After the weekend I went to eat with my friend X. She told me a lot about her life as a couple. She's with a great guy, my friend AND, for a ton of years, long enough to feel comfortable with each other (and vice versa).
Feeling comfortable, we agree between dishes, is one of the pleasures of being in a long-term relationship. You can order takeout, watch two seasons of a series in a single afternoon, curl up on the sofa for an entire Sunday. She said, caricaturing the situation. That happiness that is called getting bored together. I said.
X did not stop enumerating advantages. It's a relief not to have to be on alert. Feeling free to be unattractive or tell some weird neurosis without worrying about the other person finding out who we really are. She said. However, this is also a relationship risk: taking your partner for granted and not trying to impress them. I said. So we conclude the obvious: we forget how to flirt with each other (and vice versa) or that the other person can be attractive to someone else, and then those who form a couple can become bored with themselves, with the other person, with Netflix , of the sofa and the comfortable comfort of that comfortable long-term relationship.
"We had to do something," she said.
Confession moment. A role playing game!
-A what? -I said.
Neither X nor Y had previous experience. They don't usually stage student-teacher scenes, pretend that one is in a job interview with the other or that she is the princess and he is Jabba the Hutt. They were not going to pretend to be others. They were going to be them. They would go to a bar, pretend to be two strangers and try to seduce each other.
How to meet “for the first time”.
For discretion, I will not explain details or how the night ended. Only that X claimed to have felt it as a unique experience. A strange, casual, exciting sexual encounter... with her partner. It's not that my friend recommended the game to me, but she did what she did for them: she reminded them that, despite the illusion of familiarity that years together give, they were still a pair of perfect strangers.
