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.
