You’re fifty-two. You run a business. You’ve raised adult children and buried a parent. And you’re lying in a full-size bed in your childhood bedroom with your feet hanging off the end, listening for footsteps in the hallway, because your mother is about to come check the thermostat for the fourth time tonight.

Welcome to the holidays.

Corey and Pam spend this one on what happens to your sex life when you go home. Not the logistics of it, though those come up. The thing underneath, which is that walking back into your family system turns you back into whoever you were in it. The fourteen-year-old. The in-law. The outsider, the favorite, the black sheep. You can be a competent adult in every other room of your life and lose it in forty feet of hallway.

The best thing in this episode is a piece of code. For the last fifteen or twenty years, “would you like a glass of water?” has meant something specific in their marriage, and the rule was that it had to come with a real kiss. They spent a lot of Christmases getting water from the back of the house and still wonder whether anybody ever noticed.

What matters is when that code showed up. They slept in those bedrooms for twenty-five years without one. It arrived once the two of them had grown up enough to need it.

Also in here. Why sex in your childhood bedroom at twenty-three was exciting and still mostly immature, because it was stress relief and anxiety discharge rather than connection. Pam’s counter to that, which is that she was tense every single time they stayed at family, while Corey was thrilled, and the two of them were having completely different experiences in the same bed. Why hosting your own holiday turns into a performance against Hollywood’s version of it, leg lamp included. Keeping a family hierarchy straight, where you play one role with your parents and a different one with your spouse, and only one of those is the top of the chain. Three helpings of dessert and half a bottle of wine as a decision rather than a circumstance. The cataract game. The buffet line.

And the heavier thing that showed up on its own, which is Pam talking about feeling guilty for getting to lie in bed next to her husband after her dad died, because her mom didn’t have that anymore. The holidays carry that too.

What we want from you. Stories. Where the holidays trip you up, what you’ve figured out that works, and especially the funny ones. The near-miss at your parents’ house when you were forty-one. We’ll read the good ones.

feedback@sexymarriageradio.com or 214-702-9565.

Happy holidays from the two of us, a couple weeks early.

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