Marriage Bed Quotes

“He closed his eyes. This bed was a wedding gift from friends he had not seen in years. He tried to remember their names, but they were gone. In it, or on it, his marriage had begun and, six years later, ended. He recognized a musical creak when he moved his legs, he smelled Julie on the sheets and banked-up pillows, her perfume and the close, soapy essence that characterized her newly washed linen. Here he had taken part in the longest, most revealing, and, later, most desolate conversations of his life. He had had the best sex ever here, and the worst wakeful nights. He had done more reading here than in any other single place - he remembered Anna Karenina and Daniel Deronda in one week of illness. He had never lost his temper so thoroughly anywhere else, nor had been so tender, protective, comforting, nor, since early childhood, been so cared for himself. Here his daughter had been conceived and born. On this side of the bed. Deep in the mattress were the traces of pee from her early-morning visits. She used to climb between then, sleep a little, then wake them with her chatter, her insistence on the day beginning. As they clung to their last fragments of dreams, she demanded the impossible: stories, poems, songs, invented catechisms, physical combat, tickling. Nearly all evidence of her existence, apart from photographs, they had destroyed or given away. All the worst and the best things that had ever happened to him had happened here. This was where he belonged. Beyond all immediate considerations, like the fact that his marriage was more or less finished, there was his right to lie here now in the marriage bed.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“A spouse who refuses to cultivate or fan physical intimacy first devalued the marriage in their mind and priorities. Spouses who defile their marriage bed first lost honor for their marriage.”
― Ngina Otiende, The Wedding Night: Embracing Sexual Intimacy as New Bride

“Gail leapt from bed and went to sit in the tiny bathroom, seething with grief and anger. Then tears began to roll down her cheeks. To consider that her husband was arousing her as he spoke of his betrayal made her want to jump into the shower. That he expected this kind of arousal from her in a culture so far flung, confused her. The fact that he was not a virgin and further, that he hadn’t bothered to tell her this before the wedding, felt shameful.
Waves of rage washed over the building layers of regret for marrying Rich. The way he played with her in the telling of it!
His physical foreplay had readied her to try again, but now a sick feeling of remorse and hatred claimed her body. Gail stepped into the shower and steamed away her confusion, her disgust.
Gail wiped her tears and asked Rich to go sleep on the couch while in the same sentence informing him that she would be seeking counsel in the morning. She omitted saying what kind of counsel she would seek. She hardly knew herself.”
― Lynn Byk, The Fearless Moral Inventory of Elsie Finch