There’s a lot of horniness in the latest installment of the Cut’s Sex Diaries series, a column that takes readers through a week in the life of anonymous horny New Yorkers. “28, married, Manhattan,” as the piece identifies her at the top, has been legally bonded to her husband for five years. She suspects he’s cheating on her with her best friend; she’s definitely cheating on him with her best friend’s boyfriend. At least they are all in the same bubble (presumably).
If that sounds a little complicated, that’s really the least of the challenges our “28, married, Manhattan” faces in a week of sexual travails, which include an abrupt sex act that should really not be abrupt, a lot of being carried around by men, and two apartments in New York City with stairs. Some have questioned if this particular sex diary is the dispatch of a real-life adult, or maybe, say, the imagination of a 13-year-old boy (who frankly would have pretty decent writing skills given his age). We are not here to determine if this person is actually real or imagined, we are here to take this story at face value and note how remarkable it is. In order of appearance, here are the most logistically tricky feats presented in “The Woman Whose Husband Is Sleeping With Her Best Friend.”
Day one, 7 a.m.: “We have slow morning sex on the countertop while the bacon is cooking — a risky move considering our kitchen has massive floor-to-ceiling windows.”
Right off the bat, congratulations to this woman for having enough counter space in Manhattan to wriggle around on. Yes, I have considered the possibility that “on the countertop” actually means against the countertop, or with one party merely sitting on the countertop and the other standing, but, given the presence of the “massive floor-to-ceiling windows,” I’m going with my brain’s initial instinct to picture a correspondingly massive countertop.
Also, for the sake of everyone’s skin/genitals not coming into contact with oil splatter, I hope the bacon was cooking in an oven.
Midday: “I consider texting Adam to cancel the dinner plans so that we can just fuck.”
She’s been married to this man for five years! We’re in the middle of a pandemic that renders many if not most activities dangerous! Somehow, it is still hard for this woman to squeeze eating and sex into the same evening. Honestly, great for these people! (They do end up going to dinner.)
That evening: “Adam carries me up the stairs to our apartment; I’m so drunk and horny that I can’t even walk straight across the footpath”
Horniness, here, is a contributing factor to not being able to walk straight. This is debilitating horniness, to the degree that one is neither able nor willing to hobble up the stairs, nor across a “footpath” (whatever that could possibly mean here).
11 p.m.: “I think Adam might’ve ripped my backless dress as he attempted to work out how to get it off of me.”
Backless dresses actually seem somewhat specifically NOT hard to get off, due to the relative lack of material, but nonetheless, I’m impressed by a backless dress during a pandemic.
Day two, 7 a.m.: “He fucks me normally, missionary style, on the floor as the bed is still damp from last night’s trysts.”
This is eight hours later. That’s a while for sex fluids to evaporate—but I guess, lots of sex fluids, trapped under sheets and blankets and bodies—it could happen. So having slept in the sex fluids, this couple is now choosing to have intercourse on the floor, a surface preferential to the damp, slept-in bed because it is bone dry.
Day three, 5.30 a.m. “ …… whipping up waffles from scratch.”
Whipping up waffles from scratch on a weekday? Whipping up waffles from scratch at 5:30 in the morning on a weekday?* Good for this married 28-year-old and all her breakfast foods.
That evening, 6 p.m.: “Adam and I arrive at Lana’s house separately. Adam makes sure to bring several bottles of red wine and vodka so he can unwind.”
Six p.m. is very early for four New Yorkers to all be available to meet up on a weeknight. Anyway, the total count here is: four people, “several bottles of red wine and vodka.” But, Merriam Webster suggests that the term “several” can mean anywhere upwards of one or two, so—technically, this could be a reasonable amount of alcohol per capita. You know, in the classic combination or red wine and…vodka.
9 p.m.: “I start loosening up now, probably because of all the vodka lemonades. Mason [Lana’s boyfriend] and I start dancing around the living-room screaming to our favorite songs from our childhood.”
There are two other adults in the room, listening to this screaming but apparently not participating.
9 p.m.: “It comes as no surprise when Adam and Lana decide to take the car out and drive to a local bakery to get dessert for us.”
Everyone knows that to get to a local bakery in Manhattan what you do is drive. Particularly when you’ve been drinking.
“As soon as they leave, [Mason and I are] in their bedroom. We don’t even bother to strip each other’s clothes off, conscious that they might be back any second. Mason leans me over the bed, with my ass pushed out sexily. And with no foreplay or anything, he just fucks me in my ass.”
This is basically impossible without lube.
Some smaller notes: “their bedroom” is confusing as elsewhere the piece refers to “Lana’s house” and “Mason’s house” separately. Also, there seems to be a lot of lying going on in this marriage. But having never been married myself, who am I to say if this is normal.
Day four, midafternoon: “My day goes from bad to worse when Adam’s mom decides to call me and ask how I’m doing because he told her I had vomited this morning. She even has the audacity to ask me whether I think it’s morning sickness because I’m pregnant.”
As a reminder, this couple has been married for five years. Also they are grown-ups.
“I decide to go into graphic detail and tell Adam’s mom that he’s considering getting a vasectomy (even though he isn’t). I then proceed to tell her the horror story of the time Adam managed to displace my IUD during sex which led to a lot of bleeding.”
Intrauterine devices reside in the uterus, not the vaginal canal, which means that they can’t poke a penis or anything else during sex (what you might feel is the string). While it is technically possibly for an IUD to go AWOL—well, according to a piece in Self by Zahra Barnes:
[T]he chances of this happening because of sex are honestly infinitesimal, according to experts. “No IUD is coming out because of intercourse,” Jacques Moritz, M.D., an ob/gyn at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, tells SELF. Dr. Minkin agrees, adding, “I’ve heard lots of strange things in my life, but that’s not one.” Could your IUD theoretically already be on its way out, only for you to realize during sex? Sure. But it’s not going to actually happen due to penetration, the experts say.
8:20 p.m.: “Mason calls me. It takes him only two short minutes on the phone to convince me to go out with him tonight.”
Two minutes is actually a long time to be talking to someone, on a telephone.
“[Mason] carries me upstairs into his bedroom, and I make sure to tell him I’m in the mood for anal again.”
Another day in this diary, another man carrying this woman upstairs in his (presumably also Manhattan) apartment (for unlubricated anal sex).
Day five, 8:30 p.m.: “Adam wakes me up [from an evening nap] with my favorite tacos and some flowers. After we eat, we’re both full and horny.”
“Full and horny.”
“But neither of us can be bothered to head back up to the bed, so we decide to have sex on our leather couch. Adam pulls out a new tub of blueberry lube from his bag.”
Here are some options for blueberry lube: here’s this 4 ounce one, here’s another 4 ounce one, here’s this 3.5 ounce one, here’s one that’s blue raspberry. All of these are in cylindrical squirt bottles.
How do you use a tub of lube? Dip your hand in, and? What if your hand is dirty? I don’t recommend spending any more time thinking about lube-tubs. I am, however, still thinking about the blueberry lube-leather couch combination.
3 p.m.: “It’s the weekend, so I have a midday bath. Adam decides to climb into our crammed bathtub with me—which is a terrible idea.”
OK, yes, this one thing makes sense.
Correction, Sept. 9, 2020: Due to an editing error, the original version of this post suggested the diarist was violently hungover the morning that she made waffles from scratch. She was not violently hungover that morning.
