky farting, whenever that familiar smell made it’s way across the room he’d immediately blame the dog and make it leave the room. Until the day he shouted at the dog and it wasn’t there.
Obviously I couldn’t keep up the no fart facade. Something was going to trip me up and that something came in the form of my first pregnancy.
If you haven’t shared all bodily functions with your partner yet, try getting pregnant, it’s a great icebreaker for vomiting, fainting, farting, indigestion and in the final stages you can enjoy a game of “spot the hemorrhoid.”
I spent a lot of my first pregnancy in Jakarta and was struck down with the usual Indonesian tummy bugs. I had no choice but to share it with G. We were living in a hotel room and the smell of my duty free Chanel number 5 mixed in with Diarrhea number 2 still haunts me to this day.
By the time I made it to my due date I was the size of a small elephant, people had to rearrange their furniture when I entered the room. When it was time for the birth, G got to see all of me, inside and out. The labour started, it stopped. When the suggestion of sex was made by the obstetrician I could see G looking at me, not with a thought of lust, but more with a logistical “HOW?”
Hemorrhoids arrived with a vengeance. “Umm, there’s something coming out of your bottom” G gently told me one day. We’d hit rock bottom, literally.
When I thought it was all over and our first child was born, G watched the nurse remove the pad that was the size of a small country from under me. There wasn’t much more I could share. When I told my girlfriend in horror she laughed and told me she shared the same experience with her husband (who is a farmer). Being a practical guy, he took one look at the pad and asked the nurse where they got them, he thought they looked handy for changing the oil on the tractor. I giggled and then realized I was the tractor in this scenario.
Is there ever a case of too much information in a partnership? How much can you see before it changes how you feel?
A few years ago I was getting ready for bed and was half undressed when one of the kids woke and called for me. As I picked him up out of his bed he promptly threw up all over me. Not just a little chuck, it was one of those insane just keeps coming projectile vomits. As I stood in my knickers and bra looking completely shell shocked and dripping in vomit G walked in to the room. “Well helloooooooooo there” he said as if we’d just met in a bar.
It was as if he couldn’t see the vomit or the baby, all he saw was a wife, her knickers and bra and an opportunity. I think it was then that I realized I could be wearing tracky dacks and a stained t-shirt and G would always be “up for it”. Sure, he’d prefer the lace knickers swinging from a chandelier option but like most blokes he was happy with whatever was on offer.
12 years and 4 children and I still keep the bathroom door locked, there will never be simultaneous tooth brushing and toilet going. I’ve definitely relaxed a little as has our beagle, I have to banish her from the room regularly.
How about you? How much do you share and have you reached a point of too much information?