The gift of touch

Lord knows I love my wife. She’s a great mom, a great provider (though it shames me to bestow such a title on a woman) and she puts up with my moodiness, which is a pretty big deal. With all that, it’s a given that I would never do anything to put our relationship in jeopardy…well maybe not.

My wife’s birthday and my birthday are but three days apart (she’s older) and this year her parents splurged and got us a couple’s massage at a local spa. Renew Spa to be exact. Now, unlike most spas that do couples massage, here you’re not really in adjoining rooms where you can see each other, a feature I find a bit absurd anyway because the last thing I wanna do in the middle of my massage is look over at my wife and say, “Hey babe, does it feel good?” especially when she has a man-sseuse touching parts of her body that I generally regard as my own personal property. And anyway, this is one time where it’s “all about me” so I’m gonna enjoy it knowing that even if my wife is not enjoying her massage, there’s nothing I can about it anyway. So why worry I say?

We get massages, not regularly, but probably more often than other couples we know. But since this isn’t something that normally comes up in conversations with other guys, we could actually be getting them more or less often than our friends, you just don’t know. I’m guessing with the costs skyrocketing, massages are still a luxury for most of the people we run around with.

Anyway, lying there getting rubbed by a complete stranger is an interesting thing. Strictly speaking, getting that kind of—dare I say pleasure—from a woman who is not my wife might possibly be considered sinful (and probably is in some middle-eastern religions) and yet there I was at the blessing of my wife. Don’t get me wrong, these spas are a far cry from the massage parlors often potrayed in war movies where the men went and left with a smile on their face for a completely different reason. Nossir, I imagine even the hint of impropriety at one of these spas would be grounds for dismissal of the masseuse and banishment of the client, but still, you can’t lie there and not think about these kinds of things.

After all, happy feelings = happy thoughts. Am I right?

However, it does help that of the many massages I’ve had, only one or two of them were from a woman I found remotely sexy, so it’s pretty easy to keep the mind on relaxation and away from other things that are likely to get one in trouble when the clock hits the 30-minute mark and it’s time to flip over (don’t make me explain it).

But as good as a massage is, these days the lingering loveliness is nowhere near what it was pre-kids. Used to, we could come home and have a glass of wine and have a great ending to the evening, but now we come home and there are still kids to bathe and put to bed, dogs to feed—all the wonderful things that make home, home. As long as there are masseuses in the world, and as long as couples give each other their blessings for the other to go avail themselves of their services, there will always be that little fantasy. But that’s what they are…fantasies…no more, no less.