I really don’t know if it gets any better than a solid hour of morning snuggles with your sweetheart, especially when you’re just awake enough to really appreciate them.

There’s something about slightly-more-than-barely-awake snugglefests, when you’re both naked and warm, when it’s so easy to just melt into the other person because your limbs are still all relaxed and heavy.

For two insanely creative people, Mr. Price and myself are awfully utilitarian in our naming of snuggle/sleep poses. There’s Position A (head-in-underarm), Position B (spooning, which for us, more often than not, is him behind me, because of the…erm, rather opportune places it provides certain convex and concave appendages), Position C (which if I recall right is face-to-face scissoring) and Position D (which is how we often fall asleep, side by side, holding hands). I’m always a bit fuzzy on C and D because we tend to revert to A and B.

We lucked out in the snuggle department. Sparing Mark being a handful of inches taller than I am, we’re basically the same size and we fit more nicely together than almost anyone else I’ve been with. (And I have to say that one advantage — silly as it sounds — to having a male partner versus a female one is that while with any couple, you always have that one extra arm, you at least don’t have two sets of breasts that can sometimes make very tight snuggling a little more tricky, especially when both sets are substantial.) But more importantly, we’re both insanely demonstrative snugglers together.

In my long slew of casual and serious partnerships in my life, somehow, more often than not, I always managed to wind up with people who were less demonstrative than I. Sometimes this was a bummer, other times it wasn’t: my claustrophobia has often been profound with many people, especially considering that for all the bodies I’ve put mine next to, I’d guestimate that I’ve only felt 100% close and trusting of a small handful of them. And I confess that in many (maybe even most, I’m on my first cup of coffee and not inclined right now to try very hard to count back) of my intimate encounters, I’m that jerk who wanted everyone to get up right away all abruptly in the morning and get back to their own lives and their own skin, if sleeping overnight was even something I made an option. Having a cup of coffee and talking was usually okay: endless snuggles? Not so much. More sex? Maybe. After all, morning sex is the serious good stuff.

If I could only pick one time of day to have sex, it’d be in the morning. Of course, if I could pick only one time of day to do anything, it’d be in the morning. I’m one of those annoying morning people, as we all know by now.

I have real objections to these strange divisions made with physical intimacy: as in, this is sex, this is snuggling, or the ever heterosexist (and sexist, really, if you think about it) this is sex, this is “foreplay.” The morning snuggles are strongly intimate: sometimes far more so than when one or both parties are chasing the orgasm dragon, and you’ve got to think a little more, rather than just melt in, be a pack animal, and babble the sweet nothings as you please. It’s hardly asexual: I’m turned on throughout, and when it manifests itself as genital sex, I don’t decline, and I usually come in three minutes flat.

But it’s not a highway, it’s an old, misty, quirky side road. You’re delighted to take the long way, stop here and there, enjoy the drive, and sometimes you enjoy it so much that even if you had a particular destination, it’s become unimportant. Maybe you’ll get there, maybe you won’t: just enjoying the drive is the real order of the day.

I’m really glad it’s not just me in this partnership who can’t figure out why 99% of the time, this is all still so easy for us, still so exciting, still so freaking fantastic after all this time. I’m glad it’s not just me who can’t figure how things that have been big problems in nearly all our other relationships don’t even rear their ugly heads in this one: even the fact that I am cohabitating with someone and not panicking about it 24/7 is nothing short of miraculous.

And I’m really glad it’s not just me who could while a whole morning away just wrapped up in warm skin and blankets, whispers and grins, because I always have loved those side roads best.

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P.S. I keep seeing about 2G in errors on my site logs since the switch to wordpress. Doing the math, I’m wondering if some users aren’t having an issue with the navigation bar loading? Can you tell me if you’re missing things on the page, or getting errors? Cheers.

filed under Heather Corinna | home | my fine romance | sex/life
posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 9:15 am

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